Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  Only later, way too much later, would the young Norwegian come to realise that what he experienced in that moment was fear.

  But now it was too late to turn back the clock. They had tried to achieve the impossible, and, as Carl sat there, he knew that he should never have continued beyond the pole.

  ‘The saddest thing of all,’ Carl told Fitzgerald, ‘is that I used to love this place. Now I think of it as the enemy.’

  ‘We can still do it,’ Fitzgerald repeated. ‘It’s your mind which is letting you down.’

  Carl tugged at Fitzgerald’s arm, forcing him to turn towards him.

  ‘Look at me,’ Carl pleaded. ‘I’ve lost too much weight. I can taste ammonia in my mouth … do you know what that means? Our bodies are consuming themselves.’

  Fitzgerald turned away in disgust. ‘If you’re so desperate to get out, why didn’t you just push the ruddy switch anyway?’

  Carl sighed.

  ‘Because I’m working to the principle that we should take all the important decisions together.’

  ‘Very noble, I don’t think.’

  They sat in strained silence for a while, both exhausted by the expenditure of nervous energy.

  ‘Do it if you want,’ Fitzgerald told him, finally, ‘but I want it to be understood between us that it’s you who is calling the expedition to a halt. Not me. It’s not in my nature to quit.’

  Carl took the emergency beacon and ripped the protective plastic seal away.

  ‘I’m doing this for both of us, Julian, and I hope in time you come to appreciate that.’

  He clicked the switch to ‘on’. A faint bleep could be heard emitting from the tiny loudspeaker.

  It was done. Carl looked up into the sky, fantasising that he could already hear the drone of an incoming aircraft.

  There would be food on board. Carl felt the craving deep inside him as he thought about that.

  4

  Richard Leighton was in his hotel room in Ushuaia, playing a little pre-lunch patience on his laptop, when the telephone rang. It was Julian Fitzgerald’s radio operator, Irene Evans, calling from the expedition control room at the airport.

  ‘We just got a call. They let off the beacon. Get down here as fast as you can.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. I’ll be right with you.’

  Richard stuffed his thermal clothing into a kitbag and packed his laptop and camera. Please God, he thought as he walked the now-familiar dusty road down towards Ushuaia airport, don’t let this be a false alarm. If he had to spend one more day in this dead-and-alive hole, he’d start talking to the penguins. Kicking his heels in Tierra del Fuego wasn’t what Richard Leighton had expected when he’d been offered the reporting job of his dreams.

  Just a month earlier he’d walked into the offices of the Daily Mail feeling ten feet tall. This wasn’t just the beginning of a job, Richard felt, this was the beginning of an illustrious media career. Getting the royal tour to Brazil had been a great excitement, his first foreign assignment. Granted, it wasn’t exactly the Gulf War, or a Washington posting, but it was a start.

  He filed his daily reports, diligently stayed awake during the interminable official meals and slipped easily into the reporters’ ‘club’ which followed the British royals around the globe.

  It was five-star all the way.

  Then the bad news, just as he was packing his bags for the business-class flight home: the call from his editor back in London.

  ‘Ever heard of a place called Ushuaia?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘I want you down there as soon as possible. Seems that explorer Fitzgerald has gone missing in Antarctica. They haven’t had any radio contact for ten days.’

  Richard listened to his brief with dismay. He had heard of Fitzgerald and his overblown exploits, but as far as he was concerned the man was a dinosaur. What the hell was the point of trying to walk across a bloody continent when you could fly? It all seemed a bit of a farce.

  Still, he couldn’t say that to the editor.

  ‘How long’s the assignment?’ he asked.

  ‘Can’t say. They should have reached the edge of the continent some days ago. Their control people are pretty sure they’re in trouble … so get your ass down there.’

  There was no business class to Ushuaia. Richard sat in an economy seat with a stale chicken sandwich and a cup of fake Pepsi, watching miserably out of the window as hundreds of miles of Altiplano rolled endlessly by.

  Where the hell is this place? he thought. It feels like we’re flying to the ends of the bloody earth.

  They were, as Richard found out when he finally got round to seeing a map. Ushuaia is the southernmost human habitation of any size on the planet, a frontier town cursed with a year-round wind so cutting and intrusive it frequently drives inhabitants insane.

  ‘A gold-rush town without the gold,’ Richard wrote in one of his first scene-setting pieces, ‘a place which feels like it is being punished for some forgotten crime, where even the dogs look like they are contemplating suicide.’

  He made contact with Irene, Fitzgerald’s stressed-out radio operator, who filled him in on the nuts and bolts of the story. The two explorers had been out there for well over three months and should have been making radio contact every day or two. In fact there had been silence for eleven days.

  ‘What does that mean?’ he asked her.

  ‘It means I don’t sleep until we get that emergency signal. Those men are dying out there now, and winter’s about to strike.’

  ‘Winter?’

  ‘It’s the southern hemisphere,’ she snapped impatiently, ‘upside-down land. The Antarctic winter happens in our summer.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. Gets a bit chilly down there, does it?’

  Irene gave him a frosty look. ‘Once winter sets in,’ she explained, ‘there’s no daylight at all. The temperature gets too low for a plane to land.’

  That was the beginning of the wait, the beginning of Richard Leighton’s forced exile at the southernmost tip of South America. The days had dragged so slowly he actually began to believe time had a different pace to it down here in nowhere land. He bought himself thermal clothes. He visited the nearby penguin colony. He took a boat trip around the Beagle Channel. He learned a few words of Spanish from the almost-attractive girl at the reception of his hotel.

  He masturbated. And he played patience on his laptop.

  Now Irene’s call had broken the spell, and the waiting was over. Richard bustled into the tiny expedition control room at the airport, where Fitzgerald’s radio coordinator and a local pilot were consulting a large map.

  ‘What’s the news?’ Richard asked.

  ‘They’re here,’ Irene told him, tapping a position on the map, ‘at the far end of the Blackmore Glacier. I’m just discussing the rescue with Captain Villanova here.’

  Richard shook the captain’s hand.

  ‘Think you can get them out?’

  ‘There are many crevasses in that area,’ Villanova told him, ‘but we can try.’

  ‘How about the weather?’

  ‘There’s a big storm front coming in from the west, but that’s normal for Antarctica. We’ll try and get in and out before it hits.’

  Richard made a quick call home. He knew his fiancée would be excited to hear the news, but all he got was the answerphone.

  ‘Sophie, it’s me. We got an emergency signal from Fitzgerald and his mate; we’re leaving for Antarctica right now to pick them up. I’ll call when I can, OK? Love you.’

  The co-pilot, Ariza, escorted him out to the aircraft.

  Finally, some action, Richard thought as he buckled himself into his seat. Desperate explorers, tales of derring-do, skeletons on the ice: maybe this story was going to get his byline on the front page after all.

  Hope they’ve got some food on this old crate, he mused, his stomach hollow after the missed lunch.

  The co-pilot came to check he had mastered the lapbelt.

 
‘Got any food for the flight?’ Richard asked him. ‘I’m starving.’

  Ariza’s English was not as good as Villanova’s.

  ‘Starving? What is starving?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the reporter told him, patting his substantial stomach. ‘Just my little joke.’

  5

  The two men lay side by side in their sleeping bags, suspended in that miserable hinterland between sleep and despair.

  For the moment, the wind was light, playing lazily about the fly sheet of the tent, rustling the fabric in that soothing way, as if apologising for the days—the weeks—in which it had been so hard.

  But from the hunger there was no respite. Carl was astonished at how painful starving to death was proving to be. He had considered the early days hard—those days when he had fantasised endlessly about roast meats, sweet chocolate, plates of fried rice, peaches and strawberries, and butter and curry. But those days had been nothing, a pathetic prelude to what he was experiencing now.

  Now, after seventeen days without a single scrap of food, he was hunger, he had become it. Every cell of his body was putting out chemicals which were causing him pain. His kidneys throbbed and ached in his sides, and urination had become a dreaded event. His head pulsed permanently with a brilliant sharp pain, his teeth had loosened and fractured in his jaw, tiny unknown infections deep in their roots flaring into abscesses which wept with pus.

  They had run out of antibiotics long ago.

  Carl had done his research; he knew in perfect detail what was happening to him, how his systems were breaking down. He knew his muscles had been robbed of their sugars and fats, that his liver was being forced to give up its own reserves.

  They still had gas to melt ice, but no one can keep going on water alone. There would be a point at which he would not recover. Carl was terrified he was already there.

  ‘We have to put out the flares,’ he said, switching his thoughts to the rescue. The pilots would need a landing strip to be identified and marked out.

  Fitzgerald grunted. ‘You do it. I’ll melt down some ice.’

  Carl slowly unzipped himself from his sleeping bag and dressed in his cold-weather gear, every painful movement costing him a few more precious calories of energy, bringing him a few tiny chemical steps closer to the point where his body would cease to function at all.

  He found the flares and went out on to the glacier, scanning the terrain for an area with potential to mark out a strip. His progress was erratic, wandering backwards and forwards, looking for a good enough site, trying to ignore the constant stars in his vision, the sensation that at any moment he might faint. Each time he found a possible stretch of ice, he would slowly pace its length, counting his steps laboriously before coming to the next obstacle and realising that it was not enough.

  The Twin Otter needed a minimum of four hundred metres. Nothing less would do. Carl reckoned that was about six hundred and fifty of his shuffling steps.

  So far he had failed to find any strip of ice longer than half that. Not for the first time on the journey, Carl had the feeling that the terrain was conspiring against them; surely there was somewhere to land a plane in this godforsaken wilderness?

  He sat, despairing, on a hummock of ice, his head cradled in his hands as the wind began to rise. Even in his exhausted state, Carl had registered the further deterioration in the weather. Last time he had looked, the determined-looking clouds on the horizon seemed to have moved a little closer.

  Fear brought him back to his feet. If he couldn’t give the pilots a place to land, they would have to return empty-handed to South America. Would they come back and try again? Carl wasn’t at all sure.

  ‘Come and help me!’ he shouted back towards the tent. But there was no sign that Fitzgerald had heard him. Carl was sure that the rising wind had swallowed up his words.

  6

  Captain Manuel Villanova walked out across the tarmac at Ushuaia airport, his leather flight jacket hunched up against the bitter wind which was ripping off the waters of the Beagle Channel.

  Co-pilot Juvenal Ariza had already completed the pre-flight checks, and the starboard turbo-prop was coughing into life as Villanova climbed up the steps into the ageing Twin Otter aircraft.

  The captain sealed the door, nodded briefly to the journalist, who was sitting in the back, and made his way into the cramped cockpit. He strapped himself in, not bothering to question Ariza on the pre-flights, the two men had flown so many hours together, they trusted each other implicitly.

  Both men were ex-Argentinian air force, veterans of the ill-fated Guerra de las Malvinas. Between them they had more than forty thousand logged hours, much of it on supply runs to the numerous Argentine bases which were scattered around the Antarctic Peninsula.

  Their civilian employer, Antarctic Air Service, was one of the most unusual airlines in the world; its sole trading purpose was to place, supply and retrieve people, fuel and equipment on the Antarctic continent. It was a lucrative niche; in an average year there were dozens of scientific and other expeditions heading south, and they paid big money to do so. The minimum fare per passenger was thirty thousand US dollars. Each way.

  Villanova took the controls for the take-off, easing the Twin Otter smoothly into the air and putting in a right-hand turn to avoid an incoming Aerolinas Argentinas 737. It was not a view to tire of easily: to the north he could see the permanent ice cap covering Tierra del Fuego, with the towering summit of Mount Sarmiento glinting on the horizon. To the south was the tail end of South America and the myriad islands marking the ends of the earth.

  Beneath them the red-and-green-painted houses of the outpost town were quickly slipping away. They circled over the port and headed for the wooded slope above the bay.

  Villanova knew he wasn’t supposed to do it, but hell, he thought, if you make a promise to your six-year-old son, you’d better keep it.

  He picked out the woodbuilt house on the hill and flew directly towards it. He could see his wife Lola standing in the yard in a red dress, little black-haired Luis jumping and waving excitedly by her side.

  Villanova passed over the roof at about a hundred feet, dipped his wings and rolled back out over the Beagle Channel.

  ‘That’s a nice kid you got there,’ Ariza told him.

  Villanova put the aircraft into a climb, keeping to the left of the channel to avoid straying into Chilean airspace. The disputed border between the two countries ran loosely down the middle of the naturally straight passage and had been the scene of numerous skirmishes and minor wars. Crossing the line would be an embarrassment, to say the least.

  The Beagle was a remarkable sight from the air, a feature so straight and deeply cut it could have been a Norwegian fjord. Named after the ship which had so famously carried Charles Darwin to his discoveries, the Beagle had been the gateway to the Southern Ocean for as long as men had sailed, or flown, to the south.

  The water of the channel was as dark as night, the land to either side densely forested, the higher slopes home to hardy shrubs which had learned to resist one of the windiest environments on the planet. A couple of ranches had been carved out of the flatter ground, tough estancias producing scrawny cattle and a few malnourished chickens.

  Tierra del Fuego was a very hard place to scrape a living. Better experienced from the air, Villanova was sure.

  After a while the islands of Lennox and Wollaston came into view, brown heathery outcrops of salt-lashed rocks, home to pelagic birds and not much more. Then, to the right, the distinctive camel hump of Cape Horn, absolute south to centuries of mariners, graveyard of ships and dreams.

  Villanova raised the Cape Horn station on his radio, telling them his callsign and asking them for the latest weather.

  Their report confirmed the earlier satellite map: a huge depression was sweeping up from the west, one of the seemingly endless storms which race clockwise around the bottom of the planet. They would be in for a battering as they fought their way back.

  Ca
pe Horn passed on the starboard side, the cockpit compass set to one hundred and eighty degrees. The water beneath them now was the Drake Passage, the turbulent one-thousand-mile ocean corridor separating the landmasses of South America and Antarctica.

  Far away, deep in the continent across that most intimidating of seas, the two explorers would be anxiously waiting for them. Villanova figured they would bring them back successfully, as they had done on every other emergency call over the years. Villanova and Ariza were a ‘lucky’ team, according to their fellow pilots; somehow they always seemed to bring off the rescues, no matter how dangerous the location.

  Villanova was proud of that one-hundred-per-cent record.

  After a couple of hours in the air, Ariza left Villanova at the controls. One of the advantages of a lightly loaded run was that they could take turns to steal a little sleep on the stretcher in the passenger area.

  In the cockpit, Villanova was ever observant. Unlike some of the other pilots, he was not in the habit of reading newspapers or completing crosswords to pass the time. Instead, he let his body tune to the pitch of the engines, alert for any change which would indicate a problem.

  Fifteen thousand feet beneath him, he could see whitecaps rolling across the Southern Ocean.

  Nine hours flying time to the target. Villanova lit up a Chesterfield and switched the heater onto full.

  7

  Out on the glacier, Carl was cursing his bad luck. An hour had passed, and he still hadn’t found a suitable landing strip. The area was more fractured with crevasses than he had thought, and where there were no fissures the ice was ridged and pocked with sastrugi—the rock-hard ridges like miniature dunes of ice.

  He scrunched up his eyes, viewing the glacier with increasing frustration, trying to remember the pilots’ briefing. ‘It doesn’t have to be flat,’ he recalled them telling him back in Ushuaia, ‘but it has to be smooth. We can land on a slope, but we can’t land with too many sastrugi.’

  He forced his body to move, this time skirting round the end of a huge crevasse and exploring the area to the west of the tent. He was taking risks on this terrain, walking on his own; a snow bridge across a crevasse could collapse as he walked across it.