Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  Using all the tools at their disposal, they took it in turns to saw through the door frame. The saw was blunt, making the job a tedious one as the cutting edge bit toothlessly into the hardwood, but by persevering for an hour or more they had a section of wood which matched the missing strut.

  Next they began to bore a hole at each end of the new strut, again sharing the work as their fingers froze after ten minutes of handling the knife. The corkscrew was found to be the most effective attachment, combined with a bit of judicious probing and trimming with the small knife blade.

  ‘Let’s put it into position,’ Sean suggested, ‘see how it’s going to work.’

  They raised the damaged section of the sledge until the new upright could be slid into place. A bit of jiggling to and fro had it more or less in the right position.

  ‘You think we can attach it well enough?’ Murdo asked. ‘I get the feeling bootlaces are going to wear through mighty quickly.’

  ‘I’ve got some wire,’ Sean told him with a smile. ‘Been saving it.’

  ‘You got some wire? Where the hell did you get that from?’

  Sean slid off his goretex outer coat with the air of a magician about to reveal a favourite trick. He held the hood out for Murdo to feel.

  ‘Check it out,’ he told him. ‘I had some wire put into the rim around this hood; helps keep it in shape when the wind’s really going.’

  ‘You did? I wondered how come your hood was never flapping in your face.’

  Murdo ran his fingers along the seam, feeling the stiff cord of metal which ran inside. He had to smile at the luck which had given them this break; that tiny piece of attention to detail—an equipment customisation Sean had had carried out in the States before leaving—was about to give Frank and Richard another chance on the sledge. The strut would never have held with a bootlace alone.

  Sean nicked the edge of the seam with the knife blade and carefully pulled the wire from the hood. He handed it to Murdo to test its strength.

  ‘Perfect,’ he smiled. ‘This could almost have been made for the job. What other secrets you got tucked away?’

  ‘Just a small modification,’ Sean shrugged it off, but the others could see how pleased he was to have come up with the solution.

  They threaded the wire through the lowest of the two holes and wound it several times tightly around the frame so that the base of the door frame was bound tightly to the runner. Then they ran the wire up the outside of the new strut—to avoid having to sever it—and repeated the procedure at the top.

  When they had finished, the wood was secure enough that Murdo couldn’t budge it by hand.

  ‘It’s not very aesthetically pleasing,’ Sean told Lauren, ‘but I think it will resist for some time.’

  ‘Can I sit on it?’

  Lauren lowered herself cautiously onto the sledge, letting her weight press down on the frame. The strut held its position perfectly, absorbing the weight and keeping the front of the sledge true.

  ‘Lie down,’ Sean told her. ‘Let’s see if it’ll tow.’

  They dragged Lauren back and forth for a few minutes until they had satisfied themselves the repair hadn’t caused some unforeseen towing problem; then it was time for Richard and Frank to be helped back on.

  As they pulled away, Lauren thanked Sean and Murdo profusely. She was acutely aware that without their shared genius for improvisation the sledge would have probably remained where it had broken … and the two patients with it.

  The two men were pensive as they bounced and rocked on the back of the sledge, no cry of protest coming from either even though Richard’s legs and feet were now so swollen he had to be physically lifted on and off his transport, and Frank’s hand was still giving him hell.

  They had got away with this one, Lauren mused, but what if another strut failed? Her mind began to chew away as they strained at the ropes. What if a runner snapped?

  Lauren’s heart skipped a beat at every groan and creak from the sledge, fearing with almost every bump that metal fatigue would render another vital part of the structure useless.

  One thing was for sure: there was a limit to how many times Sean and Murdo could pull off the impossible.

  Forty miles to go … Lauren knew it would take a miracle now.

  93

  A big storm was coming, Lauren was sure; their weather luck couldn’t hold out for ever.

  The first signs were small ones, the tiny clues which don’t mean much on their own, but which collectively add up to a big flashing warning light.

  ‘You might think this is a bit crazy,’ Richard told Lauren as they set out on their first hauling session that morning, ‘but I think there’s about to be a shift in the weather. My legs ache like hell when the pressure drops. Right now, they’re both throbbing like a bastard.’

  Lauren viewed the horizon, wishing for the hundredth time that she had managed to rescue her binoculars from the fire. As yet she could see no evidence of any dramatic shift in the weather, but something told her, as she breathed the bitter morning air into her lungs, that Richard was right. There was a detectable change in the air, a pressure shift which could only add up to bad news.

  ‘We could be heading for some serious weather,’ she warned the team. ‘Let’s get some miles ticked off while we still can.’

  Obediently, they put in an extra effort, covering almost two miles in the next hour. The light conditions were extraordinary, with no sign of the sun, but a luminous, almost green glow bouncing off the ice around them. Huge snowflakes fell, dancing like thistledown from the sky, so big they seemed artificial.

  ‘Hollywood snow,’ Sean called it, holding out his hand and admiring with wonder the feather-sized flakes which landed on it. ‘If you wrote it into a script, no one would believe it.’

  The gentle snowfall stopped by eleven, giving way to an altogether less attractive bombardment: pea-sized granules of hail raking down from charcoal-grey clouds which were now scudding past with alarming speed.

  Way out to the west, perhaps as much as one hundred miles off but already visible, Lauren could just detect the telltale black line of the incoming storm where it was playing on the horizon.

  ‘Shouldn’t we camp?’ Mel asked Lauren as they took a break. ‘We won’t be able to get the tents up if this wind gets any nastier.’

  Lauren considered the terrain. ‘I’d agree if this wasn’t such an exposed place,’ she told her. ‘We’re on relatively high ground. See where the glacier dips down a little over there, about a mile away? Let’s get there before we camp.’

  The team knew it was a device, Lauren’s tactic to get them to put in that extra mile—that there was little more protection where they were going than the place where they stood. But, nevertheless, they still did it, putting their backs into the business of hauling the sledge, biting their tongues to prevent themselves from crying out loud as the hated harness dug its way ever more deeply into the sores on their hips.

  Lauren called a halt. The wind was force four to five, not unusual for any Antarctic day, but right on the edge of feasibility when it came to putting up a dome tent or two.

  ‘Let’s do it fast,’ she ordered, one eye on the scudding clouds, hoping she hadn’t left it too late.

  As they removed their outer layers of gloves to handle the fiddly components of the tents, the storm made its preliminary introductions, a harassing wind springing up, twisting and shrieking through the ice towers which stood around them.

  Lauren and Sean pulled their goretex tent from its stuff sack, the fabric immediately coming alive and threatening to rip itself out of their hands.

  ‘One person on the guy rope at all times!’ Lauren called over to the others. ‘You let go of that tent and it’ll be blown a thousand miles.’

  Lauren handed the vital guy rope to Richard, the only role which he could usefully perform given his lack of mobility. He held it tight, still sitting on the sledge, his hood pulled down low around his face to give some relief from the poun
ding hail.

  Sean screwed the kevlar poles together and began to thread them through the eyelets on the strengthened ribs of the dome. It was hit-and-miss work with the tent billowing and flapping fit to rip, but in ten minutes or so they had the main poles in place and the fabric arched into the characteristic igloo shape which gave it its phenomenal strength.

  As soon as the tent was shaped up, Lauren got the front zip undone and began the task of transferring Frank from the sledge into the interior. Trial and error had taught her that this was the only practical way to weight down a dome tent while the crucial task of fitting the flysheet was being completed.

  In other parts of the planet a rucksack or two would suffice; here it had to be twice the weight or the tent would simply take off, contents and all.

  ‘Help me get Frank in there!’ she called over to Mel and Murdo, seeing they were struggling to hold the tent down.

  ‘What?’ someone screamed back, the wind had blown Lauren’s words away.

  Sean rushed over to help them, joining them just as a particularly vicious gust whipped the guy rope through the air. It lashed across Mel’s face, drawing the hardened nylon across her skin with a stinging impact which felt like she had been bullwhipped.

  ‘Shit!’ Mel fell to the glacier as the whiplash of intense pain seared into her.

  Sean took her place on the tent and put all his body weight onto it to keep it in one piece as Murdo shuffled forward to try and open the zip. Crouching over the tent, he was blown onto his side by another evil gust as he tried, and failed, to jiggle the zip tab up its track.

  Sean looked over at Mel, who was still sitting on her backside after the shock of the impact; red spots of blood were seeping through her fingers, even now beginning to stain the perfect white surface she was sitting on. Another gust; now the tiny drops of red were no longer falling straight down but shooting off horizontally in a fine spray.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Mel said shakily. ‘It missed my eye.’

  Sean’s heart went out to her; to suffer an injury like that was just too much bad luck.

  ‘Stop dithering!’ He suddenly felt a wave of frustration at the clumsy Murdo, pushing him aside so he could free the zip himself. His fingers, much stronger than Murdo’s, achieved it first attempt.

  ‘Get in!’ He took Frank by the scruff and thrust him into the tent, where at least he could perform the useful function of weighing it down.

  He put a protective arm around Mel, pulling her close. ‘You OK?’ he asked her. ‘That looked really bad.’

  ‘It got me just below the eye. Stupid of me…’ she said tearfully. ‘I couldn’t get out of the way…’

  ‘You’ll be OK. Let me get you inside the tent. Come on, before you freeze your ass to the ice.’

  Sean escorted Mel into the tent and then helped Lauren and Murdo to fix the flysheet in place. They piled up a small drift of ice above each tent peg to freeze it better into place, then went across to put the final touches to the other tent.

  The camp was made—and not a moment too soon. Just as Lauren and Sean zipped themselves into the second tent, the leading edge of the storm surged across the glacier. The previous gusts had been innocent by comparison, outriders of the real event.

  Lauren knew, as she watched the dome roof of the tent begin to shudder with the impact of the wind, that they were now at the mercy of whatever the Antarctic chose to throw at them.

  If one of these tents is destroyed tonight, Lauren told herself, the fear taking control of her no matter how positive she tried to make her thoughts, we won’t survive.

  94

  For twenty-four hours they lay in their sleeping bags, hanging on desperately to the fabric of the tents in the fight to keep them from blowing apart.

  The storm had not abated as Lauren had hoped; if anything, now into the second day, it was increasing in intensity. Katabatic winds off the higher plateau of the ice cap had merged with the original front, creating a chaotic vortex, which seemed to blow alternately from the south and then from the west.

  There was little dialogue between the two tents, even the loudest shout could only barely be heard above the turbulent roar of the wind.

  At three a.m. on that second day, Lauren noticed that the central seam of the tent was beginning to split. It was a minute tear—just a centimetre or so in length—but she knew if the wind got into it the tent would be turned inside out in seconds.

  ‘We’re going to lose the tents,’ Lauren yelled to Sean as she showed him the rip with her headtorch. ‘We have to give ourselves more protection.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve got to build a wall. If this storm keeps blowing for another twenty-four hours, there’s no way we can keep the tents up without a wind block.’

  They fought their way out of the tent and into the teeth of the storm. Working with the headtorch, Sean set to with Lauren, using their basic tools to hack what chunks they could out of the frozen glacier. It was testing work, with the savage wind snapping in their faces, but one hour of shared labour created a pile of irregular-shaped blocks with which they managed to construct a sheltering wall about a metre high.

  Then it was back into the tent to wait.

  ‘What would I give for a piece of bread?’ Sean groaned as a cramp creased his stomach. ‘Some fruit. Anything fresh.’

  But all they could eat was a handful or two of dried porridge, their thirst slaked with mouthfuls of snow.

  The next day dragged unbearably, the wind picking up a gear as night crept over the wasteland. Sleep was an outright impossibility, the sheer volume produced by the storm was enough to keep them awake despite the deep vein of exhaustion which ran through them all. Living conditions were miserable, made worse by the fine layer of powder snow which was constantly blasted through the entrances; it was fine, as fine as talcum powder, and able to penetrate even the tiniest gap in the fabric of the tents.

  The snow melted on contact with the heat of the human body, so that their necks and faces were constantly damp and chilled. Movement around the tent created a further discomfort—any powder which was allowed to creep into a sleeping bag would slowly defrost as they tried to rest, fostering an environment which Sean described as ‘Like trying to sleep inside a giant frozen slug, but a darn sight less comfortable.’

  As the evening progressed, so the wind increased again, passing storm force ten and touching hurricane force as it raced uncontested across the icy wilderness. The tents were holding up, but only thanks to the wall; to be inside was like being in the interior of a punch bag, the blows coming thick and fast as the shell of the tent deflected them one after another.

  Lauren detected a rhythm in the chaos, a cycle which was terrifying in itself—a calmer pause, the dome regaining its igloo shape as the wind eased off slightly, then a far-off whistling sound, a rushing howl as the tumbling mass of energy gathered for the next attack. Seconds ticked by; the tent would begin to quiver, then shake as if the very ground beneath it was in the grip of some violent earthquake. Before long, the kevlar poles which held the shape would bend to the point where Lauren was sure they would splinter, then, unleashed, the full brunt of the storm would smash into the dome, compressing the structure until Lauren could feel the fabric against her head.

  The wall was demolished by the wind at about one a.m., the blocks of ice crashing down onto the front of the tents. The first they knew about it was Frank’s scream of pain as one of the blocks crushed his feet. Unrestricted, the wind now had full play on the two domes, twisting and distorting the structures so dramatically that the occupants were terrified that their weight would not be enough to pin them down.

  ‘What happened?’ Lauren could just hear the muffled shout from the adjacent tent.

  ‘The wall came down!’ she called back, repeating herself to make sure she was heard.

  Sean and Lauren quit their sleeping bags and took a fast trip outside to make what repairs they could to the wall. The wind chill was intense—stronger than eithe
r of them had ever known. Lauren could feel the heat draining out of her body faster than it could be replaced. They worked by the light of the single headtorch, the driving grains of ice shooting past at phenomenal speed in their small pool of vision.

  ‘My feet are going!’ Sean shouted after just five minutes of rebuilding the scattered bricks of ice.

  Lauren put a final block on top of the ramshackle pile; the wall wasn’t even half the height it had been. ‘That’s all we can do,’ she said.

  They re-entered the tent and collapsed into their sleeping bags, wearing every scrap of clothing. Lauren couldn’t make the shivering stop.

  By four a.m., another problem began to manifest itself: the snow was beginning to drift, the weight pressing down on the occupants of the tents until it threatened to suffocate them. Lauren and Sean went out into the whiteout every hour to shovel the stuff away with their hands, but each time were forced back in by the cold before they could completely clear the tents.

  Despite their gloves, these excursions cost them dear. The pain of defrosting their fingers was unspeakable, the tears welling in Sean’s eyes as he placed his ice-cold fingers in his armpits and waited for them to recover.

  And so that second night passed, a trial of cold, of damp, of pain for Frank with his mutilated hand. A thin cast of light announced a tentative dawn, at least allowing them to see the anxious, grey faces of their tent mates. But still the wind blew.

  At about eleven that morning the storm finally decided it would take some time out, the wind dying off to a modest force three or four, the driving snow tailing away in a succession of last-gasp flurries.

  Lying in the tent, Lauren could feel the conditions begin to change, sense the way the goretex of the outer wall was easing off as the wind started to let go. Gradually, the cracking of the fabric diminished, the whipping of loose guy ropes less frequent until, finally, it was possible to fall into an exhausted sleep.

  95

  It was twenty-nine days since the team had left the base; now every step was punctuated by a long pause to rest. The soft snow dumped by the storm meant that the runners of the sledge clogged up with infuriating regularity. Sometimes, even with all four of them pulling with all their might, they achieved just a few inches of progress before the sledge ground to a halt.