Beneath the Ice

by Patrick Woodhead

  ‘Form up!’ he ordered, grabbing them by their webbing straps and forcing them into some kind of order. As they moved, more petrol bombs arced over from the crowd but this time fell short, exploding in circular pools of flame just metres ahead of them.

  ‘Fire!’ Bates screamed, raising his own pistol. After a second, the others followed suit. Soon, there was a steady thud from the R4 rifles. Bullets smacked into the crowd with pitiless force, dropping one figure then the next, as a constant stream of empty shell casings hit the ground around the soldiers’ feet. This sudden semblance of military order caused the crowd to falter. Almost as one they pulled back, leaving the dead and dying to litter the ground like a vision from hell. There were so many of them, lying on top of each other, connected by trails of gut and bone, the ground itself was awash with pools of still-warm blood.

  ‘Move! Move!’ Bates shouted, shuffling forward. As they advanced, the soldiers of Delta team saw their salvation and jumped down from the carcass of the trapped Mamba. They ran headlong towards their rescuers, hurling themselves and their rifles inside the cabin without looking back. Bates counted them in, noting that only four remained from the original ten-man unit. He could still see the outline of at least two others inside the APC, but they sat with their heads slumped forward, arms resting by their sides, already dead.

  His own men climbed on board their Mamba. The engine roared as the driver sent them swinging round in a tight circle away from the crowd. Bates stood by the open rear door, watching with pistol raised. He didn’t attempt to fire, realising there had been enough bloodshed for one day. Instead he watched, eyes switching from face to face in the crowd as the distance between them widened with each passing second. Soon, the Mamba had crossed to the far side of the market place and was powering up towards the open ramp of the motorway.

  Just ahead of them a barricade had been hastily erected, but it was little match for the speed and momentum of the Mamba. It crashed through the meagre collection of rubbish bins and old chairs, scattering them like leaves, before swerving on to the open road.

  Bates continued to stare as the township melted into the distance. He shook his head, almost unable to believe the sheer level of destruction he had witnessed in such a short time. He had never seen anything so incendiary. If there was one thing he now knew – Nyanga deserved its reputation.

  He switched his gaze inside the cabin to the mess of wounded soldiers. They filled every inch of the Mamba, lying across the bench seats and on the floor. Right at the back, he could see Bear ripping open a medical pack she had found and jamming a wad of gauze into the wound in a soldier’s neck. Her hands and wrists were covered in his blood and she was struggling to keep her balance amongst the slew of discarded weaponry and empty shell casings.

  Bates watched her for a moment longer, his eyes following every move. He had got her out of Nyanga, but now he was going to have to deal with the Americans.

  Chapter 23

  ‘IT’LL NEVER WORK,’ murmured Katz, craning his neck back to stare towards the ceiling of the old Soviet base.

  After the bitter realisation that the helicopter’s arrival did not signal a rescue attempt, Joel, Katz and Luca had spent nearly an hour discussing their fate. Eventually, they had arrived at a single solution. Luca was going to have to climb up to the skylights and attempt to smash his way through. But at over thirty feet above their heads, the task seemed virtually impossible.

  ‘Even if you do make it up there, how are you going to break the glass?’ continued Katz, his forehead furrowing in doubt.

  ‘Look, if you’ve got any better ideas, then let me know,’ Luca retorted. He moved across to one of the room’s steel girders and gently placed his right hand on the cold metal. His fingers brushed across the line of rivets, assessing the extent of the grip. It was barely wider than his fingernails.

  In the old days, the years of climbing had conditioned his hands into vices. He could dangle his entire weight from nothing more than two fingers, while the skin on each finger had been worn down so many times that it had become as tough as leather. But things were different now. He just wasn’t like that any more.

  Clenching his hands into fists, he cracked the knuckles of each finger in sequence. The other side effect of so much climbing was that it had triggered the early onset of arthritis. Now his joints ached more than ever. His hands felt brittle and inflexible, while a nervous sweat had already started to dampen his palms. Luca rubbed them against his thighs, drying them off, then slowly shook his head. What was he even thinking? The climb would have been daunting when he was an over-confident adolescent, let alone now.

  His eyes gradually followed the line of the main girder as it ran vertical for about twenty feet before angling back towards the skylights. The entire top section was an overhang and, once committed, there would be no place for him to rest. His only option would be to keep going.

  Luca’s eyes narrowed as he stared up towards the apex of the room. A fall from that height wouldn’t kill him, it would just break a leg, or, if he landed badly, be enough to snap one of his lower vertebrae. It was the worst kind of distance – not enough to kill him, but just enough to leave him crippled.

  ‘You can do it, mate,’ Joel said encouragingly, but as Luca turned to face him, he could see the lack of conviction in the other man’s eyes. To Joel, the climb looked simply impossible. When the idea had first been mooted, he had walked over to the sidewall and tried to hang off the girder himself out of sheer curiosity. After only a couple of seconds, he had slipped off and crumpled to the floor.

  Impossible or not, they all knew that it was the only option they had left. Everything rested on Luca now.

  ‘Just so you know, I’m not going to be the one scraping you off the floor if you fall from there,’ said Katz unhelpfully, raising an arm skyward as if in premonition.

  ‘Christ’s sake, Katz!’ Joel snapped. ‘That’s not what he needs to hear right now.’

  Joel turned towards Luca by way of an apology, but realised that he hadn’t even heard. He was entirely focused on what lay before him, his eyes narrowed on the drab grey metal of the girder.

  ‘Take this,’ Joel offered, handing across a squared metal pole. He had managed to unscrew it from the leg of a low table and thought it might be useful for smashing skylights. Luca nodded distractedly as he tied it on to his belt.

  ‘You’ll do just fine,’ Joel added, but his words fell on deaf ears. Luca had already stepped up on to the girder.

  Carefully positioning the tip of his right boot against one of the rivets, he arched his heel as if attempting a ballet position. He then smoothed the rest of his body upwards with his hips pressed flat against the raw metal, before finally reaching up and crimping his fingertips tight. His body was suspended a foot off the ground, like a chameleon attached to a tree branch, with the slightest loss of balance threatening to keel him over.

  Steadily raising his other boot, he repeated the process, using the nub of the rivets as footholds. From such close range, both Joel and Katz could see the muscles of his abdomen trembling with strain as he gradually uncurled and reached higher. All the while, his fingers remained clamped to the minuscule ledge, with his knuckles whitening from the effort.

  The seconds passed, one after the other, in the dead silence of the room. Luca made short work of the vertical section, but now the girder angled out behind him in a long, sloping overhang towards the skylights. As he reached back on to it, his body naturally swung out, trailing into the open air. It left only his fingertips and the edge of one of his boots still attached to the metal.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Joel breathed, expecting Luca to slide off with each passing second. Both he and Katz watched in amazement as the climber’s back arched and his shoulders contorted outwards, almost unnaturally, as he shifted his weight higher. It didn’t seem physically possible.

  Even from that distance they could hear Luca’s laboured breath, while droplets of sweat beaded his hairline and fell on to th
e hard surface of the floor thirty feet below. But he was making progress. The first of the skylights was only a few feet away now.

  Joel winced, neck painful from being crooked at such an angle, but his eyes stayed locked on Luca’s every move. He was higher now, almost touching the glass.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Joel whispered as he saw Luca pause then retreat back a few hard-won inches. Without his glasses, Joel could only see the hazy outline of what was going on.

  ‘He’s stuck,’ Katz blurted. ‘He’s trying to climb back down again.’

  They both watched as Luca’s right leg slowly lowered into the open air beneath him, dragging the rest of his body with it.

  ‘He’s going to fall!’ Katz warned. Joel looked towards Luca, wondering if they should attempt to catch him, but Katz was already retreating towards the edge of the room.

  But Luca didn’t fall. Instead, he adjusted his grip, then reached back to his belt with his left hand. He swung the metal pipe up towards the ceiling, jabbing it into the sealant around the windowpane as opposed to attempting to smash the glass as originally planned. On the third attempt, the rod pierced though and Luca twisted the end sideways, locking it tight against the wooden frame and giving himself a chance to rest his full weight on one arm.

  ‘It’s all rotten,’ he managed to tell them, shouting down between his legs. Although he had a better hold, he was at a loss as to what to do next. The glass was too thick to smash with the rod.

  Luca grunted, trying to resist the tremor in his forearms. He knew that he only had a few more seconds before they would give out completely. His abdominal muscles were cramping with the effort of holding his body in such an unnatural position, while sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He shook his head, trying to clear his vision, but it only seemed to make it worse as strands of hair clung to his face and open mouth.

  Seconds. He had seconds before his strength would desert him completely and his fingers would slowly uncurl from the bar as if someone were deliberately trying to peel them back. He had to act now or it would be too late.

  ‘Shit!’ he panted, trying to swing his body round and kick the glass with his boot, but he barely had enough momentum to touch it, let alone smash through. With his whole body hanging now, he reached forward, digging the fingers of his free hand into the thick smudge of sealant surrounding the glass. His fingernails scraped and bent, forcing their way through the rotten substance with frenzied determination. He could feel his other hand start to slip. It was only a millimetre, but it sent a terrible wave of panic running through him.

  Twisting his whole hand round, his fingers finally broke through the window seal and he curled them up and over the edge of the glass. It wasn’t much of a grip, but at least now he could spread his weight on to two arms. He waited, swinging in the open with his body stretched out. His core strength had wilted to such a degree that it felt as if the weight of his legs would pull his whole torso in two. He hung for a few more seconds, unsure if he had the strength to do anything else.

  Shifting his weight slightly, Luca heard a crack and watched as a splinter stretched right across the pane of glass. That was it! He could use his body weight to try and snap off a section of the skylight. Jerking his body up and down, he heard another crack, then another, before a huge slice of glass suddenly carved off. He swung back on one arm as it cut through the air, slewing sideways, before smashing down on to the ground and narrowly missing Joel.

  There was a shout from somewhere below, but Luca was only aware of the sudden whoosh of air as the cold came streaming in from outside. Particles of snow flurried in all around him, plastering his face and eyelashes as he desperately swung his right leg up into the gap. Finally, he was able to rest his leg on top of what remained of the skylight.

  Levering his hips up and through the gap, Luca pushed out on to the topside of the frame. As his full weight pressed down on the structure, the glass in the other skylights began to break, sending cracks out in a semi-circle like the web of a giant spider. Then another large triangle of glass broke off, spinning down into the darkness below. Spreading his arms wide, Luca inched back across the skylight and on to the relative safety of the plasterboard roof.

  He lay still, arms outstretched. The exhaustion was just too much. His forearms and shoulders felt as if the muscles had been slowly peeled back from the bones. This wasn’t just fatigue. It felt as though he had torn every last muscle in his arms and shoulders.

  An entire minute went by. He was dimly aware of shouts from below, but they were muffled by the breeze. Already, the cold had begun to freeze the sweat on his forehead and neck, with the moisture crystallising in large patches. Luca shivered, the sudden transition from panicked sweat to freezing cold taking him completely by surprise.

  With a low moan, he pulled himself up and began clambering across the roof on his hands and knees. It sagged under his weight, threatening to send him tumbling back into the base. Half sliding, half crawling, he made his way to the edge and rested once more.

  From the vantage point of the roof, he could see that the skies had finally cleared and, instead of the terrible wind, there was now only a light breeze gently curling around the mountain ridges. He could see the Ski-Doos still parked where they had left them. Whoever it was that had trapped them inside had obviously just abandoned them, thinking that there was no chance of escape.

  As Luca’s feet finally touched the ground, he allowed his legs to buckle and dropped on to all fours. He leant forward as if in prayer and let his head rest on the freezing cold rock in front. It suddenly felt strange to be free. The open skies and distant mountains felt limitless, instantly dispelling the feeling of hopelessness that had settled over him like a shroud back inside the base.

  He sat up, already feeling his thirst return. His mouth was bone dry and he knew that he must have lost a lot of moisture from sweating so much. Reaching forward, he grabbed a fistful of snow from the drift in front and bit deep. It was so cold as to freeze his teeth and send a bolt of pain through the front of his skull, but then the moisture fanned out across his lips and he sucked it back, drinking in every last drop.

  He turned towards the entrance of the base and the pile of rocks barring the door. With arms hanging limp at his sides, he shuffled closer, pulling the nearest rock with a clatter. It would take him an hour or so to move enough of them to free the door.

  Then there was another, more pressing issue. They still had to figure out a way to get back to GARI before the last flight. Luca glanced at his watch and shook his head. Only four hours remained.

  Katz and Joel emerged from the base, blinking in the daylight. Their eyes passed over the circle of mountains, staring in wonderment at the wide, open scenery.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Joel murmured, before reaching across with his long, angular arms and enveloping Luca in a hug. ‘You did it, mate. You actually did it!’

  Behind him, Katz nodded with appreciation. His eyes were still narrowed, but this time there was something almost contrite about his expression. Finally, the suspicion was gone. He stared across and was about to say something when he noticed that Luca was shivering. On the climb up, he had ditched his heavy clothing. Now only a thin fleece protected him from the cold.

  ‘Take this,’ Katz offered, returning Luca’s own down jacket that he had borrowed at the drill site. Without a word, Luca jammed his arms into the sleeves and zipped it tight, grateful for the thick insulation.

  ‘This is all very well,’ Katz said, ‘but we’ve still got to figure out a way to get back to the RV point in time. And that’s if the old bastard Dedov has even left a tractor there for us at all.’

  No one answered. Behind him, the joy in Joel’s eyes slowly dimmed and for a long time there was silence. They each stared out across the expanse of the lake, knowing that they didn’t have enough water to make the trek to GARI. Even if they did make it back across the mountains, without vehicles, it would take another three to four days to reach the ba
se on foot and they barely had enough water for one. Eating snow would only buy them so many hours. It wouldn’t be enough to sustain them.

  It felt so unfair to have broken out of the base only to be trapped by the infinite space of Antarctica.

  ‘I could handle the winter,’ Katz added suddenly. ‘I could handle getting back to an empty base and waiting it out. I’m practical like that. I would just take each day as it comes, and count them down one by one. It’s a pity, really. I could have done it.’

  He turned towards Joel. ‘We’ve waited three years to get these samples. What would another few months matter, eh?’

  Joel shook his head, unwilling to resign himself to his fate. ‘We have to ration the water, stretch it out for as long as possible. There’s no way Dedov would just abandon us out here. I bet you a search team’s already on its way. I’m right, aren’t I, Luca?’

  But he didn’t respond, still staring out across the lake.

  ‘We break it down into days,’ Joel continued, trying to muster some consensus. ‘Assign an amount of water per person. We supplement it with snow . . .’

  Luca suddenly turned towards them, silencing Joel.

  ‘I say we take the Ski-Doos and drive them back across the lake. We then follow the base’s original route over the mountains to GARI. At the speed we’ll be travelling we should make it in under a day. That’s if we have enough fuel of course.’

  ‘But there’s a crevasse field,’ Joel replied, forehead knotting in confusion. ‘Akira and Sommers died there, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘The last storm blew a lot of snow over the surface and there’s a good chance that most of the openings are filled up.’