Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  She particularly liked sharing the rota with Mel, the cheerful Kiwi medic keeping her entertained with base gossip and her own thoughts on how things were going.

  ‘I’m still dead worried about Carl,’ Mel confided in her as they lifted a suitcase-sized block of ice into the wheelbarrow. ‘We’re only two months into this winter, and he’s going downhill fast.’

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed. I haven’t seen him in the mess room for weeks. What’s going on?’

  ‘Physically he’s weak as a kitten,’ Mel told her, ‘and he’s way underweight. A man his height should come in at seventy-five kilos, but he’s twenty-five per cent under that.’

  ‘Doesn’t he eat?’

  ‘I try my best, but he hardly touches his tray. He’s lost all interest in it.’

  ‘How’s his medical condition?’

  ‘That’s the perplexing bit. There’s nothing clinically wrong with him; all the medical problems he had when you brought him back here have cleared up … but he still isn’t getting any better. It’s definitely a mental thing, he’s just deeply depressed.’

  ‘We’ve got to take some action on this,’ Lauren said. ‘I want him out of that medical room and into the mess as much as possible. And from now on he gets no meals on his own, he eats with the rest of us.’

  Each morning, Lauren and Mel would bully Carl out of his bed, coaxing him onto his feet and taking him by the arms for the shaky walk to the mess room, where he would spend the day lying listlessly on the sofa beneath layers of blankets. He rarely spoke and, if asked a question, would often lose the thread of his answer, his face crumpling in confusion as his mind struggled to pick up the wayward thought.

  At meal times he reluctantly took his seat, pushing food around the plate with a fork but eating little.

  Richard tried to interest him in chess. Murdo challenged him to darts, but Carl’s heart wasn’t in it and they soon gave up trying to involve him. Instead, he just lay there, silent and unresponding, staring at the television screen regardless of whether a movie was playing on it or not.

  ‘He’s toasted,’ Frank said. ‘He’s got the thousand-mile stare.’

  The only time Carl became animated was when Fitzgerald was in the room at the same time. Then he would make a point of sitting as far away from the explorer as he could.

  Finally, Lauren found an opportunity to talk to him alone.

  ‘This winter is going to be hard on all of us, Carl, but it’ll be much worse for you if you carry on like this.’

  Carl nodded his head weakly but did not look her in the eye.

  ‘You need to get your strength back, physically and mentally. You have to start to contribute to the day-to-day running of the base, and I suggest you find something to occupy you over the next five months.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Carl told her bitterly, ‘but I never asked to be locked up here for the winter. This is a bloody nightmare for me, and nothing you can say is going to make it any easier.’

  Lauren had a sudden brainwave.

  ‘What if I gave you a laptop?’ she proposed, ‘that’s what keeps Julian busy.’

  Carl’s interest was spiked. ‘Fitzgerald’s got a laptop?’

  ‘Sure. He asked to borrow one at the start of the winter.’

  ‘Writing his fictional account of our great Antarctic expedition, no doubt.’

  ‘Are you taking the name of the great Julian Fitzgerald in vain?’ Lauren smiled as she faked the indignation. ‘Can you possibly be doubting the veracity of the greatest explorer on earth?’

  Carl returned the smile, the first time Lauren had seen his face register anything other than despondency for a very long time.

  ‘He’ll do his normal whitewash,’ Carl told her, dropping his voice so they couldn’t be heard out in the corridor, ‘and he’ll probably blame me for the fact we failed.’

  ‘But why would he do that? Surely you share the responsibility?’

  ‘No, no. It was his blundering that screwed our chances. If he’d planned the whole thing properly, we could have pulled it off.’

  ‘So what did he do wrong?’

  ‘You want a list? I’ll tell you if you’ve got a few months to spare.’

  ‘That bad, eh?’

  ‘I put my heart and soul into that expedition, Lauren. Crossing Antarctica on foot was a dream I’d had for years. I’ll never get another crack at it, but Fitzgerald probably will. And what sickens me the most is that he’ll fool the public with his official book, make out I was the weak link.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him to let you write a couple of chapters of the book? That way you get to put your case.’

  Carl snorted with laughter. ‘No chance of that,’ he told her. ‘I doubt he’ll show that manuscript to a damn soul. He’ll just come out with the lies and post it off to his publisher without a second thought.’

  With that, Carl reached into his bedside drawer and brought out his diary. ‘This is what the public should be reading. I’ve got the real story here.’

  Lauren took the battered notebook and flipped through a few of the pages. ‘This is a lot of work.’

  ‘Yeah. Not that I’ll ever be able to publish any of it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Fitzgerald made me sign a pre-expedition contract.’

  ‘Well, if I gave you a laptop, at least you could get all this down as hard copy. It would be worth it just for your own records.’

  Carl thumbed through the diary as he thought about the offer.

  ‘All right. I’ll do it. It’ll keep me busy at least.’

  The next day, Carl was up from his bed under his own steam, making his way to the mess room without assistance and amazing Murdo by requesting a plate of fried eggs and toast. Then he returned to the medical room, locking himself away with the computer.

  ‘I think he’s turned the corner,’ Mel told Lauren a couple of days later. ‘Since you gave him the laptop, he’s been getting back on track.’

  Lauren watched Carl closely over the next week, noting how—little by little—he was eating more and participating more in the daily social activity of the base. He was still spending large amounts of time in his bed, but no longer merely lying there with his eyes fixed on a blank spot on the ceiling. Now, every time Lauren stuck her head round the door to say hi, he was tapping busily into the computer.

  ‘Still transcribing your diary?’ she asked him.

  ‘Something like that,’ he told her and went back to work.

  38

  Lauren was sleeping when the generator-fail alarm went off, the shrill two-tone siren piercing her dreams and bringing her, heart palpitating, fast to her feet. Her first thought was fire—but she quickly realised the alarm was not the continuous bell of the fire system. She tried the light switch, found it was dead, then began to pull on clothes in the dark as Frank rapped hard on her door.

  ‘Get out here!’ he called. ‘Sean’s got a problem in the shed.’

  By the time Lauren emerged into the corridor, the rest of the team were out of their rooms. The battery-powered emergency lights had come on in the public areas, giving the team a chance to dress in their outdoor protective clothing as they moved into the pre-rehearsed emergency drill.

  Frank was dressed, ready to make for the generator building as Lauren arrived. ‘The heat exchanger on the genny’s failed,’ he told her, ‘and Sean can’t get the standby going.’

  Lauren hit the kill switch for the alarm unit and put a hand on the nearest radiator. It was already stone cold. The digital thermometer above it was reading fifty-eight degrees below zero for the external temperature, and two degrees below for the internal temperature. The moisture in her breath was freezing as she exhaled and the windows were even now coated on the inside with frozen condensation.

  ‘What time did the heating fail?’ Lauren asked Frank.

  ‘I’m not sure. Thirty minutes ago, maybe forty.’

  Lauren was shocked. In much less than an hour, t
he cosy ambient living temperature of sixteen degrees had been stripped down below zero. They were now losing more than a degree of temperature for every two passing minutes. Within the next half an hour the entire water system of the base, even sealed within its triple-lagged protective insulation, could be frozen completely solid. De-freezing it could take weeks … if it was possible at all.

  Lauren made a quick calculation, realising that it would take less than two hours for the air temperature inside Capricorn to plummet to the same extreme lows as the exterior. Their previously snug world would then be six times colder than an average domestic freezer, cold enough to make their existence a living hell … if they could survive at all.

  She checked her watch. It was just after five a.m.

  ‘Murdo and Mel, get into the galley and drain down the water systems as fast as you can. Julian, you can help them. Frank, you come with me.’

  Lauren hurriedly climbed into her protective suit and pulled the insulated neoprene face visor over her mouth and nose. The walk to the generator shed was only thirty metres or so, but at fifty-eight degrees below freezing, even a few seconds of inadequate protection could mean first-degree frostbite or tissue necrosis. Outside, conditions were clear, pitch black as only an Antarctic midwinter night can be, with a wind gusting at twenty to thirty knots. Lauren held onto the safety handline and bent her body into the blast as she followed Frank across to the generator shed.

  As they approached, Lauren flashed her torch towards the shed. Caught in the quartz-halogen light beam was a billowing jet of steam—freezing to water droplets as she watched. The acid-sweet smell of burning glycol filled the air, instantly taking Lauren back—as dangerous smells have a habit of doing—to an incident in which the radiator of her first car had exploded, showering the red-hot exhaust manifold with antifreeze.

  Without the thudding intensity of the generator the scene inside the shed was eerily quiet, the atmosphere thick with vaporised glycol and frozen water droplets. Lauren felt the prick of tears as her eyes reacted to the irritating chemicals, the fluid instantly freezing as it ran down her cheeks.

  Sean was standing on an inspection ladder, bent over the twin tubes of the heat exchanger with a plume of vapour spraying his lower body from a foot-long split in the metal tubing. His thermal suit and boots were encrusted with a thick coating of ice.

  As Lauren approached him, she could hear an ominous bubbling noise from the extensive pipework, which was plumbed above the engine, and the hiss of incinerated antifreeze as drops fell on hot metal. ‘The heat exchanger sleeve has split,’ Sean said. ‘I think the duct pipe to the main building must have frozen up and the whole thing’s built up back pressure until it boiled.’

  Lauren knew enough about the design of Capricorn’s technical layout to know how serious the problem was. Common to almost all Antarctic bases, excess heat from the main generator was transferred via a heat exchanger into a closed-circuit glycol system through which conventional water pipes ran in sealed sleeves. If the system went down, it would also shut down the ice-melting unit, which would leave Capricorn not just with no warm water … but with no water at all.

  ‘What about the standby genny?’ Frank was already crossing to the second engine.

  ‘The temperature’s fallen too fast,’ Sean told him. ‘It’s fifteen below in here now, and that old Honda doesn’t like that. Try it again.’

  Lauren and Frank tried the starter button on the standby generator, their hearts sinking as the unit cranked clunkily for a few reluctant revolutions without firing. A further try resulted in an even less convincing performance, the engine not even coughing with an attempt at life. Worse, the deep-cycle lead-acid batteries which powered the starter motor were also beginning to suffer the cold invasion, the output strength falling noticeably with each attempt.

  ‘How long’s it going to take you to fix the main unit?’ Lauren called to Sean.

  ‘Gonna be an hour at least. You got to get that standby going or we are in serious shit.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Do it like the truck drivers do in Siberia,’ Sean told her. ‘Warm the whole engine up with fire.’

  ‘Light a fire underneath it?’ Lauren knew that would be a risk too far in a room which held tankloads of diesel, glycol and kerosene.

  ‘Let’s try these.’ Frank crossed to the store area and produced three butane blowtorches. ‘We can fire these up and place them round the sump. That’ll get the engine oil warmed up and lower the viscosity. The stuff’ll be like tarmac in there.’

  ‘Don’t like to worry you,’ Sean was checking the internal thermometer for the shed, ‘but it’s minus twenty already.’

  Lauren had a further heart-stopping thought. ‘How about the kerosene?’ she asked Sean. ‘How low can it go before it freezes?’

  ‘It solidifies at fifty-five degrees below,’ he told her. ‘So we’d better get some heat going in here fast.’

  Lauren and Frank got the blowtorches lit and started to heat up the metal sump of the back-up generator. As Lauren worked, she considered how fast their fortunes had changed. Less than an hour ago she had been happily asleep in the warmth and security of her berth. Now the normally smooth-running systems of Capricorn were under serious threat—and the drilling operation was even more compromised: if their kerosene supply froze, they would not be able to maintain the de-icing environment of the drill; the bit would be irretrievably frozen into the glacier. Capricorn would have to start a new bore—an impossibly expensive and logistically nightmarish prospect—or give up the project for good.

  By six a.m.—by which time every bone in Lauren’s body felt like it had frozen to the flesh that surrounded it—Frank judged that the blowtorches had done their work. The exterior of the engine was a blistered mess of bubbling paint but at least the oil inside would be warm. The temperature inside the shed was now thirty-seven degrees below freezing. They wired up two of the lead-acid batteries in series to give some extra clout to the charge and held their breath as the starter motor whirred once, twice, followed by the sweet sound of the diesel engine ripping into life.

  Lauren and Frank smiled at each other in triumph, and, with temporary heat and light back on line, the fight to help Sean fix the main generator began in earnest. This they achieved by midmorning, replacing the damaged section of the heat exchanger and refilling the glycol reservoir with spare fluid to get the master system back up and running.

  When they had finished in the generator shed, Lauren, Sean and Frank crossed back to the main block, where Murdo had prepared soup and tea. They sat in silence, sipping the liquid warmth into their bodies, emotionally and physically spent by the events of the night.

  There was little incentive for any of them to stay in the frigid mess room, and by midday the team had dispersed back to the relative comfort of their berths. Lauren made her way wearily to her room and peeled off her glycol-soaked clothes. Her hair and face were encrusted with the frozen chemical, but a shower was not going to be possible until the ambient base temperature had risen to above freezing and the water systems replenished. That would be days away, Lauren was sure.

  The radiator was still cold, the room completely unwelcoming. Lauren slipped into bed in her thermal underclothes and lay there shivering until her body heat had created a fragile pool of warmth.

  From the window she could hear the ceaseless roar of the wind as it raced across the ice, the patter of frozen granules beating against the glass in sharp volleys. They had got away with it this time, she reflected, escaped with a few frostbite injuries and bruises.

  Next time they might not be so lucky, Lauren knew; this winter could kill them yet.

  39

  Richard drew a ring around the date and snapped his diary shut with a sigh. Today was going to be a psychological endurance test, he already knew, even more of an endurance test than Capricorn days normally were. It was ninety-two days since he’d entered the base, with so many weeks of winter left to run that Richard preferred not
to think about it.

  He quit his room and went to the rota board, to see what tasks he’d been allocated today. Lauren routinely shuffled the rota pack around to keep things fresh.

  Getting the casts off his legs had been a huge booster, and a daily two-hour physio session with Mel had got them feeling—almost—as good as new. Now, two and a half months on, he still got an occasional twinge of pain from the newly set bones, but on the whole Richard reckoned he’d got off lightly.

  Standing on his own two feet had been a turning point which meant he could participate in the thousand and one physical tasks which were rota’d through the Capricorn week. This he did with an enthusiasm which made him wonder if that plane crash had actually altered his personality. Back home, Richard considered domestic chores a curse, but here he found himself enjoying the laundry sessions, the duties in the galley helping Murdo prepare the meals, the hours out in the drilling shed with Sean, maintaining the engine and generator. It was therapeutic, this mundane cycle of essential tasks; it voided his mind and seemed to banish the tick-tick-tock of the clock which was so slowly marking the hours of winter in his head.

  And it gave him a break from thinking about Sophie.

  Sophie. During the early days of that Capricorn winter, when he was still weak and dazed from the after-effects of the crash, Richard had been moved and grateful as Sophie’s e-mails arrived almost daily. Her relief and joy that he’d been rescued was just what he’d needed, a familiar and sympathetic voice in a world which seemed to him to have taken some pretty vicious turns against him.

  Breaking the news that he wasn’t going to get home at all for the next seven months had not made things any better between them, particularly as it meant their wedding in her parents’ home village in Suffolk—a full church affair with a three-hundred-guest reception—would have to be postponed.

  That was when the e-mails started to change, with Sophie writing mournfully:

  It always was too good to be true. Fate has really done a good job on us this time, hasn’t it? I’d only decided on the dress the day before you flew to Antarctica, and now it’s sitting in the cupboard like a spare rag. Dad says you should sue the newspaper for sending you in the first place. Mum’s just as gutted as I am. Anyway, I will wait here for you to get back, and then we’ll start again. But, Richard, you can’t believe how difficult this has all been, what with having to contact all three hundred guests and explain why we’ve had to cancel for this summer.