‘No. Surprise me.’
‘We should rig up one of the flysheets and try to sail the sledge. This wind is running about twenty knots from the south, right? And this surface is the best we’ve seen … look at it, it’s like marble here, we haven’t crossed a crevasse or a sastrugi for miles.’
Lauren scrutinised the surface, shielding her eyes to look ahead, checking for the telltale wrinkles in the glacier surface which would indicate turbulence below.
‘Like Scott?’ Lauren recalled the photographs from Scott’s Last Journey, in which the British explorers had rigged a sail to help them manhaul.
‘Like almost everyone,’ Sean told her. ‘Messner, Fiennes, they all made big gains using sails when the conditions were right.’
‘You think the flysheet can take it? We can’t afford to rip one.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Sean reassured her. ‘Those flysheets are guaranteed by the manufacturers to withstand a wind up to force ten or beyond. It’s a brand-new tent without much wear and tear. Plus we can rig it in a way that will minimise the strain.’
‘What would you use for a mast?’
‘We don’t need one. We’d attach it at two points to the front of the sledge and use it like a spinnaker.’
‘I’m warming to the idea,’ Lauren told him. ‘Let’s take a look at the fly.’
They unpacked the tent from the sledge and brought out the flysheet. Lauren ran the fabric through her fingers, trying to assess its strength.
‘If there’s a danger point, it’s at these attachments,’ Sean pointed out, ‘but look how well it’s been done. This is a thousand-dollar tent; it can take a lot of punishment.’
‘Will it have the pulling power to drag the sledge?’
‘Let’s try it and see.’
Sean handed two of the guy ropes to Lauren and took the other two himself. He opened the flysheet to the wind, seeing with satisfaction that it plumped out smoothly in the air.
The pull was surprisingly strong, strong enough in fact that the two of them were immediately dragged forward several metres until Sean could collapse it again.
‘It can pull all right.’ Lauren was astounded by the power the simple sail had exhibited. ‘But it could still break,’ she worried. ‘How can we justify the risk?’
‘It’s worth the risk because I don’t think we’ll make it without some help. Look at them, Lauren: they’re absolutely spent. How many more miles do you realistically think we can haul Frank today?’
Lauren considered the team and had to admit that Sean was right. The lack of food had reduced them to the point where they could barely walk for themselves, let alone with Frank’s weight holding them back.
‘We’ll give it a go,’ Lauren told him, ‘but I want someone ahead at all times to check out the terrain for crevasses and holes.’
Thirty minutes later the sledge was underway, utilising windpower for the first time. Sean and Murdo ran the operation, Sean on the front of the sledge to ensure the sail was filling out correctly from its attachment points on the front strut and Murdo at the back, ready to brake.
Frank lay with his head buried in his sleeping bag, preferring not to think of what would happen if they came up too fast to a crevasse.
The sledge ran beautifully on the silky-smooth surface, the sail comfortably generating enough pull to transport the three of them at roughly twice the speed they could achieve on foot. Once they had the system going, they found they were easily outstripping the pace of the others as they tried to follow. A new sound filled their world, the satisfying swish of the runners as they ate up the distance.
Then, a shadow dead ahead.
‘Brake!’ Sean would shout, as soon as he saw danger.
Murdo would hang off the back of the sledge, hacking a metal spike into the ice and digging it as deep as he could until Sean could get the sail collapsed. Then they would dismount, haul the sledge around the obstacle and rig it to sail again.
They found the technique was not without its problems; a fickle blast of extra-strong wind could cause the flysheet to rear up above the sledge, from where it would fall back onto Frank. Sean would have to patiently disentangle him before rigging the sail again. Sometimes the wind died completely for ten or fifteen minutes, the flysheet flapping redundant on the ice. But then it would pick up again, fifteen, twenty knots, giving the sledge a good five or six knots of headway.
The wind rush was another danger, the relatively high speed creating a wind chill of its own. Sean found his eyes watering, the tears quickly freezing as he peered around and under the sail, looking for trouble ahead.
Soon the foot party were miles behind and Sean called a halt so they could catch up. ‘There’s enough pull on this that we could take a skier on the back,’ he told them.
With the success of the sail clear to all, there was no shortage of volunteers, and for the rest of that day the team took it in turns to be pulled behind the sledge. The extra weight pulled the speed down considerably, but it still beat hauling.
By five p.m., the wind was getting too strong to handle, and Sean once or twice lost control of the flysheet completely. He pushed a little further, but within an hour one of the guy ropes had broken.
‘OK,’ Lauren said when the damage was inspected, ‘that’s the warning sign. Can it be fixed?’
‘We can splice it back together,’ Sean told her. ‘It won’t be like new, but it will still hold.’
‘No more sailing,’ she told Sean, ‘but, I have to admit, that was a hell of a good day’s progress. Worth three days on foot at least.’
As it happened, the smooth conditions they had chanced upon that day were never experienced again. Instead, within a very few miles they were back in the familiar chopped-up chaos of the crevasse fields, in which they would never have dared to try the sail in any case.
That night, Lauren wrote in her diary:
Luck was with us today. But tomorrow back to the sledge hauling. Frank now on third day of antibiotics but showing very little sign of improvement. He’s still getting weaker every day, and the infection in his hands is not healing as it should.
76
The miles were ticking off on Lauren’s hand-drawn map. Fitzgerald had not been seen for forty-eight hours. By her calculations they were just three days from the second depot, but the closer they got, the more nervous Lauren was becoming.
‘He’s got to pass us,’ she told Sean as she checked behind them for the hundredth time that day. ‘So where the hell is he?’
‘Just out of sight, I imagine,’ Sean told her, ‘keeping on our trail and waiting.’
‘But waiting for what? Why is he shadowing us?—that’s what doesn’t make any sense to me. Why doesn’t he make for the crash site as quickly as he can?’
Sean gave a bitter laugh.
‘Because he has to know we’re dead, and know where we die. That way he can bend the story any way he likes. And if we start abandoning bodies, you can bet he’ll be dumping them into the nearest crevasse. He can’t take the risk that any of us will ever be found.’
‘Jesus, that is so sick.’
‘Also, this way he doesn’t have to think about navigation or anything, he can just follow our tracks and know he’s on the right trail.’
‘And what about the second depot? You think he’ll have figured where it is?’
Sean sucked on his teeth. ‘I’d love to say no, but, if he saw us at the first depot, the chances are pretty high he knows that the second one is at the two-hundred-mile point.’
‘And he’ll find it…’
Sean didn’t reply.
They picked up the compass bearing again and set out for the afternoon session, four hunched figures hauling at the sledge, Richard trailing far behind.
For the hauling, much depended on the precise nature of the surface the team happened to be crossing. When the going was rough, it was hell all round: hell for the haulers when they couldn’t find a satisfactory rhythm to move to, hell
for Frank as he was jerked and rocked from side to side and hell for the sledge as the frame twisted and strained with every jolt.
Sometimes the obstacles were extreme, for the best part of that day, the team found themselves in a region where the pressure ridges came thick and fast—and two to three metres high. With no hope of manhandling Frank over these whilst still on the sledge, they had to coax him onto his feet so he could make his way across as best he could.
‘No problem,’ Frank would assure them. ‘I can make it over that little bastard, you’ll see.’
They held his arms as he hobbled bravely onto the pressure ridge, only the sharp intakes of breath hinting at the pain he was experiencing in his hands.
Having made it to the other side of the ridge, Frank would take his place on the sledge once more while the haulers waited in their makeshift harnesses for the command to begin pulling again.
‘Start off gently!’ Sean would take the lead, easing his strength against the rope, biting his lip against the pain from the sores on his waist as the rope began to burn into his flesh. ‘Now, on the count of three … one, two, three, pull!’
Often, in this highly stressed part of the glacier, they would make just two or perhaps three hundred metres before the next pressure ridge would rear up and the whole process would start again.
Without a target, Lauren thought, they simply wouldn’t have had the strength.
The second depot, the second barrel; the target became so central to the thoughts and desires of the team that scarcely a minute went by when one of them wasn’t talking about it, thinking about it or fantasising about what it might contain.
Every step was a step closer.
Their food was running low, low enough that they were down to starvation rations again. The second depot; what would it contain?
Most nights, Lauren dreamed about it, her mind warping the fifty-gallon barrel into something the size of an aircraft hangar as she saw it beckoning across the ice. It was so vast it had doors, huge sliding blinds which rolled back to reveal a treasure house of edible wonders. The interior was like the food hall of Harrods, with smoked hams hanging from racks and vast display cabinets of cheeses and fruits.
Lauren dreamed her way along the aisles, scooping up handful after handful of the delicacies until her mouth was so full she could no longer swallow. There were truffles, baskets loaded with different types of breads, a whole vat full of butter—the fat she craved more than any other. Then she would wake, her heart racing, fighting to breathe, knowing as the dream receded that the reason she could not swallow was that her tongue was now continuously swollen … one of the first signs that malnutrition was becoming a serious threat to her body.
That barrel had to be there. And it had to be intact.
In three days, they would be there.
77
‘Son of a bitch!’ Fitzgerald collapsed onto the snowmobile seat, his clothes sticking to him where he had begun to sweat.
What the hell was wrong with this damn machine? Forty-five pulls and the engine still refused to fire.
The explorer dismounted and delivered a vicious kick to the drive belt. ‘Bastard!’ he screamed.
It was the mountain crossing that had done it, even a mechanical ignoramus like Fitzgerald could recognise the rapid deterioration of the snowcat since he had pushed it hard into that steep ascent. Now the infernal machine was paying him back by refusing to start.
He pulled on the starter again, despairing as no answering spark came back at him. His arm was aching, his right hand a little frostnipped after he had made the mistake of touching some of the engine’s metal components in a futile attempt to explore the fault.
He had left some skin behind, stuck to the aluminium.
He stared to the north, into the light fall of snow which was obscuring the glacier. What would it mean if the machine really was dead? Fitzgerald could hardly bear to contemplate the consequences.
He would have to manhaul … but the sledge would be punishingly heavy with the tent and all that food … perhaps too heavy for one man to move. And how many miles? Maybe one hundred and sixty to go to the plane. Christ, that was going to be a test.
He still wasn’t back to full fitness after the original crossing attempt.
Worst of all, it would reduce him to an equal footing with the others … that was the most frightening prospect of all. This game of cat and mouse—this game which the explorer had begun to enjoy thanks to his mechanical advantage—would suddenly transform into something very different.
They were ahead. Maybe they could stay ahead. And if they knew his snowmobile had given up, would they not come and hunt him down? Six against one.
The explorer shivered, then took the starter cord in his hand and gave it one final yank.
The engine gave a faltering stutter, then roared into life. Triumphant, he twisted the throttle hard, watching the revometer creep up to five, six, seven thousand revs.
‘Mess me around, would you?’ he muttered, gunning the throttle harder until the engine was screaming at high pitch. In the explorer’s mind he imagined it might clear the blockage, if a blockage it was.
He eased himself onto the seat, feeling frighteningly cold where the sweat was freezing under his clothes.
Right. Which way had they gone? Just a simple matter of following their tracks. Fitzgerald drove to the north for a while until he picked up their trail.
The engine continued to trip on itself, the steady throb cutting out intermittently, only to catch again as the motion refired the cylinder.
What about tomorrow? Would it start again? The uncertainty was beginning to wear Fitzgerald down.
78
Sean fixed his eyes on the horizon, looking for the telltale dot.
‘I thought of an alternative,’ he told Lauren. ‘Another way of … of solving our problem.’
Lauren looked at him without any vestige of real hope in her eyes.
‘Try me.’
‘How about Deep Throat?’
Lauren screwed up her face as her exhausted mind tried to make the connections required of it.
‘Deep Throat…?’
‘It’s between us and the second depot. Don’t you think it would make a perfect trap?’
Lauren got it.
‘Oh my God, Sean—you think we can do that?’
‘I think it’s worth a try. I’ll do it alone if you have a problem with it.’
Lauren stared at him intently, doubt written now in her expression. ‘I’m not sure … it takes us into new territory … dangerous territory…’
‘Just the two of us, Lauren. Really clean.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never…’
‘And you think I have?’ Sean protested.
‘No, just that there might be questions. Later. We might have to tell our story … and…’
Now Sean got really close to her, his voice changing gear, becoming dispassionate, unconnected.
‘It’s him or us, Lauren; we already worked that one out, remember?’
Lauren backed away, the palms of her hands raised towards him.
‘Give me some time, Sean. I need to really consider this. This is big; it’s going to change plenty of things if we do it.’
‘Yeah. Like give us a fighting chance.’
Lauren retreated to the sledge and sat thinking as Sean and Mel began to put up the tents. Her head was throbbing with a rhythmic ache, the debilitating pangs of hunger nagging at her more urgently now that the food was getting so scarce.
Sean had put the unthinkable into words, and now the idea was sitting there, ugly, tangible, frighteningly real.
They really couldn’t do that. Could they?
79
Heavy snow had fallen, compounding the problems for the team. Every ten minutes or so the runners would clog up, making it virtually impossible to tow the sledge.
‘Runners!’ someone would call, and they would come to a halt.
The runners were another
of Sean’s responsibilities; keeping them clear was now virtually a full-time job. Under normal circumstances he would have polished them with wax every morning and night, to get the best passage across the ice, but since they had no polish he was forced to carry out improvised maintenance on the trail, mainly consisting of cleaning them as often as was necessary.
As usual, everything depended on the quality and texture of the snow they happened to be crossing; where it was granular and dry, the runners could pass without clogging up, needing only a quick going-over with a knife every hour to expose the smooth plastic surface. When the snow was wet, however, or, worse still, sticky, the runners would very quickly lose their efficiency, balling up with many kilos of congealed ice and minimising the efficiency of the sledge.
‘We’re not crossing Antarctica,’ Lauren observed one morning as she looked back on the two deep furrows the sledge was etching into the soft snow, ‘we’re ploughing it.’
When it got to the point where they could barely make any headway, they would go through the tedious process of scraping the runners clean. Frank would be offloaded, along with the rest of their equipment and the remaining stack of wood, and the sledge would be turned over to reveal the undercarriage. Sean would take his knife and hack the ice away, taking great pains not to add to the nicks and scores which had already accumulated on the plastic runners.
When Sean was satisfied, the sledge would be turned, loaded, and the grind would begin again. For a few wonderful minutes the sledge would move freely, almost feeling to the exhausted team that the runners were coated with grease, there was so little friction. Then the balling would start anew, the runners growing ‘feet’ of ice which inexorably increased the drag to the point where even the hardest pull of all four haulers could achieve just a foot or so of progress.
‘Did you know the Eskimos have more than two hundred words for snow?’ Mel commented.
‘That’s bugger all,’ Murdo told her. ‘The Scots have more than a thousand, and every one of them is a swearword.’
Black Ice Page 27
