The skiing had been straightforward enough, at least where the ice was calm. Despite his lack of experience, Richard found he could mimic the smooth, sliding cross-country action of the others, keeping his skis in their tracks and concentrating on the heels of whoever was in front of him as a way of passing the hours.
But around the thirty-mile point the erosion had begun, a persistent sharp nagging at the back of each heel. His socks—soaked daily in sweat and often frozen—began to act like sandpaper, eating away at the tissue as his heels rocked to and fro with every movement of the skis. By fifty miles the sandpaper effect had become a cluster of red-hot needles, penetrating deeper with the sliding steps, and now spreading from the heels to the soft, flat ball of the foot as well.
Richard felt his toes begin to swell, the pressure building through each agonising day as they ballooned under the bruising impact of the boots. At night—even during his spell in the sleeping bag—he dared not take the boots off, terrified that if he did so he would never be able to squeeze the inflated flesh back into them.
Then the next day it would start again, the pain so intense he was biting his lip with each stride. Concentrate on the depot, he told himself, trying to flip his mind into a mantra as the miles crawled interminably past. But the depot was beginning to feel like an impossible dream, a Xanadu, a mirage which they would never reach. And after that was another hundred miles to the next depot … and then another hundred to the aircraft …
And the hunger. Well, that was another thing.
After eighty-odd miles, he could bear it no more. When they stopped that evening, he asked Lauren if he could borrow her penknife and a headtorch.
‘What for?’
‘I want to do some work on my feet…’
‘If they need medical attention, that’s down to me,’ Mel told him.
‘I’d rather…’
‘Let Mel do it,’ Lauren insisted. ‘Take your boots off now.’
Richard lay back as Lauren and Mel removed his boots by the light of their headtorches, stifling a cry as they pulled the frozen sock away from his right foot. There was a collective gasp of sympathy from the team as they saw flesh, which looked more like a plate of bloody steak than a human foot. The miles had exacted a terrible toll, the top layers of skin completely eroded so that the red tissue beneath was livid and raw. The toes were also affected, hammered and distorted by the constant chafing of the boots until the nails were loose in their beds.
‘Don’t touch it,’ Richard urged. ‘I’ll be all right; put the sock back on.’
‘We have to treat this,’ Mel told him. ‘If these blisters get infected, you won’t be able to walk.’
The others were quiet as Richard absorbed this information.
‘Leave us for a while,’ Lauren told them quietly. ‘It doesn’t help to have everyone crowded round.’
The others moved off a short distance as Mel took the Swiss army knife and flicked open the scissors attachment. Trying to close her mind to the pain she knew she was causing the journalist, she proceeded to cut away the dead flesh around the blisters, trimming it as deep as she could until he was begging her to stop.
‘Can’t risk any infection,’ she told him. ‘You’re just going to have to grit your teeth.’
When it was finished, she repeated the process on Richard’s left foot, encouraging him with the thought that at least now some of the pressure would be relieved. Then, with the patient still mumbling in anguish, they replaced the socks and jammed his feet back into the boots.
‘Don’t take these boots off again before we reach the depot,’ Mel told him. ‘At least there we’ll be able to clean your feet up and bandage them properly.’
Later that night, as they huddled together for warmth, Richard gently touched Lauren’s arm to get her attention.
‘You won’t leave me?’ he whispered. ‘You won’t leave me if it gets to the point I can’t walk?’
‘No way,’ Lauren reassured him. ‘If we have to pull you on the sledge with Frank, we will.’
‘Thank you,’ the journalist told her. ‘It’s just been preying on my mind a bit, that’s all.’
Wrapped up in the problems of leading the team, Lauren realised she had spared little thought for Richard and his predicament. Now she thought about how vulnerable the journalist really was—totally dependent for his life on five people he barely knew … and with his feet already falling to bits even though they were less than a third of the way to the aircraft.
Lauren reached out and squeezed Richard’s hand.
‘Think about the story you’ll have to tell when we all get out of this,’ she told him. ‘You’ll pick up a Pulitzer Prize for sure.’
‘Nice idea.’ Richard half smiled, the moment coinciding with a sudden sweeping apart of the clouds to let a few rays of moonlight hit his face. Lauren could see the ice cracking around his mouth.
67
Fitzgerald parked the snowcat a safe distance away and armed himself with the axe. It had to happen now: he hadn’t slept a moment that night, and he couldn’t take the uncertainty any more.
He strode straight into the wreckage of the base. Don’t give them time to think, he reasoned; take them by surprise.
He smashed his shoulder into the outer wall of the shelter, sending the corrugated iron crashing down with a loud clatter into the place where the survivors would be crouching. Axe at the ready, he clambered over the debris, prepared to sink the weapon into the first of them to make a run for it.
‘Come on, you bastards!’ he called. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
Nothing happened. The iron sheet had collapsed too far to the ground. It was obvious there was no one sheltering inside. Fitzgerald lifted it, still wary that it might be a trick, still not believing what his eyes were telling him.
They were gone. The space was empty.
Fitzgerald quickly scanned the surrounding terrain, fearful that this was a decoy. Perhaps they had dug in somewhere else in the ruins? Perhaps this was a deliberate dead end, designed to lure him away from the snowmobile?
But there was no figure running for the machine, no sign of life anywhere, in fact.
What the hell was going on? Fitzgerald had never known such a bizarre situation. How long had they been gone, and why hadn’t he seen them leave? And what possible logic had drawn them away from their only source of shelter?
He stood, bewildered, his mind ticking through the options.
A rescue plane. A stab of terror ran through the explorer’s spine. What if they’d managed to get the radio working? If they’d sent a message, if a plane had come?
No. It wasn’t that. The radio room—and the aerial mast—had been well and truly destroyed. And besides, the conditions still weren’t good enough to get a flight in, with the temperatures hovering down in the low minus fifties it would be a couple of weeks at least before AAS would risk coming down from South America. Get a hold, Fitzgerald told himself, there has to be an answer.
A note. There had to be a note, somewhere in the ruins. Whatever action they had taken, Lauren would have left a record, to tell searchers where they had gone.
He began to sift through the wreckage, looking for a container, for a box or a burned-up can which might hold the clue.
Where would they put it? It would have to be somewhere obvious. In less than five minutes he found it, a tiny piece of notebook paper, rolled up and placed carefully in the hollow interior of a drilling bit which had been stood on its end as a sign. Sort of logical now he thought about it.
The explorer unfolded the scrap of paper, deciphering Lauren’s handwritten note with some difficulty.
31 Aug. Capricorn destroyed by fire following incident in which Julian Fitzgerald attempted to escape the base. Carl Norland killed. Julian Fitzgerald’s whereabouts unknown but approach with extreme caution as is mentally unstable and violent. Six survivors now set out for Chilean base in direction indicated by arrow. Lauren Burgess, base commander.
Beneath the note was a small graphic depicting the points of the compass. An arrow pointed to the northeast, the direction of the nearest base.
Fitzgerald read the note again, wanting to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Heading for the Chilean base? It didn’t make any sense. How could they ever hope to make it without food … it was physically impossible.
Maybe they did have food. Was it possible they had rescued some before the galley went up in the explosion? Fitzgerald immediately dismissed the notion. He had seen the explosion with his own eyes: nothing in that galley—or the storeroom next to it—could have cheated that blast. And besides, logic would dictate that, if they did have food, they would be all the more likely to remain at the base.
It was all too confusing. And yet the evidence was there in his hands. They had set out on foot, probably sneaking out in the night when he was not observing them.
He would follow them, wait for them to die. It would all end the same way in any case.
Just as he was about to pull away from the base, Fitzgerald paused. Something had caught his eye. Something strange about some junk which had spewed out onto the glacier.
Seen from ground level it was a random scatter of debris, thrown out onto the ice, presumably by the force of the explosion. But there was something about it that fired his curiosity, a pattern to it, a shape, even, which didn’t look random at all.
Fitzgerald stopped the snowcat again and paced out amongst the wreckage. What was it? Something was wrong. Some of the pieces looked almost like they had been placed by hand.
It wasn’t until he was standing at the tip that he had it. It was an arrow, the debris was arranged perfectly in the shape of an arrow. Anyone arriving by air—and that was the only way they could arrive—would see the fifty-metre-long arrow pointing clearly away from the base. That would be the trajectory they would immediately search.
The explorer checked his compass. The arrow pointed to the northwest, not leading to the Chilean base at all.
So where was it pointing? Fitzgerald tried to conjure up a mental map of the region. What was to the northwest apart from the Heilman range and the way to the Blackmore Glacier?
Beneath his feet he suddenly noticed a small strip of metal stuck at an odd angle into the ice. The surface around it had been disturbed. It was lying at the tip of the arrow … the very place to put a second note, he quickly realised.
He scraped with his hands, finding the charred remains of a can in just a few seconds. He unfolded the note it contained and read:
Aug 31. A message from Capricorn commander Lauren Burgess. Ignore any other note found. It is a decoy to throw Julian Fitzgerald off our trail. The survivors of this fire have left today for the Blackmore Glacier on foot. We are heading for the Antarctic Air Service plane which crashed there last month in the hope we can retrieve the emergency transmitter which was left there.
An indication of the bearing followed, along with the coordinates of the plane.
Fitzgerald couldn’t believe his luck in finding that second note. The first note had been false. They too were heading for the plane! Like him, they’d remembered the emergency transmitter, left behind in the tent with all the other redundant gear. But how could they make three hundred miles on foot?
Then a half-remembered conversation came back to him. There were depots, food and equipment left by Lauren and Sean when they came on the outward leg of the rescue! Christ, why hadn’t he thought of that? There was food out there, and they might even now be arriving at the first dump.
There wasn’t a moment to lose. Fitzgerald scattered the debris so that the telltale arrow was destroyed, then raced to the snowmobile. He would decamp and set out in pursuit as fast as he could.
As he drove, Fitzgerald had to make a conscious effort to calm his rage. Lauren had been clever; he had wasted days observing that ruddy shelter, so nearly been tricked by the false note.
He wouldn’t underestimate her again. That much was sure.
68
‘How far to go to the depot?’ Mel asked.
Lauren scribbled some calculations on a scrap of paper.
‘It’s day six. Fifteen miles to go. That’s a day and a half at our present rate.’
‘Let me go ahead with Murdo and see if we can find it,’ Sean urged her. ‘The rest are just about wiped.’
‘The team stays together,’ Lauren told him. ‘That’s the golden rule, and it’s a rule I won’t break.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ Sean protested. ‘Me and Murdo are in better shape; we can be ten miles ahead of the pack by lunchtime tomorrow, pick up the barrel and haul it back by nightfall. It’ll gain us a day.’
Lauren sighed. ‘Sean, don’t think I don’t appreciate the offer; believe me, I’d love to take you up on it for my own sake … I’m desperate for food too.’
‘So why don’t you let us do it?’ Murdo interjected angrily. ‘We’re all fucking starving, Lauren, and we need that food now!’
‘Because, if you really think about it, it won’t gain us a damn thing. You’ll both be more tired … that’s an extra twenty or thirty miles you’ll have done. We’ll all get some food a day earlier, sure, but that’s not necessarily going to help. There’s a finite amount of calories at those two dumps, right?’
‘Go on…’
‘So if we break open the rations ten miles early, that means we have to shift the team one hundred and ten miles to the next meal rather than one hundred. On the same amount of food. Do you see what I’m saying?’
‘More or less.’ Sean conceded the logic but he clearly wasn’t happy about it.
‘Well, I think you’re completely wrong,’ Murdo said, jabbing his finger at her. ‘You’re basically forcing us to wait when we don’t need to.’
‘I’m keeping the team together,’ Lauren insisted. ‘We’ve got a target, and we’ve got to hit that target together or not at all.’
‘Fuck the togetherness,’ Murdo muttered. ‘I have to eat soon or I’ll have no energy left to walk at all.’
‘Yes, you will. You’ll start walking at dawn like the rest of us no matter how shattered you are. And why do you think you’ll do that? Because you’ll know that you have to to get to that depot before you can eat.’
‘You’re treating us like one of your bloody laboratory experiments.’ Mel now joined the conversation, exasperated. ‘People have limits, Lauren, and you have to recognise that.’
‘And what if Murdo or Sean falls into a crevasse while they’re out there?’ Lauren asked. ‘Or what if a blizzard blows up while they’re trying to make their way back to us with that heavy barrel? We’ll miss each other in the whiteout and then that really will be the end.’
‘I still think it’s worth the risk,’ Murdo persisted.
‘We can’t accept any more risk. Can’t you see that?’ Lauren flared. ‘It’s going to get harder, Murdo, a damn sight harder than you can imagine. Sean and I have driven this terrain, we know what’s ahead. There’s a bloody mountain range waiting for us! This is going to be the toughest physical challenge any of us have ever faced, and every single calorie is going to count. We might need that extra strength of yours to haul the sledge later on. With someone on it.’
This time no one responded.
‘There’s one more thing,’ Lauren added quietly. ‘Fitzgerald might be out there somewhere, waiting. He won’t attack us while we stay together.’
With that the team fell quiet, and within an hour or so the ashes of the fire had died down to a dull glow.
69
From the start of the seventh day, Lauren’s nerves were in a heightened state. They were approaching the first of the equipment dumps, and it was her responsibility—and hers alone—to locate it. She went through the calculations over and over again as they plodded wearily along, checking her compass every ten minutes for the bearing and calling a halt as they made it to the one-hundred-mile mark.
‘This is it,’ Lauren told them. ‘By my reckoning we shou
ld be close to the equipment barrel.’
The tired team scanned in all directions but could see nothing unusual. The terrain was undulating, the surface broken by scoops and hollows; in places drifting snow had formed into hardened dunes. The light was dull, a blanket of cloud obscuring the scene and casting a watery grey sheen over the land. There seemed to be no definition in place, as if the entire scene had been sculpted from dirty bits of old cloud.
‘You must be mistaken,’ Murdo told her. ‘I thought you said this thing had a flag on it? Surely we’d be able to see it straight away?’
‘Not necessarily. This ground is more uneven than it looks. Give or take a few hundred metres, it has to be here,’ Lauren insisted. ‘Let’s rest for a while, then get a search pattern organised.’
‘How are we going to conduct the search?’ Sean asked her.
‘We’ll measure a straight line of five hundred metres and spread out twenty metres apart. We walk that transect, then move down one hundred metres and start again.’
They rested their exhausted legs for a while, each locked in a private world of misery as they sat back to back on the ice. No one talked about the unthinkable—about what would happen if they couldn’t find the depot.
‘It’s lunchtime,’ Richard said at one point. ‘They’ll be eating scampi and chips and ploughman’s lunches in every pub in Britain.’
In the first days of the trek such a statement would have been met with howls of outrage and pleas to keep his fantasies to himself. Now no one had the energy to tell him to shut up.
Frank began his singing again, this time an Irish tune that Lauren recognised but could not name. It made her want to cry. Periodically he would screw up his face as a wave of pain ran through his infected hands.
At length, Lauren got them onto their feet and the search began.
For two hours she kept them looking, urging them to try and concentrate even as the afternoon wind began to rise. Initially, they were enthusiastic, excited even at the prospect of the hot food and supplies that the barrel would bring. But, as the day stretched interminably on, morale began to slump.
Black Ice Page 24
