Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  They were seventeen days into the trek, and for the last twenty-four hours a dense low cloud had enveloped the glacier, reducing visibility to just fifty metres or less. It made progress more dangerous for the team and made navigation even more critical for Lauren; without the compass bearing, they would be stumbling in circles, hopelessly lost.

  The fog was all-embracing—it felt like a blanket, like a shroud. It deadened all noise, muffling the metallic clinks of equipment, dulling the crisp swish-swish of skis sliding over ice, confusing the sense of orientation so that it was impossible to say which direction a shout had come from.

  Psychologically, the fog was bad for morale, increasing the team’s sense of isolation, enhancing the growing conviction amongst them all that this desperate trek might end in disaster. Mariners through the ages have experienced the same despair encountering fog at sea; there is nothing quite as effective as an impenetrable mist at imparting a sensation of impending doom.

  Lauren’s tactic in these conditions was the only one she could adopt—keeping the team as closely packed as she could, encouraging the stragglers to keep up at the tail of the group.

  ‘No one loses sight of the person in front,’ she told them. ‘That’s the rule. We can’t be sure of finding you again if you get separated from the group.’

  The team, utterly terrified at the prospect of becoming lost in the whiteout conditions, did as she asked, bunching into a tight unit, the stronger members dropping their pace to allow the weaker ones to keep up.

  As night encroached, they made camp for the seventeenth time.

  ‘We can forget about the watch rota for tonight,’ Lauren told them as they settled in for the night. ‘Fitzgerald couldn’t find us in this stuff even if he wanted to.’

  ‘We should get the food inside us now,’ Sean said, ‘while we’ve still got the energy.’

  They melted down ice and drank lukewarm tea, bitter to the tongue without sugar, and ate a half-cup of muesli each. The muesli had to be portioned out in advance, mainly because the raisins were so sought after that they had to be counted out individually. Where there was one over the odds, Frank would invariably be offered it. They melted down yet more ice and added warm water to the cereal, the gritty sweetness of the grain putting welcome sugar into their stomachs. They all saved the raisins in the bottom of their mugs, placing them one by one in their mouths only when they could resist the temptation no longer. Each hard nodule of the dried fruit was chewed over and pulped against the roofs of their mouths until the juices began to flow.

  Next morning the fog was still with them, but at least there were fewer crevasses to worry about. They set out at dawn, making steady progress for five hours or so, bringing them to the area in which Lauren calculated the second barrel should be found.

  They pitched camp and ate a miserly lunch, just half a granola bar each, washed down by a third of a mug of watery cocoa.

  ‘What can you remember about this place?’ Lauren asked Sean.

  ‘It was close to a boulder,’ Sean recalled, trying to picture the terrain, ‘a boulder the size of a car. If we had good visibility, we’d see the damn thing from ten miles away. That’s why we chose it.’

  ‘Why don’t we wait for tomorrow, save our energy?’ Mel asked. ‘Maybe it’ll clear up and we’ll see it right away.’

  ‘It could be like this for days,’ Lauren told her. ‘In fact, it could get worse. We’ll just have to go out and search, like we did at the other depot.’

  At the first depot, all the members of the team had joined in the search for the barrel. Now, eight days later, only Murdo and Mel were fit enough to join Sean and Lauren in the hunt.

  They worked by the compass, following a bearing for ten minutes, then turning as close as they could estimate to ninety degrees for a further ten-minute line. The same procedure repeated twice again brought them full circle, or rather, full square, back to the vicinity of the tent. Having drawn a blank, they would pause to rest, then set out on a different bearing five degrees to the west.

  Here and there, criss-crossing the ice in seemingly random patterns, they came across the indentations of snowmobile tracks.

  ‘Fitzgerald has been in this area,’ Sean confirmed, examining the indentations, ‘and recently too. These tracks would have been blown away within forty-eight hours.’

  ‘You think he was looking for the depot?’ Lauren asked.

  Sean shrugged. ‘We have to credit the guy with some intelligence. If he worked out that the first depot was exactly one hundred miles from the camp, he’d certainly make the two-hundred-mile point a likely place to look.’

  Lauren said nothing, but her heart sank a little further every time they found more tracks. Fitzgerald had been shuttling back and forth like crazy … his trail was scattered all over the area.

  Please God he hadn’t found the depot, Lauren prayed; please God he hadn’t done that.

  After some hours of this, they were all too exhausted to concentrate on such niceties as straight lines. They abandoned the search, retreating, aching and despondent, to the tents, where they ate just a quarter of a tin of processed meat each before huddling close for the night.

  Lauren was on the outside, her back against the goretex outer wall of the tent. No matter how hard she tried to ignore it, the penetrating fingers of cold worked their way through the down, eating into her flesh and making sleep an impossibility.

  She was losing her insulation layers, Lauren realised; all her subcutaneous fat was being burned up by the trek. She buried her head inside the sleeping bag, letting her breath create a precious pocket of warmth around her face so that at least one part of her would be warm.

  The following morning, after one of the most miserable nights Lauren could remember, she joined Sean once more for a foray out into the void. Her warning of the previous afternoon had not been unduly pessimistic, in fact the conditions were worse than the day before, with the precious visibility diminished to fifteen metres at most.

  ‘We’ve got to cast the net wider,’ Lauren told Sean. ‘I think we’re further from it than we realise.’

  They began the process again, now going out for twenty minutes on each bearing, peering into the void in the hope of seeing something—anything—other than the spectral swirling of the fog.

  They did this many times, so many times that Lauren lost count, pushing themselves to do just one more circuit when their bodies cried for rest.

  At last, looming out of the frozen mist, a dark, bulbous shape emerged.

  ‘Is that it?’ Lauren asked, hardly daring to hope.

  Sean peered through the swirls of fog, trying to find some definition in the shape.

  ‘It has to be.’ He took a step forward. ‘But…’

  The boulder was in front of them with the barrel nearby, lying on its side. The black plastic lid and metal sealing ring were scattered on the ice nearby.

  Sean pulled the barrel upright. It was empty. For a while they both stood there, staring dumbly into the interior.

  ‘Oh Christ.’ Lauren’s voice faltered as she realised the full significance of the development. ‘He’s left us with nothing. We don’t even have any drugs for Frank’s hands.’

  They were paralysed, nailed to the spot.

  ‘How much further can we go, Sean?’ she asked him, trying to get her mind round the distance which still separated them from the plane. ‘How much further can we go without food?’

  Sean leaned forward, looking inside the barrel again as if the empty interior might have somehow magically recharged with the supplies they so desperately needed.

  He shook his head as he looked over at Lauren, his face as white as the ice that clung to it.

  ‘And how are we going to tell the others?’ Lauren asked him, the tears already welling up in her eyes. ‘What can we possibly say?’

  84

  Back in London, Alexander De Pierman was a worried man.

  It was nineteen days since he’d last heard from Capricorn. No
w the alarm bells were beginning to ring.

  He looked out of his window, feeling tense and irritable. As usual, London was awash with rain, the gutters gurgling, the shop-front canopies sagging fit to bust, rivulets and minor streams coursing through alleys and thoroughfares as the drains flowed over and spilled. The doorways were filled with trapped shoppers, looking out into the sheeting downpour, wondering bleakly how they’d let themselves get caught without an umbrella again.

  At first, the radio blackout from Capricorn had been a blessed relief for Alexander De Pierman and his public relations team at Kerguelen Oils. Dealing with the media had been time-consuming and fraught, and Lauren’s satellite gremlin was a fast and effective way to turn down the heat.

  Once the media realised that they could get no further news from Capricorn, or from Fitzgerald, they quickly lost interest in the story. The twenty or thirty calls a day to De Pierman’s press office rapidly fell off to five or ten, and within a week the telephone traffic was down to a couple of calls a day.

  Breathing an inward sigh of relief that the whole affair had not reflected too badly on the company, Alexander De Pierman turned his attention back to the business of running one of the world’s biggest oil companies.

  He flew out to Venezuela for five days of negotiations with the Minister of Energy, then on to Borneo to sign an exploration deal for a new field in Sabah. The following week he was in Riyadh, then back to London to supervise the takeover of a small prospecting operation he’d been admiring for a while.

  The days ticked by; one week stretched into two, De Pierman expecting to hear from Lauren at any stage. When no call came from Capricorn, he told himself they must still be having problems with their satellite gear.

  Dr Michael Collins, the director of the Scott Polar Institute, who were also part sponsors of Capricorn, called on day thirteen. He too was beginning to be concerned at the duration of the blackout, and wondered if De Pierman had any news.

  But there was none.

  As the days went by, and the radio silence continued, Alexander De Pierman was getting increasingly concerned … and so was the Scott Polar. It wasn’t like Lauren to leave them in the dark, they agreed. She would know they would be itching for news of the drilling project, which would surely have produced some results by now.

  ‘Any call from Capricorn?’ De Pierman would ask his office every time he called in. But the answer was always the same. No call. No call.

  ‘What’s the longest you’ve ever known a base to be out of touch?’ De Pierman asked Collins in one of their now daily calls.

  ‘A week, maybe ten days. But never longer.’

  A week. Ten days. But now it was the fifteenth day since anyone had heard any news from Capricorn. It didn’t feel right.

  Day sixteen. Relatives of the Capricorn team were beginning to contact De Pierman’s office, disturbed that they had heard nothing for so long. Frank’s mother was particularly concerned, insisting on talking to De Pierman even though he was in Sulawesi at the time.

  ‘Last Thursday was my birthday, Mr De Pierman,’ she told him. ‘Frank has never, ever missed wishing me a happy birthday, no matter where he is.’

  De Pierman began to explore other means of contacting Capricorn. He got radio hams to try to raise the base on different frequencies. No response. He asked a Chilean base—the nearest to Capricorn—to try them in case bad atmospherics were disrupting long-range communications to the South American relay station. Again, no response at all.

  Capricorn wasn’t just quiet, it was downright dead. De Pierman was beginning to lose sleep.

  Day nineteen. He consulted with the Scott Polar, and they decided to give it a couple more days. If there was no news by the end of the week, they would consider funding a flight to find out what the hell was going on down there.

  85

  Misery wormed its way into their souls like a parasite setting up home in a gut. The deepest depression had struck them, a sense of exposure and helplessness as solid and intractable as the two kilometres of ice beneath their feet.

  Even the weather conditions seemed to have renewed the battle against them, the cold so invasive it actually froze them in their sleeping bags. Lauren had to dig deep to conquer her own apathy as she crawled out into the wind-scoured world of ice which surrounded their two lonely tents.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Murdo snapped at Lauren when she tried to rouse him from his sleeping bag. ‘We lost the battle, and we’re going to die. Better to die in a sleeping bag than slogging our guts out there in the deep freeze for nothing.’

  ‘I’m taking the tents down in five minutes,’ Lauren warned him. ‘We’ll leave you here alone if you don’t get up.’

  Lauren hated to play the bully, but this was really the only way.

  Murdo groaned, and Mel joined him.

  ‘My back…’ she pleaded with Lauren. ‘I can’t tow the sledge any more.’

  The medic rolled up her clothing to reveal a bloodied mass of blisters virtually covering her entire back.

  ‘We’re all the same,’ Lauren told her firmly. ‘I’ll show you mine if you want…’

  ‘Give me one reason…’ Murdo mumbled from his bag. His head was turned away; he didn’t want to look Lauren in the eye. ‘One good reason to carry on.’

  ‘Because if we quit now, we definitely can’t win. There’s still a chance, Murdo, that we can get to the plane before Fitzgerald. His snowmobile might break down … he might get lost in a storm … fall down a crevasse.’

  As she spoke the words, Lauren was painfully aware of how thin they sounded.

  ‘He’s got all the food…’ Murdo sulked. ‘That was our food … you promised it to us, remember?’

  ‘I know…’ Lauren placed a hand gently on Murdo’s shoulder. ‘But we can still survive. You can get to the plane if you really want it.’

  ‘I don’t care about the plane. The whole thing is shit.’ Murdo burrowed his head even deeper into the bag as Mel and Richard reluctantly began the process of sorting out their gear ready for the departure.

  Lauren returned to the other tent and found the biscuit she’d been saving. It was a custard cream, the soft filling frozen hard. She waited until Mel and Richard had left Murdo alone in the tent and took the biscuit to him.

  ‘Breakfast,’ she told him, placing the precious object next to his head. ‘But only if you get your ass out of that sack and come and join the rest of us.’

  Murdo unfolded the sleeping bag, his mouth filling immediately with saliva as he saw the biscuit.

  ‘Where the hell did you get that from?’

  ‘Saved it,’ Lauren told him, ‘for a moment like this.’

  ‘I can’t eat that,’ he told her. ‘You should give it to Frank.’

  ‘It’s yours. It’ll help get you going. The others won’t know.’

  Murdo couldn’t resist the food. He placed the biscuit in his mouth, chewing it hard. In a few moments it was gone.

  ‘Now will you get out of the tent?’

  Murdo nodded, feeling suddenly ashamed of his greed.

  ‘We should have kept it…’ he started. ‘Maybe someone else is going to need it more…’

  Lauren left Murdo to extract himself from his bag and went to help Sean with Frank. The radio man was now incapable of using his hands at all. Every zip, every button had to be fastened for him; they helped him out of the tent and pulled him clumsily to his feet.

  ‘I need to piss, Sean,’ Frank said. ‘Would you be so kind?’

  Frank stumbled a short distance away, and Sean helped him to piss.

  ‘Do you want Mel to take a look at your hands today?’ Lauren asked him when he came back.

  Frank shook his head violently. ‘No, no.’

  ‘Is it my imagination,’ Lauren asked Sean when they were out of earshot, ‘or are Frank’s fingers beginning to smell real bad?’

  ‘They sure are,’ Sean agreed. ‘I never smelled an infection like that before.’

  ‘We shoul
d watch him carefully today. I think he’s sicker than he’s letting on.’

  After a long struggle, Lauren finally had the team out on the ice, the tents packed and loaded. Richard was strangely silent, rocking slightly on his feet, his hands placed gingerly inside his wind jacket.

  ‘How are your feet?’ Lauren asked him.

  Lost in a world of his own pain, Richard didn’t respond.

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ he told her quietly. ‘The hurt keeps my mind from thinking of food.’

  Richard pulled down the hood of his jacket so Lauren couldn’t see his eyes.

  The temperature was breathtakingly low, somewhere down in the minus fifties, Lauren estimated. It paralysed them; the severity of the cold seemed to turn them to statues where they stood. The very idea of walking fifteen or twenty miles that day, with nothing to eat, seemed so ridiculous it almost made Lauren want to cry.

  Murdo suddenly threw back his head. ‘I hate this place!’ he screamed into the air. ‘I hate this fucking place!’

  His shout echoed back from the ice.

  No one said anything, but Mel put her hand behind Murdo’s back and gently pushed him to make a step.

  ‘Jesus. Has anyone any idea how my feet feel?’ Murdo was close to tears as he shuffled onwards.

  Lauren was biting her own lip as she forced herself to take a step. The rope began to build pressure against her hips, the familiar deep-set pain of the friction burns reigniting again.

  Sean pulled next to her, as strong as ever, his body leaning into the work as the first seconds of the shift passed in a blur of agony. ‘How many miles to the plane?’ he asked her quietly.

  ‘Ninety. Plus.’

  ‘Frank’s not going to make it. He’s going down fast.’

  ‘I know. And so is Richard,’ Lauren replied. ‘You reckon we can pull him and Frank on this thing?’

  Sean did not reply.