A gnawing sensation of despair began to eat away at Lauren. How long could they continue to search? she asked herself. When would the weaker team members begin to collapse if they didn’t get food? They would survive another night, she surmised, but not much more.
After a while the tight discipline of the search broke down, each of them moving off and wandering in aimless patterns as they looked for the elusive barrel. From time to time, Lauren reminded herself that it was dangerous for them to be separated in this way … that Fitzgerald might have followed them, might be waiting for a chance to stalk up and …
‘I had the same thought,’ Sean told her, ‘and I’ve been keeping a good look-out behind us. So far nothing.’
‘I just don’t want anyone to stray too far,’ Lauren told him.
But she didn’t have the energy to try and regroup the line and continued her own meandering search as her mind wandered erratically from one thought to another.
The mood when Lauren finally called them back together was one of unmitigated depression. No one, not even Lauren and Sean, had anticipated that the barrel would prove so difficult to find.
‘Maybe it got blown away,’ someone said, flatly.
‘Or Fitzgerald got it.’
‘Or we’re looking in the wrong place. Your calculations might be wrong.’
Lauren turned to Sean, the frustration clearly written across her face.
‘Come on, Sean. Think! What are we doing wrong?’
‘Well, the first thing we have to realise is that the flag obviously isn’t upright any more. If it was, we’d have found it by now.’
‘Correct. But what about the barrel? Why can’t we see it? It’s a socking great bright blue barrel in the middle of a vast white wilderness, and we can’t see it!’
‘Maybe the answer is … it’s not blue any more. We’ve told everyone to look out for something blue, but what if it got completely coated in ice during a storm? That could happen, right?’
Lauren thought about it.
‘You think it could be that simple?’
‘Yes, I do. It’s the only reason I can think of that we might have missed it. It’s camouflaged. Everyone’s so damn tired someone might have walked right past it!’
‘So we’re looking for something white. Everyone got that?’ Lauren told them.
‘Something white?’ Murdo pointed out glumly, waving his arm to encompass the uniform white terrain that surrounded them. ‘That narrows it down nicely.’
Nevertheless, after they had rested for an hour the team began the search once more, fanning out again in pairs, continuing a rough search pattern even though most had lost hope they would ever find the depot.
Suddenly, a shout went up to the south of the camp position. It was Sean, waving his hands in the air about four hundred metres off.
‘Got it!’ the others heard. ‘Here it is!’
The barrel was on its side; one of the anchors which had held it upright had been ripped out of the ice in a gale. The flag was long gone, nowhere to be seen, and—as Sean had predicted—the blue plastic was completely obscured by a coating of ice … and by a drift of snow which half covered it.
The team gathered round the barrel, elated and relieved that it had finally been found. Frank was the most emotional, gently touching the plastic as if he feared it was not real, then promptly breaking into a fit of unrestrained sobs.
Lauren hugged him until he stopped crying, while the others chipped the plastic object free from its mantle of ice.
‘You see that?’ Sean pointed to a set of tracks which passed a few metres to the west of the barrel. ‘I was right. Someone did walk right past it on an earlier search and never saw it!’
As they broke open the barrel and began to sort through the contents, Lauren walked over and inspected the tracks, her cheeks burning as she recognised the tread. She never told the others that those boot prints were hers.
70
Fitzgerald had driven like the wind, pushed the snowcat so hard the exhaust glowed red hot in the night. He didn’t dare sleep, knowing that if he could only get to that depot first …
It was a dangerous business, driving at speed across the plateau in the dark, but Fitzgerald was oblivious to the risk, pushing the machine harder and harder until the oil pressure gauge was high up in the red, the engine screaming as it powered onwards, eating up the miles to the target.
The explorer was not frightened of missing them in the night, he knew they would have been able to cover at least eighty or ninety miles by now if they’d been going strong.
He guessed he would make contact sometime in the afternoon, and, sure enough, just after three p.m., he saw the line of black specks on the horizon. There they were, crossing and recrossing an area perhaps a half-mile in width.
Fitzgerald parked the snowmobile behind the cover of a pressure ridge and began his observation. They were distracted. He was confident they would not be looking for any sign of him.
They were searching; he realised that straight away.
So there was still hope! Maybe they wouldn’t find the depot after all. Perhaps they were looking in the wrong place.
What had Sean told him about the depots? The explorer had been sifting through his memory, frantically trying to recall. How many were there? Two, perhaps four. And where were they stationed along the route to the crashed plane?
Fitzgerald remembered the milometer on the snowmobile, perhaps that would hold a clue. It read ninety-seven miles. That was it! He felt a wave of satisfaction at the discovery, pleased he had thought to zero the gauge before pulling away from the base on the northwest heading.
The depot was one hundred miles from base. Simple, really.
As he watched them, he saw the team come together to a specific point. They were more animated now, the dejected stance of the search replaced by more activity.
They’d found it. Fitzgerald cursed his luck. An hour or two earlier and he would have been there first.
But at least he’d found them. He had to be grateful for that.
The position of the next depot wasn’t hard to fathom; logic told him it would be placed an equal distance from the base, at the two-hundred-mile point, on the other side of the Heilman range.
He could overtake them whenever he chose.
Fitzgerald mounted the snowmobile and pressed the starter. The engine coughed once or twice but failed to start. He pressed again, realising now that he might have pushed the engine too hard on that hundred-mile dash from the base.
This time it started, but it didn’t have the crisp note of before. Fitzgerald frowned as he engaged the gear. If he was honest, the whole machine felt a bit sick, like the belt drive wasn’t engaging properly.
He lurched off to find a place to camp—a place where he could rest in safety. He hadn’t slept for three days now, and he was tired to the bone.
The snowmobile coughed again. Damn this machine, the explorer thought, if it lets me down …
71
No child ever ripped open a Christmas stocking with more delight than the Capricorn team exploring the contents of that barrel. Seven days without eating a scrap had driven them to the point where the mere sight of so much food was enough to make them weak at the knees.
Dried fruit. Tea bags. Biscuits. Glucose energy tablets. Pre-packed foil sachets of bacon and beans, beef stew and dumplings, goulash. There was chocolate, sugar, tins of coffee and ham.
‘I hope you put a bloody tin opener in here, Frank!’ Murdo told him.
Almost as precious as the food was the medical box containing antibiotics, bandages and painkillers which—crucially—included morphine. Mel took charge of the kit and immediately began to treat Frank’s infected hands. Within a matter of minutes, she was cleaning and disinfecting the wounds.
Deeper down, packed tightly beneath the food and medical supplies, was cooking equipment, two tents and three sleeping bags. Lauren almost wept when she saw them. She walked over to where Frank was lying fl
at on his back on the sledge for his treatment.
‘You did a great job when you packed this depot,’ she told him. ‘Thank God you thought this one out properly.’
‘I never dreamed we’d end up using it.’
‘How are his fingers?’ she asked Mel.
‘The infection doesn’t seem much worse than yesterday. I think the spell on the sledge did him good. This clean-up is exactly what they need, and I’ll put him on a strong course of penicillin after he’s had some food.’
Next the team made a careful stack of the provisions so that Lauren could compile a list of what they had. ‘By my calculations,’ she told them, ‘we’ve got enough for six to eight meals each. If we take care we can eke this out so that we can eat at least one meal a day each until the next depot.’
‘Don’t forget the next depot’s a much tougher walk with the mountain range,’ Sean reminded her.
‘Screw the calculations,’ Murdo said. ‘Let’s eat.’
They erected one of the tents, and Sean soon put the cooker to work, melting down ice and handing out a steaming plastic mug of cocoa to each of them. After seven days of tepid meltwater, the taste of the chocolate was exquisite.
Then each was allowed to choose one of the pre-cooked foil sachets of food—a process they undertook with elaborate care, comparing the contents and discussing which had more calories to offer.
Lauren chose beans and bacon and waited her turn for the sachet to be warmed in a pan of boiling water. When she placed the first spoonful in her mouth, it created an explosion of warmth and taste which almost took her breath away.
Normally, Lauren disliked fatty foods, but now she relished the chunky pieces of salted bacon, chewing the gristly meat over and over so as not to waste a single particle of taste. Every bean got the same treatment, the sweet tomato paste savoured for long moments before she reluctantly swallowed the food.
When she had demolished every last morsel, Lauren ripped the sachet open and licked it clean.
Afterwards came a handful of dried fruit (each apricot counted out individually so no one got more than anyone else), three squares of chocolate and a few boiled sweets.
‘We’ll have to get a rota system going,’ Lauren told them. ‘Four people will sleep while two keep watch. After two hours, the ones on watch go into the bags and another two come out to take their turn.’
‘You still think we need to mount a watch?’ Mel asked her. ‘We haven’t seen Fitzgerald since we left the base.’
‘We keep the watch,’ Lauren told her. ‘Imagine how it would feel to come out here in the morning and find Fitzgerald had stolen all this food and the sledge during the night.’
They agreed to the plan, and, desperate for the warmth, the first four volunteers were inside the tent and into the sleeping bags within minutes of finishing the meal. The tent was designed for two, but four could jam in—head to toe—at a pinch. The comfort level was low, but no one had the energy to put up the second tent, and the tight conditions generated a few more degrees of heat.
Out on the glacier, Lauren and Sean took the first watch, sitting on the sledge and staying close to the heat of the fire.
‘You must be proud, getting everyone to the first depot,’ Sean told her.
‘Proud of the team. I haven’t done anything special, but I appreciate the thought. Not many people thank the leader.’
‘Well, all the more reason to do it. You did a great job to get us here … and you were right about keeping everyone together when Murdo wanted to make the break.’
‘Thank you, Sean.’
‘You think they’ve got it in them to get over the mountains?’
Lauren let out a long sigh. ‘They have to. There’s no other way down onto the glacier. But I must admit that frightens me a lot.’
‘It’s Frank we’ll have to watch. He’s definitely the weakest link. Richard’s a bit wobbly too, but he’ll pick up now we’ve got some provisions.’
Gradually, they fell silent, awed by the millions of stars which the clear night revealed above them. Every few minutes a shooting star would race across the night sky.
‘You think Fitzgerald’s on our trail?’ Lauren asked him.
‘I hope not.’ Sean peered out into the night. ‘But even if he is, maybe we got lucky and he’s hit a problem with the snowmobile. Maybe he had a spark plug crack, or threw a belt. I don’t know what kind of mechanic he is, but I sure wouldn’t want to be on my own out there with a dead machine.’
Lauren looked out into the darkness.
‘Maybe he’s keeping just out of sight. He wants us to think he’s lost us.’
‘So we let down our guard?’
‘Precisely.’
When their two-hour watch was over, Lauren and Sean took their turn in the tent while Mel and Murdo took over the watch. Crawling into the protection of the sleeping bag was a sublime moment of luxury. To be out of the penetrating wind seemed to Lauren to be the greatest pleasure she had ever experienced.
Her belly was full, her mind relaxed now the tension of the search for the depot was over. Lauren let the glorious warmth of the duckdown fold around her and nestled down to sleep as the snores of her companions filled the tent.
‘Sean?’ she whispered.
‘Yep?’ His reply showed he was right on the edge of sleep.
‘I wanted to tell you something about what happened between us at the base…’
Sean turned towards her, his face so close she could feel his breath on her cheek.
‘Don’t you mean what didn’t happen between us?’
‘Yeah. It’s just that it happened to me before, on another base. I got involved with someone, and then it all went sour. Then we had to spend the entire winter living under each other’s skin, and it was a total nightmare.’
‘I think we would have been cool.’
Lauren leaned forward and kissed him softly on the lips.
‘I think so too. And maybe we still will be.’
‘If we get out of this alive.’
They were silent for a while.
‘There’s still two hundred miles to go,’ Lauren whispered, her heart full of fear as she lay there awake, listening to the sound of Murdo and Mel talking softly outside the tent.
72
‘One and pull … and two and pull!’ Lauren called the moves as they hit the lowest flanks of the Heilman range, the sledge graunching across the rough ice in fits and starts as the incline began to work against them. It was day eight of the trek.
‘Keep it coming! One and pull … and two and pull.’
‘You were born in the wrong century,’ Murdo muttered. ‘You sure you weren’t a slave driver in a former life?’
There were four of them on the harness now, Lauren and Sean at the front, Mel and Murdo at the back. Richard brought up the rear, his damaged feet counting him out of the hauling duty even though he desperately wanted to help.
It was the first morning after finding the depot, and they were better fed and rested than they had been at any point since the fire. That was why Lauren was pushing them so hard. They’d slept for a straight ten hours, and Lauren had let them eat their fill at breakfast, knowing that they would need every precious calorie for the trial of hauling Frank over the range.
Frank had fought to stay off the sledge, had insisted he was strong enough to walk, but a quick test stroll had revealed the truth—he was still feverish and weak from the infection. He had reluctantly taken his place, lying in a sleeping bag for extra warmth.
Lauren was sure of one thing. They had to cross the range in a day. One extreme burst of energy while they still had the reserves. If it took them longer and they got stuck on the higher slopes in a storm, there was little prospect of finding a safe place to pitch the tents.
She had them awake at six a.m. By ten they were navigating their way onto the first of the steep glacier ramps which had seemed so easy with the snowcats. They worked on foot; without skins, the skis were as good as useless
.
‘Don’t let the momentum stop,’ Sean yelled as the sledge jammed in a crack. They heaved extra hard to free it, thigh muscles straining as they leaned forward to win a few more inches of the slope.
‘Keep it coming!’ Lauren urged them on as they paused to rest. ‘Another twenty minutes before we stop!’
Somehow they did as she asked, leaning forward and straining in unison, the sledge grinding reluctantly up the ice for a couple more paces before they rested, gasping for breath. With every metre of height, it seemed the sledge was gaining weight.
‘Are you carrying rocks in there?’ Murdo demanded of Frank. ‘Or do you just weigh a bastard ton?’
Midday. They hauled the load up a particularly steep rise then eased back on the makeshift harnesses, appreciating the relief as the constant strain on their backs was relieved.
‘Take a break,’ Lauren told them. ‘Ten minutes.’ She gave them a boiled sweet each and a swig from a water bottle containing powdered orange drink.
‘It’s the harness that kills me,’ Murdo said, sitting heavily on the sledge.
Lauren knew what he meant. Hauling Frank up the range was proving a backbreaking task, and one which wasn’t getting any easier as the hours crawled past. The harness was Sean’s design, a simple series of loops twisted into their only rope.
As a means of towing the dead weight of the sledge, the system worked fine; they could harness four pullers at the same time, arranged in a fan formation in front of the sledge. It reminded Lauren of old black-and-white photographs of Scott’s expedition, in which his team had manhauled provisions in the same way.
But on these punishing slopes the disadvantage was a serious one: the rope had no padding, the nine-millimetre cord cutting ever more insistently into the flesh of their waists and hips as they fought to gain altitude. They tried wrapping pieces of clothing around their waists, hoping to alleviate the pain, but the constant motion of the rope would inevitably dislodge them, sawing its way steadily into the soft tissue around their waist until the skin broke.
Black Ice Page 25
