Eventually dim light filtered through the gap in the tail. María stirred and opened her eyes, licked her lips. I gave her the remaining water bottle and she took a couple of mouthfuls.
“Talk to me, Cal.”
I knew what she meant. She wanted the straight dope.
“We’re at about fourteen thousand feet, somewhere between what the GPS called Cerro Sosneado in Argentina and Tinguiririca volcano in Chile. More or less the middle of the Andes. The plane is wrecked with absolutely no chance of repair. The radio is down and cell phones don’t work. No-one knows we’re here, so no-one will come to rescue us.”
“So what do we do?”
“We have snow that we can melt to drink but no food at all. Unless we can find something to eat our chances don’t look good.”
“Then let’s find something.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
I backed out of the plane and helped her out after me. She leaned some weight on her left leg and screwed up her face. With one hand pressed against her bruised ribs she took a tentative step.
And fell over, moaning.
I propped her against the side of the plane, gave her two more paracetamol and told her to relax. She asked for the bottle of water and I pretended I didn’t hear her. She chewed the pills and swallowed some snow.
The plane lay on a slant, its bent nose pointing down towards a valley which fell away steeply towards the east, back to Argentina. In every other direction, beyond the carpet of deep snow in which we were located, arose steep walls of immense mountains. Occasional patches of gray and rust coloured volcanic rock showed through almost blanket whiteness. The night-time frost had frozen the surface of the snow and I walked around, numbed by the sameness of it all. Thank God my sunglasses had survived the crash but I still had to scrunch up my eyes in the intense snow glare. I searched for vegetation.
There wasn’t a single thing growing. No trees, no bush, no scrub, no alpine-like flowers, not a single blade of grass. Not even moss on exposed rock.
The bleakness of our situation hit home to me. “Unless we can find something to eat our chances don’t look good.”
Our chances looked terrible.
Chapter 23
I went back to María and discovered she was having another nosebleed. Her face looked deathly white behind the blood. I wiped away the caked red rivulets and asked her how she felt.
“I think I have – I don’t know what you call it – the altitude sickness?” she said, “I have . . . nausea. Even without these injuries I would be weak.”
My own movements were heavy and my mind slow. I sat down beside her to rest.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I said. I explained to her what I’d seen in my walkabout.
“I don’t feel hungry.”
“You will.”
“We won’t die of thirst. We have the snow.”
I nodded. “True, but it’s hard to melt.”
“I’ve been pressing it into a ball of ice and sucking it.”
“There has to be a better way,” I replied.
“What if you cram snow into the empty bottle and shake it?”
“That would take too long and use too much energy.” I picked up some snow and pressed it through my fingers; felt the sun thawing my face. My thoughts faded away like dew and I dozed off.
An hour later I woke up, with the sun now even warmer on my face. My energy level was restored and I knew what I needed for water supply. María was still sleeping and I left her alone and went inside the plane. I had an old Swiss Army penknife I’d been carrying around in the pouch of my travel bag. Opening the largest blade I began hacking at the back of the pilot’s seat.
Years ago I’d helped a friend take a wrecked ancient Beaver seaplane apart. We stripped it of all the reusable parts until only the bare fuselage and seats were left. The latter were no good because the leather on them was both torn and flaky. But having nothing better to do, and being the curious type, I began stripping them too. Under the leather there was upholstery and under that there was aluminium lining, like the foil you’d wrap a turkey in only thicker. If this plane was the same . . .
It was. After an hour of exhausting effort I extracted a large rectangle of aluminium foil from the back of the seat. I took it outside, rested for a while, and then bent up the sides of the foil until it formed a shallow bowl shape. Using my thumb, I twisted out one corner to make a spout and it was ready.
I took the foil well away from the plane and piled some snow in it. Then I tilted the whole thing so that it leaned over to the corner with the spout. It wasn’t long before the snow began to melt and water trickled into the empty bottle I’d positioned at the spout.
“Well done,” María said when I told her.
“I’ll do one for the other bottle later,” I replied, “Too tired right now.”
She squeezed my hand. I leaned my head back and dozed off again.
Chapter 24
Somehow, we survived. The foil water-makers turned out to be a good idea and required a minimum of physical effort. My main concern was to use only fresh, clean snow, avoiding any that was too close to the plane and therefore likely to be pink with blood or polluted by aviation fuel. Gathering enough pure snow turned out to harder than I’d imagined. There was no shortage of the stuff but either it was too soft to walk in, or, as in the early morning when the temperature was still low and the surface was frozen, too hard to scoop up with my bare hands. Still, I made enough water to keep the two of us going.
I used ripped off seat covers as floor padding and as tiny blankets to make us a little warmer at night. We continued to massage each other to keep blood flowing and frostbite away.
We’d been stranded here for three days now and María was recovering well. She was able to stand up and hobble short distances. Her ribs were no longer as painful and her breathing had normalised. There were no more nosebleeds. She was still weak but able to go to our chosen ‘bathroom’ area in front of the plane all by herself.
Of course there was the one thing we could do nothing about. The hunger. The raw gnawing in my belly that never went away but always nagged in the background, even when I was distracting myself with something else. It must have been just as bad for María. Without consulting each other, we both refused to talk about it. Nor did she mention her father again.
Energised a little by the warm morning sun, I went on another exploratory walk. It seemed impossible that there really was absolutely nothing growing here, not even moss on a rock. There had to be something to provide a little nutrition but all around the plane there was only snow. The only ground exposed to sun and air was the sheer mountain rock face. The nearest was about five hundred feet away. I made for it.
Halfway along I had to pause and rest for five minutes but I got there eventually. I peered closely at the bare rock and discovered that parts of it were smudged with a thin, darker grey film of what I guessed was lichen. I removed my sock glove, scraped off the little there was with my fingers and mixed it into a paste with half-melted snow.
I thought about eating it for a long time. Then I put it into my mouth and swallowed. It tasted bitter and disgusting, and if there had been anything in my stomach I’m sure I would have vomited it up. I concluded that the lichen was useless for food. Apart from the lichen there was nothing else growing. I made my way slowly back to the plane.
Shortly after noon I heard a familiar droning sound and looked up. A plane was flying directly overhead, a jet liner, high above the mountain peaks. I jumped up and grabbed one of the aluminium sheets, emptied it of snow and tried to use it as a reflector in the sun. It was useless, I knew full well. There wasn’t the slightest possibility that the pilots would see us. But I did it anyway. I didn’t want María to think I’d given up hope.
A couple of hours later an old turboprop flew over us, from east to west, but at a much lower altitude. Again I flashed the foil in the bright sunlight, this time with a slight hope of
attracting the pilot’s attention. I even waved and shouted but the plane continued on its course and disappeared behind a mountain.
“Do you think they saw us?” María asked.
I thought about our small wreck, its white roof half buried in the snow, and the tiny reflector I’d flashed optimistically in the pilots’ direction. Not quite a snowball’s chance in hell but pretty close.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe.”
“It flew so low it must have seen us.”
She needed to believe it but I couldn’t lie to her. The pilot would have circled or at least dipped his wings if he’d seen us. He would have done something to let us know.
“We have to hope,” was all I could lamely come up with.
Time inched forward and it began to grow dark. The sun crept behind the mountains, signalling the bitter cold to descend on us. Neither of us had spoken for hours. It was clear that, even if by some miracle the pilot of the second plane had seen us, we would not be rescued tonight. We shuffled to our feet and I helped María back into the plane, where we lay on the tilted floor, angled forward at about thirty degrees. The thin cloths I’d accumulated provided scant padding.
In the dim light I clasped her lightly in my arms, enveloping her with my body to give her all the warmth I could. Our faces rested close together, warm breath shared, but neither of us could get to sleep. Instead María talked quietly of helicopters landing in the morning light, or, if not, of just having to survive up here until more planes came and brought rescue, maybe tomorrow, at most a few days. She must have seen the doubt on my face and lapsed into silence.
“But you don’t believe it,” she finally said.
I looked into her eyes and saw all the sorrow, pain and confusion that had swept over her like an avalanche these last few days.
“What choice do we have?” she asked.
“How far could you walk?” I said.
She thought carefully. “Maybe a mile or two.”
I’d have been amazed if she could get a hundred yards. “Then we stay here,” I replied.
There was another long silence and I closed my eyes. I felt her hand move across my face, tracing the lines of my forehead and cheek.
“You must go,” she said.
Immediately I was wide awake. “I’m not leaving you,” I replied.
She must have sensed it would be useless to argue and instead accepted it. I wiped away the tears as they slowly trickled down her face.
Chapter 25
I tried to remember what day it was and couldn’t figure it out. Day seven, I finally concluded. Or was it eight? I considered asking María then let it go. Doesn’t really matter.
Starvation was taking its effect and I had become weaker and more listless. When I stood up now I felt lightheaded and had to steady myself against the plane to stop myself from falling over. What little movements I did make had grown heavy and slow and I became exhausted by the slightest exertion. Even in full sunlight I felt cold and my skin wrinkled and flaked like an old man’s. It was even worse for María. Unless something changed soon, neither of us would survive much longer.
In the middle of the afternoon, sitting watching snow melt on the aluminium sheets and trickle into bottles, we talked about it.
“It’s taking too long,” María sighed, “No more planes have come.”
“I think it’s unlikely we’d be seen from the air anyway,” I replied.
“You could get down the mountains,” she said, “Find help, come back and get me.”
I shook my head gently. “I’m already far too weak. Any effort at all just makes me weaker. Even if I could do it, it would take me days to get down.”
And you’d be dead by the time I got back.
“Anyway, I’d freeze to death in the snow,” I added.
“Not if you wore enough clothes,” she argued.
She let it go at that. Deep down she must have known that without something to eat I’d simply have collapsed in exhaustion and we’d both die apart and alone. Better this way.
Still, I let my mind wander, fantasize. It was all I had left. If I could go, which direction would it be? I thought we were probably closer to the Chilean foothills than to Argentina so I would head west. The problem there, though, was that any path to the west was completely blocked by tall, sheer mountains. The valley in which we were trapped naturally led east, back to Argentine cordillera. How far back? I had no idea.
As the light changed throughout the day, the mountains took on different appearances. In the early morning they seemed bright and distant, then as the day progressed and shadows lengthened the grey and reddish-brown rock assumed the features of angry gods or brooding mountain ogres. I stared west and imagined a luscious green valley filled with Chilean farmhouses on the other side of the mountains, smoke rising from stone chimneys as they cooked their evening meal. Even if there were no Elysian farmhouses there might be foliage, something growing, something edible, a patch of berry bushes, anything at all.
At the first sign of twilight we squeezed into the plane and lay in the darkness. A strong wind rose up outside and blew freezing air through every crack and crevice in the fuselage. I shivered and thought of home and family.
María said the Lord’s Prayer aloud in Spanish. The dim light grew fainter.
“Cal, you must try–”
I touched her lips with my finger to silence her. No more talking about the impossible. I pulled my spare shirt up over my face and closed my eyes. But as I drifted off I continued to think about ascending the nearest western mountain. About multiple sock gloves, and towels wrapped around me for extra body insulation. About snowshoes made from the stiff backing material in the seats, tied on with a scrap of duct tape I’d found on the floor. On and on and on my thoughts meandered, until I finally fell into the void of sleep.
It was pitch black when I opened my eyes. Some unusual noise must have awakened me and I listened for it again. A few seconds passed then it returned. A low rumble that I could feel deep in my bones. The floor beneath me seemed to be vibrating.
A terrible fear shot through me and instantly I was wide awake. I squirmed rapidly up onto my knees and reached out, fumbling for the cockpit door handle. It fell wide open and I tumbled out of the plane and stood upright.
A strong wind almost blew me over. Snowflakes blinded me and for a moment I could see nothing. Then the vibration started again and the ground trembled beneath my feet. An ominous cracking, like plasterboard breaking into pieces, echoed across the valley from mountain to mountain. A black mass, hundreds of feet high, moved off the rock face directly ahead and raced towards me like a tidal wave. I raised my arms; my hands covered my face and I jumped instinctively into the air.
Then the black wall hit me, knocked the breath out of my body and I was smothered in snow. A single word; avalanche reverberated in my brain before I lost consciousness.
Chapter 26
I have no idea how long I was out for but it was probably only a few seconds. I opened my eyes to utter blackness. Time and space seemed to have frozen to a standstill. I wondered if I had died and if this is what came next. A bright light was supposed to approach now, right? And someone with open arms would welcome me into the afterlife.
But no-one came. Slowly my senses returned and I felt a tremendous weight pressing in on me from all sides, as if I was gripped by a huge industrial vise. I couldn’t move an inch. In sheer panic I tried to shout to María but found that my mouth was stuffed with snow. I struggled to spit it out, managed to shake my head a little from side to side and discovered there was more icy snow pressing tightly against my face.
Buried alive. There was no chasing the thought away. A stark terror gripped me. I was completely submerged in snow and there was no-one to rescue me. Here I would die, all alone beneath this crushing white death.
I wondered why I wasn’t already frozen like a slab of ice. Either I was too numb to feel it or the snow provided some kind of insulation. I tried to still my p
ounding heart and take stock of the situation.
At least I could breathe, so there must have been some air trapped in the snowfall. How long would that last? I had no idea. With the pressure on my chest it was hard to take deep breaths but I told myself that shallow ones were better anyway. Less oxygen used up.
And María, what about her? If I was to be any use to her I had to put her out of my mind for now. Stay sane and think.
I’d raised my arms and jumped in the air as the avalanche hit me, which meant that my legs were now bent at the knees and my hands were in front of my face. I wriggled my fingers in my sock-covered hands and felt them move against my nose and chin. There was a small gap here where my breath had melted a little snow.
I flexed my fingers, exerted all my remaining strength, and managed to move my right hand several inches. Using the back of the hand I pushed the snow away from my face, compressing it hard and enlarging the air pocket. I forced the icy snow out of my mouth with my tongue and felt a little calmer.
My small victory had tired me. I felt weak, dizzy, ready to faint. The blood was pounding in my ears like a mad drummer, but I knew I had to remain focused and dig myself out. Then a terrifying reality hit me. I had no idea if I was lying up, down or sideways. Even if I managed to worm away enough room to move, I might just dig myself deeper.
There was still water in my mouth from the snow plug. I forced it out through pursed lips and it trickled across my face.
I smiled, grunted out a low laugh, almost choked. The water from my mouth was meandering past my nose and eyelids, onto my forehead. That meant I had to be upside down.
How deep was I? I could be twenty, thirty feet under, or even more. My corpse could lie buried here forever, perfectly preserved under the snow. I shivered uncontrollably, physically weaker than I’d ever been in my life. Again, I had to put all that out of my head if I was to have any hope of getting free before my small pod of air ran out.
Shadow of a Killer Page 8
