Black Ice (12 page)

‘I'm … I'm not sure,' he told her. ‘I think it's solid. It looks like a fault line from an old pressure ridge.'

‘But look how wide it is,' Lauren told him.

Sean looked again. Then he saw what Lauren was saying: it really
was
wide—the darker shadowed area was a good thirty metres across. Looking to each side he could see it snaking for hundreds of metres, perhaps even kilometres, in both directions. A cold shadow of terror crossed him as he recognised its true scale.

They stopped the engines.

‘You think there's a crevasse under there?' Sean asked. ‘Because if it is, it has to be the biggest mother of them all.'

Lauren shrugged. ‘I don't know, but I think we should check it out before we try and drive over it.'

She took a snow probe from her rucksack, a thin section of aluminium with a sharpened tip normally used for locating buried avalanche victims. Now she used it to test the solidity of the snow in front of her, edging forward on her knees until she was right on the lip of the shadowed area.

To her horror, the probe slipped into the snow as easily as a hot knife through butter. She put her fist into it and moved it around, easily creating a hole. Whatever she had found, it was hollow; there was no doubt about that.

Lauren bent her face to the snow and looked into the hole she had just made.

‘No way!' she whispered in awe. ‘Sean, you are not going to believe what I'm looking into here.'

‘What do you see?'

‘Well, imagine you're lying on the high point of a cathedral dome and you can slide one of the tiles off and look down into the interior.'

Sean inched forward to join her, bending down to look into the hole as Lauren had just done.

His eyes took a while to register the scale, but, when they did, he could hardly comprehend what he was seeing. It really
was
the biggest crevasse he had ever looked into, a cobalt crack which might have plunged four kilometres down to the true surface of the continent, for all he could guess.

On the far wall he could see stalagtites of sharp ice, each one as thick as a factory chimney, each one pointing a frozen finger into the oblivion he had so narrowly avoided.

Sean pulled his gaze away from the hole with difficulty, looking across the deadly trap with a dread feeling clutching at his guts.

‘You think that snow would have held if I'd kept going?'

Lauren chose not to answer verbally but instead broke a piece of ice off a nearby sastrugi.

‘How much you think this weighs?' she asked him, showing him the book-sized chunk.

‘Couple of kilos.'

Sean watched as Lauren tossed it right into the middle of the snow bridge, the area around the impact immediately caving in to create a hole about a metre square. The ice was swallowed out of sight, and an instant later it plummeted to the depths of the crevasse.

They listened, like two children waiting for a stone to hit the bottom of a well, for any sound from the interior, but there was none.

‘It's just like a skin,' Lauren said, deeply shaken. ‘That snow bridge is a few inches thick in the middle and no more…'

‘This one has to have a name,' Sean said. ‘I'll christen it Deep Throat.'

They remounted the snowcats in silence and found a way to route around the giant crevasse, Lauren leading the way. The detour was a big one, but when it was over she felt they had overcome the worst.

‘Don't feel bad about what just happened,' she told Sean as they paused to drink tea from the flask. ‘It could happen to anyone.'

Sean shook his head, subdued after the near miss. ‘I was getting too cocky. I've done that before on big climbs sometimes; you know, you just get to the point where you think you got the whole thing worked out? Then—bam—something creeps up and slaps you back awake.'

‘You're doing great. Just slow down a little, and we'll get through fine.'

Lauren looked ahead, experiencing a surge of relief as she saw the changes in the terrain. Now the glacier shrugged off its stresses and strains like a river reaching middle age leaves its rapids behind. It became docile and quiet, free from the traps and pitfalls of the first crevasse field, level enough to hit thirty miles an hour in short bursts.

Although they never discussed it formally between them, Sean let Lauren lead the way from that moment on.

How she had seen that slenderest of visual clues, he would never know.

26

That afternoon they hit the two-hundred-mile point, the agreed position for the second depot. This time the location was an easier choice: a huge black boulder which sat, incongruous and alone, on the surface of the glacier.

‘What's this thing doing here anyway?' Sean asked. ‘Where did it come from, unless it fell from outer space?'

‘It's a wanderer. Or at least that's my name for them. This one will have come from the mountain range forty miles behind us. It got eroded off one of the peaks by frost action, fell onto the glacier and has been travelling down towards the sea for probably the best part of a few thousand years.'

‘A travelling rock?' Sean was delighted with Lauren's description. ‘That's weird. I like that.'

‘Sometimes they travel for hundreds of miles.' Lauren smiled as she watched Sean circle the boulder in awe.

They placed the barrel in the lee of the boulder and lashed it down as they had at the first depot. Like before, Lauren made a note of the GPS position in her pad, and they had some food while they checked the map.

‘We've got another fifty miles of flat ground, then we're into the next crevasse field,' Lauren told Sean. ‘And it's bigger than the last.'

‘What I don't understand,' Sean said, ‘is why the hell Fitzgerald and his buddy kept going when they hit more crevasses. They must have known by then they'd have to call in a plane … so why didn't they do it here, where it could land realistically?'

Lauren shrugged. ‘That's Fitzgerald for you, the man just doesn't know when to quit. He would have kept going right up to the time he physically couldn't put one foot in front of the other.'

Three hours later they were driving the snowcats into the labyrinth, progressing cautiously as huge drops fell away beneath them on every side. If anything, the objective dangers were even greater than the first crevasse field, the snow bridges weaker now they were loaded with snow from the storm. They kept to a crawling pace as the hours ticked by, never taking chances unless they could be sure no monster crevasse lurked ahead.

The transit passed without incident, and they found themselves in the middle of the crevasse field. Lauren checked the GPS.

‘This is it,' she told Sean. ‘According to my calculations, we're right on top of the coordinates for the spot where the beacon was fired.'

Sean looked around. ‘I see nothing. How accurate do you think that beacon is?'

‘It definitely won't be as precise as the GPS,' Lauren replied after some thought. ‘Maybe accurate to within four or five hundred metres either way.'

‘Which means we could have an area of a couple of square kilometres to search.'

‘Or more.'

They looked out over the glacier, realising the task of finding the tent was going to be no easy feat in that minefield of crevasses. Worse, there were numerous ridges where pressure from within had pushed up great mounds of ice.

If the tent was hidden from view by one of the larger pressure ridges, they could easily pass within ten or fifteen metres without spotting it.

They began the search, keeping together for safety, slowly crossing and re-crossing the glacier in a grid pattern, stopping every ten minutes to scan the surrounding terrain with binoculars. The weather conditions were fickle and changeable—for ten minutes it might snow heavily, preventing them from moving at all, then it would clear without warning, giving them another chance to see.

Suddenly, Sean spotted the tent.

‘There's someone standing next to it! He's heard the engines.'

27

The lone figure raised a hand as he saw them approach, a gaunt spectre of a man standing by the half-collapsed tent. Not far off, odd-shaped bits of metal were strewn across the ice field—the remains of the crashed aircraft, partly covered in snow.

They killed the engines as the man stumbled forward.

‘Who are you?' he managed to say. ‘Where are you from?'

If Lauren hadn't known she was being addressed by Julian Fitzgerald, she would not have guessed it was him. Fitzgerald was proud and erect, with a ramrod back; this creature was stooped and hunched. Fitzgerald was well built, almost stout; this man was emaciated and hollow.

‘We're from Capricorn base,' Lauren told him. ‘We came overland.'

Fitzgerald screwed up his eyes as he looked at her.

‘You,' he said, searching his mind for the name, ‘I've met you, you're…'

‘Lauren Burgess. And you're right, we have met before…'

‘Welcome to our camp,' he told them and fell forward onto his hands and knees.

Lauren and Sean helped him to sit and gave him hot chocolate to drink from a flask.

‘Have you got food?' he asked them urgently. ‘We don't seem to have eaten for some time.'

‘We've got everything you need,' Lauren told him. ‘But what happened here? Why did the rescue plane crash?'

‘The landing site was too small,' Fitzgerald replied. ‘They tried to bring it in, but it was just too tight. They hit that sastrugi at the far end and lost control. That big lump out there is one of the engines.'

‘Where's the rest of the plane?'

‘Down here.' Fitzgerald stood with some difficulty and led them to the edge of the nearby crevasse. ‘And it's not a pretty sight, I can tell you. The fuselage is broken in two.'

‘Those poor men.' Lauren was distraught. ‘They wouldn't have stood a chance.'

Sean spotted a red rope dangling over the edge of the lip.

‘You've been down there?' he asked Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald unclipped the rope from its anchor.

‘Of course I've been down there. How do you think I got the journalist out?'

Sean was astounded. ‘You pulled a man out of there on your own? How deep is the wreckage?'

The explorer shrugged. ‘Deep enough. Not the first time I've carried out a crevasse rescue. We had a pulley with us.'

‘What type of condition is he in?'

‘In a lot of pain. Both legs broken, I think.'

Sean was expecting the explorer to pull up the rope, but instead Fitzgerald tossed the end of it into the crevasse.

‘Won't be needing that again. Both the pilots are dead. Nothing we can do for them now.'

Lauren went to the tent to check on the condition of the other men. The interior was squalid, reeking of human waste.

The man on the left was the Norwegian Carl Norland, she imagined, the more skeletal of the two. His condition looked bad, his nose damaged by frostbite, his mouth bleeding. He appeared to be close to coma, unconscious, starving and extremely dehydrated. In his right hand he held the emergency transmitter, his bony fingers locked around the yellow casing.

Lauren prised the unit from his grasp and de-activated the switch, there was no point in having the emergency bleeper sounding into the airwaves with the land rescue underway.

She tossed the transmitter amongst the jumble of equipment at the back of the tent and turned to the other man. This was the journalist, she realised, awakening from sleep as she bent over him.

‘I heard a noise,' he croaked, ‘Is there another plane?'

‘We're here to rescue you,' Lauren told him. ‘You're going to be all right now; we've got drugs and food. What's your name?'

‘Richard. My legs … you've got to do something about my legs.'

Lauren pulled back the sleeping bag, trying not to retch at the stench.

‘Sorry about the mess…' Richard began to sob.

‘That's nothing,' she told him. ‘We'll have you cleaned up in no time.'

The legs were in a terrible state. Lauren shuddered to think of the pain the reporter must have gone through in those days.

‘You need morphine,' she told him. ‘I'm going to give you an injection now.'

‘Thank you.' The reporter looked at her with such gratitude, Lauren thought for a moment that she would cry.

‘I'll go and get my medical kit,' she told him.

Lauren left the tent.

‘How are they?' Sean asked her.

‘Worse than I'd hoped. The reporter has two nasty fractures on his legs. The other man is extremely weak. I'm going to do what I can to stabilise them both, but the priority has to be to get them back to the base, where we can look after them properly.'

Lauren assembled the radio and raised Capricorn base. She confirmed that they had found the explorers and gave Frank an accurate account of the survivors' condition to pass on to Irene Evans at Ushuaia. Then she signed off and turned to Sean.

‘Sean, I want you to get these machines refuelled and ready to leave as soon as possible.'

‘Sure. But don't you think I should go down and check out the wreckage?'

Fitzgerald stepped up to him. ‘What do you want to do that for? Can't you see every second counts in getting those two men to medical attention?'

Sean was surprised at Fitzgerald's tone. ‘Well, I was just thinking that either Lauren or myself should see the wreck. There's obviously going to be an inquiry into the crash and the deaths … Perhaps we can help the investigators.'

‘I can tell an inquiry anything they need to know,' Fitzgerald told him. ‘I saw the crash, and I can inform them as to the exact situation down in that crevasse.'

‘Did you take any photographs?'

Fitzgerald stepped closer still to Sean. ‘Photographs? There are two men dead down there. You think I'm going to go snapping holiday pictures, desecrating the dead?'