Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  ‘It came as quite a shock, I can tell you.’

  ‘It was a fire, you said?’

  ‘Yes. It seems the base was razed to the ground. Nothing left, and no human remains visible.’

  Gresham gave a deep sigh. ‘Fire. It has killed more people in Antarctica than anything else. But when did you get this news?’

  ‘This morning. Two Argentinian pilots landed at the base and carried out a search. They found no survivors.’

  ‘And how can I help you?’

  ‘I want to know one thing,’ De Pierman told him. ‘Assuming that one or more of the team survived the fire, what would they do?’

  ‘There’s no doubt about that,’ Gresham answered emphatically. ‘They would have stayed by the base and awaited rescue. That’s the standard textbook response to such an emergency.’

  ‘And Lauren Burgess would know that?’

  ‘Without any doubt. So would anyone else at that base.’

  ‘And if there was nothing left to sustain human life? If all food and available shelter had been completely destroyed in the fire? What would they do then?’

  ‘They would still stay at the base location.’

  ‘And how long would they last?’

  Gresham turned to his computer and inputted a series of commands.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, jotting down some notes. ‘The answer to your question is this. At minus fifty-five degrees … and that, as we know, has been the ambient temperature across Antarctica in recent weeks … a fit individual with minimal shelter and no food could theoretically survive for up to seven days. More likely they’d be dead within three.’

  ‘And what would kill them?’

  ‘Exposure. And dehydration. If they had no means of melting ice, they would have no access to water. Of course there are other factors which may be working against them: one or more of them may be injured as a result of the fire. Then there would be the shock of the disaster itself … that would exacerbate the effects of hypothermia and cut their survival time by quite a bit.’

  ‘Dr Gresham,’ De Pierman said, ‘there was another factor in all of this. Capricorn’s radio system was down … Lauren had contacted us to say they were having problems and not to worry if we didn’t hear from her.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Gresham tapped his yellowing teeth with the chewed end of a pencil. ‘That does confuse the situation somewhat. How long was the anticipated blackout?’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem: she couldn’t tell us with any accuracy. In her last radio call she mentioned a week to ten days before restoring normal communications.’

  ‘So she knew that no alarm would be raised for at least ten days … and probably more?’

  ‘Exactly. By which time—given that they had no food or shelter—according to your calculations, they would almost certainly have perished.’

  Gresham nodded sadly as De Pierman continued.

  ‘Do you think it’s feasible they might have set out for the nearest base?’

  ‘To get to the Chileans?’ Gresham took a quick look at his wall map. ‘I doubt it. That would have meant an overland journey of more than seven hundred miles … much more than any human being could do without provisions.’

  ‘But perhaps they did manage to rescue some supplies. Maybe they had a snowmobile too.’

  Gresham thought about this for some time before replying.

  ‘If we apply logic to this situation, there really is only one scenario. If anyone had survived the fire, they would certainly have been found at the base.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘If they had no provisions, they would have stayed at the base because they would have had no choice … there simply wasn’t anywhere for them to go. And if they had had the means to sustain life, they still would have stayed at the base … knowing that rescue would eventually come, albeit after a delay. They certainly wouldn’t have risked a long overland journey—with all its attendant hazards—if they didn’t need to.’

  ‘Just for my own interest, if someone had tried to make a break for it, to walk out, how far do you think they could get?’

  Gresham entered more data into the computer, his bony fingers tapping against the keyboard as he waited for the result.

  ‘If they were very determined, Dr Burgess might get her team one hundred or perhaps one hundred and fifty miles before they would start dying. But that would be the limit.’

  ‘So there’s really no hope.’

  ‘I fear not.’

  ‘I had a feeling that would be your response,’ De Pierman told him, ‘but it’s obviously not what I wanted to hear.’

  ‘That is my professional response, Mr De Pierman; my personal response is one of great sadness at the loss of so many friends.’

  De Pierman left the Scott Polar in a bleak depression. He called the relatives to give them the news, then rang his secretary to arrange a press conference in London for later that day. By five p.m., he was addressing more than a hundred reporters, giving them the news that Capricorn was destroyed and with no realistic hope of any survivors.

  Lauren Burgess was dead, he told them, and so was Fitzgerald and his team mate, the Daily Mail journalist and all the rest of the Capricorn crew.

  The response to the disaster was electric, the stunned journalists running to their mobiles to reserve the front page for this sensational new twist.

  After the press conference, De Pierman went for a walk in Hyde Park—the place he habitually turned to when he needed to resolve a problem. As he strolled, he went back over his conversation with Dr Gresham, unsure as to why he was still uneasy about writing off Lauren and her team so fast. He knew that Dr Gresham’s scientific analysis had been accurate and based on a wide range of experience, so why was this stubborn insistence still ticking away somewhere inside him? The ridiculous feeling—a hunch, maybe—that somehow, against all the evidence, Lauren and her team might still be alive.

  Again and again that night, De Pierman pored over the Antarctic pages of his World Atlas, trying to come up with the one factor which they might have missed. When no further revelation came, he abandoned the struggle and fell into a shallow sleep, plagued by a series of nightmares in which Lauren appeared, her arms outstretched in a plea for help as flames erupted around her.

  90

  They operated on Frank the following morning, after a night in which he tossed and turned in agony.

  ‘Do it today,’ he urged them. ‘I really can’t bear this any more.’

  ‘We’ll use the other tent for the operation,’ Mel told Lauren. ‘We’ll have more room to move in there.’

  Lauren and Mel prepared the instruments for the operation, laying them out on a clean handkerchief, which someone had found in an untouched pocket. There was a Swiss army knife, a syringe full of morphine, a small phial of iodine and what remained of the first aid kit which had been in the first barrel. Nearby was the gas cooker and the pot they would use to boil up water.

  ‘Thank God we’ve got the morphine and the sutures,’ Lauren said, looking at the meagre supplies.

  ‘Not exactly what the medical textbooks would require for surgery,’ Mel said grimly as she examined the knife. ‘This is one operation I hope I never have to repeat.’

  ‘Which blade are you going to use?’

  The medic flicked open the multibladed device, selecting the saw attachment.

  ‘This one. It needs a cutting edge to be able to get through the bone, you see,’ she said.

  Lauren began to feel sick.

  They fired up the gas cooker and began to melt down chunks of ice to create a supply of water. When it boiled, they sterilised the Swiss army knife by the simple expedient of immersing it in the pan for ten minutes.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Mel told Lauren at last. ‘Bring in the patient.’

  Lauren walked to the other tent, where Frank was waiting. His fever was still raging, his hair plastered to his head with sweat even though the temperature was down to twenty degrees bel
ow freezing.

  ‘It’s time, Frank. Are you ready to do this? Do you want us to carry you?’

  ‘No, no. I’d rather walk. I need the bloody exercise, let’s face it.’

  Lauren smiled as she recognised the humour for what it was: an attempt to cover up his fear.

  Frank let Lauren dress him in the warmest clothes she could find. She managed to get him out of the sleeping bag and, with the sick man’s arm around her shoulder, escorted him to the tent where the operation would take place.

  The others were sitting around the camp, awkward and frightened to look Frank in the eye as he passed, now they knew what he was about to endure.

  ‘It’ll be OK, Frank,’ Murdo called out to him. ‘They’ve got the morphine.’ Frank looked at him, wild-eyed, an expression of gratitude passing for a moment across his racked features.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  ‘Good luck, Frank.’

  In the operation tent Mel took the iodine and cleaned the wounds as best she could, trying not to gag as the rancid smell of the decomposing flesh filled the tent. She noted that the gangrene had spread another half a centimetre down towards the knuckle. This operation was only just in time, she thought, or Frank was going to end up losing the hand.

  ‘I’m going to inject half of the morphine now to alleviate the pain of the operation,’ she told him. ‘This is going to hurt a bit now. We’ll save the other half for later.’

  Frank screamed as she injected the painkiller directly into the infected fingers.

  ‘All right, that’s going to deaden the feeling.’

  Mel waited five minutes while Lauren talked soothingly to Frank, holding his good hand for reassurance.

  ‘Let’s see if that’s taken effect,’ she said. ‘Can you feel anything when I touch here?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Frank said. ‘For Christ’s sake do it now while that stuff is still working.’

  He fainted as Mel began to work with the tiny saw, as she had warned he might. Lauren held his head up so his airway was clear, and by the time Mel had the operation complete he was just coming round.

  Mel stitched the wounds, then cleaned them with iodine once more and dressed the hand to stem the blood loss. ‘Now he needs to rest,’ she told Lauren. ‘There’s no way we can move him today. We’ll let him sleep this off, and I’ll give him another shot of morphine when he comes round.’

  The team carried Frank back to his sleeping bag, and Mel and Lauren stayed with him in the tent through that long day. He wavered in and out of consciousness as the hours went past, helped into a befuddled oblivion by the effects of the morphine.

  The crisis came at about three a.m., when it seemed his fever was set to return. His temperature rocketed as his immune system fought back, his cries terrible to hear in the stillness of the night air. But by dawn he was clearly recovering, the fever subsided and his skin colour looked relatively normal for the first time in days.

  ‘I think he’s winning,’ Mel told Lauren. ‘Everything should go fine now, so long as the infection doesn’t return.’

  At first light they managed to get a cup of sweet tea inside the patient, and by ten a.m. he was sitting up and sipping the cup of asparagus soup which they had prepared for him. He drank it down appreciatively, savouring every last morsel of vegetable it contained.

  ‘There’s no more morphine,’ Mel told him. ‘We’re down to paracetamol now, and nothing else, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No matter. This pain is nothing compared to the gangrene,’ Frank told her. ‘And by the way, shouldn’t we be getting underway? I wouldn’t want to hold anyone up.’

  Lauren looked at him with astonishment, amazed at the resilience of the man.

  ‘You think you’re well enough to get back on the sledge?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to let you down,’ he said.

  ‘I think,’ Lauren told him, ‘that I’ve never been prouder of anyone than I am of you at this moment. Not many people would bounce back after what you’ve been through.’

  When Frank emerged and took his place on the sledge next to Richard, he got a rousing chorus of cheers from the rest of the team. They gave him an extra sleeping bag to lie in to ensure that he kept as warm as possible.

  Thirty minutes later they were packed up and pulling away from the camp, inching their way slowly towards their objective.

  91

  Lauren had assumed—and it had frightened her greatly—that Frank’s operation would mark a downward shift in the spirit of the group. She could not imagine that morale would do anything other than plummet once the battle to save his fingers was lost.

  To her amazement the opposite had occurred: on the day after Frank’s operation, the team had had their best day of progress since Richard had taken his place on the sledge—a full nine miles of distance travelled across the glacier before dark, sustained on a diet of just two water biscuits each and a sliver of spam so slender it was almost transparent.

  At one point Frank had even got them singing his old favourite, ‘The green, green grass of home’, directing them from his prone position on the sledge, laughing as they strained to pull him over the bigger bumps and drifts.

  The question of why the team had reacted in this way was one which interested Lauren greatly. She let the theories run slowly through her mind as the soul-destroying process of hauling towards the north continued for hour after hour.

  Ultimately, she suspected, the knowledge of what Frank had suffered had pulled the team into a mind set in which every individual had realised that whatever their privations—and there were many—they were better off than him. It was Frank’s incredible courage that had re-energised the team when they should have been on their last legs.

  As they pitched the two tents that night, Lauren felt her heart bursting with pride. ‘We did nine miles today,’ she told the team. ‘I think we should split open one of the chocolate bars to celebrate.’

  She supervised the cutting of the bar—one of only three left from the first depot—each precious square taken with glee by the grateful recipient, cupping their gloved hands so as not to lose a single microscopic crumb.

  No one mentioned that the knife used to cut the chocolate was the same one that had been used to amputate Frank’s fingers just twenty-four hours before.

  Frank got a bonus in addition to his square—the silver paper filled with fragments of chocolate, a gesture which had him beaming from ear to ear as Mel checked his fingers.

  ‘No infection,’ she told him. ‘Looks like you’re going to keep your hand.’

  That night Lauren wrote in her diary:

  Anything is possible when the human spirit wants. Frank has reminded us that we are all lucky to be alive. I feel right now that we can overcome anything.

  Lauren had saved her chocolate, wanting to delay the ecstasy of the moment when its taste would be hers. As soon as the last torch was turned off, she placed it in her mouth, using her tongue to position the softening square against her palate for what seemed to be hours. Long after the actual square had dissolved, she held a mouthful of the chocolate-flavoured liquid in her mouth, remembering how she had done the same thing eating pieces of Easter egg in bed as a child.

  Two bars left. And a handful of cans. Some biscuits and a few packets of soup.

  Forty-five miles to go.

  92

  The front left strut of the sledge broke the following morning. There was no particular knock or movement which precipitated it—it just snapped without warning while they were traversing a smooth piece of ground.

  The effect was instant and dramatic, the broken strut causing the collapse of the front of the sledge, which dug straight into the ice, where it acted like a brake. The two occupants were tipped to one side, only just managing to hold onto their positions.

  ‘Hold it there!’ Frank called out. ‘Problem.’

  They carefully lifted the two men from the sledge while Sean inspected the damage.

  ‘
Metal fatigue,’ he announced. ‘Cracked straight through the tube. We got to think of a solution to this one or…’ Lauren flashed him a warning glance—it wasn’t going to help to frighten the two incapacitated men any more than necessary. ‘Well, we’ve got to think of a solution, and we will,’ he finished lamely.

  ‘I had a feeling this would happen.’ Frank’s voice was fearful. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘It’s a setback,’ Lauren told him, ‘nothing more. This is the type of problem Sean and Murdo solve for breakfast.’

  ‘If we had any breakfast,’ Murdo added despondently.

  ‘Well … my magic carpet ride had to hit the buffers somewhere along the way.’ Richard lay back against a convenient ridge of ice and closed his eyes, as if by blacking out the scene he could make it disappear.

  Murdo came to Sean’s assistance as he struggled to remove the broken strut; the others left them to it, taking the chance to rest.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sean asked him as they looked despairingly at the fractured metal.

  Murdo shook his head. ‘This is finished. Even if we could drill a hole in the tube, we wouldn’t be able to fix it back onto the frame.’

  They lifted the top part of the sledge up.

  ‘Trouble is,’ Murdo observed, ‘without the left strut the whole platform is going to be tilted on an angle. And the right strut will be taking all the stress.’

  Sean nodded in agreement. ‘That won’t last long. We have to prop up the left side. But with what?’

  They considered the various items that had been salvaged from the fire, aware as they did so that their options were frighteningly thin.

  ‘How about this?’ Sean proposed, holding up a piece of door frame they had rescued from the base for firewood. ‘This has the rigidity for the job. If we saw it to the right length and bore a couple of holes at each end, we can wire it to the frame.’

  ‘We can give it a try.’