Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  “That’s it.” Will looked expectantly at Al, who nodded and took a deep breath.

  “Okay, let’s see if this thing wants to go.” Al dry-motored the right engine for five seconds. Then he waited for a minute until the battery was warm enough to permit starting. He held the start switch at RIGHT and watched the oil pressure slowly rise. When gas generator speed had stabilised, he moved the engine fuel lever to ON. The engine accelerated to a normal idle; Al released the start switch. Oil pressure steadied and the CAUTION light went out. An ice fog began to gather around the aircraft.

  He repeated the procedure for the left engine, checking to make sure he had forgotten nothing. Warm air began to flow into the flight compartment. Will watched Al, trying not to seem obvious about it.

  The Otter taxied out on to the ski-way. Someone up in the dome waved to them; Al waved back. The plane accelerated between the long rows of empty fuel drums, tilted and took off. Al set a course on Grid 50° and lit a cigar.

  “Something the matter?”

  “Yeah. I’m scared. Kind of late to develop fear of flying.”

  “Do you know something I don’t know?” Will asked.

  Al laughed. “It’ll be okay. I didn’t get much sleep last night — makes me a little slow, but I’ll be all right.” He shook his head. “It hasn’t been a good year for old Antarctic fliers.”

  He looked out to the left: the first light was glowing on the peaks of the Queen Maud Range, surprisingly far away. “Hey, we really have moved, haven’t we?”

  “You’re right.” Will glanced down, but the Shelf was still too dark to be seen clearly. “Laputa must be getting close to the Ridge.”

  “Guess so.” The Ridge was a range of submarine hills that divided the Ross Sea into two relatively deep basins beneath the Shelf; in places the Shelf was grounded on it. Will had studied the effects of that grounding during his first summer at Shacktown, three years before.

  Neither man spoke for some time. Dawn broke, and the sun began its brief traverse along the Grid South horizon. The surface of the Shelf seemed unusually rough in the low-angled light; even small sastrugi threw long shadows, and crevasse fields looked grotesquely sharp. The sky was clear, but long streamers of cloud flew from the mountains across the broken islands of the Shelf.

  “Look at the bloody pressure!” Will exclaimed as they neared the Shackleton Coast, not far from the Beardmore Glacier.

  “What’s wrong?” Al stared at the gauges. “What’s wrong with the pressure?”

  “Sorry — I meant the pressure ice. I’ve never seen such ridges. They look like mountain ranges.” He lifted the videotape camera to his eye and shot thirty seconds’ worth.

  Wherever two islands were in contact, their edges were crumpled into steep ridges for hundreds of metres on either side, with crevasse fields running at right angles to them. In one place Will saw that part of a ridge had disappeared as the submerged sides of two islands had crushed each other to bits, creating a chasm a kilometre long whose bottom was lost in darkness.

  A few minutes later they sighted what seemed to be a real island rising from the Shelf just a few kilometres Grid South of the Beardmore’s mouth. It glittered, white and blue, presenting an almost sheer face to the sun.

  “What’s that?” Al asked. “There’s no island here.”

  “Not sure,” Will said. “Must be two or three hundred metres high.”

  “Want to get a closer look?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The Otter banked to the left and descended a thousand metres as it neared the island. They were still several kilometres away from it when they realised it was growing, rising higher into the air every moment while avalanches of shattered ice fell in lovely plumes like waterfalls down the island’s vertical face. The rumble of the avalanches could be heard over the engines as the Otter levelled off near the crest of the island and flew parallel to the enormous cliff. Drifting snow and falling ice masked much of the cliff face, but it did not look like the side of a tabular berg, and the island itself was too narrow to be one.

  “It’s a grounded island, being pushed right over!” Will shouted.

  “What?”

  “Pull away to the right, fast!”

  Even as the Otter banked, the island disintegrated. The cliff fractured and toppled in hundreds of places almost simultaneously, falling in a blinding white cloud that spread out over the Shelf at well over a hundred k.p.h. In less than three minutes the island was only a mass of rubble, from which a few spires of ice rose here and there.

  To the Grid North, beyond where the island had been, was the surge ice. It stretched away to the distant mountains, sparkling in the morning sun like quartz crystals. It had hills and valleys, patches of drift and serac fields that went on to the edge of vision. In some places it had overrun the Shelf, crushing or drowning some islands and sliding beneath others that rose until they broke under their own weight.

  The Otter climbed again, until the Shelf and the surge ice shrank to a black-and-white jigsaw puzzle, they crossed the coast at Richards Inlet, about thirty kilometres Grid East of the mouth of the Beardmore. The Otter followed Lennox-King Glacier up into the Queen Alexandra Range, crossed the Bowden Nevé, and then went up Law Glacier to the polar plateau. Everywhere the ice was surging, though less rapidly than Axel Heiberg had done a month earlier. The drop in the level of the ice made the terrain strange to Al: too many new nunataks, unfamiliar crevasse fields and dagger-like ice thrusts. He scarcely recognised the Sandford Cliffs; facing the plateau, their steep black slopes had been almost buried by the surge. The cliffs receded under the starboard wing. Ahead was a glittering nothingness.

  Al, mistrusting his compasses, shot the sun and got a good fix on their position while Will taped long stretches of the polar plateau.

  “It’s moving here as well,” Will said. “The ice looks like the tapes that Steve brought back. Just seracs and crevasses and more seracs… How are we doing?”

  Al was plotting the plane’s fuel consumption on a howgozit chart. “Better than I expected, but not as well as we should be. The fuel drums are too darn heavy.”

  “Bloody nuisance. Varenkov said they’ve got lots of JP4; no reason to carry our own.”

  “Maybe not. But if their fuel’s contaminated, we could spend a long time filtering it.”

  “That’s a thought. God, how are we going to land if Vostok’s as chewed up as all this?” Will gestured towards the plateau.

  “We’ll manage.”

  The sun crept along the horizon, sometimes dimming behind banks of clouds. The plateau was an irregular mosaic of blues, greys, blacks and whites; only around the occasional nunatak could it be seen to be moving. The ice-free slopes of the nunataks had a raw look to them, as if their sides had been scoured. Will looked at one nunatak through binoculars and sucked in his breath. He took some telephoto shots and then studied the peak until it disappeared behind them.

  “The surface is dropping,” he said. “The surge was a good two hundred metres higher than it is now.”

  “That’s almost as much of a drop as there was at the Pole,” Al said.

  “You know, I’m beginning to think that we’ve missed the worst of the surge. The Shelf acts like a buffer — slows down the ice and piles it up.” He pointed to the horizon ahead. “No ice shelves to speak of out on that coast. The surge would go straight into the ocean like — like a kid shooting off the end of a slide. And there’d be a hell of a lot of it. The thickest part of the ice sheet is between here and the coast… God help the poor buggers at Mirny.”

  The ice sheet seemed flat, but in fact it sloped steadily upward like a shallow dome hundreds of kilometres in diameter; Vostok was near the top of the dome. To maintain their height above the surface they had to keep climbing, and Al watched their fuel consumption rise. The howgozit looked less promising. After shooting the sun again, Al calculated the amount of fuel they would have when they reached Vostok.

  “Twenty litres.”
r />   “We could land somewhere and refuel from the drums,” Will said.

  “If we can find somewhere, I’m all for it,” Al answered. “But it’s bad down there. I’d hate to risk it, especially at this altitude. We might not get back into the air unless we used our JATO bottles, and I have to save them for Vostok.”

  “What then — take a chance, or go home?”

  Al looked at his watch. “If we can find a place to land in the next ten minutes, we will. Otherwise we turn around or we dump the drums. And hope there really is enough JP4 at Vostok.”

  The surface below showed no clear space longer than a hundred metres. After seven minutes Al looked questioningly at Will.

  “We can’t turn back, Al.”

  “I know. Okay. If we get rid of the drums, we should gain another twenty minutes’ flying time.”

  “Good enough.” Will pulled on the hood of his anorak, tied the draw-strings under his chin and pulled his gloves on. Then he went into the passenger compartment.

  All but four of the seats had been removed to make room for the drums, which were lashed down on their sides. There were eight of them, each weighing close to a hundred and fifty kilos. Will edged around them to the door, slid it open and secured it. The wind made him squint, and he stepped back quickly. With the wind chill factor, the temperature near the door must have been close to -100°C. He moved cautiously around the cabin until he stood opposite the door, with the drums in front of him. Working awkwardly in his gloves, he unstrapped the first one and rolled it towards the door. It was much harder to move than he’d expected; the plane was at five thousand metres, and the air was thin.

  Leaning back against the wall, Will heaved against the drum with his boot until it rolled heavily out the doorway and vanished. The Otter bucked slightly. He unlashed another drum and repeated the process. By the time half the drums had been dropped, he was panting hard and trying not to breathe too deeply. Al came back for a moment to check on him.

  “Pooped,” Will gasped.

  “Yeah. Catch your breath and finish ’em off. We’re running into a little weather.”

  “Right. Be done in a minute.”

  But it was more like five minutes before Will felt ready to go on. He unlashed the fifth drum, heaved it into place, kicked it and lost his footing as the Otter lurched a little. The drum hit the edge of the doorway and caught there.

  “Bloody hell.” He sidled across the cabin and gave the drum a shove with his boot. There wasn’t enough leverage, so he bent over and heaved at it with both hands. It spun with unexpected ease and toppled out. Will sprawled flat as the plane tilted to the right and then back again, a little too far. He fell within a hand’s-breadth of the doorway and felt himself rolling over, as helpless in his bulky clothes as a Weddell seal. He was looking out at the far horizon, a straight white edge marred by a chain of distant nunataks. A kilometre below was the tortured surface of the ice sheet, glittering and sharp and very far away.

  Instinct wanted him to bend his knees as if in readiness for the long drop; reason made him straighten his legs and fling out his hands above his head. Feet and hands struck the sides of the doorway. He groped for a handhold and found nothing. With a grunt, he flung himself away from the door, rolling over until he reached the fuel drums and could hook an arm through their lashings.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered. His vision was blurred, and for a horrible minute he was afraid his eyes had frozen. At last the blue-painted drums and yellow nylon webbing came into focus. He pulled himself upright and shuffled around the remaining three drums. His hands were shaking so badly that he could scarcely undo the knots in the lashings. It took almost ten minutes to jettison the rest of the drums; then he slammed shut the door and went back to the flight compartment.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I got to admiring the view.”

  Al handed him a thermos of hot coffee, thick with condensed milk and sugar. Will drank it all and felt almost drunk as its warmth spread from his belly to his hands and feet. Revived, he found Al’s howgozit. A new line had been drawn on it.

  “I shot the sun again and found we were doing better than I’d thought,” Al said. He looked embarrassed. “Looks like I stuck you with a job that didn’t need doing. Sorry.”

  Will took a deep breath and let it out very slowly.

  As they flew deeper into the continent, the ice sheet’s surface grew less chaotic. Amidst the seracs and crevasse fields, smooth patches began to appear, some of them hundreds of metres on a side. “They must be on one of those spots,” Al observed.

  “Have you picked up anything from them?” Another part of Will seemed to be speaking; his real self was still looking down through the doorway, reaching for a handhold that wasn’t there.

  “Nothing.” Al checked their position and studied the fuel gauges. “We’re so close we ought to be able to smell the borscht.”

  Will studied the terrain below. In all but the worst serac fields, there was something of a pattern in the surface features.

  “Looks as if the ice is moving Grid South-East — towards the coast. We’re over the top of the dome. I’ll bet they’ve moved farther than they realise.”

  Al looked at him, inscrutable behind his sunglasses. “We’ve got about seventy minutes’ flying left. You’d better be right.” He changed course, and they began a standard search-and-rescue sweep pattern.

  Fifteen minutes later they saw a short line of black dots across a clear patch. Al brought the Otter almost to the surface and circled the station. “They’ve moved almost seventy kilometres,” he said. “I never would have believed it.”

  There was no sign of life below. The ski-way was heavily drifted over, and both ends of it vanished into crevasses. Al estimated that no more than fifteen hundred metres remained of the four-kilometre strip. A row of half-buried buildings extended Grid South-East from the ski-way; several of them had collapsed, and one had obviously been gutted by fire. A few vehicles, mostly big green Kharkovchanka tractors, were nearly parked about fifty metres from the buildings.

  “See anyone?” Will asked. Al shook his head. He was studying the ski-way.

  “Bad. Looks bad,” he said. “If I don’t put us downright now, I’ll be too scared to try.”

  It was a rough landing. The Otter dropped to the surface, bumping and skidding as it struck sastrugi buried like land mines under the drift. Al brought it to a halt not far from a crevasse field and turned it cautiously around. They taxied back to the buildings, and Al throttled back the engines.

  “Don’t strain yourself,” he said. “The altitude and the cold will make you pretty clumsy. Let’s hope we don’t have to stay long enough to get acclimatised.” He looked at the altimeter, and his jaw dropped. “Twenty-six hundred metres. That’s wrong. That’s impossible.”

  “This side of the dome must have surged even faster than the other side,” Will said. “It must have, to move Vostok this far and drop the surface by a thousand metres.”

  “Mmm. Let’s get going.”

  The air was very still, and very cold. A constant background rumble could be felt more than heard. Will took a few steps from the Otter and looked around. It was much like the Shelf, or most places on the polar plateau: a white flatness, disturbed here and there by sastrugi or drifts. The crevasse fields were invisible from here. Above them was an empty blue sky.

  “Where are they?” he wondered. “They must’ve heard us.”

  “Probably in no shape to move. We’ll find them.”

  The nearest building was a pile of wreckage. “The American Pavilion, they used to call it,” Al commented as they made their way around it. “Used to be one or two guys from McMurdo here every year, back in the old days. We had some great parties here. We had a pissing contest once, right about here. It was fifty-five below. Your pee darn near froze in mid-air.”

  They trudged on between the buildings and the Kharkovchanka. They were immense, like railway cars on caterpillar tracks. Each was te
n metres long, five high, and five wide; Will recalled hearing that they could sleep ten men, and were divided into rooms — even a laundry.

  “Gotta be in the main building,” Al said. “It’s down there, past the drilling sheds.”

  “Buggers must’ve liked walking a lot,” Will wheezed. “Never saw such bloody urban sprawl.” His face felt stiff and masklike, and even his eyelashes were delicately picked out in frost. His head ached badly.

  “You never saw so many guys in such good shape as the Russians. Really solid.” Al gripped the handle of the door to the main building’s cold porch, and pulled hard against the drift that blocked it. After a minute’s grunting and tugging, he got it open. They went through, leaving the outer door open to give some light.

  The inner door of the cold porch opened into a narrow corridor. There was much of the same sort of clutter one found in any station; the chief differences Will noticed were the stencilled Cyrillic letters on the crates, and the brownish-black bearskins hanging over the doorways.

  Al looked down the corridor. “Hello!” he shouted. “Anybody here?”

  “Hello,” someone called back faintly. “We are here, hello.”

  The two men blundered down the dark corridor. At its end was a door like all the others, but its frame was heavily crusted with frost. Will pulled aside the bearskin — it was as rigid as a plywood board — and fumbled with the knob. The door seemed frozen on its hinges, but yielded at last. They stepped into the station’s mess hall.

  Three kerosene lamps, standing on tables, were the only illumination. The floor was slippery with ice except at the far end of the room, where long batts of fibreglass insulation had been laid down; some of them were covered with blankets. A long, narrow window in one wall had been blocked off with more insulation. A little stove made the room just warm enough to be dank. There was a sour stink of kerosene and human waste in the air.

  “Hello?” Al repeated, less confidently. The blankets at the far end of the room moved a little. A man’s eyes glinted in the lamplight.