SKELETON GOLD: Dark Tide (James Pace Book 4)

by Andy Lucas

  Yes, it was true, there were indeed two strangely dressed, yellow-skinned humans taking a swim in the middle of the sea. Very odd.

  The morning aged into noon and then crawled into afternoon before mutating into an early dusk, at a little after four o’clock. Still their exhausted legs kicked, with fading strength, inching them closer to land, they hoped.

  They were spent, and dangerously over-tired by the time that darkness fell and it was heading towards midnight when an annoying sound began to itch at the edge of Pace’s fading consciousness. Gradually, dulled senses identified the sound as the crashing of waves against a solid shoreline but his addled brain still took a further minute to process the information.

  ‘Hey, Max,’ he croaked. ‘You still with me?’

  ‘Just about,’ came the equally weary reply. ‘I can’t feel my legs anymore but I think they’re still kicking.’

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  Pace stopped swimming and spun around on the spot. Tethered together as they still were, Hammond did the same thing. Salvation was dangling no more than half a mile away.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Hammond croaked.

  Pace ignored him but shared the disappointment. Waves weren’t rolling against an icepack, or level beach; they were breaking against an area of rocky shoreline that stretched for as far as his tired eyes could make out, in the starlit gloom.

  Hammond’s heart sank like a stone. Not only was the beach awash with rocks and smooth boulders but he could see smaller rocks, just offshore, poking vicious, razor-sharp teeth just above the churning foam. The chances of making it to land unscathed were slim. It was more likely that they would be sliced to ribbons on submerged rocks, which they would be helpless to avoid once they were caught in the grip of rolling breakers.

  But they couldn’t stay in the water. Cold was beginning to find its way inside and their numb faces were red raw. There was also no sign of a break in the rocks, or of a better entry point, for as far as they could see.

  ‘We could pick a direction and swim along the coast for a mile or so,’ suggested Hammond, his tone flat and listless.

  Pace heard the lack of energy in his friend’s voice and knew it mirrored his own fading will. They didn’t have much time left.

  ‘We could swim until we freeze to death and never find a better beach,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know about you but I’ve just about had a gutful of the water. I’m going to take my chances here.’

  Hammond had been thinking exactly the same thing and was relieved that he wouldn’t have to try and coax Pace into joining him.

  ‘The suits should offer us some protection from underwater rocks, as long as we don’t hit too many,’ Pace said. ‘Let’s just go for it.’

  Hammond nodded, although the restricted head movement within his suit meant Pace would never have noticed it. Instead he shouted out his agreement and the two men paddled closer together, eyeing up the best place to try and head in.

  About one hundred metres to the left, there appeared to be a narrow corridor where no rocks thrust upwards from the seabed. Pace had no doubt they were there but perhaps there might be enough water on top of them for the men to float over unscathed. It was barely two metres wide and the wave action was already fairly agitated at the start of the corridor, so they would have to line themselves up very carefully to avoid being washed outside the corridor, where several rocks split the surface like hungry crocodiles peering above the surface for unwary prey.

  Hammond started paddling for the corridor and Pace followed. Totally drained and spent of energy, it took several minutes before they floated, ten metres out from the mouth of the corridor, barely thirty metres from salvation.

  There wasn’t any point in hanging around; they’d made up their minds. Hammond unhooked their tether lines. If one of them should be washed sideways to his death, the other one still deserved a chance to make it.

  Pace turned and lined up as best he could before striking out for the mouth of the corridor, headfirst. Hammond followed close behind and they were both immediately caught by a cresting wave.

  Luck was with them because the wave that gripped them was the largest they’d seen so far, curling beneath them and lifting them several feet higher than the surface as it rolled majestically inland. Before they knew enough about it to be grateful, they literally surfed high above any underwater perils and were deposited, with a jarring crunch, on an expanse of pebble-festooned sand.

  The wave withdrew quickly and they had to scramble to avoid being sucked back out to sea, rolling and kicking, digging elbows into the sand and grimly hanging on until the tug of the water eased. The successive waves were less intense and a minute later, Hammond and Pace were sitting five metres away from the water, grinning stupidly at each other like a couple of teenagers who’d just sampled their first joint.

  As the euphoria of being alive, and uninjured, sank in, so did the reality of their situation. The beach was empty and desolate. The starry skies were clouding over with the threat of snow and the vast wilderness of ice and snow was only separated from the foaming water by a ten metre width of beach. Additionally, a vigorous wind was whipping up.

  ‘Our suits will help but we need to find shelter.’

  ‘You’ve got to love a man who always states the obvious,’ ribbed Pace, good-naturedly.

  ‘Glad to see you’re sarcasm has returned,’ quipped Hammond. ‘Now, if your positive attitude will just whip us up a nice log cabin, complete with fire, food and Jack Daniels, I will truly believe in magic.’

  There was precious little chance of that but just being on dry land gave them hope, after spending so long in the grip of a malignant ocean. They twisted a release valve to bleed to deflate their suits before standing up on wobbly legs. They had to hold each other by the arms for a few minutes until their balance adjusted to the lack of movement, in what sailors called getting over the ‘sways’.

  The beach stretched away into the semi-darkness of the brief Antarctic night for as far as the eye could see. The vista of white stretching back inland was fairly flat, with undulating drifts here and there, but it looked fairly navigable. Their biggest problem was not knowing where they were.

  ‘If we didn’t drift too far off course,’ suggested Pace, without conviction, ‘I think we shouldn’t be too far from the American base at McMurdo. That was why I set the course I did after the life boat was sunk.’

  ‘The sea was pretty choppy and we were exhausted for most of the time. We might have been thrown off course by miles.’

  Pace knew Hammond was right. ‘We’re standing on solid ground, not ice. We must be on Ross Island, rather than the ice shelf, so we’re not far from help,’ he explained.

  There were only two possibilities of survival. One was reaching the large, established McMurdo station. The other was finding Scott Base, a far smaller research station operated by the New Zealand government, a couple of kilometres from McMurdo. Unless they found them, there were no other research stations for a thousand miles.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Hammond, a brightness returning to his words. ‘Come on, we’ve been in worse scrapes than this.’

  ‘At least we were warm then,’ grumbled Pace, remembering the swarming flies, sultry heat and constant downpours faced in their recent trek through the Amazon.

  Hammond chuckled. ‘But nobody’s going to be shooting at us for a while.’

  ‘They don’t need to waste their bullets.’

  They had two choices; travel along the coast one way or the other.

  Both McMurdo and Scott base were built on the Ross Island, which only showed itself to be an island for a couple of weeks when the summer temperatures melted some small patches of the perpetual snow and ice cover that blended the island to the ice sheet. McMurdo Station was built on the shore, for ease of supply by ship, and both had ice airfields.

  If they were nearby, their lights would be visible in the darkness. As there was no sign of life, they were clearly some d
istance away. But which way to go?

  ‘You know what we have to do?’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Hammond.

  ‘Which way do you fancy? I’m easy.’

  Hammond thought for a moment. Both directions looked bleak so he settled for heading to his right. ‘I’ll go this way. You take the other.’

  There was no question of staying together, which most survival manuals would have said was imperative. They could not afford the luxury of keeping each other company. As long as they were not too far from the American and New Zealand bases, one of them had a good chance of stumbling across them. Then they could send help back to the other one.

  Hammond clapped him on the back of his suit with his gloved hand. ‘See you in a couple of hours. If you find civilisation before me, send them back with a pizza.’

  ‘Deep pan, with all the toppings.’

  Hammond turned and started along the dark beach, hugging the upper sand near to the border with the ice, where the pebbles were fewer and smaller. Walking was not easy, despite the terrain, and he tottered along in an ungainly manner, resembling an unfortunate restaurant employee who’d been forced to wear the company’s giant banana suit to lure families inside to eat.

  Allowing himself the briefest of smiles, Pace turned and headed in the opposite direction just as a light dusting of snow began to flurry down, caught in powerful, invisible fingertips.

  All he and Hammond could do was keep walking until they either found people, or dropped dead on the beach. At that moment, already severely weakened by their ordeal at sea, death still seemed the likelier outcome.

  4

  The only benefit of walking in the survival suit was that Pace quickly started working up a sweat that defied the frigid desolation. He was grateful for the ever-present company of the crashing surf. Having to keep a close eye on his footing also prevented him from falling into a lacklustre mind-set.

  Snow was rare inland, in Antarctica, but few people realised the continent’s true extent. Twice as large as Australia, weather patterns at the centre were typically the coldest on Earth, dry and actually classified as a desert climate, athough a frozen one. In contrast, on the coast, where temperatures were warmed by the ocean, snow and blizzards were common.

  So, unsurprisingly, the snow soon thickened into a heavy storm and visibility closed down to barely a few metres. If he hadn’t been walking along the edge of a beach, Pace would have quickly become disoriented and lost his bearings.

  Pushing on, he whistled aimlessly to keep up his spirits and tried to ignore an increasing feeling of weariness. All he wanted to do was stop, lay down, and go to sleep. Although he was conscious that these feelings were dangerous and a symptom of extreme exhaustion, he could not shake off their attraction.

  ‘Come on, snap out of it!’ he berated himself. ‘If you stop, you die.’

  He carried on and lost track of time as he grew increasingly desperate. If it had only been for himself, perhaps his fire to survive might have flickered out. But, if he succumbed, then Hammond would die too and that was something he would not allow. Then there was Sarah. She probably already thought he was dead and he was flooded by a powerful need to see her again, spurred on by a clear mental image of her beautiful face that chose that moment to pop into his head.

  Hugging the coast, he moved from beach onto ice and snow in places, where a stretch of ice was thick enough to reach out to sea. By sticking to the edges he soon found the beach again when the ice fell back.

  As swiftly as it had thickened, the snowstorm eased but the cloud remained, threatening a second round.

  An hour after setting out, Pace wobbled, staggered and collapsed onto a very narrow section of shingle beach, this time filled to overflowing with thousands of static penguins, who regarded him with indifference. As long as he didn’t look like a leopard seal, they did not mind the intrusion. The smell of guava was appalling, stinging at the base of Pace’s nose and stirring him from virtual unconsciousness.

  Pace initially had no idea why this particular stretch was so full of life when he’d barely seen a penguin in the past hour but, as he forced himself into a sitting position, he noticed something odd about the beach. Instead of being a thin edge that separated the water from the ice, this stretch was split by a wide stretch of water, perhaps thirty feet wide. The water was flat and deep, cutting into the land and disappearing under a heavy overhang of ice that suddenly rose up about fifteen feet from the beach to form a tunnel.

  Interest piqued, Pace staggered to his feet and studied the water more closely, noting that there was a clear air gap between the water’s surface and the roof of the ice tunnel. It appeared to vanish inside a cave, hidden from view by the thick ice crust. If he hadn’t stumbled right on top of it, from the beach side, he would never have known it was there.

  ‘Not that finding an ice cave helps you much,’ he scolded. ‘Except now you have to back up and find a way over it.’ Just as he was digging deeply into his fading reserves of energy, an obvious thought struck him and he found himself laughing. He didn’t need to go around because he was still wearing his inflatable survival suit. Although he had bled out most of the air, some was still trapped in the bladders. He was sure it was enough to help him float across the inlet.

  Easing himself over to the water, he slipped in and immediately floated; fully within the water instead of up on his back. Unlike the ocean, he only needed to swim a few strokes to reach the other side but his addled brain had forgotten to consider one crucial fact. Current.

  If it was an inlet then the current would be moving with the tide, if it was the mouth of an underground river then the current would be flowing out into the ocean. As tired as he was, a slight current was all he could manage and definitely not the strong one he suddenly found himself caught in.

  Even then, he might have been okay if the current had pushed him out into open water but it was not to be. Clearly an inlet, the surging tide that lurked menacingly just below the surface, gripped him and pushed him inland. Before he could draw a breath, the cloudy sky vanished and he was plunged into an insidious blackness as he was washed beneath the ice and swept inside the ice tunnel.

  With his heart in his mouth, Pace dug into his last reserves of strength and swam for all he was worth but it proved futile. The power of the tide was immense. All he could do was ride with it and hope it spat him out before dragging him too deep.

  Having the presence of mind to activate his suit’s blinking emergency light, every half a second the dark, smooth ceiling of ice became visible, racing past over his head.

  Terrified that the air space might suddenly vanish, drowning him in the darkness, Pace breathed out a relieved sigh when he spotted the ceiling getting further and further away from him with each blink. The water had been thirty feet wide at the beach mouth and it stayed the same as the journey proceeded.

  Then, without warning, the current suddenly released him and he found himself washed into a vast open space; more felt than seen. The pressure was lighter and he sensed an enormity, in contrast to the confines of the tunnel. The ceiling was so high above his head that the weak emergency light no longer lit it.

  He trod water for a moment, catching his breath. Looking around, to his utter disbelief, his bleary gaze found itself focusing upon the voluptuous figure of a naked woman, beckoning to him provocatively.

  5

  Max Hammond was a great deal more fortunate. He had only been trudging for about half an hour before the faintest flicker of light caught his attention, instantly rousing him. Inland, perhaps a half a kilometre or so away, he made out a couple of separate light sources. It was not an illusion. Out here, it had to be one of the research bases.

  Spurred on by a mixture of excitement and relief, he pushed the thought aside of Pace currently walking into oblivion and instead focused on crossing the thick snow as quickly as he could. The going was easier than he thought, as the snow was powder fresh for only a few centimetres above a hard-packed base of
compacted ice.

  As he hurried on, as fast as the constricting suit would allow, slowly a large collection of long, low buildings started to solidify out of the gloom, raised on stilts. One building was clearly lit inside; the heavy windows spilling golden rays of hope out into the freezing night.

  Hammond knew he wasn’t at McMurdo station, which was far larger. The collection of pea-green buildings told him that inside he should find some friendly New Zealanders.

  As he drew nearer, cresting a small rise and looking slightly down on to the base, two things happened virtually simultaneously that snatched away hope and replaced it with a solid punch in the stomach. The first was the sight of a bright yellow Sea King helicopter, tucked just to the side of one of the buildings. The second was the sound of a shrill scream, followed by the staccato rattle of automatic gunfire. The shooting only lasted for a split second but the screaming abruptly ceased, leaving only the low whine of the mournful wind in its place.

  Instinctively, Hammond dived flat and hoped his brazen approach hadn’t already been spotted. The mixture of the helicopter and gunfire could only mean one thing. That damned Chambers woman.

  On his belly, he waited, hardly daring to breathe. All thoughts of fatigue vanished and a surge of adrenaline coursed through him.

  If this was Scott Base, then he knew that McMurdo station was only a few kilometres north, on the water’s edge. He could easily make it there on foot, as long as the weather did not deteriorate again. Or, he mused, he could risk a covert approach to the base to see if he could do anything to help the scientists, and himself.

  In the end, being a realist, the choice wasn’t really a choice at all. Tired, cold and running on empty reserves, he was no match for a gun-wielding enemy.