by Jean McNeil
Clouds were the thing to worry about; high cloud and the icing would affect the propellers; low cloud and they might have to land on visuals in dusk without a runway beacon. You couldn’t win. Overnight, they would refuel, then start back the following day.
Luke looked again at the report: high cloud at 8858 feet. Weather charts, little flags of wind speed and direction harried, clumping, showed a forecast of a 70-knot tailwind the following day. ‘With that kind of wind in your tail you hardly need fuel,’ he said. Chris looked ruefully at the charts. He knew Chris would prefer to go in and come out on the same day. If they risked staying overnight they might be there for days, possibly weeks, if the weather closed in.
Years ago they would not have even contemplated flying in the four-prop plane at this time of year. Then the only way in would have been with the Otters, which were built for polar environments and could take almost anything the weather threw at them. But now it was warm enough that severe icing was, while still a possibility, a remote one. Now the runway could be cleared for a wheeled rather than a skifit aircraft, although it took an effort to shift the snow from its kilometre-long stretch. Down on base they had begun clearing it two days previously with the snowblowers, working in two shifts, day and night.
It had taken five days to fly the aircraft back down from Canada to the Falklands, leapfrogging from Houston to Merida to Curaçao to Manaus; then a giant leap of faith which pushed the aircraft to the limit of its range to Rio de Janeiro, then, after the first good night’s sleep in a week, to Florianopolis, Montevideo, Stanley. He had been hiking in the woods with two of his children when his phone vibrated. On its screen a Cambridge number appeared. His summer holiday had ended, there and then.
He had never done a winter medevac before, in all his years flying. Very few people had ever done it; all they could do was try. He and Chris had calculated the Point of No Return, with Marsh as their divert. If Marsh was fogged in they could get to Punta Arenas, provided they turned back in time. Past their PNR, if the weather closed in, either they lost visibility on the ground or they encountered icing in low cloud, they would have to get to base, no matter what.
‘Ok,’ Chris said, ‘we’re going in.’
A shiver ruffled up and down Luke’s spine. There was nothing he liked more than a challenge.
They donned the survival gear which had hardly changed in one hundred years, layer by layer: silk underwear, moleskins, fleece, padded boiler suit, parkas, boots. Once they were airborne they would peel these off, one by one, unless they had to climb above the aircraft’s official ceiling, where the air would be cool and thin. Luke had done this many times before – gone high to save on power and fuel; in this way he increased his range. Even in the Otters he never suffered from altitude sickness. It was officially forbidden; if they went above altitude neither he nor Chris would log it in the flight book.
They went through the takeoff checklist: Number 1 engine, then number 2, 3, and 4. Fuel pumps, auxiliary fuel pumps. Chris was captain, but Luke would do the flying. He recited the flight plan: once airborne, steady climb to 5,000 feet, reduce power, set autopilot course for the Drake Passage, shortest transect possible. Once they reach 12,000 feet, radio Marsh. How, and where, and at what altitude they would turn the aircraft around and head back. Normally these rehearsals of plans B and C were routine and speculative, but on this day they might actually have to use them.
Then the landing: arriving in darkness was, while a possibility, something to be avoided. He and Chris knew the descent to base better than anyone, they had the most hours racked up on the aircraft. If anyone could bring it down safely in poor vis, in weather, in wind or snow, they could.
In the back of the plane sat the mechanic and the medevac doctor, strapped into passenger seats shoved hastily amongst the cargo. The medevac was also a chance to get essentials onto base – ten boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables, and eight drums of Avtur to be deployed on the Pine Island glacier the following year.
The doctor, an improbably young woman flown down from Cambridge on short notice, looked pale. She had seemed fine until she saw she would be sitting on top of aviation fuel. Luke was about to tell her, The wings are full of fuel anyway. Even without the drums, we’re a flying bomb but at the last moment he opted for gentlemanliness, and assured her it would all be fine. The mechanic did not look particularly confident, either. He more than anyone knew what they were up against. If anything went wrong with the aircraft he would be on his own, with the prospect of being stuck for months if he could not fix the problem.
The first moments of a flight into or out of the Antarctic were the hardest. Luke knew from experience how difficult the transition could be; sometimes he had had to pit himself against it mentally. For years, flying into the Antarctic had meant saying goodbye to the people he loved for months at a time, and it had acquired a heavy air of regret, of absence, of resolve to find a job that would keep him closer to home.
After takeoff he felt immediately how different it was to flying in summer. Night lapped at their edges from all directions, like a dark tide. Below, the sea foamed with whitecaps. ‘It’s a wild old day down there,’ he said and Chris nodded in agreement. The most stable ship would struggle in these seas. These waves were borne by a relentless dynamic, unbroken in their journey from Australia through the southern Pacific, driven by the most powerful winds on earth through the botteneck of the Drake Passage, their loping kinetic force squeezed and torqued until they rose up and folded back on their own power, yearning for something to smash apart.
The moment Nara awoke in the surgery, she knew she had been sedated. A chemical burn lingered in her mouth, and there was a fogginess in her thoughts which refused to disperse.
She looked up into a wall of boxes of medicines, stacked in a perspex cabinet. Many of the boxes were empty; these belonged to the coveted drugs – antidepressants, the painkillers, the codeine and morphine, which were kept under lock and key.
She walked, uncertainly at first, then with more confidence, through the cafeteria, the bar, the hallways, prepared to meet eyes which refused to focus upon her. But base was empty. She went to the comms tower. There she found Alistair, the comms manager. Before he could look away she asked, ‘Where is everyone?’
‘Skiing.’ His pursed lips. Evaded eyes. Yes, this was how it would be for some time, for months to come.
That night she did not eat dinner with the others. At midnight she crept into the kitchen and made herself some soup. At breakfast, she did the same – waited until everyone had eaten, then slunk into the cafeteria to make her own.
Alexander was tagged in on the tagging board. The doctor walked by; her eyes swivelled away.
She was seized by a feeling that something was wrong. It grew from the pit of her stomach, rose through her heart, then finally reached her brain.
‘What day is it?’
‘Thursday.’ The doctor’s voice said: Does it matter?
No path existed around the Point now, only snow-covered boulders and a hazy fissure of snow and ice where the fragile shore ice began.
Underneath her feet the snow squeaked. This meant it was minus fifteen, or colder.
There was no moon to guide her, only a pale glow on the horizon. The days were lengthening rapidly, now that Midwinter was past. Three hours of perpetual dusk had become, within only four days, an hour of visible light in the sky. Still the light was sealed off, as if contained on one side of a vast glass wall. Nacreous clouds glimmered in the sky. At times she stumbled. She stopped, stood still, listening to the lordly, unaccommodating silence. It thudded through her. After a minute she realised it was her own heart, beating.
The moment is one of balance. Of poise between safety, between a humdrum ice observation mission, back to base for a cup of coffee, back to his computer screen, and disaster.
Some part of him chooses disaster.
Alexander did not want to slip, he did not want to lean into gravity, but his body chose this for him. A
mind not entirely in control, an instinct, a spiral. Before coming South he had had it – they all had – drummed into him that in the Antarctic, accidents never have one causal factor. For things to go wrong, one mistake had to lead to another, then another, until the situation becomes desperate.
His unravelling began with a footfall which sunk into snow to his thigh. Then a tipping, as his long body leaned downslope into the unexpected sinking. After that, a handbrake which failed to arrest his topple, then, with his right leg, a slip. Very quickly he was sliding down the sharp drop underneath the cliff, to the sea.
He carries no ice axe. It is just a walk around the Point, the Antarctic equivalent of a stroll around the park.
The fall and scrape of ice against his young, hard body created immediate drag, but not sufficient to arrest his fall. He can feel the bruises forming, their heat and swell. Baggy capilliaries, flush with blood and hurt.
With a relaxing of the angle of the slope, the drag on his body increases, and he slides to a stop just short of the shoreline. He tries to stand, but cannot. Adrenalin is masking the pain of a fractured tibia; the break occurred, unnoticed by him, two seconds previously when he had put out his leg in an attempt to arrest his slide. The shiver of pain he receives if he tries to put his left leg to work means he would not be able to walk, or swim, he cannot climb back up the glacier. In another, colder, year – cold enough for the sea ice to form – he would have been able to drag himself across the sea ice, around to the wharf, and home.
He is only four hundred metres from the base’s door, close enough for rescue, but his name is tagged in on the tagging board. He never tagged out, for his missions around the Point. He is not a man to be known or controlled.
He knew that everyone assumed he was lying low, after what happened, that he was avoiding her. It might be another day before anyone thinks something is wrong, and knocks on his door.
Before he can form a response – whether regret, rueful laughter, or grim determination – he is flooded by a fear so powerful he stops breathing. The fear is spiked with panic and pain and in its heart lives a dark, worming purpose. It invades him from all directions, enters every pore, a stampede of snakes.
He has just realised that the overhang of the slope means no one can see him. The way he has fallen, he is out of sight.
Three hours into the flight they called PNR. On base, the siren whooped over the runway for the first time in months. Base radioed them. It was Alistair, the comms manager. ‘The cloud mantle has dropped.’ Chris’ reply was immediate. ‘How much?’ ‘From 5,000 to 1,000 and dropping.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell us half an hour ago?’A crackle of static, before the answer. ‘Because half an hour ago it was at 5,000.’‘That’s impossible.’‘No, it’s not. It’s a different place here in winter, Chris.’‘What’s the coverage?’‘Eight octas.’‘We’re past PNR, you know that?’Another static pause. ‘Roger. We’ve sounded the siren. The runway is clear.’‘We’re going to need some help to land this thing,’ Chris said. The bite in his words: this thing – that was new to Luke. ‘We’ll have to get them out there with flares, just in case.’ Luke nodded. It was the only way.
Luke never thought: if we ditched, that would be it. He always considered that he could get the aircraft down, no matter what – get it down in some form. Landing was for him a moment of grace, of suspension, power and accomplishment. He could not imagine it ending in disarray, in explosion and charred skin and kerosene. He didn’t know if this were optimism or recklessness, only that for him landing was the fullest expression of his competence as a pilot. In those moments when he set an aircraft on the ground he felt a surge of power, and he knew he would never have consented to live a life in which that feeling of mastery and control was not possible. He dreaded the murk and hedge of most people’s existences: squabbles with the boss, jockeying for position on the commuter train home. He was free from all that, and secure in his power. Only ten or twelve men in the world could do what he was doing now, and one of them sat beside him. If they couldn’t do it, nobody could.
Nara was short, so she was assigned the position in the middle of the runway. As a short person she ran less of a risk of being injured or killed by the plane’s landing gear and wheels. Tall men were positioned at the edges of the runway – their flares were the crucial signals, they would keep the pilots from landing on the edge, or worse, off the runway entirely.
Fifteen years previously a man had been up on a mast doing some rigging at Midas base when the wheels of a departing Twin Otter severed his head from his body. The pilot hadn’t seen him. Nara had never given the Midas incident much thought. Now, she considered it: a headless body in the snow, his bloodied orange boiler suit. The same plane would have had to return to fly the body out. She wondered what had happened to the pilot. She wondered if Luke knew him.
They lined themselves up, backs to the runway, facing Adélie Island. Dressed in red padded boiler suits, hard hats, any reflective gear they could find, one line at the south end of the runway, one line to signal the turn onto the hangar apron. They could not even see Adélie Island; it was lost in the blanket of fog and low cloud that had smothered base, and so quickly.
They waited for the shear: they would feel the plane before they heard it. The strange sound dynamics of the Antarctic meant that sounds did not creep up from a distance as they usually did, but burst from a vortex.
There was nothing more to be done than to hold these flares aloft in the dark, waiting for the roar of the plane to come upon them.
At 11am blue and gold soaked the southern horizon. The light lasted for only ten minutes, but it was enough to show Nara Alexander’s tracks, where they stopped, close to the edge. She inched her way out to the overhang and looked down. Little whirlwinds of panic in her mind, lashing her to the moment, to a sudden gripping inertia.
The sound of her voice was alien to her. The silence consumed her shout as if she had never made a sound at all.
She did a quick calculation: fifteen minutes to get back to base – no, twenty, from the precarious position she occupied. Fifteen minutes to get geared up, to get the field assistants on search and rescue duty out here. Fifteen more minutes to pull him up.
He was not moving. She could see that from where she stood.
She had rope, two snowstakes, a sling, her harness, jumars, karabiners. In fifteen minutes, she could get down to him herself. She could put a sling on him. If he were conscious, he could jumar up. If not, she would leave him down there with the sling, and go and get the field assistants.
She pounded in the snowstakes, fashioned a triangular sling to equalise the distribution of her weight, and roped up. She had no crampons, only her winter boots.
She lowered herself over the ice cliff, her crampon-less boots sliding uselessly on the iceface. On the way down she was so dehydrated she could barely swallow. She was breathing heavily, so that her breath condensed in globules of frost, which stuck to her eyelashes.
They would take the southeast approach. Descend to 9,000 feet, bank right. Every summer they did this two, three times a week. Their wide-angled approach to base was high enough to clear the peaks which jut all around them. They would fly in from the south, into a stiff, capricious wind.
As they levelled out, base and the shoreline were obscured by cloud. Peaks of mountains they were used to seeing in summer, bared, their chocolate-hued basalt providing markers for their approach, were now covered in snow. Ahead was only a white definitionless land; inside the emptiness were mountains, lethal granite towers. At last they saw a familiar landmark: the island’s peaks prodded the tops of the cloud. If it weren’t for Adélie Island, they would not have been able to even find the base.
Then, puncturing the cloud, a small throb of red light – the human runway beacon. It went against all their training to have people in the way of the landing track of an aircraft. But then you couldn’t really train for what the Antarctic threw at you.
‘We’re too high. We’re going
to have to drop out of the sky.What about bergs?’
‘Comms man says there are none on the path in. Let’s hope he’s right.’
The pilots took their last look at the steel mountains, wide-hipped, inevitable, overlain with sheets of fresh snow. Then ailerons curled down over the wings, and the plane descended into cloud.
The roar did not come upon her from the outside; the machine came from inside her body. She dove to the ground, the flare still in her hand. The fuselage sleeked above her, its underbelly congealing out of the air. She lifted her head from the runway in time to watch it touch down, then to be covered with a spray of gravel and snow. She lay on her back on the runway, the expired flare held aloft in her hand.
The winter base commander stood above her. He extended a hand, which she grasped. She thought he was going to joke, to laugh at her, splay-limbed on the runway. Usually, he was the joking kind.
‘Christ,’ he said, pulling her to her feet. ‘That was close.’ She took off her glove and reached her fingers toward Alexander. When they encountered his throat they felt no warmth, but there was a throb, muted, insistent. His lips were blue, and his extremities were cold. But the overnight temperature had not been very low, for the Antarctic winter, so he had survived.
She could not see a way to get him out of there on her own; she wouldn’t be able to jumar them both up, his weight was too much for her. If he had been conscious, she would have been able to convince him to climb out. She didn’t yet know about the fractured tibia.
She would have to leave him, and go for help. She stood up. The familiar dark pewter mantle of cloud hung over the point.
Again, she felt its presence: the grinding, like a wheel, a mechanism, gigantic and diffuse. Whatever it was, it was older than them, better than them, and so much more powerful. This skulking force brooded around him like a scavenger looking for a way into a house. She recognised it as the same giant eye that looked at her so casually at night in her bunk, when she couldn’t sleep and the visions refused to disperse. But she was fierce, now, she was in life and at the height of her powers. She bared her teeth against it and felt the hairs bristle at the bottom of her neck. Her growl sounded like one of the fur seals, there was nothing human about it. With this growl she fended this presence off, because Alexander was not able to. The presence mooched about, disappointed, then slunk away.
