Cold Blood

by Andy McNab

The cloud was thinning and settling but the ice pack was trembling. Huge chunks of the stuff were being thrown up behind me. My ears were filled with the sound of rushing water. I spun round and faced the channel. The breaker’s bow was now completely submerged and its stern had reared up towards the sky. It was howling and whimpering like a caged animal. Or maybe that was the ice around me. A lead opened up barely a metre from where I was standing, lengthened and widened.

  I scrambled and slid away as best I could. Not looking up, or sideways, just down, running, staggering, slipping, crawling, running again – anything to make distance. The ice moved around me. I stopped and turned back, in time to see what remained of the Lisandro finally surrender and vanish into the dark water. All that was left was maybe a half-dozen survivors, thrashing and screaming, but sound and movement doesn’t last long in the Arctic Ocean.

  A couple of safety capsules still bobbed around in the channel, but they were crushed and mangled, semi-submerged. I stared at the bodies alongside them, trying to identify duvets.

  ‘Jack! Stedman! Jack! Jack!’

  The wind had picked up. It gave the cold even more of a sting, but had carried the remains of the ice and snow cloud away. The air was clear and the blue sky returned.

  ‘Jack! Stedman!’

  I heard a cry from behind me.

  Jack was about twenty metres away, dragging his false leg behind him. He stopped and dropped onto his good knee. He wasn’t trying to lever himself upright, though. He seemed to be trying to get down onto his belt buckle. He was shouting down into the ice.

  When I reached him, I saw why.

  He was lying next to a lead.

  Stedman was floundering in the water beneath him. He managed to thrust his good arm into the air. Jack grabbed it. Stedman thrashed his legs, trying to gain enough momentum to lever himself onto the ice.

  Jack grabbed a fistful of sodden duvet with his other hand.

  Stedman was fighting for breath. The shock was sucking everything out of his lungs.

  I threw myself down next to Jack. ‘Breathe! Breathe!’

  I added my hands to Jack’s. We heaved together and beached Stedman on the ice. We both knew what we needed to do. Jack was totally focused. He knew his best mate would die if we didn’t do something quickly.

  ‘It’s OK, we’re here.’ His voice was extraordinarily calm. ‘We’re going to get you sorted.’

  ‘You get his kit off.’ I unzipped my duvet, pulled it off and trapped it with my foot so we didn’t lose it to the wind. Then I ripped off my Gore-Tex jacket and handed him my woollen base layer. ‘Get both layers on him.’

  The cold gripped me like a vice. My core heat was still up there, but it wouldn’t be for long if I didn’t sort myself out. I replaced my Gore-Tex jacket, dropped my arse onto the ice, pulled off my boots and unzipped the sides of my trousers so we could exchange our base layers.

  When I got to my feet again, exposing myself to the wind, I was shivering within seconds. I handed Jack the long johns and pulled up the zip on the Gore-Tex trousers. It was easier said than done – my fingers were so cold they felt like they were about to drop off.

  Jack had already transferred my base-layer top and duvet onto Stedman, hood up, and was now pulling off his boots and Gore-Tex trousers. It was my turn to talk while Jack concentrated on replacing his mate’s insulation. ‘Mate, keep breathing.’

  Stedman’s teeth were about to shake themselves loose, but I kept my voice as calm and emotionless as possible. ‘Not long now. We’re going to get you warm, and get you moved. We’re going to get you out of the wind.’

  He tugged off Stedman’s long johns while I peeled off my outer socks and threw them over. I removed my second layer too, along with my vapour barrier, and swapped them over, so I now had my last remaining pair of dry socks inside the VB.

  Jack remained incredibly calm, methodical, and totally focused. He shoved Stedman’s hand into the pocket of my jacket, giving him a constant stream of encouragement. ‘It’s all right, mate. It’s all right. Yes, that’s good. Toasty, eh? We’re going to get you out of here, soon as …’

  I wrung out his base layers as best I could with hands that were freezing fast. The rest of my body wasn’t far behind. I could almost feel the heat leaking from my core. I had to get a move on.

  I undid my jacket again and pulled on Stedman’s very clammy woollens, long johns, socks and boots, which had already started to freeze on the inside. Then I zipped everything up and started swinging my arms and stamping my feet to warm up the pockets of air in the way that Stedman was no longer capable of doing.

  I crouched down again as soon as I could. ‘Mate, I’m going to get you up now. Jack, give me a hand. One, two, and three …’

  I didn’t wait for any acknowledgement. I wrapped my arms around his trunk, hauled him upright and hoisted him onto my shoulder, knowing that if I didn’t get moving, I’d be joining him. I could feel him shivering big-time.

  I began to walk as fast as I could, swinging my body vigorously left and right to generate heat. I squinted through the ultraviolet bouncing off the ice, searching for somewhere – anywhere – we could find shelter.

  I could hear the steady crunch of Jack’s boots behind me. The only other sounds were our laboured breathing and the whistle of the wind.

  Shards of ice as jagged as broken glass were strewn across our path. A hundred ahead lay the first of a series of what looked like baby pressure ridges. They were unlike any I’d come across. Maybe they’d been created by the movement of the Lisandro.

  I soon found a mini version of Rune’s monument – a hollow in the ice with walls about a metre high on each side of it. I eased Stedman off my shoulders and manoeuvred him inside. ‘We’re out of the wind, mate. Not long now …’

  Jack lay prone on the ice to act as insulation so I could put Stedman on top of a body before I went out to gather further building material. Exaggerating every movement to generate heat, I excavated every slab of ice I could get my hands on and carried them back to the hollow.

  There was a chance the crew of the breaker had sent out a general risk SOS, but I thought it unlikely. The Chechens would have been the quickest to respond, and very happy to take possession of all the shiny kit the geeks had been playing with on the Lisandro. Maybe they’d sent an internal mayday call to the US Navy, but I had no idea how far away they might be.

  All I knew for sure was that the heli had taken off successfully, so that was where I placed my hope. But our first priority remained the simplest of all: to live long enough to be rescued. After I’d heaved the last block of our ramshackle igloo into place, I got down on my knees and crawled into the cave.

  I knew that the heat I’d generated would soon dissipate, but I needed to transfer as much of it as possible to Stedman.

  70

  We couldn’t afford to waste a single therm of body heat now. Whichever of us was wearing the dry duvet would lie on the ice, the bottom layer of the Stedman sandwich. Jack and I swapped places – and duvets – as soon as the top man couldn’t take the cold any more. Who knew how long we’d be there? Whether help or another drama appeared on the near horizon, I didn’t care. As long as it was something.

  The wind found its way through every gap in the roof of my igloo, no matter how small, and blasted us with needles of ice. The sound it made was as eerie as our solitude – like a big unfriendly giant blowing across the neck of a bottle.

  Jack’s body was starting to shake. We’d both had better days out.

  As our next changeover approached, Jack said he was going to have a piss.

  ‘Don’t, mate. Think of all that steam and liquid leaving you, leaving us.’ I tried to take his mind off it. ‘I’ll tell you the best way I’ve found to keep the cold at bay …’

  He wasn’t biting.

  ‘Never fails …’

  From under his hood came a muffled ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Dream, mate. Dream. Just think to yourself that this will all be
over soon. This time tomorrow you’re going to be in a hot bath with a huge mug of coffee and a fat sticky bun. This time tomorrow we’ll all be laughing about this shit. This time tomorrow—’

  ‘Nick …’

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘It’s my turn with the duvet.’

  We swapped places. Now I lay on top, wrapping my arms around Stedman, tucking his head into the space between my neck and my shoulder.

  Maybe an hour later, the situation was getting out of control.

  Jack and I were still muttering words of encouragement, making stupid, irrelevant jokes, but we were all shivering convulsively. My hands were numb, frozen and searingly painful.

  As my core temperature continued to drop, I was starting to feel light-headed. And I wasn’t the only one.

  Stedman had been mumbling from time to time. Now he was getting increasingly incoherent. It wasn’t a good sign. His central thermostat had gone into meltdown, sucking the heat from the head, leaching the oxygen and sugar from his brain.

  Hypothermia was coming in fast – with the real danger that he didn’t know it was happening. One of the first things it did was take away your will to help yourself. You stopped shivering. You stopped worrying. You were dying, and you couldn’t give a shit. Your pulse would become irregular. Drowsiness would give way to semi-consciousness, then a little further along the line, unconsciousness. The only stop after that was getting dead.

  Jack was now back on top of the sandwich, and sensed it. He gripped into Stedman even more. ‘Mate … it’s … OK. We’re here. We’re … here …’

  Stedman shouted, and thrashed about. Jack kept holding him as I brought my arms up and hugged him into me.

  I looked up at Jack, as we sandwiched Stedman between us, and blamed myself. I should have told the team everything; should have given them the option of pulling out.

  Stedman made a noise that was half sigh, half cough, and then a low groan.

  Jack lowered his mouth to Stedman’s ear. ‘Remember Catterick? Pretending to be … airline pilots … fuck’s sake. ’Member? We would have … pulled it off … if their husbands … hadn’t turned up.’

  He somehow managed a snort of laughter, even though his best mate was about to die and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  ‘Running down … high street … trying … get away …’

  Stedman reached out for Jack’s face, brushed the underside of his chin with the tips of his gloved fingers.

  Jack’s hand grasped Stedman’s.

  ‘Tell you what … If they’d … caught us … would have been us … fucked.’

  I thought I heard Stedman giggle, but maybe I was imagining it. Then his body went still.

  I craned my neck to one side. Jack’s eyes were closed, his hand holding Stedman’s against the side of his face.

  I gave him a minute with his friend, but we had to get moving, ‘Mate, you know we have to sort ourselves out now, don’t you?’

  His eyes remained closed, but he gave a couple of nods. He did know. Of course he did. He finally rolled off Stedman’s body and lay beside me.

  I took off my glove, put my frozen middle and forefinger into my mouth to try to warm them up, then touched Stedman’s neck, trying to find his carotid pulse. I could feel nothing. His skin was as cold as mine. But we needed to be sure.

  Jack was still grasping his hand.

  ‘Jack, mate,’ I kept my voice low, ‘can you check his breath?’

  He gave a reluctant nod. He knew what we had to do, but it didn’t make it any easier. His lids flickered open. He pulled back his hood, lowered his face mask and gradually raised his head until his right eyeball and a patch of cheek were a couple of millimetres away from Stedman’s nose and mouth.

  He seemed to stay in that position for ever.

  When he finally sank back onto the ice I saw tears welling in his eyes.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  I gave him another thirty seconds, then eased Stedman off me and rolled him onto his back. Jack pushed himself up onto his knees. I retrieved my duvet, then unzipped Stedman’s Gore-Tex jacket and handed it to him. Even a tiny bit more warmth was all we needed to give us a bit of hope. I recovered my boots and dry socks and rearranged the vapour barrier. It would take a while for my feet to warm up again, but they would once we got going.

  Jack was on his arse, watching me. That was all I wanted him to do. The tears were starting to freeze on his cheeks. The more layers we had on, the more air would be trapped, and that was what would save us. The outer-shell trousers and base layers came next. I handed him the merino top, and kept the long johns for myself.

  Jack rearranged his clothing in slow motion. I was about to say, ‘Get moving, get some heat,’ but thought better of it.

  His speech was still slurred, but less so now.

  ‘Know what, Nick? Stedman … totally turned everything around for me. We did that for each other … I suppose. When I got out of … Headley Court, I wasn’t all there … I was even worse mentally … right on the edge. Stedman was the same … We were both fucked. My old man was making it worse for me … He took against Stedman … Don’t know why. Stedman could be a twat … You know that … But at the end of the day he was just … Stedman … wasn’t he?’

  Then it all came out in a rush. He’d felt worthless. He’d had enough. He’d been literally on the way to the railway bridge when Stedman had managed to talk him out of it. They’d made a deal to say fuck it to everyone. A pact to depend on each other.

  ‘Because no one else really gives a fuck … do they, Nick? Does anyone give a fuck?’

  He zipped up the Gore-Tex jacket halfway, then stopped.

  ‘Look, Nick … I know you and Jules … my dad … Everyone sees him, saw him, as a fuck-up. And they weren’t completely wrong … But I’m only here because of him.’

  Fresh tears began to tumble as he stared at the near naked body beside me. ‘And he’s only here because of me. So … where does that leave us?’

  I glanced down too. Stedman’s skin was colourless. His body had already started to shrink in the extreme cold.

  Then I looked up again, and got some eye to eye. ‘It’s all about life now, Jack. And if we don’t get some action going, we’re going to be joining him.’

  ‘Action?’ Jack wasn’t convinced. ‘What action?’

  For the first time, he sounded defeated. I needed to reset him. ‘We need to think about fluids, mate, hot fluids. We can’t eat snow.’ He knew this shit, but that wasn’t the point. He needed something to concentrate on. ‘You waste crucial body heat melting it in your mouth, and it cools the body from the inside. Chills the vital organs in the body core. So, our first task is to get one of those fucked-up survival boats closer to the ice, see what’s in them. Then we can start thinking about what to do with it.’

  I zipped up the Gore-Tex trousers and couldn’t wait to get my body moving to generate a bit of heat.

  ‘Mate, we’ve got to leave him now. We’ve got to get moving, or we’ll both be joining him.’

  He didn’t move a muscle.

  I was about to grab him and give him a good shake while dragging him out onto the ice when we both heard the unmistakable sounds of tracked vehicles.

  Jack lit up like someone had just recharged his batteries. He was set to race out of the cave.

  Now I had to make him stay exactly where he was. I held on to him, just in case. ‘Let’s see who they are first.’

  71

  I knelt just inside the entrance to the igloo. The wind whipped needles of ice into my face as soon as I leaned out, so I had to squint.

  A white skin had started to form on the canal carved out by the Lisandro – almost enough to camouflage the darkness of the water but not enough to hide the horror of what had happened there. Yellow and red lifejackets were dotted about at random, frozen in place, some framing a head and shoulders, others a rigid, outstretched arm.

  The only craft in sight were two wrecked survival capsules,
both semi-submerged. Bodies were still aboard, stiff as mummies, some clinging on for what must once have seemed dear life. I spotted a couple of brightly coloured duvet jackets on our side of the channel. Their owners had somehow managed to claw their way onto the ice. They probably shouldn’t have bothered. If they’d stayed in the water, it would have taken them less time to die.

  Dark, angular shapes were heading towards us, exhaust stacks doing their bit to widen the hole in the ozone layer. I could tell they were Russian from the clinking sound of their tracks. Five of them. The last vehicle was dragging what looked like a load of mangled wreckage behind it.

  Jack joined me, kneeling too, not moving as they drew closer. We recognized the Russian equivalents of the Viking – and the significance of the tangled remains of a steel cockpit and rotor blades bringing up the rear.

  Jack’s head dropped.

  ‘Mate, we don’t yet know anything for sure. And there may be other survivors out there, like us, trying to stay out of the wind. Let’s see if any of them break cover. Then we’ll check out the Russians’ reaction. It’ll only take a little while longer.’

  We reversed into our shelter. The wagons passed no more than fifty metres away from us, heading towards the channel, tracks clinking. Once the sound had died, I crawled out again.

  The front two vehicles bristled with antennae and satellite dishes. They wanted the gizmos. I studied the heli as closely as I could. I didn’t see any scorch marks. It hadn’t gone up in flames. The yellow pontoons were heavily buckled. Two rotor blades were lashed to the roof beside them. One had worked itself loose and its tip was bouncing across the ice.

  Jack moved alongside me again, his chest heaving. It had nothing to do with the cold.

  ‘Mate, let’s wait. Let’s just … wait.’

  I didn’t need to draw him pictures. We both knew that if any survivors did front up, they might get dropped.

  The lead wagons stopped a few metres short of the channel. The last one seemed to be trying to get as close to the edge of the pack as it could without toppling in, then veered to the right, exposing the heli to the sea. Bodies in standard white Arctic kit clambered out of all five vehicles, some with weapons.