Asura
Page 11
Just then the ice on which Rose was standing gave way. A chunk the size of a double bed just tilted forward and pitched into the chasm. Instinctively Rose tried to go with the motion of the falling ice and use it to try and reach the other side. But the free-falling ice gave poor footing for his desperate standing leap, and he fell into the pit.
Garrett panicked. The fissure was growing ever larger, advancing towards the crashed plane in a double pronged attack by nature against the frail humans that had dared to disturb it. Garrett was caught between the ever-widening chasm and the crushing advance of the avalanche that bore down on them like a cavalry charge a mile wide.
He dropped Morcellet’s stretcher from his shaking fingers and staggered, almost crawling on all fours into the Fairchild’s fuselage, hoping that after beating the odds once, the old bird would hold together under a second pummelling.
‘For God’s sake, don’t leave me!’ Morcellet called. He sat upright still strapped into his stretcher, exposed and unable to move. He tried to push the stretcher along the ice with the palms of his hands but got nowhere. Frantically he clawed at the straps that held him tightly against the plastic.
‘Garrett!’ he cried. ‘Damn you, Garrett!’
Garrett watched him from inside the end of the fuselage. He couldn’t see the approaching avalanche; he could only hear the rumbling crescendo of its approach. It shook the ice like a million hooves: it echoed through the walls of the plane like a shouted promise of destruction. He didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish by cowering in the plane. He just felt a bug-like need for the enclosing darkness of the small space, knowing that it offered no real protection. All it did was blind him to the approaching destruction like the blindfold of the condemned man before the firing squad.
‘Damn you, Garrett!’ Morcellet shouted again.
Garrett held his head in his hands. Shut up! Shut up! Why did that French bastard have to use his last breaths to condemn him? He had done nothing wrong. But then again, he reminded himself, he had done nothing right either.
◆◆◆
Campbell watched as Garrett dashed out of the wrecked plane and grabbed the Frenchman. Morcellet had managed to undo his straps and crawl a metre or so towards the plane and Garrett dragged him the rest of the way. Behind that futile tableau, the avalanche reared up, twice the height of the crashed plane and more.
Campbell and Carver didn’t even have Garrett’s false hope to cling to. Exposed away from the plane, the avalanche would squash them like bugs on the windscreen of a semi-trailer. The noise was unbelievable. It was incomprehensible that such power, such icy fury would probably never be heard by anyone except its victims. It was his own personal Armageddon.
Campbell realised that the roar he heard was growing stronger behind him. He turned to face whatever new terror had outflanked them.
‘Well don’t just stand there,’ Marinucci said from the driver’s seat of the Supacat. ‘Get on!’
CHAPTER 11
There wasn’t a hope in hell that they could outrun the avalanche. The wall of ice and snow was only a few hundred yards away and travelling at over a hundred miles an hour. Even on a sealed road, the turbocharged diesel engine of the tough little vehicle could only push it up to fifty miles an hour. On icy glacier, with its rolling dunes of wind blown snow, they were not even making that.
Marinucci drove the ‘cat like a madman. He swung the ‘cat and its sled-like trailer around the powdery mounds—half driving and half surfing down the slopes on the ‘cat’s flat bottom. The six balloon tyres spun furiously. They tore at the snow, sending plumes of it skyward where the fine crystals hung as if weightless before being swallowed by the churning maelstrom at their heels.
Mark Campbell crouched behind the driver’s seat, clinging onto the tubular steel roll bar as if his life depended on it, which it did. Carver sat opposite him.
‘We can’t outrun it,’ Marinucci shouted over the roar of the engine, ‘—but we might be able to find some cover.’
The mountains that rose around the glacier formed a natural bowl on three sides with the fourth being the spectacular ice fall to the north. The sides of the bowl were steep. The ‘cat could handle slopes of up to fifty-seven degrees, but the mountains rose like sheer cliffs around them. There was no way to climb out of the bowl. But the cliffs were not smooth; the perimeter of the bowl was a jagged, frozen coast of bays and inlets. If they could cut across the path of the glacier and make it into one of those sheltered bays, then the avalanche would just roll right past them.
It was going to be close. Marinucci’s every instinct screamed at him to turn away from the avalanche: to run before it for as long as they could before it eventually caught them. He knew that their only chance was to make it to the relative shelter at the edge of the glacier, but forcing his intellect to overcome the animal urge to run away from the approaching monster was another thing entirely.
The first blocks started to whiz past them. Huge chunks of ice, the size of double-decker busses tumbled across their path in blue-white blurs of clean, deadly purity. The wave of snow wasn’t far behind; it was slowing slightly as it gave up its kinetic energy in the churning motion of its advance, but it was still coming. The icy boulders it spat out gave up none of their speed in random collisions. They shot through the wave front and straight down the slope, any one of them capable of smashing the Supacat and all its occupants into smithereens.
Marinucci threw the ‘cat around a particularly large dune and, as they swung around, Tej saw a block of ice the size of a Volkswagen Beetle shooting towards them.
‘Right! Right!’ he shouted. Marinucci flung the ‘cat into a swift right-left shimmy as if taking some imaginary chicane. The ice block missed them by less than a metre; it gouged a hole in the snow as it thundered past them, tearing through the loose powder and glancing off the hard ice underneath.
‘Hang on!’ Marinucci shouted, and a second later the ’cat and its trailer were airborne, flying over the trench that the speeding block had left in its wake. The engine pitch rose to a shriek as the six tyres lost all resistance and spun madly in the air. Then they landed on the down slope of a dune, and the force of their landing slammed them into the snow up to the tops of their tyres, forcing the ‘cat to sledge along on its bottom until they sounded again, bursting out of the snow like a porpoise cresting through the bow wave of some great ship.
The mountainside loomed large above them, but their flight had brought them to an unusually sheer face of rock: an expanse of granite with barely enough handholds for a climber, certainly no features large enough to shield the ‘cat and its occupants.
‘There,’ Tej shouted and pointed over Marinucci’s shoulder at a dark shadow on the rock face. Marinucci strained to see what he was pointing at. A crack in the rock barely six feet wide—only just wider than the ‘cat itself.
‘You have got to be kidding,’ Carver said behind them. ‘I’d rather climb.’
This was madness. Travelling at top speed as they were, if he was even a fraction out either way, they would slam into a head-on collision with the rock face and the avalanche would be the least of their problems.
He felt the first stings of flying ice crystals against his cheek. They weren’t going to make it anyway.
◆◆◆
Rose clung onto his ice axe on the inside face of the crevasse. Below his swinging boots, the fissure through the ancient ice continued down into a still, black void.
The thought of staying put flashed across his mind—maybe he could sit out the avalanche, just hanging there from his axe. He dismissed the idea just as quickly. The mouth of the crevasse was too wide. Instead of rolling over it, a good few tonnes of ice and snow would fall into it. Even if he could hang on as the wave of snow broke over him—which he doubted—he would be buried alive. No he had to get out of there, and fast.
The ice near the lip of the crevasse was dangerously friable. The sudden movement of the glacier had frosted the hard, blue ice with
a spider’s web of cracks: most were hairline fissures, but some were wide enough to use. Rose shoved his hand into on of the bigger cracks and balled it into a fist, wedging it tightly in place. Even through his glove the ice was incredibly cold. He slammed the toe points of his crampons home and risked releasing the axe.
The extra weight on his feet proved too much for his toe holds and they shattered beneath him. He dangled from his one hand hold: his fist growing more and more numb with every passing second.
‘Real good technique, Jon,’ he scolded himself.
With desperate strength he slammed his axe in again as far up as he could reach. Tentatively he transferred some weight onto it. It held! He climbed as quickly as he could, hand over hand using one axe and the vertical crack until his shoulders burned. His forearms threatened to cramp up under the strain of holding his whole weight with one hand while slamming the axe home with the other.
After what felt like an age, he crawled over the lip of the crevasse into the middle of a howling gale. The avalanche was almost on top of him. Its massive, rumbling advance shook the entire glacier and it pushed a great bow wave of freezing cold air in front of it as it charged down the slope. Suddenly the black depths of the crevasse didn’t seem like such a bad option after all.
He saw Marinucci’s Supacat speeding away across the snow. He hoped that they would make it. He immediately saw what the canny Australian was trying to do and wished them luck.
The sacs of his avalanche-proof rucksack flapped, deflated, at his sides. They couldn’t help him now. He stared at the mega tonnes of snow bearing down on him. I’m going to need something bigger, he thought.
He had an idea. It was a desperate plan, but he was fast running out of options.
He shot a glance over his shoulder; the avalanche was right on top of him.
Morcellet’s orange plastic stretcher lay abandoned on the snow. Rose dashed for it, picked it up on the run and sprinted down the slope as fast as he could across the frozen crust of the snow. He held the stretcher at his side in two hands, his axe dangling dangerously from its lanyard, threatening to trip him or impale a thigh as he ran. He threw himself forward onto the stretcher like a surfer leaping off the beach to paddle out to sea. The hard plastic of the stretcher skittered across the frozen crust of snow, gathering speed slowly down the gentle slope.
It wasn’t going to work. The wave front of onrushing destruction was only metres behind him and the slope in the bowl of the glacier crater just wasn’t steep enough.
Morcellet’s oxygen bottle. It was still strapped into the side of the stretcher where Doctor Keyes had fixed it. Its plastic mask had been ripped away when Morcellet had dragged himself off the stretcher, but the steel bottle and its regulating valve were still there.
Rose smashed his ice axe down on the valve: once… twice… The brass nozzle gave way and the pent up oxygen burst from the opening. Rose felt an almighty shove as the little bottle pushed the stretched down the slope like a miniature rocket motor. Clinging desperately to the stretcher, Jonathan Rose shot down the slope.
◆◆◆
Rupert Garrett was not a brave man. He had become acutely aware of that fact over the past few days. Every success in his long career had been almost entirely because of one skill. If the truth be told, he had very little political or managerial talent, but he had an almost magical ability to get other people to deliver. Whether it was due to fear, or a desire to impress, people always did what he told them to do.
The last few days had been completely beyond his ability to cope. His one real skill had been rendered useless, as none of his fellow survivors had the capacity to get him off the mountain no matter how hard he bullied.
Garret cowered in the corner of the wrecked passenger cabin, tight up against the bulkhead separating the cargo compartment. Morcellet was with him. The two men clutched each other unashamedly: Garrett had never released the Frenchman from when he had grabbed him under the arms to drag him back into the dubious safety of the fuselage. They sat there and waited for the avalanche to hit.
The noise was unbelievable. It was so loud that Garrett found it difficult to believe that it hadn’t hit them yet. Maybe it had passed them by somehow.
Then it hit. Something smashed into the end of the fuselage with the force of a freight train. Garrett and Morcellet both shouted together although their voices were lost in the rumbling, crashing white-noise of the avalanche. The whole fuselage, struck as it had been on one extreme of the twelve metre long cylinder that lay across the slope of the glacier, turned with that first impact. What remained of the sixteen tonne aircraft after the crash, the tough cylinder of aluminium and plastic that had protected them against the elements for two days, that had survived even the terrible impact of their initial crash, spun like a top under the titanic force of nature that was now being applied to it.
Something kicked Garrett in the back, pushing him and the rest of the cabin forward as if he was strapped to the top of a Saturn 5 rocket. The body of the avalanche was upon them. The thousands of tonnes of rolling ice and snow–still speeding at over a hundred kilometres an hour, despite its long advance over the shallow slope of the glacier —picked up the Fairchild like a child’s toy, turning it over and over as if examining it for some weakness.
Garret fell from wall to wall as the rolling of the cylinder tossed him around. He did not even feel the rough body slam of each ricochet against the hard plastic wall panels. His senses grew dull until the violent rattling seemed to him little more than the rocking lullaby of a loving parent. Gratefully, he succumbed to the desire to slip into unconsciousness. The last thing he was aware of before he passed out was a delicious feeling of weightlessness, as if he was being held between heaven and earth by a cloud of attendant angels. Then his world opened up beneath him, and he fell down into a black sleep from which he knew he would never awaken.
◆◆◆
Jonathan Rose sped along the glacier. The stretcher he rode like a toboggan was a single tough hunk of blow-moulded plastic. It had been designed as both stretcher and sled specifically for mountain rescue applications, and was even stiff enough to allow patients to be winched to the safety of a helicopter by attaching lines to the lifting eyes at each end. The gently sloping ice of the glacier posed it no problem at all, although with no method of steering his little craft, the occasional dune of wind-blown snow could not be avoided, and when he hit them, Rose was in real danger of being flung off his bucking steed. He held the handles of the stretcher in a death grip, and each time he found himself airborne after launching off some mogul he had not even seen before hitting, he shifted his weight left and right like the passenger in a racing motorcycle sidecar to try and keep the stretcher level for the landing and lose as little speed as possible.
The initial kick from the oxygen bottle had given out after a few seconds, but not before it had pushed Rose forward with all the acceleration of a high performance motorcycle. He had actually gained ground on the avalanche, but the storm of churning ice was still following him; it showed no sign of giving up the pursuit.
Another dune of snow loomed ahead of him. He considered digging in the ice axes that still hung from his wrists by their nylon lanyards, but although that would give him some control over his course, it would also slow him down, and that he just couldn’t afford.
The face of the dune was as steep as the lip of a ski-jump, and Rose flew into the air. He could see the ribbed dome of the Svenska shelter only a few hundred metres ahead. Beyond that, the glacier continued for the length of a couple of football fields before disappearing over the lip of the huge icefall that separated the bowl-like birthplace of the glacier from the lower valley.
Rose was caught between the whirling ice demon that chased him, and the prospect of flying off the lip of that ice fall at about a hundred kilometres an hour. At that speed he would fly a good hundred metres through the air before finally falling with a bone-splintering impact to the jagged ice and rock below. Neither
alternative seemed particularly attractive and so he decided to take Plan C.
The stretcher landed with sharp crack and continued on its skittering course straight down the slope. Rose waited until he was only a second away from shooting straight past the shelter and the little camp that had been set up when they had first arrived. Then he rolled off his makeshift toboggan and jammed his axe into the ice as hard as he could.
◆◆◆
Rebecca McCarthy didn’t want to go outside. Outside was cold. Outside were men who had tried to kill her. At least sitting on a folding chair inside the warm shelter with Hill’s semi-automatic pistol on her lap she had the illusion of safety.
Yvonne Gibbons was using the same trick that McCarthy had developed during her two days on the mountain. She absolved herself from any need to think about the harsh realities of the situation by focussing her energies entirely on her duties to her patient. Muhammad Khamas man lay in a cot, smothered with blankets with an oxygen mask over his face which helped relieve his symptoms of altitude sickness even more than the already pressurised air inside the shelter. Every now and then he would pull the mask to one side to remind Yvonne about his daughter.
‘Don’t worry yourself, Mister Khamas,’ Yvonne would say. ‘She’s with the Doctor. I’m sure they’ll be here soon.’
They hadn’t told him that both helicopters—and therefore their only transport off the mountain—had been destroyed. Indeed, to hear Yvonne’s assurances, you would think that she had never possessed that information herself. Bedside manner or self delusion? McCarthy wasn’t sure.
The ground shook beneath her feet.
‘What was that?’ Khamas said at once. He started to swing his legs out from under the thick swaddling of army-issue grey wool that Yvonne had placed over him, but his nurse would have none of it. With matronly authority she placed a firm hand on Khamas’s shoulder, all but pinning him to the bed. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.’