Lauren looked at Frank, seeing the despair in his eyes. He knew what she was about to say.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ she told Sean with infinite regret. ‘When the satellite went down, I radioed a message back to London to tell them we had a communications problem. I told them not to worry if they didn’t hear from us … for a week or so…’
There was a stunned silence as the team thought about the new implications of that decision.
Murdo was the first to speak.
‘But surely someone will begin to get worried. After a while…?’
‘What about the sponsor?’ Mel added. ‘Won’t De Pierman raise the alert?’
Lauren swallowed to clear the sensation of rising nausea in her mouth. ‘I don’t know … I just don’t know. But it’s probable no one will start to really worry for at least a couple of weeks.’
‘So as far as the rest of the world knows, we’re just happily drilling away, day after day, minding our own business in our nice little silent world?’
‘That’s right.’ Lauren could barely whisper the reply.
‘And it might be a fortnight before they wonder why they haven’t had news from us? Or it might be a month.’
Lauren nodded her head imperceptibly.
‘How long can we survive here? Without food? Without shelter?’ Murdo asked, gesturing to the empty world which surrounded them.
No one replied.
‘That’s it then.’ Murdo held up his hands in utter despair. ‘We can’t raise the alarm, winter’s still got weeks to run … we’re going to die here; we’re absolutely fucked.’
He walked away from the group and crouched in the snow, the tension of the last hours overwhelming him with tears he didn’t want the others to see.
‘Not a single one of us is going to die,’ Lauren called after him. ‘I give you my word.’
She looked over to the smouldering wreckage of Capricorn, no more now than a collection of twisted metal, melted plastic and charred wood.
How she would keep that promise, she had no idea.
56
As soon as the worst of the heat had subsided, Lauren ordered the team into the wreckage—their first priority to find whatever remained of Carl.
The body was not easy to locate, incinerated by the furnace heat of the fire to the point where all that remained was carbonised flesh and scorched bones. When they did find it, the team said nothing, but merely stood with their heads hung low as they contemplated the horror of the scene.
‘We’ve got to get him into a decent grave,’ Lauren said. ‘Will anyone help me?’
In the end Sean was the only volunteer for the gruesome task. They both retched as they prised the carbonised flesh out of the still-glowing ashes.
The others dug a shallow grave into the ice, and Carl’s remains were committed with an improvised prayer from Lauren.
When the burial was over, Lauren turned once more to her team.
‘Murdo, I want you to check out the area where the food store was,’ she instructed. ‘See if there’s any way we can scrape something edible out of this disaster. Sean, you see what can be got out of the vehicle shed. I’ll work with Mel to try and retrieve what I can in the way of medicine or other supplies.’
Frank and Richard were ordered to keep a watch for Fitzgerald, who, for the moment, had vanished from sight.
Mel and Lauren concentrated on the area where the clinic and laboratory had been, looking—without much optimism—for any locked chests or boxes which might contain still-useable drugs. But the fire had left nothing. Even the most robust of the medicine chests—the one which had contained the most powerful of their painkillers—had only ashes inside.
In the food store, Murdo had also drawn a blank.
‘Is there nothing we can retrieve here?’ Lauren asked him.
Murdo shook his head. ‘It’s hard enough to see where the food store even was, let alone find anything intact. This area was right next to the butane supplies, so the tins must have exploded, then melted in the heat. You can see that big blob of molten tin lying there. As for the packet foods and the flour and so on, well … you can imagine … that was four tons of food reduced to a pile of ash. There is nothing edible in that debris.’
The one commodity they could scavenge was firewood, and Lauren gave each of the team the task of gathering as much as they could. Most of it was heavily charred, but here and there—particularly in the galley area where the gas explosion had blown some of the roof out away from the main inferno—they found the odd small section of structural timber, or roof beam, which would still make a good fire.
They piled the scraps of wood in a stack, and then, utterly despondent, joined together to construct some type of shelter for the night.
Over in what remained of the vehicle shed, Sean picked his way through the debris with infinite care. He found the skidoos, charred skeletons of their former selves, every fuel line and critical engine component melted in the heat to the point at which even he knew they would never run again.
He ran his hands along the still-warm metal, wondering if whatever spirit lived inside those engines would feel the regret in his touch. Then he moved away, finding a few tools to be scavenged, some saw blades and pliers. Finally, hidden behind the metal frame of a workbench, he found one of the sledges still virtually intact.
He pulled it out of the wreckage, calling Lauren over excitedly.
‘We got a sledge,’ he told her. ‘We can do things with this.’
Together they beat the twisted metal runners back into shape, bending the pliable aluminium until they had the sledge back in serviceable order.
Suddenly, a cry went up.
‘He’s back!’
Lauren and Sean followed Frank’s outstretched arm, spotting the distinctive shape of the snowmobile far off on the horizon. They could just detect the thin buzz of the engine blown towards them on the wind.
The movement stopped. The dark shape of a human figure could be seen dismounting and standing next to the machine.
‘He’s watching us,’ Lauren said, ‘wondering what we’re going to do next.’
‘No, he’s not,’ Sean said, quietly. ‘He’s wondering how long it’s going to take us to die. That’s what’s going through his mind right now.’
‘Why has he done this, Sean? Do you think he’s really insane?’
‘No. I think he’s capable of being perfectly rational. Think about the way he tied Richard to that bedframe. Look at the way he planned his escape. He must have hidden all those supplies, ready for the moment he could get away.’
‘And the fire? Was that his plan all along?’
‘I’m not so sure. If Murdo and I hadn’t disturbed him, maybe he really would just have slipped quietly away. But as it happens, losing the base has played straight into his hands. Now he can wait for us all to die, go resume his heroic expedition and then come out with some nice story about how he was the only survivor of an accidental fire.’
‘You’re right,’ Lauren said, ‘and he’s got enough supplies on that snowcat to last for weeks. Maybe months, if he’s careful.’
They stood, watching the eerily still figure as the wind picked up around them.
‘It’s him or us, Lauren,’ Sean told her. ‘It really might be as simple as that in the end.’
57
Fitzgerald screwed up his eyes as he focused the binoculars, trying to pick out some detail in the half-light as he watched the stumbling figures picking through the smoking wreck which was once Capricorn.
It was risky coming this close to them, he knew, but the question of who had survived the fire was one the explorer was anxious to resolve. He picked out Mel, then Murdo and Lauren, all three seemed relatively fit and mobile. Another figure moved across to join them; that was Sean.
Fitzgerald swore beneath his breath. Of all of them it was Sean he trusted the least. He was strong; he was young and fast, the explorer still had the bruises from the fight to remind him
of that. Everything would have been a lot easier if Sean had been killed in the fire.
He was a problem, that boy.
And there to the side? The explorer could see another two figures lying prone on the ice. Was that Frank? Or Richard? Or Carl? It was too dark to see.
Fitzgerald drove back out to his tent, secreted miles away in a small indentation in the glacier surface. Even if they came looking for him, they would never find him here. And if they did … there was always the axe he had managed to take from the tool shed. He tested the axe blade with his finger, gratified to find it was razor sharp.
He fired up his cooker and melted down some ice for a drink.
Fitzgerald sipped his coffee slowly, savouring the bittersweet taste against his tongue. One of the successes of the operation, he reflected, had been the amount of food and cooking gas he’d managed to stash away in his secret store. He cast a professional eye over the many boxes and tins, very satisfied with what he saw.
God, it was cold, he thought; thank goodness he had the blankets and sleeping bag, which would guarantee warmth.
Now it was a waiting game. A question of how long they could last before they started to die. They would be burned, he was sure, some of them injured by the fire.
No hurry. Plenty of time. There was nowhere they could go. The explorer had all the time in the world and what a story to tell. He opened up his diary and began to think about the tragic accident … an engine fire perhaps, or maybe an accident in the gallery … which had engulfed Capricorn in fire.
58
The dim light began to fade. The wind rose steadily. The team huddled in the makeshift shelter hastily put together out of the scavenged iron. They lit a fire with the scraps of charcoaled wood, holding their palms towards it for the precious warmth as thick clouds of spindrift swept in through the many cracks and holes.
An hour later the glow on the horizon was gone, plunging the ice cap once more into darkness and a twenty-hour night which would see the temperature plummet to fifty, even sixty, degrees below freezing.
Lauren could already feel the tendrils of cold biting into her flesh through the inadequate clothing she was wearing.
There were occasional attempts at conversation, Murdo even trying a joke.
‘Did I ever tell you the one about the two turtles and the skunk?’
No one responded, and he didn’t continue.
They pressed in tighter against each other as the wind picked up yet more speed towards ten p.m. The fire began to fail, the embers dying away fast, exposing them to yet more chill factor. The powder snow was relentless, drifting against their bodies, packing into the tops of socks and boots, trickling down their necks in frozen cascades.
‘Put more wood on, Lauren, don’t you think?’ Mel begged her.
‘We’ve only got enough for a few hours each night,’ Lauren told her. ‘We have to conserve it.’
Collectively the group began to shiver, their chattering teeth rattling in their skulls so that they were one shaking mass of tortured human flesh.
‘I’ve s-s-survived some mountain b-b-bivouacs which I thought were c-c-cold,’ Sean stammered to Lauren, ‘but I tell you, this is s-s-something else.’
They took it in turns to use the single sleeping bag that Mel had managed to save from the mess room, taking one-hour shifts before handing over to the next grateful occupant. Every few hours Mel checked Frank’s hands, the blisters growing dramatically as the burned tissue reacted. Frank took the pain in silence, never once complaining, even though the others knew he must be in agony.
Lauren waited until she thought it was three a.m. and checked her watch, grasping her wrist with her hand to steady it enough to see the dial. It wasn’t yet midnight. It already felt like the longest night of her life, and it wasn’t even halfway through.
By two a.m., the shivering of those pressed against her was so intense that Lauren knew each of them was approaching hypothermia.
‘Everybody up,’ she announced. ‘We h-h-have to move. We need to b-b-body heat to survive.’
There was an outbreak of grumbling protests as she goaded them up and onto their feet.
‘Move in a circle. You too, Richard. Frank, you can stay in the bag. I want everyone mobile for one hour.’
The team began to stagger in a rough circle, stumbling frequently on their frozen feet.
‘Flex your fingers and toes,’ Lauren ordered. ‘One after the other. Don’t lose the feeling in them.’
Soon the only noise was the crunch-crunch of their boots on the crisp snow and the sound of their laboured breathing as they continued to walk. They might be prisoners in some Siberian punishment camp, Lauren thought as they continued the regime, pushing themselves round and round in circles in the dead of this frozen night.
The motion brought them some relief, the welcome sensation of warmth as their bodies settled into the rhythm. But they couldn’t keep going for long, and after an hour Lauren called a halt.
‘Back in the shelter,’ she told them. ‘Get close to each other.’
They retreated back into the pitiful shelter, squatting side by side and wondering how they had ever taken the base for granted. The warmth and security it had offered seemed like a cruel trick of the memory; the very idea that they had been strolling those corridors in T-shirts, that they had enjoyed hot showers and efficient radiators, seemed only to conspire to make the cold more intense.
In no time at all the warmth they had so carefully gained was sucked out of their flesh. The cold was merciless, probing every crack in their clothing, freezing the fabric until it was as stiff as iron, numbing their limbs so that they could feel the muscles crackling as they attempted to relieve cramp.
‘How long can we survive this?’ Murdo’s voice was already filled with despair.
‘You mean tonight?’ someone asked.
‘I mean how long before we die.’
‘I don’t think it’s going to help any of us to…’ Lauren began.
‘Tell us,’ Murdo insisted. ‘At least give me an idea how much of this we’ll have to take.’
Lauren looked at Mel, her eyes posing the question.
‘I’d say five days,’ Mel said quietly. ‘Maybe six or seven for the strongest.’
‘And what’s it going to be like?’ Murdo whispered. ‘What’s going to kill us?’
‘This conversation is not going to help you, Murdo,’ Lauren told him gently. ‘You have to keep your mind positive, or it’ll be worse.’
‘Oh sweet Jesus.’ Now Murdo was crying, the tears freezing on his cheeks. ‘I wasn’t planning on dying just yet.’
‘And you won’t.’ Lauren reached out to place her hand over his. ‘Just get through tonight, and we’ll start to work this out. We’ll find an answer, Murdo; you wait and see.’
A little later Lauren found the stub of a pencil. ‘Anyone got any paper?’ she asked.
The team searched their pockets, managing to find a few scrumpled sheets and a tatty envelope.
‘I’ll keep a diary,’ Lauren told the team. ‘Just a few words each day. It’ll help keep us sane.’
‘And when they find our bodies,’ Richard muttered, ‘at least they’ll know who killed us.’
59
At eight, having not slept a single moment, Lauren pulled together some scraps of wood and lit a fire. She put their one saucepan on it and melted down ice until she had produced a litre of tepid water.
‘Everyone has to take some water,’ Lauren told them. ‘Dehydration will kill us way before we starve.’
They took it in turns to drink the lukewarm fluid, their lips freezing to the aluminium pan even as they sipped. The liquid tasted foul, the pot had been partly carbonised in the fire.
‘I would pay every penny I ever earned for a single cup of sweet tea right now,’ Murdo commented with a sincerity that could not be questioned.
‘And I’d kill for a bacon sandwich,’ Sean added.
They sat in silence, passing the pan around
, clutching it tight in their hands to benefit from the passing heat of the water.
‘I want an inventory,’ Lauren announced when they had finished the drink. ‘We have to know exactly what we’ve got to work with.’
It didn’t take her long to jot the list down on Sean’s envelope.
‘Four sets of skis. Three sets of bindings. One sleeping bag. Assorted tools. One sledge. One half-destroyed cooking pot. One compass. Two Swiss army knives. Several cigarette lighters. Various warm-weather clothes. One blanket. Scrap pieces of wood enough for a couple of weeks of night fires.’
‘Anyone got any cigarettes?’ Mel asked.
No one replied.
‘We’ve got to keep searching the wreckage,’ Lauren said. ‘Somewhere in this debris there might be more things we can use. It’ll give us a focus to the day, and the movement will keep us warm.’
They began to scour the remains of the base, shifting the movable bits of structure and poking around in the ashes. It was a dismal task with precious few rewards; Lauren called a halt to the search after just a couple of hours, in which time the only useful finds had been a few more pieces of firewood and some odd bits of metal which Sean used to improve their makeshift shelter.
They gathered together, hunger already gnawing at their stomachs. Lauren knew it was time for some decisions.
‘So,’ she began, ‘bearing in mind the fact that we have absolutely no food whatsoever, how the hell are we going to survive this?’
‘We’ll have to hunt Fitzgerald down,’ Murdo suggested. ‘Follow the skidoo tracks and surprise him in the night. I’ll kill him myself. That way we get the food and the snowcat.’
‘But he might be fifty miles away,’ Lauren countered. ‘We don’t know where he’s gone.’
‘And he’s got an axe,’ Sean added. ‘None of us have a weapon at all.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ Lauren agreed, ‘and it’ll mean having to split the team. If Fitzgerald sees two or three of our fitter members tracking him down, he might realise that the weaker ones have to be here on their own. Who knows what he might do then?’
Black Ice Page 21
