Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  For a second or two, Lauren caught herself wondering if the sleeping bags would zip together. Then she put the idea out of her mind.

  Lauren peeled off her outer layers of protective clothing and stored them neatly in her kitbag. It felt good to be out of the bulky cold-weather gear, but even in her fleece and thermal layers she couldn’t help shivering at the chill air inside the tent.

  ‘We’ve got to warm this place up. I’ll get the cooker going.’ Lauren knelt in the entrance and sparked the little epigas into life, the blue flame licking around the bottom of the aluminium pan as she poured in water from a thermos flask.

  They drank hot chocolate, then boiled up some pre-packed meals of casserole and potatoes. The warm food was gone in minutes, the heat it conveyed seeping quickly and welcomingly into their bodies.

  ‘So what more can you tell me about this Fitzgerald character?’ Sean asked her as he lay back in his bag. ‘Since we’re busting our asses to save him, it might be nice to know who he is.’

  Lauren let out a curious laugh. ‘You really want to know?’ she asked him. ‘I’m almost reluctant to tell you in case you decide to head back for base.’

  ‘Come on,’ Sean responded. ‘He can’t be as bad as all that.’

  ‘Well,’ Lauren told him earnestly, ‘that would depend on who you talked to.’

  22

  ‘In the UK, he’s a legend. An exploration superstar. A successor to Scott and Shackleton … at least in his own eyes.’

  ‘We’re talking about someone with a big ego?’

  ‘Ego?’ Lauren snorted with laughter. ‘It’s hardly an adequate word. He’s got an ego the size of Antarctica. He’s got charm too, coming out of his ears.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘When I was young, he used to be a sort of idol of mine, embarrassing though it is to admit it. Maybe I even had a crush on him. I can remember going to a few of his lectures when I was a child.’

  ‘You can? So he’s pretty old?’

  ‘He has to be in his mid-fifties.’

  ‘Isn’t that a touch ancient for the task? I mean, crossing the entire Antarctic continent on foot is not what you’d call an old man’s game.’

  ‘He’s still fantastically strong. Everyone who’s ever been on an expedition with him says the same thing. He’s got that type of natural fitness that means he can just keep going and going.’

  ‘So how come he’s failed on this one?’

  ‘Oh, I imagine the same reason just about half of his other expeditions have failed. He’s got the dream, but he hasn’t always got the attention to detail that these things require.’

  ‘But he still gets sponsorship?’

  ‘Sure. He’s a genius when it comes to getting press attention. He’s everyone’s favourite tame explorer. Including mine. Or he was until last year.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He put a trip together called the Tierra del Fuego Youth Expedition—there was a girl from Senegal, a boy from Siberia, a few Europeans and Americans. The purpose was to cross the Patagonian ice cap on foot, a sort of international peace expedition; he got the UN and all sorts of other foundations to fund it.’

  ‘Sounds OK,’ Sean replied. ‘A bit holy for my tastes, but I guess the kids had a great time.’

  ‘His critics say it wasn’t really about the kids,’ Lauren told him. ‘That he was in it for the reflected glory, for the kudos of flying this great humanitarian flag. They say all that one-world stuff was just another way of getting his smiling features in the colour supplements.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Lauren paused as she considered her response. ‘I suppose I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s always encouraged kids to have an appreciation of the wild places of the world, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But on that Tierra del Fuego trip, things went seriously wrong. They got halfway up this mountain, the kids were already exhausted and badly scared, then a storm ripped in. Fitzgerald was the only one with a compass. He was the only one who knew where the camp was and the only one with any real idea of how to get off the mountain. The whole thing was caught by a documentary camera team filming a one-hour special about the expedition.’

  ‘You’ve seen the film?’

  ‘Sure, it’s pretty strong stuff. Anyway, Fitzgerald must have taken a wrong route off the mountain, because they ended up wandering through this ice fall, the kids almost on their last legs, a few of them already suffering from frostbite and exposure. It went on for hours, right into the night, blundering around in circles with Fitzgerald screaming at them to keep up. In the end Fitzgerald forced the camera team to stop filming.

  ‘By the time they finally found the camp, three of those kids were in a serious state. They were helicoptered off the next day and taken to hospital at Punta Arenas. The girl from Senegal lost a hand to frostbite, one of the American kids lost both his feet … can you imagine the horror of that when you’re sixteen? Fitzgerald was deeply fortunate no one got killed.’

  ‘What was the response when he got back to London?’

  ‘Initially, he was fêted as a hero. As far as the media saw it, he’d saved those children’s lives in the face of a potentially fatal storm. The film went out at peak time and got phenomenal ratings.’

  ‘So how did things go sour?’

  ‘A couple of the kids’ parents began to look a little closer at the story, started to piece together what had really happened that day. As far as they were concerned, the whole incident was Fitzgerald’s fault from start to finish: he deliberately led the kids up the mountain when he knew that a storm was on the way.’

  ‘Why on earth would he do that?’

  ‘The parents reckoned he did it to pump up the film. He needed some drama along the way so he could end up being the great all-conquering hero of the moment.’

  ‘That’s a pretty serious allegation.’

  ‘Yeah. And two of the kids backed it up, said that climbing the mountain had never been a part of the original plan, that Fitzgerald had sold it to them as a sort of fun excursion.’

  ‘How did Fitzgerald react?’

  ‘He did a big damage limitation job, cranked up a charm offensive. He spun the press a story about how it was a freak storm, conditions beyond his control and so on.’

  ‘They swallowed that?’

  ‘At first, but the tide’s definitely turning against him. There was a critical radio documentary about him last month; I caught a review of it on the BBC’s Internet news site.’

  ‘Maybe his fans will desert him.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure. Most people think of him as a lovable eccentric, he does a lot of chat shows and radio stuff … always telling amusing stories about how he narrowly cheated death in some scrape or another. Millions of people are genuinely fond of him. It would take a lot to change that.’

  ‘How about you? You still got a soft spot for your childhood hero?’

  ‘I think his heart’s in the right place, but I think he’s losing the plot. This Antarctic expedition is a case in point: he’s bitten off more than he can handle, and now it’s us—and Capricorn—that’s having to bail him out at the cost of precious time and resources.’

  ‘How many survivors do you think we’ll be taking back?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Depends on what happened with the plane. If it crashed on takeoff with the two explorers on board, we could come back empty-handed.’

  ‘I pray they’re all still alive.’

  ‘Me too, Sean. And if we can save them, we will.’

  Lauren and Sean brewed up a final cup of chocolate and fell silent as they drank it, lost in their own thoughts as they listened to the wind ripping at the outer shell of the tent.

  23

  Now the mountains were before them, revealed suddenly as the clouds parted in a rare moment of calm. Sean and Lauren paused as they drank in the scene, awestruck at the imposing ramparts of the Heilman range
soaring many thousands of feet out of the glacier. The peaks were sharp, the frost-shattered rocks jutting like the shoots of early spring flowers from beds of winter ice, stark black towers competing side by side for prominence.

  ‘These are brutal when you see them close up,’ Sean told Lauren, deeply impressed by the untamed beauty of the craggy peaks.

  ‘Depends on your definition of “close”,’ she told him. ‘By my reckoning they’re still fifteen miles away.’

  ‘How many of these have been climbed?’

  Lauren laughed. ‘As far as I know, not a single one has ever been attempted, let alone climbed.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Sean was astounded to think that so many tempting summits could remain untouched. ‘But how many people have been here?’

  ‘This region is hardly researched,’ Lauren told him. ‘It’s only been mapped by satellite, and I can’t think of a single scientific expedition which has come out here. What you have to remember about Antarctica is that there are literally hundreds of mountain ranges like this … some are the size of the Alps, and most of them are virtually unexplored.’

  ‘But Fitzgerald and his buddy must have passed this way?’

  ‘Sure. And they’d have crossed the range on the shortest route. You don’t do a single metre more distance than you have to when you’re on foot out here.’

  Lauren pulled her map from her windsuit pocket and folded it to the relevant section.

  ‘We got two choices here,’ she told Sean. ‘We can continue parallel to the range for another eighty miles or so and sneak round the far end onto the glacier. Or we can tackle it head on and save a few hours.’

  ‘I say we go for it,’ Sean told her after he’d scanned the route with the binoculars. ‘That pass doesn’t look like it’ll give us any major problems. It’ll be much more interesting to cross the range,’ he added. ‘All this flat terrain can get a little dull, don’t you think?’

  Lauren smiled. ‘OK. We’ll go for it. But don’t forget we have to put down the first depot before we hit the mountains.’

  Just after three p.m., Sean checked his milometer and gave his snowmobile a burst of speed to catch up with Lauren.

  ‘That’s a hundred miles since we left the base,’ he called over as she slowed. ‘This would be a good place, on that tall sastrugi.’

  Lauren considered the terrain. ‘You’re right. Not much in the way of landmarks around here, so we might as well make it as high as possible.’

  They silenced the engines and untied the first of the emergency barrels from the back of Lauren’s sledge. They rolled it to the top of the sastrugi and set it upright. Sean screwed two ice anchors into the walls of the mound, and they lashed the handles of the barrel down so it wouldn’t blow away.

  Lauren fetched the marker pole, and that too was tied to the barrel, the red pennant at its top fluttering in the wind at the end of the two-metre aluminium pole.

  They viewed their handiwork from the snowmobiles. The finished result was about as good as they could hope for, as visible as they could make it under the circumstances.

  Lauren brought out her mobile GPS unit, a Magellan device not much bigger than a cigarette packet. She switched it on and waited for the transmitter to lock onto the satellites which would give the precise latitude and longitude.

  ‘Three satellites,’ she read out from the LCD display, ‘good fix.’

  Lauren wrote down the figures on her pad and replaced the precious unit back inside her jacket.

  ‘Sure hope we don’t need to rely on finding this depot without the GPS,’ Sean said. ‘All it needs is a real good blow and that pole could snap like a twig. Then we could end up like Scott, wandering around in circles trying to find the damn thing while we starve to death.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Lauren told him. ‘There’s no reason we should ever need this depot. And no reason why we should end up in a situation where we haven’t got the GPS.’

  She pressed the starter on the snowmobile and drove off across the plateau, trying to clear Sean’s words from her head. A few miles later she stopped, just out of interest, to see if she could still see the marker flag.

  Even though she knew exactly which bearing it was on, she could only just make out the tiny barrel and its marker pole. A few miles later she stopped again. This time it was completely impossible to see, obscured by the ice mounds in front of it.

  After a heavy snowfall that thing would be pretty well invisible amid the many hundreds of sastrugi which dotted the plateau. Without the GPS it would be worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. For the first time, Lauren wondered why she had only brought the one positioning device with her when there were three others lying redundant back at the base.

  Anyway, she reasoned, it would be a pretty catastrophic set of circumstances which would see them stranded without their snowmobiles and without the GPS.

  Very unlikely to happen.

  She pushed her shoulders back to stretch the muscles of her back; sitting on the snowmobile for so many hours had built up a persistent ache in there which didn’t feel like it was going to go away any time soon.

  Lauren straddled her leg over the seat and looked to the horizon, where the Heilman range was waiting for them, the peaks jutting through the swirling storm. That would be the first real test for the snowcats.

  The sooner they were through it, the happier she would be.

  24

  ‘We’ll keep to the middle of the glaciers,’ Lauren had explained to Sean. ‘That’s where the ice is at its smoothest.’

  Sean had to smile at her use of the word ‘smooth’ as they rubbed their noses into the first of the huge ramps of ice. Nothing he had seen so far could qualify for that word; the snowcats were continually beating across small weathered rocks and stones which had been eroded from the surrounding peaks by frost shattering. Worse were the large collections of moraine at the glacier snouts, the runners of the sledges grating horribly as they tracked across gravel and shingle. Then they were back onto ice, accelerating hard as they bit into the climb, the engines straining as the sledges bucked and jumped behind them.

  The wind was still blowing intermittent storm force, rocking them on their seats as they leaned into it, but at least the visibility had improved. They had forty to fifty metres of clearway before them, and sometimes more as sporadic gaps in the cloud gave them tantalising glimpses of the mountainous landscape through which they were travelling.

  Crossing the range was largely a matter of following the natural weaknesses in the terrain, the rising valleys and cwms which glaciers had eaten into the mountains over millennia of passage.

  With every thousand feet of height gained, they lost another degree or two of temperature. Soon, Sean was shivering inside his many layers of protective clothing, his fingers beginning to freeze even though the gauge in front of him indicated the heated grips were still working. On the insides of his thighs Sean could feel sores starting to spread, the chafing from the snowcat seat eroding his flesh in the same way that a horse saddle will do after a long day’s ride.

  He put the discomfort to the back of his mind, knowing that only by the highest level of concentration would they beat a trail through these mountains without an accident. In front of him, Lauren was driving with considerable skill, rising from the seat to throw her centre of gravity forward on the steepest parts of the ascent and never failing to take the best line through the many dangerous icefalls which littered the route.

  They continued to climb, five miles’ progress taking them almost to the heart of the range, but eight miles into the traverse they found themselves out of safe options, creeping tentatively round the flank of one of the highest peaks and wondering if they could take the risk to continue.

  ‘If we can crack this one, there’s nothing between us and the saddle.’ Lauren pointed out the straightforward trail which lay enticingly on the other side of the lethal slope. ‘Think we can do it?’

  ‘I don’t see any other wa
y,’ Sean confirmed. ‘Either we try this or we go back.’

  There was one truly heart-stopping section: a polished face as smooth as glass, on which they were forced to traverse. The incline was working against them, tipping the snowcats—and the sledges—out to the point where it seemed likely they would roll. Beneath the slope, revealed from time to time when the clouds allowed, was a three- or four-hundred-metre fall to a plateau littered with sharp rocks.

  They inched across, their hearts in their mouths, ready to leap off the seats in an attempt to save themselves if the worst happened. Both were painfully aware that if one of the sledges lost its grip and began to slide sideways there would be little they could do to recover the situation.

  The runners held. They reached the better gradient of the far side and stopped to celebrate with a shared bar of chocolate.

  Lauren showed Sean the altimeter. ‘We’re very nearly at the high point.’

  They kicked into gear and powered onward, choosing a direct line up the final obstacle, a forty-degree ice wall which they took at speed before gunning the engines for the last steep burst up onto the saddle, which was the only realistic crossing point of the range.

  This place was more exposed than the lee slope they had been climbing, the wind howling across the col so strongly that they had to crouch in the shadow of their snowcats as they considered the view. It was a dramatic vision, banks of rushing cloud scudding across the horizon as the black heart of the storm front continued on its path. Here and there they could see individual snow clouds bursting out from the mass, while beneath the cloud they could see small patches of the glacier which they were now to cross.

  ‘The Blackmore. Biggest glacier on earth,’ Lauren told him. ‘You could fit France and Germany into the space this thing occupies.’