Henry Hubbard leaned back and said, “If we can keep this up, we should reach Dead Man’s Mansion by midday tomorrow.”
“Provided it exists.”
“It exists, Jim. I know it exists. The closer I get, the surer I am.”
There was a lengthy silence between them as the Sno-Cat ground its way across the glacier. They were bumped and buffeted against the sides of the cabin, but they were dressed in so many layers of clothes that they barely felt it. TT began to mewl inside her box, so Jim let her out and sat her on his lap, so that she could look out of the misted-up window. She didn’t seem to want any food or drink. She sat upright staring northward, her ears folded back, and Jim had the strangest feeling that she was coming home.
After a long while, Jack sat up and touched his father’s shoulder. “Dad … I just want to tell you that what you’re doing here … well, I really appreciate it.”
“I’m doing what I have to do, that’s all.”
“No, you’re not. I know you didn’t mean to trade my soul. I know you must have thought that the Snowman was some kind of hallucination. I would have thought it was, too.”
“I still shouldn’t have done it.”
“It doesn’t matter any more. I know you never wanted to come back here. I know what that thing did to you – taking your pride and your courage and everything. But it takes much more courage to come back when you’re scared than it does when you’re not, doesn’t it? And who needs to be proud when other people are proud of them?”
Henry Hubbard looked quickly at Jim and Jim could see that there was a tear glistening in his right eye.
Jack said, “I’m trying to make you understand that I forgive you for what you did. Whatever happens here … even if we can’t find Dead Man’s Mansion. I know that you never really meant to hurt me.”
Henry Hubbard gripped his son’s hand and said, “Thanks, Jack,” in a soft, husky voice. After that, they traveled in silence again for a while. The dark clouds began to mount the sky from the west, and a fine snow began to blow horizontally across the glacier, like thistledown. The sun was still shining, but Jim reckoned that it would soon be overwhelmed. He hoped to God that they could cross the exposed surface of the glacier before a blizzard caught up with them.
“By the way,” said Jack, “what was that you said to John Kudavak back there? Was that Spanish?”
“No estoy en casa a Senor Fisgando. It means keep your schnozzle out of my business. Strictly translated, ‘I’m not at home to Mister Snoopy’.”
Within an hour, the clouds had completely swallowed the sky, and it was so dark that Henry had to switch on the bank of spotlights on top of the Sno-Cat’s roof. The wind blew harder and harder, until it rocked the Sno-Cat’s cabin and screamed between the tracks like a ghost train. The snow was still quite light, however, whirling in the spotlights and pattering against the windows.
Henry turned around and shouted, “We’re almost halfway across! So long as the snow holds off, we should make it okay!”
Jim strained his eyes and peered at the gloomy landscape ahead. Through the flying snow, he thought he could make out a jagged shadow crossing the ice at a sharp diagonal, only thirty or forty feet in front of them.
“Henry! What’s that ahead of us?”
Henry turned his head and immediately brought the Sno-Cat to a shuddering halt. The jagged shadow was a deep crevasse – wide enough for the Sno-Cat to have tipped into. They climbed down from the cabin into the wind, and walked over to the edge. The crevasse was not only wide, it was so deep that they couldn’t see how far it went down.
“What do we now?” said Jim.
“We can’t cross over, so we’ll just have to follow it as far as it goes. It looks like it’s going to take us way off course.”
“Better get going, then. Let’s hope that it doesn’t stretch across the whole damn glacier.”
They heaved themselves back into the Sno-Cat and Henry started it up. He steered it along the left-hand side of the crevasse, making sure that he kept the tracks well away from the brink. “I saw the edge of a crevasse give way once, with two men and a sled and a dog-team standing on it. They went down so deep that they broke every bone in their bodies, dogs and men both, and they were frozen to death before we could winch them out.”
Henry kept on talking, but he couldn’t relax his concentration for a second, because the crevasse zig-zagged so unpredictably. It also took them further and further to the west, more than a mile from the place where they had planned to reach the opposite bank.
They were more than two thirds of the way across when Jack lifted his woolly hat clear of his ear and said, “What’s that? Can you hear something?”
Jim listened but all he could hear was the thrumming of the engine. But Jack said, “There it is again. It’s coming closer, whatever it is.”
Jim strained his ears, and this time he could hear something. It was a flacker-flacker-flacker noise, the same kind of noise that he used to make when he was a kid, by clothes-pinning a stiff square of cardboard on to his bicycle wheel.
“Engine’s not giving up on us, is it, Henry?” he shouted. “Sounds like a bearing’s gone.”
“Don’t think so,” Henry replied. “Oil pressure’s up, heat’s steady.”
Still the flacker-flacker-flacker grew louder. It sounded as if it were coming from the south-west, close behind them. Jim peered out of the Sno-Cat’s window but he couldn’t see anything other than whirling snow and clouds the color of rotten cauliflower.
Jack said, “Jim, that sounds like a—”
And it was then that a white Alouette helicopter suddenly appeared in front of them, dipping and dancing in the wind. It switched on a blinding searchlight that shone directly into the Sno-Cat’s cabin, and a hugely amplified voice announced, “Stop! Alaska State Police! You are approaching a prohibited area! Turn back immediately!”
The helicopter circled around them, so that they could see the Alaska State Police insignia, and they could see the goggled trooper sitting at the open door, with a high-powered rifle resting across his legs.
“Turn back immediately! We will escort you back to Lost Hope Creek!”
“What are you going to do?” asked Jim. “We can’t turn back now – not after coming this far.”
“Then we’ll carry on,” said Henry. He revved up the engine again, and the Sno-Cat continued to crawl forward across the glacier, with the State Police helicopter pirouetting all around it.
“Turn back immediately! Turn back immediately!”
Henry’s response was to press the accelerator even harder, so that the Sno-Cat picked up speed to eighteen miles per hour.
“Turn back immediately, or we will open fire to disable your vehicle!”
“Do you hear that?” said Henry. “They’re going to start shooting at us. Typical police response to anything they don’t understand.”
He kept on driving steadily forward, while the helicopter’s searchlight shone through the cabin so brightly that none of them could see.
Jim said, “Keep going. With any luck they won’t have the nerve to open fire. This is Alaska, after all. Not LA.”
They picked up speed as they roared down a steep, slanting incline, the ice crackling and creaking underneath their tracks. Close beside them, the helicopter reared and side-stepped like a skittish horse.
“What did I tell you?” said Jim. “Hayseeds in furry hats. They won’t hurt us.”
At that moment they heard an explosive bang and the Sno-Cat’s engine let out a wounded scream. Another bang, and another, and a bullet punched right through the roof of the Sno-Cat’s cabin and blew a hole through TT’s cardboard box. TT, sitting on her own by the window, didn’t even jump. Her attention was still fixed on the north, her ears sloped back, her eyes slitted, and all the time she was softly purring – a purr that you could hear only if you sat right next to her.
The helicopter circled around behind them. Jim heard another shot, and then another, and
the moaning sound of ricochets. They were shooting at the track assemblies now, trying to damage the tracks or pierce the hydraulic hoses. Another bullet struck the cabin roof, flying off into the snow; and yet another punctured the windshield.
“They’re going to kill us,” said Jim. “Forget what I said about hayseeds in furry hats. These guys mean business.”
“So what do we do?” Henry demanded. “Stop? Give up? And sacrifice Jack to the Snowman?”
“Can we get to Dead Man’s Mansion on foot?”
“From here? It must be seventeen or eighteen miles.”
“But can we do it?”
“Like I told you, it’s very difficult terrain. It depends on the weather. It depends on how determined we are.”
“But can we do it?”
“I guess we have a seventy per cent chance. With a little help from the Great Immortal Being.”
“Then here’s what we’re going to do. Jack and I will jump out of the Sno-Cat when the helicopter’s light is pointing the other way, and we’ll hide ourselves in the snow. You turn the Sno-Cat toward the crevasse and leave the gas pedal jammed down with that fire-extinguisher. Then you jump out, and hide yourself, too.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Do you have any better suggestions? Either we stop, and they arrest us, and take us back to Fairbanks; or else we don’t stop, and they shoot us; or else we try to get away.”
Henry hesitated for a moment, but then the helicopter came roaring closer, and three more high-powered bullets penetrated the engine compartment. Steam began to hiss from the hood, and the oil-pressure gauge swung dramatically downward.
“Henry – we don’t have any alternative. Not if we’re going to save Jack.”
“Okay,” said Henry. “Let’s do it. Jack – you take that rucksack with all the supplies. Jim – you carry the tent. What are you going to do with your cat?”
“TT can ride inside my coat. I don’t think any other cat would do it, but TT seems to be more determined to get to Dead Man’s Mansion than we do.”
Again they were blinded by bright blue halogen light. The helicopter marksman fired three more shots – one of which banged through the Sno-Cat’s cabin with a noise like somebody stamping on a tin roof.
“That’s enough for me,” said Jim. “Let’s get out of here.”
As the helicopter swung away, he opened the Sno-Cat’s door and climbed out onto the ladder. The wind was screaming even more loudly now, so loudly that the noise of the helicopter was almost drowned out. Jack picked up a limp, unprotesting TT and handed her down. TT’s fur blurted in the wind, and she turned her face away, but she didn’t struggle. Jim hesitated for a moment, and then he dropped on to the ice. He stumbled and almost fell, but he managed to catch his balance and jog off sideways into the darkness, with TT dangling under his arm. It didn’t take him long to find an icy outcrop and drop down underneath it, covering his orange survival outfit with powdered snow. Jack jumped out next, rolling over and over with his backpack. He picked himself up and looked all around him, bewildered, but Jim gave him his taxi-hailing whistle and he came running over to join him.
The Sno-Cat trundled on, heading toward the crevasse. The helicopter swooped around it yet again, firing three more shots. But it didn’t slow down. Henry must have wedged the fire-extinguisher on top of the gas pedal by now, and it would be only seconds before he jumped out, too.
Just here, the crevasse was more than forty feet wide and it ran straight across the Sno-Cat’s slowly grinding path. It was impossible to tell how deep it was, but a crevasse as wide as that could reach down right to the underbelly of the glacier, where the unimaginable tonnage of ice above it melted the Sheenjek river into water.
“Time to abandon ship, Henry,” urged Jim, under his breath.
But the Sno-Cat roared onward, pouring out thick black smoke and high-pressure steam, and still Henry didn’t jump out.
“Come on, Dad,” said Jack, desperately.
“It’s okay,” Jim told him. “Your dad’s cutting it a little fine, that’s all.”
The Sno-Cat kept on going. Its engine was on fire now. They could see the bright orange flames licking out of the engine vents. It was less than ten feet from the edge of the crevasse, but even though the door was swinging open, there was still no sign of Henry Hubbard.
“Dad,” said Jack. It sounded like a prayer.
The Sno-Cat’s engine suddenly flared up; and the helicopter swung around and picked it out with its searchlight. It was only then that Jim saw the dark figure lying at an awkward angle over the control sticks, and the spray of red blood and yellow brains up against the perspex window. One of the last three shots must have penetrated the Sno-Cat’s cabin and hit Henry in the head.
Before the Sno-Cat reached the very edge of the crevasse, the ice began to collapse under its weight. Abruptly, it tilted sideways, its tracks racing, its engine flaring up. The last that Jim saw of Henry Hubbard was a silhouette of a man being flung to one side like a marionette, one arm raised in a jerky, involuntary farewell. Then, with an ear-splitting crack of ice, and a tortured scream of metal and machinery, the Sno-Cat dropped into the crevasse, and disappeared.
There was a long moment of tumbling and banging as it collided with one side of the crevasse, and then the other. The helicopter came dipping down to see what had happened, shining its seachlight right down into the depths.
Jack shouted, “You bastards! You bastards! You killed my dad!” He tried to scramble on to his feet but Jim snatched the strap of his rucksack and dragged him back.
“They killed him, and they’re going to pay for it. But if you let them see you now, this whole expedition is finished.”
“They shot him! They shot him! He was my dad and they shot him!”
“They’ll pay, I promise you! You and I were witnesses. They’ll pay.”
At that instant, there was a deafening explosion, and a thunderous ball of orange flame rolled out of the crevasse. The helicopter tilted away, but the huge upsurge of heat must have caught it off-balance, because it suddenly keeled over, and the tips of its rotor-blades bit into the ice.
It happened so fast that that Jim could hardly follow what was happening. The helicopter’s rotors burst into thousands of flying fragments, which whistled all around them like boomerangs. Its fuselage dropped on its side and hit the ice, but then it bounced off and toppled into the crevasse, following the Sno-Cat. There was a sharp series of crackles and cracks, and then a soft, emphatic whoommfff! Another ball of fire rolled up into the air, followed by a rolling column of acrid smoke.
With their hands lifted to protect their faces, Jim and Jack approached the crevasse and peered over the edge. Sixty feet below, fires raged like a medieval vision of hell. The heat was so intense that the ice on either side was melting in bubbling cascades and then boiling. Tangled together in a last destructive embrace, the helicopter and the Sno-Cat were both fiercely burning, and the crevasse was criss-crossed with ladders of wreckage. Jim saw the helicopter pilot still sitting in his seat, as if he were sitting on a high blazing throne, his head thrown back, his uniform charred black and fire pouring out of his open mouth.
Jim took hold of Jack’s arm and led him away. Jack’s eyes streamed with tears, but then Jim’s were streaming, too, from the heat and the smoke.
They sat down for a while, exhausted, shocked, saying nothing, while showers of sparks flew out of the crevasse and danced amongst the snowflakes. Then Jim stood up and said, “Time to go on, Jack. They’ll be sending more helicopters soon. We can cry about this later.”
Thirteen
With each hour that passed, the blizzard grew fiercer. It was so dark that it could have been two o’clock in the morning instead of two o’clock in the afternoon. The wind screamed at them from the north-west, all the way across the Bering Straits from Siberia. Jim opened his stormproof coat and tucked Tibbles Two into his sweater. She didn’t struggle, even when he tugged the zipper right up over her ears.
Side by side, keeping so close together that they kept jostling each other, Jim and Jack plodded along the edge of the Sheenjek crevasse. Jim had seen the blizzards that Henry Hubbard had faced on his videotapes of his last expedition, but he had never appreciated how strong the wind was, and how stinging the snow, and to what agonizing degrees the temperature could drop. Although it was summer, it was probably forty-five below, but the windchill factor made it seem half as cold again. In spite of his hood and his gloves and all of his layers of clothing, Jim felt as if every last calorie of heat had been leached out of his bones, and that he would never again know what it was like to be warm.
The snow became furious. Jim and Jack clung close together. One of them would have to stray only five or six paces and he would disappear into all of that madly whirling whiteness, and be impossible to find. And the blizzard never relented: it went on and on, until Jim felt as if he were being forced to stare at a blank television screen for hours on end. All that gave him any sense of direction was the edge of the crevasse, which he knew was taking them further and further west of the place they had been aiming for; and his compass, whose dial frosted over every time he brought it out to look at it; and Tibbles Two. Every time he unzippered his jacket to make sure that she hadn’t suffocated, her eyes were staring fixedly northward.
They reached the edge of the glacier shortly before sunset – although they couldn’t have known for sure, because they hadn’t seen the sun for hours. The wind was so strong now that they had to walk with their backs bent. They were both exhausted and Jim began to wonder if it was less of a risk to turn back to Lost Hope Creek. There had to be another way of fighting the Snowman, apart from trudging for miles and miles through sub-zero temperatures, looking for a mansion that was said to be nothing more than a mirage.
He patted Jack on the shoulder and they crouched down together behind a low curve of rocks. “Let’s take a rest,” he said. “We still have another ten miles to go, at least.”
Rook: Snowman Page 17
