Antarctica (52 page)

“If you had missed this crack we would have been there in about half an hour,” Jack said.

Val’s jaw clenched so hard that X could see all the muscles on that side of her face bulge out. Carlos and X merely looked at each other. They shook hands. “Let’s get going,” Carlos said.

Val ran around at full speed until they all stood on the ice beside the tilted hovercraft: nine people encased in full extreme weather gear, crampons on their boots, two of them pulling banana sleds piled with equipment and bags. They had skis and ski poles tied to the sleds, but they were on bare ice here, and crampons were mandatory. High thin clouds covered the sky, and down the broad glacier, between its cliff-sided mountain walls, a bloom of thick cumulus cloud sat right on the ice. It was windy, although fortunately the wind was from above, and so would be behind them as they walked. It was cold. No one looked happy.

Val surveyed the group one more time before starting out. “We’ll walk down to Shackleton Camp and take breaks every hour on the way,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”

No response. Jack had not said a word since they had climbed off the hovercraft back into the frigid
blast. Probably they should have been hauling him in one of the banana sleds right from the start, but he had refused to cooperate, and the sled was there if needed; and anyway it was a good sign that he was still well enough to be himself. All the clients looked weary and tense, she thought, except for Ta Shu, who was wandering away from the rest and turning in slow circles, talking rapidly in Chinese. The others were huddled around her. Wade and X stood beside each other, watching her like a little Greek chorus. Wade had not gotten any further calls, either in or out. He seemed resigned to whatever happened next, pinched by the wind but resolute. X stoical as always. At least those two were fresh compared to her clients, who had already walked farther than their ordinary strength would have taken them. To tack on twenty more miles was a hard thing. But they needed to get Jack to the med clinic in McMurdo, and they were still very short on food. So there was no choice but to walk the remainder of the way.

Val took off, hauling the banana sled and keeping her pace down so that she would not get too far ahead of the rest. Carlos pulled the other sled; between the two of them they had everything they thought they might use on the hike.

Despite the sleds, the other seven were much slower than she and Carlos. Her clients were stiff and exhausted; and Wade and X not very good on the nobbled blue ice. Jim walked next to Jack, giving him something to grab onto if he slipped. A man who had hidden the fact that he had a broken collarbone, the fool. If he had known. Val sighed and shook her head. Lots of climbers were heavily psyched to do the hero thing, they knew all the great injury stories, Doug Scott getting off the Ogre with two broken legs, Joe Simpson smashed like a
doll and crawling back to his partner in Patagonia; the stories were endless; but why not tell your companions you were hurt? What did that accomplish, except perhaps to make them feel guilty afterward for wondering why you were going so slow? Which was stupid. She was not going to feel guilty. It was so stupid that, combined with his periods of unconsciousness, she had to worry again about how hard he had been hit in the crevasse. Get stunned and go silent, like a hurt animal. It happened. Sad in a way.

But she was pulling too far ahead again, even ahead of Carlos. She waited while the others staggered to her. The worst part was the wind. Back in the world they said (way too often) It’s not the heat it’s the humidity. And in Antarctica they said just as frequently It’s not the cold it’s the wind. And it was just as true. On a windless day the proper clothing made it possible to withstand the coldest temperatures Antarctica had to offer—even to overheat in them. But with even the slightest breeze that warmth was ripped out and flung away. Even the best of the new spacesuit gear was not much shield against its bitter power. And if a wind rose to gale force, it became unbearable. You simply couldn’t face it.

Unfortunately, she could see that that kind of a wind was very possibly approaching them from downglacier. It was like being in a train wreck in slow motion; the wind was behind them, strong but at their backs, so that they could hunch over and endure it, and in some ways it even helped a little, pushing their legs forward as they lifted them; a wind at one’s back was not such a bad thing, no matter how cold. But despite this katabatic wind, the cumulus cloud lying on the glacier down near the NSF camp was coming their way, in what appeared to be utter defiance of the laws of physics. “God
damn it,” Val said to herself as she watched it come. Something different was going on down there, of course; the cloud was impelled by some other wind, a northerly coming off the Ross Sea it looked like, pushing up and under the katabatic. Or whatever. Storms in Antarctica could do almost anything. In the ordinary course of things she would have been checking satellite photos on her wrist to see what was up, maybe calling Mac Coms for a detailed weather report, and if the forecast was bad she would probably be ordering her group to stop and put up their tents. As it was, she continued to watch the cloud come at them, hoping it would slow down, swearing at its apparent ability to move against the wind. “God damn it. There is a curse on this trip.”

She took a look back. Getting too far ahead again. Carlos was behind her, hauling the other banana sled. Then X and Wade. Behind them Ta Shu, still looking around every few steps, still talking to his distant audience, or presumably taping a talk. Then Jorge and Elspeth, obviously wasted; and Jim hanging back with Jack, who was holding his right elbow with his left hand. All eight moving in slow motion, as far as Val was concerned. The wind was getting gusty, hard buffets interspersed with dead air. She found it hard not to feel for Jack, who was certainly a jerk, but whose collarbone must have hurt with every misstep on the ice. He was definitely angry at Val for spurring him on, back on Mohn Basin. And X was angry at her too for that matter, for the Mac Town stuff. Of course. There really was a curse on this trip.

Wade was holding his wrist to his mouth and shouting into it, in yet another fruitless attempt to reach the world; or maybe he had heard a ring and was trying to respond. Then he slipped, and hastily started using that
ski pole again. Anyway there would be no help for them from the outside now, no matter if he made contact or not. Val took off again, very chilled, happy to stop facing the wind. The glacier here was nearly flat, only a slight tilt downhill. The blue ice was dimpled as usual, but other than that easy going. A rubble line of black and rust-colored rocks paralleled them to the left. The black cliffs walling the glacier on both sides had clearly been shaved smooth by earlier higher versions of the glacier, which must have run a thousand feet higher by the looks of it, for the cliffs were shaved that high, right to the feet of ramparts which then jumped up, scaling to peaks in the sky far above them. It was not as tight and deep a canyon as the Axel Heiberg’s, but something about the vast breadth of it was even more impressive; as if they were ants. Everything was enormous. Shackleton Field Camp was about seventeen miles ahead of them, down where the McGregor Glacier poured into the Shackleton, in a giant confluence under Mount Wade. But all that was invisible under the massed clouds rolling up the canyon, except for Mount Wade lofting high over all—white snow over white cloud. Storm coming.

This group was not going to be able to hike in a storm of any severity. Despite herself Val recalled Krakauer’s searing account of the notorious Everest debacle, ten people killed in a single day, and mostly because the guides had gotten a bit overconfident; they had been taking complete amateurs to the top of Everest for hefty fees, and had dealt with all kinds of problems shepherding them up and down, including hauling comatose ones from the peak all the way back down the mountain, so that they thought they had all possible situations in hand; but had never been on the summit ridge in a storm. And so when the inevitable happened
and a storm struck on summit day most of the clients had died, and the lead guide had stayed high on the peak trying to save one of them and had died too. Near the end his base camp had patched his radio link into their satellite phone so that he had been able to have a final talk with his pregnant wife back in New Zealand. An early example of the total com age’s mixed blessings.

When Val had read Krakauer’s account, early in her guiding career, she had vowed never to make the same sort of mistakes. And she hadn’t, at least so far. She had never guided on the eight-thousand-meter peaks, or on any other radically dangerous climbs or tours. Other guides were still taking amateur clients up Everest, of course, and people were still dying up there on a regular basis; these days the southeast ridge resembled a cemetery cracked down the middle and thrust into the stratosphere, the bodies (a couple hundred now) spilling down both sides of the slope. But she had refused all such work. She had only taken on competent clients, she had never pushed the outside of the envelope when she was with clients, she had paid very respectful attention to the weather. In Antarctica you had to. She had sat out storms many many times, sometimes for up to two weeks straight, resisting all pleas to forge on from the (mostly bored) clients. And so on. She had been a safe guide!

But here she was. There really did seem to be a curse on this trip, a malignant combination of problems. Well, that was what had struck down Hall’s group on Everest too. But here there was the added factor, unprecedented as far as she knew, of human sabotage. From what Carlos and X and Wade had said, it sounded like the saboteurs had tried to destroy the oil camps without causing any loss of life. But if anything
went even slightly wrong down here, then the danger from the cold was immediate.

The wind stopped. Val stopped too. It shifted onto her left cheek, like a slap to the head; went dead, though the howl of it was all around them; then hit her again from the right. Then it struck her full in the face, the hardest blow of all. And suddenly they were hiking into the wind instead of away from it.

Val cursed into her ski mask. Already her sunglasses were icing up, and even at their lightest coloration their polarization dimmed the world to various shades of brilliant or dull gray. Still she could see quite clearly that the cloud that had been coming up the glacier was now upon them.

She took a sharp turn to the left, toward the rubble line, looking back and waving to make sure that everyone was following. She had almost left it too late, she saw, in her desire to get down to Shackleton Camp before the storm hit. Carlos had grasped the situation, and was actually running for the rubble. Bad weather changed everything. On a windless sunny day they could have marched down to Shackleton in style. But not today.

Then they were fully in the cloud. The wind shrieked. Visibility dropped to a few score yards—not a classic whiteout by any means, but a blizzard. The ice dust that composed the cloud was driven horizontally into them, it was like having an industrial sand-blaster shot into one’s face. Val’s clothes plastered against her, the wind penetrating right through the fabric. What she could see in the cloud was a kind of rapidly fluctuating bubble which appeared lit from below, as the glacier seemed brighter than the dark cloud rushing by. Her face hurt, and she had to drive each leg forward to take steps. Buffets of wind struck
like blows from an invisible heavyweight. The noise of the shriek was incredibly loud, like jet engines on all sides,
krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrr
.

But she reached the rubble line. She turned and waved to the others. They staggered in one by one. She went back to help Jim help Jack over the remaining fifty yards or so, fighting to keep her balance. Jack was hunched, and couldn’t throw his right arm over her shoulder. She walked on the windward side of him with an arm around his waist, trying to protect him from the blasts. Any injury would be bound to hurt in this frigid wind, and a collarbone was much too close to the center of things. The noise was like a fleet of jet engines, it was too loud to talk.

They reached the rubble line and Val got Jack sitting down in the lee of a boulder that was a foot or two taller than she was. As good a start for their shelter as any she could see at a quick glance, and so she made her way around to the others, and using hand signals got them all to move to the huddled Jack. The rubble line was a big collection of rocks, from chunky boulders to pebbles and sand, all piled in a surprisingly well-defined line on the ice, resting in a shallow depression. Startling features at first sight, they were often found many kilometers away from the rock banks that fed them; they were something like the lines of debris that collected around the eddies in a stream, Val wasn’t clear on the dynamics, but she seemed to recall they marked the quickest-moving parts of the ice. And as befitted one of the largest glaciers on Earth, this rubble line was big too, a kind of pebble road studded with boulders and dolmens.

Val bent over and picked up the biggest boulder she thought she could lift, given the body-blows from the wind, and gestured at X to do the same. She started
filling a gap between the tall boulder and a chest-high one nearby, while at the same time clearing all large rocks out of the space on the lee side of them. Carlos saw the plan and pulled his banana sled over to the gap, tipping it on its side to form a windscreen at the bottom of the wall. X hopped around propping it in position with rocks, moving fast, in X overdrive. He could lift rocks none of the others would even think to try. As they lifted and set rocks he and Val banged into each other hard, and they grabbed each other to keep from going down. He looked at her as if asking a question, but masked by sunglasses and clothing they could see nothing of each other’s face, and the roar of the wind made it impossible to talk. They might as well have been on opposite sides of the glacier. She felt stuffed with energy, and went for another rock, mute in the howl of the storm, which if anything was louder here than it had been out on the glacier; shrieking over the rocks, no doubt. They were all cut off from each other. Nine strangers in a storm. Windchill factor must have been a hundred below; it dropped exponentially with the speed of the wind. Too windy to put up any tents. But the rock wall was growing. Had to be careful, though, as the wind would quickly throw any loosely placed rocks down on their heads. The stacking had to be right. It was something to concentrate on, something with which to distract herself; and it was the only thing she could do at this moment to improve the situation. So she set about building the best rock wall she could. X was a big help, it was amazing what heavy rocks he could lift. Carlos and Wade too were helping, as was Ta Shu. Jorge and Elspeth and Jim were getting sleeping bags off the banana sled and out of their stuff sacks, dropping big slabby rocks on them as they pulled them out so that they wouldn’t blow away. The wall was
thigh-high now, and beginning to help; though it was still insanely loud, behind Jack’s rock there was some shelter from the blast, and more with each row they managed to stack on the one below, and each foot of curving extension to the sides. The work kept them not warm but at least functional, and there was an endless supply of rocks to choose from. A U-shaped wall to start with, then perhaps a full oval later, to ensure that any more reversals of wind didn’t take them from the rear. After that they might be able to set up one of the tents inside the rock wall and get even more shelter, enough to light a stove. It was actually looking pretty good, Val thought; if it hadn’t been for Jack, huddled at the foot of the largest boulder, she would have considered the situation to be somewhat in hand, given the circumstances. Jim and Jorge were pulling a sleeping bag up over Jack’s legs and torso. When the wall was finished they would all be able to get into bags. They would be all right. Except they didn’t have enough food or stove fuel to wait out a storm of any great length. Hopefully coms would come back and they could get a report on the weather. So odd to have all this happen in the mute solitude of the storm’s roar. And the light was odd too, fluctuating rapidly as thinner or thicker clouds shot overhead; despite all it was a well-lit scene, the sun wheeling about somewhere overhead though it was the middle of the night, Val thought; but it didn’t matter. The flickering made it like being inside an antique film. X put his face against her ear: “It’s good shelter!”