“How does it look over there, Roger?”
“Pretty bad. Must be four, five metres high, and really rough.”
“Same here. Well, I’m gonna climb over it and see what the other side is like.”
This side of the ridge was in the lee of the wind, and the ice was jagged and bare. Gordon had to pick his way slowly, a flashlight clumsily held in one mitt, and it took him almost ten minutes to reach the top. The wind was like a punch in the face. Squinting, he tried to see how far the ridge extended. It seemed to run Grid South for at least a couple of kilometres. But it wasn’t very wide — maybe ten metres — and the Shelf beyond looked clear and smooth.
He slid back down, glad to be out of the wind, and got back on the radio.
“Carter, this is Gordon. We’ve hit a pressure ridge.”
“Can we get over it or around it?”
“I don’t think so. But we oughta be able to blast a hole through it.”
“Okay. Sit tight. We should reach you in an hour or so.”
Gordon saw a light twinkle briefly in the distance: one of the vehicles, coming up over a rise. It made him feel good just to see it.
The convoy, however, took almost three hours to reach the ridge. The wind was a full gale now, carrying enough snow to half-blind the drivers. Gordon and Roger had pitched a tent under the ridge, and listened to the bellowing of the wind while they ate a tepid stew for lunch. The wind was so loud that the sound of the D8’s engine was drowned out until the big tractor was almost on top of them.
The men crawled out of their tent and stumbled towards the convoy. Carter, who’d been riding in the cab of Sno-Cat 1, got out and led them to the wanigan behind it.
“Hell of a wind,” he said as Gordon and Roger huddled around the heater with Will and Ben. “But it shouldn’t take too long to plant some charges and start clearing a way.”
“Good. Well, come along, Ben. I’ll teach you the fine art of blowing holes in ice.”
“Where’s Steve?” Roger asked.
“He’s been driving the Sno-Cat for the last hour,” Will said. “We’ve been spelling each other — just too bloody cold to stay in the cab more than an hour at a time. Speak of the devil,” he added as Steve came in.
“Hi, you guys.” Steve said. His beard and eyebrows were thick with frost. “Thank God you found this ridge. I’m not sorry to stop.”
“Neither were we,” Gordon said. “Jeez, and this is just the first goddamn day.”
“We haven’t done too badly,” Steve said, pouring tea into a mug. “Almost twelve kilometres since we left the slope. Not bad in this weather.”
“At this rate we’ll reach Outer Willy in about a month,” Will muttered as he tightened the drawstrings on his anorak and stood up.
*
The wind increased all afternoon. When the charges were detonated, no one in the vehicles could hear them; there was just a trembling in the ice while the wind went on screaming. Howie in the D8 and George in the D4 began to bulldoze a path through the fractured ice of the ridge. The work went slowly, and more charges had to be set off that evening before the path could be finished. By then a blizzard was raging, but Carter ordered the convoy through at once; he was afraid the path might drift over if they waited.
On the far side of the ridge they were exposed to the full force of the storm. Carter held a quick meeting by radio with the vehicle drivers, who reluctantly agreed to push on until midnight. The snowmobiles were lashed to a sledge, and their drivers happily moved into the D4’s wanigan. By 2000 hours the convoy was moving again, with Sno-Cat 2 in the lead and the others following at close intervals.
In the next two hours they covered less than a kilometre. Tim, driving Sno-Cat 2, could see only a few metres ahead; he had to send Colin out in front, roped to the nose of the Sno-Cat, to guide him. After fifteen minutes Colin was too numb to continue; and Max Wilhelm took his place; then Terry. It was soon impossible to hold to a straight line, and Tim had to rely on an uncertain compass to bring them back on course after each detour. The surface was softer than it had been on the other side of the ridge, and the Sno-Cat laboured in low gear. Tim tried to keep out of the hollows, where they were likely to bog down, but the rises weren’t much better.
At 2200 he called Carter. “This is ridiculous,” he shouted hoarsely into the microphone. “We’ve got to stop, Carter. I’m gonna burn out my transmission at this rate.”
“Okay, Tim. We’ll start up again at 0600. Everybody — keep your engines running tonight.”
No one got much sleep. The wind and the hammering of the diesels were incessant, and each vehicle had to be refuelled to keep the engines going. It was almost a relief to get up for breakfast at 0500, and Penny even volunteered to help refuel the Nodwell before they got underway. The wind took her breath away, and she could scarcely move against it; wrestling the drum of diesel fuel off the sledge was torture, even with help from Herm and Don. By the time they got back inside, the oily stink of the cabin was like the perfume of tropical flowers to her.
The blizzard had weakened a little, and it was possible to see as much as twenty metres ahead. Tim led off again, and had actually got up to a speed of three kilometres per hour when Sean McNally reported that the Nodwell had lost its sledge. By the time the tow rope was secured, the blizzard was blowing with full force again, and everything came to a frustrated halt.
For the rest of that day, July 7, the engines idled but nothing moved except the snow and the wind. Carter sat in his wanigan and computed fuel consumption. Others played cards, slept, read and waited for mealtimes. Late that afternoon Katerina examined everyone in the Nodwell. The men all showed a slight rise in blood pressure, and everyone had headaches. She suspected carbon monoxide might be leaking into the cabin, and ordered the back door opened every twenty minutes.
“Oh, come on, Katerina,” Ray protested. “It’s just the damn noise and inactivity. Why should we freeze as well?”
“Do not argue!” Katerina snapped. Then she rubbed her face and sighed. “I am sorry. We are all irritable. I wish we were moving, too.”
The storm ended at midnight; half an hour later the convoy set out again. The sky was clearing rapidly, and a haloed moon shone through the clouds. Will, in Sno-Cat 1, led them for eight uneventful kilometres, and when they stopped for breakfast everyone was tired but cheerful. Refuelling was relatively easy with no wind to fight, and they were on their way again by 0500. Almost at once they encountered the edges of a sastrugi field, but managed to keep going for over an hour before the sastrugi became too high and steep to negotiate.
Carter stood in the cab of Sno-Cat 1 with Will, looking at the sastrugi glittering in the headlights. He shook his head and got on the radio to the D4.
“Tom, tell Gordon and Roger to get off their duffs and make a run to Grid South. If the sastrugi keep on going after four kilometres, they can come back and try in the other direction.”
An hour later they were back: the sastrugi extended as far as they had ventured to Grid South. The reconnaissance toward Grid North, however, soon turned up a gap in the field.
“It’ll be rough,” Gordon warned. “But we oughta be able to make it.”
It was very rough. The vehicles heaved and lurched and skidded for hours over a surface little better than a tank trap. Around 1500 Sno-Cat 2 lost its right tread. Tom and Howie managed to repair it, but it took them three hours in a rising wind that carried drift as fine and sharp as ground glass. They had to work with their mitts off, and the cold bit easily through their wool gloves. Katerina treated them for frostbitten fingers and noses, but they seemed otherwise all right.
“We’re not stopping for dinner,” Carter announced as the convoy started up again. “I want us out of these sastrugi before the real storm hits.”
It didn’t happen. By 1930 hours the vehicles were bogged down in another blizzard with sastrugi all around them. There they sat for the rest of the night, and the next day, and a second night. On the morning of Ju
ly 9 the blizzard ended and the temperature dropped from -20° to -45°C in less than an hour.
The convoy was heavily drifted over. To save fuel, engines had been turned off during the first night of the blizzard, and all were now frozen solid. Most of the day was spent in digging the vehicles out and getting the engines started. Ben Whitcumb was outside for hours, the flamethrower strapped to his back as he went from one vehicle to the next; snow vaporised in the orange tongue of the flamethrower and froze on his clothes in a thickening crust of ice. When all the engines were going, he went back to his wanigan. It took him several hours to warm up again.
The convoy finally moved out a little after 1600. The sastrugi were still there, hidden under the drifts, and the Nodwell bucked and swayed violently. After three long hours Sean handed the controls over to Penny and went aft for a mug of tea. At first she was terrified, but the driving soon became almost enjoyable. There was a knack to getting over sastrugi without losing either momentum or a tread — and a knack to recognising when to steer right around a really bad stretch. Fortunately, the Nodwell was near the end of the convoy, and could follow the packed-down trail left by the bulldozers.
“Sean, how’s your fuel consumption?” Carter asked over the radio. Penny reached for the mike.
“Not so good, Carter. We’ve used half a tank in the last three hours.”
“That Penny?”
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself. Are you driving?”
“Sure. Look, Ma, no hands.”
The loudspeaker crackled with eavesdroppers’ comments, most of them unimaginative variations on the theme of the woman driver. Then Steve came on.
“You’ve doing damn well, Penny. Just don’t push that thing too hard.”
“And watch your fuel gauge,” Carter added.
“Okay.” She hung up the microphone, feeling very pleased with herself.
*
The convoy finally got through the sastrugi field, but by then it was 0500 the next morning, July 10. They had travelled a total of about fifty kilometres since leaving Laputa, but only about thirty had been made in actual progress towards Outer Willy. Carter promised them that they would make better time as their sledges’ burden of fuel drums grew lighter, but Penny suspected that the weather and surface would continue to slow them down.
She was right. All that day the convoy floundered through snow as fine and dry as talcum powder; even the weight of the D8 scarcely packed it down, and it seemed bottomless. A steady breeze from Grid West threw drift across their course and cut visibility to less than half a kilometre. By 1800, after nearly twenty-four hours of continuous travel, the convoy had covered about sixteen kilometres.
The Nodwell stopped between the two Sno-Cats. Penny, Herm and Don went outside to pump fuel into all three vehicles. It was exhausting work, struggling with the drums and manually pumping the fuel out of them. When the job was finished, Steve invited Penny over for supper.
The wanigan was like a miniature A-frame, four metres long and two metres wide and high. The interior was small and cramped: thick batts of fibreglass insulation were stapled to the walls, and more lay under the plywood floor. A tiny loft was packed with food boxes, tools and batteries that powered a small lamp, a heater and the radio. There was no headroom.
Ben Whitcumb was squatting at the rear of the wanigan, making stew on the primus stove. Will and Carter sat nearby; there was just room enough for Penny and Steve.
“Well, look who’s slumming,” Will laughed. “Come to see how the other half lives, have you?”
Carter passed her a bowl of stew and a spoon. “How’s the Nodwell holding up, Pen?”
“Pretty well. Mm — good and hot! You’ve a good cook, Ben. But it sure burns a lot of fuel.”
The wanigan shuddered as if something had rammed it. From outside came the crunching sound of metal scraping over ice. The lamp above Ben’s head swung hard against the wall; the floor vibrated for several seconds.
Carter leaned over and switched on the radio. “This is Carter. Anyone hurt? Anyone in trouble? Sean? Tim? Howie? Tom?” A fuzzy chorus replied: everyone was all right, but no one knew what had happened.
Steve crawled over Penny’s legs and opened the door. The others followed him outside.
The vehicles’ headlights glared through ice fog. Someone walked in front of the other Sno-Cat, and his shadow loomed up against the fog like a misshapen giant. The snow underfoot was fine and gritty, almost like sand, but Penny could still sense a trembling in it, far below the surface. Out in the darkness, beyond the convoy’s oasis of light, an irregular metallic banging arose: the sound of breaking ice.
“What is it?” Penny shouted over the engines.
“I think it was an earthquake,” Steve shouted back. “We’re in the middle of the goddam ocean!”
“Tsunami. The quake was probably back on the mainland, but it could’ve started a wave under the ice. I’m surprised there haven’t been more quakes — the whole continent must be rebounding with so much ice off it.”
Steve turned to Carter. “I think we should reconnoitre the whole area — see if there’s any crevassing that might get in our way.”
Inspecting the vehicles and sledges took almost an hour. There were more shocks, none as violent as the first, but each one made Penny want to scream and run. At last Carter sent her back to the Nodwell, where Katerina gave her cup after cup of hot water. It took her a long time to stop shivering.
Carter came on the radio around 2200. “Well, we’ve been through a real icequake, it seems, and no harm done. Some of the lads have made a quick trip roundabout, and there don’t seem to be any crevasses nearby. Even so, from now on we’re going to probe the surface before we move across it. I suggest we all get some sleep and be ready to move out at 0600. I’ll need at least five volunteers for the probe team.”
The snowmobiles stayed on their sledge; now men went out on skis, roped together and carrying long aluminium poles. From the cab of the Nodwell, they were gleaming green shapes that cast long shadows ahead of them as they advanced to the limits of the headlights’ beams. Then, having tested the snow, they would signal the convoy to move up while the process was repeated.
By noon of July 11 they had covered six kilometres, without incident but very slowly. Now, as the sky flamed red above them, they reached a crevasse field. The probers ventured cautiously into it, relying on the wind-crust to hold them up, and then came back to the convoy to confer with Carter. At 1300 he discussed strategy with the drivers.
“The field isn’t too wide, thank God. The snow bridges seem good and thick, but the quake probably weakened them. How about sending the D8 in first?”
“Okay,” Howie nodded. “Whoever comes after me, stay on one side or the other of my trail. If I drop a snow bridge, they can cross where it’s still holding up.”
The D8 growled ahead of the convoy and stopped beside an aluminium pole marking the far side of the first crevasse. The probe team followed it, and found that the snow bridge had settled by almost a metre. Tom Vernon, in the D4, crossed about a hundred metres to the right; Sno-Cat 2, about a hundred metres to the left.
Will got Sno-Cat 1 across, but the bridge gave way while the sledge was still on it. A gap appeared, almost two metres wide and fifty metres long; it crossed the tracks left by the bulldozers. Will edged forward until the sledge was past the crevasse, while Steve, Carter and Ben watched from the edge. Then Carter went back inside to talk to Sean on the radio.
“The whole snow bridge looks ready to fall,” Carter said. “You’d better get the crevasse bridge out, and use it to cross over.”
Sean, Herm, Don and Ray went outside and awkwardly slid the bridge off the roof of the Nodwell. Penny and Katerina watched them drag it to a part of the crevasse still concealed by snow.
“How is that going to hold up this monster?” Penny muttered. Katerina said nothing.
Just visible in the headlights, Sean waved. Carter’s voice crackled over the radio: “An
y time you’re ready, Pen.”
She put the Nodwell in gear and slowly advanced. The ends of the bridge overlapped the crevasse by only two metres on either side; it was easy to imagine the surface giving way and dropping them into the darkness.
Sean stood on the bridge, guiding Penny on to it. He walked backward as the Nodwell ground slowly on to the narrow aluminium strip. Hallway across, the tractor shuddered as the snow gave way and the bridge sagged; Sean caught his balance, paused and then beckoned Penny forward again. They were across.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Penny said to Katerina. She scrambled out of the cab as the men crowded around her, cheering and slapping her shoulders.
“Excuse me, you guys.” She sidled around to the far side of the Nodwell. “I’ve really got to pee.”
*
They were in the crevasse field for three more days. It would have been less, but a blizzard kept the convoy immobile for a day and a half. On the afternoon of July 14 they finally reached a hard, flat surface and began to make up for lost time. Carter kept the convoy going until 0300 hours on the morning of the 15th; by then they had travelled over a hundred kilometres from Laputa.
Most of the party slept for twelve straight hours. Howie and Tom Vernon made some repairs to the D8, clearing the fuel line of the pony engine used to start the big bulldozer’s diesel. Early on the 16th, the convoy moved on.
For Penny, time began to blur. Sometimes the sky glowed red and gave a pinkish tint to the snow; more often there was only darkness and the glare of drift in the headlights. Sometimes there was the roar of engines, sometimes the moaning of the wind and sometimes an absence of sound that was more startling than ordinary silence.
They drove when they could, for an hour or for ten, and slept in catnaps or around the clock. The Shelf was rarely smooth enough for a long run; though there were few bad crevasses, the sastrugi fields seemed endless, and some low-lying stretches were treacherously soft.
Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller Page 20
