Cold Blood

by Andy McNab

  I also needed to have a think about this. And there was no better place on earth to do that than here. The world’s three dominant religions came from the desert for one very simple reason: there’s fuck-all else to do in it.

  I pulled down my hood, ventilated my jacket, tilted my head so I could see through a gap in the ice inside my goggles, and took my place at the end of the line.

  54

  Our ninth munchie stop felt like a lifetime ago, apart from the ever-present taste of salo, the gift that went on giving. The team were slowing. We really should have ended the first day at our seventh munchie stop, but the Quislings just kept on going, like they had an urgent dinner date ten miles ahead. I was going to have to grip them both tomorrow if it happened again.

  On the plus side of covering more distance, I’d finally got a half-decent view through my goggles. Only a third of the left-hand lens was frozen; the rest was just covered with ice crazing so I felt like I was walking through a snowstorm rather than doing it under a clear blue sky.

  The sun had circled around us, rising and dipping as if it was bouncing off the horizon in very slow motion, like one of the early computer games I’d played in the Tidworth pubs as an eighteen-year-old squaddie. The light gave us no idea of the time, and it was easy to lose all sense of not only where we were in the day but also which direction we were heading. The feeling of disorientation wasn’t helped by the landscape: there still wasn’t one – just a vast, barren field of white stretching to each horizon.

  The only variation was a slight crust on the ice field ahead of us, which started to grow in size as we got closer. If anyone was flagging, no one was prepared to admit or show it. But that was how it was for these people: they had been trained to crack on, and then lived it.

  By the fourth munchie stop everyone had made the extra effort to close up, but only with their buddy. It came instinctively: it was all about helping your mates. Rio and Gabriel had spent most of the breaks on the verge of punching, helping or laughing at each other, as they munched, drank and zipped up. Stedman and Jack had more of a bromance going on. They’d left the head-butting behind them, and were now simply pleased to be there for each other. I couldn’t work out why Jules was so concerned about Will. She was by far the fittest and most able of us all, and if Will had problems she could probably just zip him into his pulk bag and drag the fucker to the Pole by herself.

  The most important thing for all of them was the mission, the task, the job, whatever anybody wanted to call it. Everything they did individually was for the benefit of the team, and the team existed only to complete the mission. This shit was easy once you understood that.

  The theory had it that the physical side was always filled with pain. Looking ahead of me at the line, and at the amount of plastic they had to use between them just to function, was a prime example.

  As for the other three, fuck you, Norway. Nul points. Whatever you’re really up to, just get us all to the Pole.

  55

  Up ahead the Quislings stopped, but the message they shouted back told us it wasn’t permanent. ‘No stop … No stop.’

  They checked their sat nav and moved another five hundred metres, then stopped again. Jan crossed his poles, and this time both men removed their harnesses. It was the end of the day’s tab. They’d pushed the pace without really bothering to check that we were in tow behind them. But everyone had stuck together regardless. It had been painful for some but a good day’s tab for all.

  Tomorrow, however, looked like it was going to be a fucker. A pressure ridge – where two floes collided – loomed about a mile away. It looked as if the gods had taken a very big can of squirty cream and blasted a long, messy line of it across the ice.

  At this distance it was impossible to tell, but they could be at least five metres high and forty wide – which meant a long day for people dragging weight with fewer than the usual number of limbs between them.

  This time the whole team bunched up as one. We knew what we had to do. There were three three-bag tents. The Quislings and Rune had one. The bromancers shared the second with Rio and Gabriel. Four in a three-bag tent wasn’t as bad as it sounded. More bodies equalled more heat. The third tent, strapped down on top of my pulk, was for Will and us two remaining hangers-on.

  The Quislings had taken their time deciding where to stop, but siting the tents wasn’t a precise science. The tents obeyed the same rule as our bodies did out there: if they were static, it was back to the wind. Beyond that, the only how-to trick was to put the thing up as quickly as you could, then jump inside. There would be no singing songs or reliving the day’s japes around the campfire. It was too cold.

  I dropped my poles and harness onto the ice and unfastened my bindings before hooding and zipping up. I took the mask off, cleared my nose for what I hoped would be the last time that day and dug about inside my goggles, then grabbed the tent off my pulk. Walking felt strange after being on skis all day: I felt like a toddler trying to find his feet.

  The tents had been completely assembled before we left Barneo. The fibre-glass poles had been threaded through the sleeves of the outer shell and the sleeping compartment attached to the inside. To pack the tent away, the poles simply had to be broken in half so the material could be folded and wrapped.

  All we had to do now was reverse the process. I threw the thing onto the ice and knelt to undo the bungees. Jules and Will joined me. They’d done the training together, so probably had a routine.

  ‘What you want me to do?’ Jules was on top of her game, as usual. The bungees came off and were placed inside the pulk bag. They’d be lost to the ice overnight even if the wind didn’t blow them away so, like everything else, they had to be zipped up, secured or worn. ‘Will normally sorts out the inside and I deal with the outside.’

  ‘Then I’ll dig the trench and set up the burners.’ That sounded good to me: digging to keep warm, then hot soup to finish the job.

  The Quislings’ tent was already up on the far side of Jack’s – fuck everyone else.

  We fitted the poles together with gloved hands and all three of us lifted the dome-shaped tent, its sleeping compartment hanging perfectly in place under the top sheet, and turned its back to the wind before plonking it on the ice. The performance going on next to us was more Billy Smart’s Big Top than Arctic explorer. Rune still seemed concerned, but he needn’t have. The lads knew what they were doing – it just took longer.

  A series of low, rumbling thuds, like distant cannon fire, stopped us all in our tracks. We scanned the surrounding area as if there were something to see.

  Jack was the first to spark up. ‘Oi, Rio! The Taliban are still after you.’

  ‘Yeah, funny. But what the fuck?’

  Rune did his mother-hen dance around us once again. ‘Just a couple of ice masses coming together. You’ll get used to it.’

  While Jules held the tent in place, Will and I anchored it with our six skis and poles. We didn’t need pegs – they would just have given us more weight to drag – and this way, we also knew that our kit was secure. Five minutes later it sat there, like a Burger King party hat.

  The three of us got our tent bags out of our pulks and dumped them on the ice, along with our flasks, at the entrance to the tent. They contained our sleeping bags and personal bits, along with the evening’s food and drink. Waffle at this point was a waste of energy, and wouldn’t get anything sorted more swiftly. It could wait until we were warming our hands on that first Cup-A-Soup.

  Will unzipped the front flap, climbed inside and took off his boots before crawling in deeper. It was like living in a desert: if you brought sand into the house you’d get a good slapping, and rightly so. But at least sand could be swept away. Ice in the sleeping compartment was a complete no-no. It would melt with your body heat and soak your kit. You got more than a slapping for that.

  The sleeping compartment took up the rear two-thirds of the interior. It also had a zip door that we’d close when we got our heads do
wn. Once we were tucked up inside, there would be no reason to leave, unless we needed a dump.

  The porch, the space between it and the entrance, which would be used for keeping stuff out of the rain in the UK, would be our cooking area. I grabbed our blue alloy shovel and extended the shaft. As Jules lobbed the tent bags through to Will, I dropped to my knees and marked out a two-foot by five-foot rectangle. Then I began to dig.

  Having a big trench in the ice made life a lot easier. It meant we had somewhere to sit and get our boots on and off, for starters, and somewhere safe to cook and make brews, because we wouldn’t be rolling around and bumping into each other. And the heap of surplus ice I was producing, shovelled to the front of the porch area, would supply our cooking water.

  Apart from anything else, digging kept me warm. I’d learned a basic rule of Arctic survival long ago: if volunteers are needed for a job that requires physical effort, always put up your hand.

  Will finished blowing up the first Therm-A-Rest, straightened his back and reached for the next while I kept digging and Jules fished the burners and pots out of the pulks.

  ‘Nick, get a move on!’

  I pulled a roll mat and the inflated Therm-A-Rest Will had just been working on and shifted my arse onto them, then swung my legs into the nearly completed trench.

  Jules poked her head through the flap. ‘Come on, Will, put some puff into it! That’s my bed you’re making!’ She gave him the world’s biggest grin.

  I leaned out as she passed the cooking kit through to me and I caught a glimpse of the other two tents. The Quislings’ was already zipped up tight, and so were their pulks, but Rune was still outside, putting the finishing touches on the wind-break for the toilet area. He’d volunteered to dig it for the whole trip, either to regain his eco credentials or to spend less time with his Norwegian mates.

  Billy Smart’s Big Top was not far behind us. Jack and Stedman were still wrestling their group’s tent bags off the pulks.

  Jules had one more job to do. I handed her the shovel and she zipped up the flap from the outside, leaving me and Will completely enclosed. We felt warmer immediately.

  I grabbed the cooking board – a three-foot-by-two plywood sheet with bungees attached – and manhandled it into place as Jules methodically tugged out the hem of the tent. Soon, all I could hear was the scrape of the shovel as she weighed it down with ice.

  All good. It would help prevent the wind pushing its way into our mobile hotel suite, and improve our chances of the fucking thing not blowing away during the night.

  56

  Jules kept shovelling and Will kept blowing lungfuls of air into Therm-A-Rest number three.

  I’d positioned the cooking board across from me, the other side of the trench, so it acted like a table, and shoved ice underneath until it was level. Now I secured the canisters on top with the bungees. They would be refilled every morning after breakfast from the five-litre fuel cans that were loaded onto the pulks.

  With the burners sitting safely upright, I got busy with the pressure pump, releasing a small amount of fuel into one of the reservoirs and igniting it. Lighters didn’t always work in these conditions, and if Swan Vestas had been good enough for Shackleton, they were good enough for me.

  I waited until my small ball of flame had heated up the metal of the burner before I released the pressure pump. There was a reassuring hiss and a burst of heat from the first ring. I shook each of our flasks, checking for leftover liquid, and poured some, about an inch, into the larger of the two pots before lifting it onto the burner.

  Melting chunks of ice took for ever, so kick-starting the process with water was always a bonus. In any case, I couldn’t have put the ice straight into a hot pan. It would have burned like milk.

  Once I had the second burner up and running I poured what was left in the flasks into the smaller pot, and added a couple of scoops from the larger one. The system was simple: the ice from the trench was our water supply, the larger pot was our immersion heater, and the smaller pot was the tap.

  I opened the small vent in the top sheet above the cooker board to let out as much of the vapour as possible. At no time would we allow the pots to boil. Steam condensed and almost immediately turned to ice. There was already enough of that stuff around and the trick was to keep it outside the tent.

  Will had sorted out the sleeping compartment. Roll mats down, Therm-A-Rests on top, and sleeping bags pulled out of their bags. I asked him to throw me the mugs, and tonight’s and tomorrow morning’s food.

  The very first thing we needed to get down us was the Cup-A-Soups, two each, then we’d move on to the meat and rice. Then biscuits and tea with enough sugar in it to frighten up a Daily Mail headline.

  And that wouldn’t be the end of the night’s work for the burners. We had to melt more ice to fill the flasks with water to heat in the morning to make breakfast quicker, then needed to melt even more ice when we woke up to refill the flasks so we could set off with two litres each. Even though ice melted quicker than snow, the whole performance would take about three hours. The upside was that it meant three hours’ worth of heat finding its way into the sleeping compartment.

  Jules unzipped the entrance flap from the outside, crawled through, eased her feet into the trench next to me, then zipped it back up again with the same care that she’d have used to stitch a wound. If you pushed and pulled these things, like a demented gorilla, and they bust, that was everyone inside fucked for the duration.

  She slid the blue shovel into the water-supply pile, pulled down her hood and removed her goggles, then leaned towards me. I realized she wanted the hiss of the burners to cover her whisper. ‘Would it be all right if Will cooked?’

  That wasn’t a problem for me. I leaned back into the sleeping compartment. ‘Mate, do you want to do your Jamie Oliver impression tonight? I’ll sort the flasks last thing.’

  His reply couldn’t have been more upbeat. ‘I’d love to. And don’t worry about the flasks. I’ll do the lot.’

  Jules started undoing her boots as I got my goggles back on and zipped everything up.

  ‘Right. I’m going to put Rune’s facilities to the test.’ It was the first time today that my goggles had been clear, and they gave me an amazing view. The wind was on a mission to peel the top layer off the ice and it hung in there at knee height like mist, making the three tightly fastened tents look like they were floating in a desert of white. Now and again there was a murmur of appreciation from inside them as the Cup-A-Soup found its target and condensation billowed from the vents before being whipped away into the endlessly clear blue sky.

  I shook the ice off my pulk bag, kitted myself up with toilet roll and dump bags, and crunched my way across to Rune’s brand new toilet. What I saw when I got there was not the Inuit version of a pub urinal. He hadn’t just thrown up one ice wall, he’d constructed three in a metre-high open square. He’d fashioned a dumping monument.

  It seemed a pity not to spend as much time there as he’d taken to build it, but browsing the colour supplement and cracking the crossword weren’t on the agenda. This might be a mundane event in the real world but when skin froze in minutes it was a major deal. So you pissed onto the snow then unzipped and pulled down your Gore-Tex trousers, long johns and whatever so you could bend and fill the bag as quickly as possible.

  You couldn’t just shit on the ice and blame it on the bears because they didn’t bother tabbing this far, even when there was at least a week’s food heading north. And we didn’t need Rune to tell us that there would be mountains of shit and Tesco’s toilet paper all over the Arctic unless we bagged every dump – and the misfires too – and took it back to Barneo. At least it would be frozen when we got it back to the pulks, so we didn’t have to drag the smell as well as the weight.

  But I didn’t have to meet that challenge right now. Irrespective of what I’d said to Jules and Will, I wasn’t out there for a dump. I was hoping to make that part of my morning routine, because a munchie stop
wasn’t long enough.

  I turned and slowed so the crunch of my footsteps wasn’t so loud and aimed for the Quislings’ and Rune’s pulks. I wanted to take a closer look at the monitors.

  It would have been a waste of time trying to be subtle about the next bit. It wasn’t as if I could wait until it was dark. The thin blanket of ice fell away as I unzipped the first bag. Inside, I found a thin aluminium case, maybe a metre long, which wasn’t part of any standard Arctic kit I could think of.

  I carefully undid the two retaining clips and lifted the hinged lid to reveal nine lumps of stainless steel that looked like blinged-up RPG warheads. They lay in a neat row, slotted into their custom-moulded polystyrene packing. The tenth was missing.

  Maybe they needed nine. Maybe they’d already started inserting them into the ice. I guessed I’d find out soon enough. Right now, at least I knew they existed. Before zipping up again I spotted a familiar shape in a nylon-padded bag. It wasn’t difficult to feel the hard steel of a long-barrelled revolver, probably a .44, even through my gloves.

  I left everything exactly as I’d found it, and as I started to retrace my steps to the Cup-A-Soup, the pulk bag had already grown a new coating of frost.

  I had to assume that both the Quislings would be carrying, not just one. They might claim they were playing ‘better safe than sorry’ on the bear front, but if that was the case, why hadn’t they told us where the weapons were? During my soldiers-on-ice days we used to run a tripwire around the tents – basically a couple of ring-pull personal alarm devices attached to a ski pole and a length of para cord doubling as a perimeter fence. The theory was that the bear would trip the cord and trigger the alarm. Then it was all hands on deck with the flare guns and assault rifles. Maybe the Quislings also had them tucked away for a rainy day, and didn’t want us to know that either.