Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  By 0830 the mess hall was emptying: the mechanics left first, to make last-minute checks of the Otter, and soon most of the others were on their way outside to see off the plane. Penny and Al, escorted by Hugh, walked down Tunnel D.

  “I almost wish the weather would turn bad,” Hugh said. “We’ll be worrying about you.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Al. “We’ll probably be back for supper.”

  Penny groaned. “God, if we are, Suzy will make me wash the dishes.” The men laughed.

  A few minutes later the Otter stood in the glare of the floodlights outside the hangar. Through the windshield Penny stared at the drifts that had built up, and which Howie had had to bulldoze away during the night. Outside the pool of light everything was pitch black; anyone who stepped into the darkness vanished instantly. The green anoraks of the bystanders were vivid, almost fluorescent, and the fog of their breaths glittered around their heads.

  Suddenly the floodlights went out. Al paused in the middle of start-up and slid open his window. “What’s the problem?” he called. Several voices answered at once, and Penny could hear boots crunching in the snow. Light still came from inside the hangar, throwing long shadows across the blue-white surface. A minute or two passed; then Penny could hear the voice of Reg Lewis, the electrician.

  “Looks like some kind of wiring problem, Al. Might be awhile before we can track it down and fix it. Can you get off okay anyhow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay — piss off, then, Yank, and don’t come back without a Hercules.”

  Al waved and shut the window. Start-up went smoothly. With both engines going, he turned on the taxi lights and moved away from the hangar. The runway was anywhere Al chose; in all directions there was the same undulating surface. It was harder than it looked, and as they accelerated they could feel the plane jolt and sway. Penny refused to let herself be scared, but it was hard for her to keep her eyes off Al’s face. In the dim yellow light of the instruments, he looked old and intent, almost grim. Not until they were airborne did he relax.

  “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” he remarked as the Otter climbed to two thousand metres. He dimmed the instrument lights and peered out at the sky to the Grid South. “Sky looks good. We should reach Hallett about 1100; there’ll be a little light in the sky by then. Let’s hope it’s a dull flight. Did you bring a book?”

  “Forgot. Hey, we’re on our way! We’re really going!”

  Al smiled at her. “Are you glad to be leaving?”

  “I’m not sure.” She hesitated. “Glad and sad. Like the morning of the icequake, remember? We were all going to evacuate that day.”

  “I remember. It seems like a long time ago.” He doused the instrument lights completely; as their eyes adjusted to the dark, the Shelf slowly emerged below them. It was a vast blue-grey plain, seamed with pressure ridges and mottled by sastrugi fields. Ice islands rose steeply from the Shelf in a few places; some were many kilometres long. The air was very clear.

  Penny felt an unexpected contentment, a gladness at seeing something so beautiful and new; yet she realised that even the cold and empty grandeur of the ice was as transient as a field of wildflowers. Someday the sea would free itself again, and its waves would run unhindered till they crashed on the ancient rocks of the Antarctic shore. It would not happen in her lifetime, or even that of mankind, but it would happen. Someday rivers would run again in the glaciers’ beds, and trees would take root and grow on old moraines, as they had long ago.

  Al turned on the lights again and checked their course. He tried to raise Shacktown, but got only static. Then, as he was about to turn the radio off, he paused.

  “Put on your helmet,” he said. Penny yanked it on as he plugged it into the radio, and she heard a fuzzy voice in the earphones:

  “Mayday, Mayday! Mayday, Mayday!”

  “Mayday, this is Otter Five-Three,” Al said. “We read you. Identify, please. Over.”

  “My God.” The voice sounded shocked. “Otter Five-Three, this is Outer Willy. Where are you? Over.”

  “Ah, we’re over the Shelf, bearing Grid 125°, about three hundred kilometres Grid South-West of Cape Crozier. What is your location? Over.”

  “We figure we’re about a hundred and fifty kilometres Grid South of Ross Island. Where are you going at this time of night? Over.”

  “Just stepping out for a beer,” Al laughed. “We’re en route to Cape Hallett, from New Shackleton Station. Over.”

  “I’ll be damned. You guys got through okay? Over.”

  “Yup. But we’re trying to get help. Hey, I thought Outer Willy was abandoned before Erebus blew up. Over.”

  “It was. We got here too late to be picked up, and we’ve been sitting here ever since. There are three of us. Over.”

  Al had already switched on the radio direction finder. “Any problems? Over.”

  “Wow. Well, no, but we’d kind of like to be rescued. Over.”

  The Otter banked left on to a new course.

  “If we can land,” Al said, “we’ll take you along to Hallett. And if there’s enough gas there, we’ll go on to the Balleny Islands; if there isn’t, we’ll play poker all winter until somebody shows up. Is that all right? Over.”

  There was a pause. “Sounds interesting. Listen, you must be pretty close. We’ll start sending up flares, once a minute. Let us know if you can’t find us. Over.”

  “I’ll find you. Just keep sending. Where were you guys when everything happened? Over.”

  “Up on Nimrod Glacier, doing geology. We had some trouble with our helicopter — by the time I got it fixed, everybody must’ve been evacuated. We had a few bad days until we got past Erebus. It’s been okay since then. What happened with you fellas? Over.”

  Al described events at Shacktown, speaking almost absent-mindedly. He had turned down the instrument lights again and was scanning the blue darkness ahead. A thin belt of cloud passed under them. Penny began to think they must have overflown the airstrip; she wondered what would happen if the Otter ran low on fuel before they could reach the geologists. Presumably Al would then fly them all back to Shacktown and try again for Hallett. If the weather held. In a way she would be relieved to be back in the familiar stinks and drafts and noises; but it would be horrible as well — especially to have to deal with Steve again.

  “ — barely got over the Ross Sea Ridge in one piece,” Al was saying. “Woops, there you are!” A brilliant red star burned in the darkness, a little to the right of their course, and Al changed direction. “Send up another one, will you? Over.”

  “Will do. Earl, he wants another flare. Okay. Uh, we don’t have a real landing field now, but we can burn a couple drums of gas just to show where the buildings are. Over.”

  “Thanks. Can you give me wind speed and direction? Over.”

  “No wind to speak of. Uh, maybe you better make a couple of passes, just to see what it’s like. Last time we looked, there were some sastrugi Grid North of the buildings. And there’s a big old Herc half-buried out at the end of the ski-way.”

  “A Herc — right, I remember it.” The next flare went up, visibly closer. “Keep those flares coming; we’re almost there.”

  The surface below them was strangely mottled now, like the marbled endpapers of an old book. Penny realised that the dark patches and streaks must be a layer of volcanic ash, buried in some places and exposed in others.

  “Can we land on that stuff?” she asked. “On skis?”

  “Well, I’d rather not try it.”

  The third flare was very close, and they could see a rosy blur of reflected light under it. A few moments later the Otter dropped low over the huts of Outer Willy. There was little to see: three burning fuel drums and rows of snow-buried buildings. Al circled, searching for a smooth, safe place to put down. The best he could find was over a kilometre Grid East of the buildings. After one trial approach just a few metres above the surface, he landed the Otter without incident.

  The air seeme
d much colder than it had at Shacktown, and it made their noses run. Won’t I look lovely? Penny thought, annoyed to be meeting strangers with a lump of frozen mucus on her lip. They walked quickly across the wind-crust towards the burning drums, crossing some patches of ash that grated under their mukluks. Off to the left the horizon was reddening a little.

  A white spark appeared not far ahead and came flickering towards them. A minute or two later they heard someone call, “Hello!”

  “Is that the welcoming committee?” Al called back.

  “Sure is.” A bulky shape in a blue-and-orange anorak became visible. The man extended a hand. “Hi — I’m Mike Birnbaum. Glad to meet you.”

  “Al Neal. And this is Penny Constable.”

  The flashlight glared in Penny’s face. “Well, hello. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?”

  “I keep asking myself the same question,” Penny laughed. She took Mike’s hand and felt oddly shy.

  Mike must have felt the same way, because he said little as they went on to the buildings. He led them past the half-buried orange helicopters and into a Jamesway hut, a big semi-cylinder of canvas. The hammering of a diesel generator was loud until they got inside.

  The Jamesway had been Outer Willy’s mess hall and kitchen; most of the tables had been shoved to the far end of the room to make way for cases of canned food brought from elsewhere. Oil stoves burned at both ends of the hut, making it almost too warm; fluorescent lamps threw a bluish light. The ripe smells of oil, food and sweat reminded Penny of Shacktown.

  Two men in dirty trousers and plaid shirts stood by the cold porch. There was a round of handshaking and backslapping, and one of them gave Penny a hairy, unselfconscious kiss.

  Mike Birnbaum, Penny now saw, was a short, slender man in his early twenties, with a downy black beard and dark eyes. Bob Price, the man Al had spoken with on the radio, was tall, gaunt and very blond, with a silver ring in one ear; it gave him a piratical look, but Penny wondered how he kept from freezing his earlobe. Earl Bollinger, the third man, was a round-faced black, even bigger than Howie O’Rourke, with a meticulously trimmed goatee.

  “It’s really great to see you,” Bob said. “Would you like some lunch?”

  They all sat down at a table near a big oil-burning range; Bob served them corned-beef sandwiches on fresh rye bread, fried potatoes, bean salad and canned peaches.

  Over coffee the geologists described how they had been caught by the quake; they’d had to clear a frozen fuel pump before they could get back to McMurdo Sound. They had finally reached Outer Willy a couple of days after Al and Max had tried to land there; seeing Erebus in continued eruption, the geologists had stayed put. As their ice island had moved past Hut Point Peninsula, ash falls had nearly buried the buildings, but a change in wind direction had saved them from the worst of it. Outer Willy had moved rapidly down McMurdo Sound, and hadn’t frozen into the new Shelf until June.

  The geologists weren’t surprised to learn that the earth’s magnetic field had reversed, since their own compasses had behaved crazily since last summer. They listened with professional interest to Al’s description of the effects and extent of the surge.

  “Sounds like you folks have had a lot of fun,” Bob remarked. “Least you’ve been getting out and seeing things. We’ve been sitting on our butts for six months, wondering what the hell’s been going on.”

  “Well, here’s your big chance to see the world,” Al said. “We’re planning to check out Cape Hallett. If there’s gas, we’ll go on to the Balleny Islands and maybe even New Zealand. If not, we’ll hole up at Hallett till spring.”

  Bob lit a cigarette and looked thoughtfully across the hut; then he looked at Penny. She recognised something in that look. He was a calculator, like Steve, a weigher of costs and benefits.

  “You mentioned that over the radio,” Bob said at last. “I’m not sure we’d need to go if we weren’t gonna go any farther. Hallett is right in the path of every storm coming in off the ocean. And it’s not a big place — it wouldn’t have much of a fuel dump, or a whole lot of supplies. It probably got evacuated, but if it didn’t the guys there wouldn’t need five extra mouths to feed.”

  “I know,” Al nodded. “It’s a very long shot. We’ve got to try it, but I wouldn’t blame you for staying put.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Bob went on. “The Hercules.”

  Al looked at him cautiously, like someone who finds himself dealing with a self-possessed lunatic. “Oh?”

  “You might go out and look it over if you have the time. I only know about choppers, but I couldn’t find much wrong with it. The batteries are just about dead now, but I checked out the instruments back in March. Just for something to do, really. There was something wrong with the hydraulic system, or else the wiring. But everything else looked good. She was all gassed up and ready to fly; if they hadn’t been in such a hurry to get out, they probably could’ve fixed her up in a day or two.” He shrugged, an amateur unsure of his judgement against that of a professional.

  “Well. Well, well.” Al looked at his watch. “Can we get inside it fairly quickly?”

  “No sweat. We dug a tunnel. Want to see her?”

  In a few minutes they were back outside, walking across snow that glowed pink-violet under a crimson sky. It was just bright enough for them to see where they were going, but all of them stumbled at least once. Penny, walking between Al and Mike, shivered with something more than cold: a frightened excitement, an anxious exhilaration. — Oh God, if it can only fly, if it can only fly —

  Drifts had piled up on the port side of the Hercules, but relatively little snow lay banked on the starboard side. Compared to the Otter, it seemed monstrously large, too large to fly. The starboard wing alone was as long as the Otter’s full span, and the turboprop engines looked grotesquely big. Bob led them under the wing and along the starboard side towards the tail.

  “The passenger doors are drifted over,” he explained, “but the rear cargo door is open.”

  “The inside must be full of snow,” Al said.

  “Pretty near.”

  The rear of the fuselage tapered up and away from the snow towards the tail assembly. Drift had spilled around the plane here, and rose well above their heads. Bob shone his flashlight on a bamboo pole, then dug into the snow beside it. He pulled out a sheet of plywood, revealing a narrow black opening in the drift.

  “I’ll go first,” he said, and went in on his hands and knees.

  Penny went third, after Al, and was surprised to find the tunnel relatively warm. She crawled for some uncertain distance, watching Al’s backside in the light of her flash. Then the tunnel sloped steeply upward, and its floor turned from packed snow to thickly frosted metal. The cold suddenly bit through her mitts and trousers, and she remembered how Al had made them abandon the helicopter after the crash.

  The tunnel ended, and she stood up in freezing darkness. Bob and Al were shining their flashlights around a space that seemed as vast as Shacktown’s hangar, even though the interior of the Hercules was half-filled with snow. Earl and Mike came through, and their lights made the space a little less cavernous; but she remembered that each of Shacktown’s huts had been carried intact in the cargo compartment of a plane like this one.

  Where the drift hadn’t reached, the cargo compartment looked like a cave: every surface was crusted with glittering frost. Simple seats — red plastic webbing over steel frames — had been bolted to the walls, facing each other across a wide aisle that could hold personal baggage and other cargo.

  “It’d be some job digging this out,” Al grunted. “Let’s take a look at the flight deck.”

  They had to struggle through knee-deep snow until they reached a door and forced it open enough to squeeze through. Penny gasped in shock at the dim red light that came from the far side.

  The flight-deck windows, though frosted, were translucent enough to let in the noon twilight. Al looked around for a moment before settl
ing into the pilot’s chair; he swept the flashlight beam over the instrument panels. Penny felt a pang of disappointment: so many gauges, so many switches and knobs and dials — anything as big and complex as this couldn’t be repaired by a few people on an ice island, with the nearest proper facilities thousands of kilometres away.

  Al pressed a switch and a faint yellow glow appeared in the gauges.

  “Yeah, not much life in the batteries anymore,” he said almost to himself. “Gee, this is an old Herc!” He turned the flash on a small metal plate and scraped the frost away, revealing the numbers 56740. “I’ll be darned — I’ve flown this one before. Used to belong to VXE-6 before we sold her to the Kiwis.” He tried some more switches, rubbed frost from the instruments, and muttered to himself as he watched the feeble responses they made.

  Penny began to feel the cold; so did the others, but Al seemed oblivious. After a very long time he got up and poked around the flight deck, pulling panels away to inspect the wiring behind them. Finally he turned to Bob and asked: “What about the skis? Any damage?”

  “No — I don’t think so, anyway. They were drifted over with ash when we got here, and they’re probably frozen into the snow by now, but I don’t think we’ve got a real problem.”

  “Well. Let’s get out of here.”

  The Jamesway was like a Turkish bath; they pawed themselves out of the top layers of their clothing while fingers and toes came painfully back to life. Al found a cigar butt and carefully lit it. He took a few puffs.

  “I think we can do it,” he said. “There’s a leak in the hydraulics, all right. The booster system — the rudder and the starboard-wing spoilers are out of action. But the wiring’s okay — if that was the problem, we’d be out of luck. And if the skis are damaged, we’re really out of luck. But I’ll bet they’re okay.”

  “What’ll it take to fix the booster system?” Bob asked.

  “You know anything about Hercs?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I know a fair amount, and there must be some manuals around. We got one or two guys at Shacktown who could help — Simon’s worked on the Hercules a few times, and there’s a Russian aircraft mechanic who knows his stuff.” Al blew a smoke ring. “Might take a couple of weeks. Maybe less.”