Night Without End

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘But, good God, man, you can’t do that!’ Hillcrest was horrified. ‘Without a chance, without warning? It’s murder, simple murder!’

  ‘Want me to go over the number of people they’ve murdered?’ I shook my head. ‘You just don’t begin to know those two, Hillcrest.’

  ‘But—’ He broke off, turned to Jackstraw. ‘It’s you he’s asking to do it. What do you say?’

  ‘It will be a pleasure,’ Jackstraw said very softly.

  Hillcrest stared at us both, baffled incomprehension in his eyes. I suppose he thought he knew both of us well. And he did. But he didn’t know what we had been through, words couldn’t even begin to make him understand. The atmosphere was uncomfortable, tense even, and I was grateful for Joss’s sudden calm words.

  ‘0943, Captain Hillcrest. Three minutes to go.’

  ‘Good.’ He was, I could see, as glad of the interruption as I was. ‘Barclay’ – this to the cook, the only other of Hillcrest’s men there, the other three were in the big driving cabin to make room for us – ‘three Wessex rockets. Line them up on the stand and wait for the word. I’ll go myself with the flare, two for safety. Give a beep on the horn, Joss, when it’s time to set ‘em off.’

  I went with him to watch and the whole thing went off without a hitch. Dead on time, just seconds after the third rocket had been fired to curve upwards and explode into incandescent light in the star-dusted darkness above, we heard the high-pitched whine approaching out of the south-west, and in an incredibly short space of time a vague dark blur, carrying no navigation lights, screamed by five hundred feet overhead, banked in the distance, came at us again at much reduced speed, banked a second time and then, with a crescendoing banshee shriek of the jet engine, had vanished again into the vaguely lightening darkness to the south-east before we had realised that the pilot had made his drop. It was a measure of his complete self-confidence that he didn’t even trouble to check the accuracy of his drop: but for a man skilled in landing on the handkerchief-sized flight deck of a carrier in the middle of the night this must have been a childishly simple exercise.

  There were two packages, not one, attached not to parachutes but to insignificant little drogues that seemed to let them fall much too fast for safety: they landed almost together not forty yards from the magnesium flares and with such force that I was sure that their contents must be smashed. But I had underestimated the Fleet Air Arm’s skill and experience in these matters, the contents were so beautifully packed and cushioned that everything was completely intact. The packages were duplicated: two ampoules of insulin and three hypodermic syringes in each package: whoever had packed these had been taking no chances. But gratitude was the last thought in my mind at that moment: I just tucked the boxes under my arm and made for the tractor at a dead run.

  For close on two hours Hillcrest’s driver pushed the big Sno-Cat along at its maximum speed, and despite the inherent stability afforded by its four wide caterpillars, the tractor swayed and lurched in terrifying fashion. This was bad country, this was crevasse country, and we had been forced to make a wide detour that had carried us more than three miles away from the Kangalak glacier. And once again Jackstraw’s big Siberian wolf proved how invaluable he was: running tirelessly ahead, he repeatedly guided the Sno-Cat away from dangerous territory, but even so our route was a necessarily devious and twisted one, though the picking out of a path became considerably easier after the pale grey light of the arctic noon spread across the ice-cap.

  For all of us it was a time of tension, of an ever-mounting anxiety that reached intolerable proportions. For the first half-hour or so I was busy enough in broaching the tractor’s first-aid kit and doing what doctoring I could to Mahler – a Mahler whose dyspnoea was already dramatically easing – Marie LeGarde, Helene, Jackstraw and, above all, to Zagero’s shattered hands. Then I myself submitted to Hillcrest’s rough and ready ministrations, but after that there was nothing for me to do, nothing for any of us to do except try to avoid the bitterness of thinking what must happen if the Citroen reached the tongue of the glacier before us.

  Suddenly, exactly on noon, the tractor stopped abruptly. We jumped out to see what the matter was, and it became apparent soon enough the driver was awaiting instructions. We had abruptly rounded the humpback of the last ice ridge that had lain between us and the glacier itself.

  Even in the half-light of the arctic day the panorama suddenly unfolded before us was a breathtaking one. To the north, the ice-sheet extended all the way down to the coast, forming vertical and in some places overhanging cliffs, the well-known phenomenon of the Chinese Wall fronts: nobody, nothing, could hope to land there.

  To the south and separated from the fjord by the mile-long ridgeback of the seaward-projecting southern wall of the fjord, was a wide bay, fringed by a low, ice-bare rocky coast, quilted here and there with drifts of snow blown off the ice-cap. There, if anywhere, was where we would have to leave.

  In the centre, between the low walls of the fjord, the Kangalak glacier itself, here, at its tongue, about 300 yards wide, ran down to the waters of the fjord in a great dog-leg curving sharply thirty degrees right about half-way down its length, ending abruptly with its upper surface a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the pack-ice-strewn water beneath. For the first half of its length the tongue of the glacier sloped fairly sharply from right to left down to the nunataks, crescent-fringed by the debris of moraines, that thrust up through the ice at the far corner of the dog-leg: the surface of the glacier was a nightmare of transverse and longitudinal fissures, some of them anything up to two hundred feet deep, great gaping chasms fanged with seracs – the irregular, often needle-pointed ice pinnacles that reached up between the walls of the larger crevasses. Surely Smallwood could never be so desperate, so insane as to drive the Citroen out on that: apart from the fissures, the very steepness of the slope downwards and to the left would be enough to send him into an uncontrollable slide.

  And beyond everything lay the sea, the island-studded, ice-filled waters of Baffin Bay. Off-shore there was a mile-wide belt of loose pressure ice -the season was not yet far enough advanced for the fantastic shapes it would assume in the early spring – streaked with open, ever-changing leads and dotted at rare intervals with small icebergs -probably ones that had broken off from the east coast, drifted south round Cape Farewell and then moved north again, the whole half-lost, unearthly, and impossibly, weirdly, continuously altered in configuration by the white drifting fog that hung miasma-like over the sea.

  But two things there were that were not lost: two ships. The one to the south-west, wraith-like and blurred though its lines were through the swirling mist, was quite unmistakable, that raked and slender silhouette would have been unmistakable anywhere: it was a destroyer, it could only be the Wykenham, moving slowly, cautiously shorewards through the ice-filled waters of the bay to our left. A heart-warming, immensely reassuring spectacle – or it should have been: but after the first cursory identifying glance I lost interest, my attention was taken and completely held by the second ship.

  I couldn’t see all of it, most of its hull was hidden by the precipitous end of the glacier, but its small squat bridge, two masts and broad, bluff seaward-pointing bows were clearly etched against the mirror-calm waters of the head of the fjord and the sloping ice-bare rock that brushed its portside fenders. I could see no flag. It was a trawler, unmistakably so, and I thought grimly that it must have been a very special trawler indeed to have battered that still-visible path through the ice-choked mouth of the fjord.

  My gaze moved back to the trawler again and a second later I was grabbing Hillcrest’s binoculars without so much as by your leave. One glance was enough, even in that shadowed gloom of the depth of the fjord I could see all I wanted to see by the grey noon-light. I could see a great deal more than I wanted to. For a few seconds I stood stock-still listening desperately for the sound of the Citroën’s engines: moments later I was in the tractor cabin, by the radio tabl
e.

  ‘Still in contact with the Triton, Joss?’ He nodded, and I rushed on: ‘Tell them there’s a group of men coming ashore from a trawler in the Kangalak Fjord. Ten, twelve, I’m not sure. And I’m not sure whether they’re armed. I’ll be damned surprised if they aren’t. Tell them I’m certain they’re going to move up on the glacier.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Of course!’ I snapped. ‘Send a message immediately. And—’

  ‘No. I meant are they moving up the glacier now?’

  ‘Take them ten, fifteen minutes – the fjord walls are pretty steep and it’s tricky to climb … After that ask the Wykenham if they will send a landing party ashore. An armed party. And for God’s sake tell them it’s urgent.’

  ‘Will they get here in time, Doc?’ Zagero was behind me. ‘By the time they lower a boat, row ashore, cross this headland – it’s half a mile if it’s an inch – it’ll take them fifteen minutes, maybe more.’

  ‘I know,’ I said irritably – irritably, but softly, for Joss was already talking into the table microphone, in the swift, staccato yet strangely unhurried voice of the trained radioman. ‘If you have any better suggestions—’

  ‘It’s coming!’ Hillcrest’s excited face had just appeared at the door of the cabin. ‘Come on! We can hear it coming down the glacier.’

  And indeed they could. The deep throaty roar of that heavy engine was recognisable anywhere. Hurriedly we moved about a hundred yards away from the moraine-ringed depression where we had parked the tractor, Jackstraw, Hillcrest and I each with a rifle in our hands, and crouched down behind the concealing protection of some ice-covered debris at the edge of the glacier. From where we lay we could command a view of the glacier across its entire width and up to a point several hundred yards away, where it curved sharply out of sight.

  We needn’t have hurried. The Citroen was still some good way off, the sound of its engine being funnelled down through the glacier valley well ahead of it, and I had time to look around me. What I saw seemed good. I was banking everything on the hope that the Citroën would still be on the same side of the glacier as when we had last seen it, and, from what I could see, the chances were high that it still would be. The entire centre of the glacier was a devil’s playground of crevasses ranging from hairlines to chasms twenty and more feet in width, transverse, longitudinal and diagonal, and as far as I could see they extended clear to the other wall. But here, on the left side, close in to the lining wall of moraine, was a relatively clear path, fissured only at long intervals, and not more than thirty yards broad. Thirty yards! Jackstraw could never miss at this point-blank range, even with a moving target.

  I stole a glance at him, but his face might have been carved from the glacier itself, it was immobile and utterly devoid of expression. Hillcrest, on the other hand, was restless, forever shifting his cramped position: he was unhappy, I knew; he didn’t like this one little bit. He didn’t like murder. Neither did I. But this wasn’t murder, it was a long overdue execution: it wasn’t life-taking, it was life-saving, the lives of Margaret and Solly Levin …

  There came the sudden click, abnormally loud even above the closing roar of the tractor, and Jackstraw, stretched his length on the snow, had the rifle raised to his shoulder. And then, suddenly, the Citroen had come clearly into sight and Jackstraw was gently lowering his rifle to the ground. I had gambled, and I had lost. The tractor was on the far side of the glacier, hugging the right bank as closely as possible: even at its nearest point of approach it would still be three hundred yards away.

  TWELVE

  Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m.

  The Citroen was travelling in a most erratic fashion – one moment slowing down almost to a stop, the next jerking forward and covering perhaps twenty to thirty yards at a rush. Although we couldn’t see the glacier surface at that distance, it was obvious that the driver was picking his way round ice-mounds and threading along between fissures at the best speed he could manage. But his average speed was very low: it would probably take him almost five minutes to reach that point opposite us where the glacier fell away sharply to the left towards the outer angle of the dog-leg half-way down towards the fjord.

  All these things I noted mechanically, without in any way consciously thinking of them. All I could think of was that Smallwood and Corazzini had outwitted us right up to the last – almost certainly, I could understand now, they had seen and been warned by the rockets Hillcrest had fired to give the Scimitar our position, and decided to give that side of the glacier the widest possible berth.

  But the reasons no longer mattered a damn. All that mattered was the accomplished fact, and the fact was that Corazzini and Smallwood could no longer be stopped, not in the way we had intended. Even yet, of course, they could be stopped – but I had no illusions but that that would be at the cost of the lives of the two hostages in the tractor.

  Frantically I tried to work out what to do for the best. There was no chance in the world that we might approach them openly over the glacier – we would be spotted before we had covered ten yards, and a pistol at the heads of Margaret and Levin would halt us before we got half-way. If we did nothing, let them get away, I knew the hostages’ chances of survival were still pretty slim – that trawler would almost certainly have a name or number or both and I couldn’t see Smallwood letting them make an identification of the trawler and then come back to report to us – and to all the waiting ships and planes in the Davis Strait -Baffin Sea area. Why should he take the slightest risk when it would be so easy to shoot them, so much easier still to throw them down a crevasse or shove them over the edge of the glacier into the freezing waters of the fjord a hundred and fifty feet below … Already the Citroën was no more than three minutes away from the nearest point of approach they would make to us.

  ‘Looks like they’re going to get away with it,’ Hillcrest whispered. It seemed as if he feared he might be overheard, though Smallwood and Corazzini couldn’t have heard him had he shouted at the top of his voice.

  ‘Well, that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ I asked bitterly.

  ‘What I wanted! My God, man, that missile mechanism—’

  ‘I don’t give a single solitary damn about the missile mechanism.’ I ground the words out between clenched teeth. ‘Six months from now other scientists will have invented something twice as good and ten times as secret. They’re welcome to it, and with pleasure.’

  Hillcrest was shocked, but said nothing. But someone was in agreement with me.

  ‘Hear, hear!’ Zagero had just come up, his hands swathed to the size of boxing gloves in white bandages. The words were light enough, but his face was grim and his eyes bleak as he stared out across the glacier. ‘My sentiments exactly, Doc. To hell with their murderous little toys. My old man’s in that buggy out there. And your girl.’

  ‘His girl?’ Hillcrest turned, looked sharply at me under creased brows for a long moment, then murmured: ‘Sorry, boy, I didn’t understand.’

  I made no response, but twisted my head as I heard footsteps behind me. It was Joss, hatless and gloveless in his excitement.

  ‘Wykenham’s anchored, sir,’ he panted out. ‘Her—’

  ‘Get down, man! They’ll see you.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He dropped to his hands and knees. ‘Her powerboat’s already moving inshore. And there was a flight of four Scimitars already airborne: they should be half-way here already. In two minutes’ time four or five bombers are taking off, with HE and incendiaries. They’re slower, but—’

  ‘Bombers?’ I snapped irritably. ‘Bombers? What do they think this is – the Second Front?’

  ‘No sir. They’re going to clobber the trawler if Smallwood gets away with that missile mechanism. They won’t get a hundred yards.’

  ‘The hell with their missile mechanism. Do human lives mean nothing to them? What is it, Jackstraw?’

  ‘Lights, Dr Mason.’ He pointed to the spot on the fjord wall where the men from the trawler had already co
vered two-thirds of the horizontal and vertical distance to the end of the glacier. ‘Signalling, I think.’

  I saw it right away, a small light, but powerful, winking irregularly. I watched it for a few moments then heard Joss’s voice.

  ‘It’s morse, but it’s not our morse, sir.’

  ‘They’re hardly likely to signal in English just for our benefit,’ I said dryly. I tried to speak calmly, to hide the fear, the near despair in my mind, and when I spoke again my voice, I knew, was abnormally matter-of-fact. ‘It’s the tip-off to our friends Smallwood and Corazzini. If we can see the men from the trawler, it’s a cinch the men from the trawler can see us. The point is, do Smallwood and Corazzini understand them?’

  Five seconds later I had my answer in the form of a suddenly deepening roar coming to us across the glacier from the engine of the Citroën. Corazzini – Hillcrest’s binoculars had shown him to be the driver – had understood the danger all right, he was casting caution to the winds and gunning the engine to its maximum. He must have been desperate, desperate to the point of madness, for no sane man would have taken the fearful risks of driving that tractor through sloping crevasse ice with the friction coefficient between treads and surface reduced almost to zero. Or could it be that he just didn’t know the suicidal dangers involved?

  After a few seconds I was convinced he didn’t. In the first place, I couldn’t see either Corazzini or Smallwood as men who would panic under pressure, no matter how severe that pressure, and in the second place suicidal risks weren’t absolutely necessary, they would have stood a more than even chance of getting away with their lives and the missile mechanism if they had stopped the tractor, got out and picked their cautious way down the glacier on foot, with their pistol barrels stuck in the backs of their hostages. Or would they – rather, did they think they would?