Black Ice (15 page)

‘Marvellous! Just fantastic! Are we the first to speak to him? Has Associated Press talked to him yet? Put me on to him now!'

The explorer hastily took the handset from Frank and sat at the transmission desk. ‘This is Julian Fitzgerald speaking.'

‘Good morning, sir. I'm delighted to hear you alive and well after your ordeal. Can you tell us more about the rescue?'

‘The rescue?' Fitzgerald found his voice cracking with emotion.

‘Well, I only did what anyone would have done for his fellow man under the circumstances…'

‘Let me stop you there…' The journalist's voice was confused. ‘I was thinking about the rescue that Lauren Burgess and her teammate have just carried out to bring you back to Capricorn base.'

‘That? A simple matter of driving a snowmobile … it's a bit like tootling round the M25, my dear. No, the rescue I'm talking about was the one in which I managed to retrieve the
Daily Mail
journalist when his plane had crashed down the crevasse.'

‘Well, that
does
sound dramatic. Tell me more about that…'

‘It will be a pleasure…'

Lauren couldn't listen to any more; she went to her room, suddenly feeling more tired than she could ever remember.

One thing was for sure, Lauren reflected as she lay in her bed, Capricorn wasn't going to be the same place now. The three new additions would change the demographic mix, altering the chemistry of the place for good. All three would have to remain at the base for the duration of the winter; there was simply no way a plane could get in and rescue them during the following months. How long would it be? Lauren didn't like to think about it. Two hundred days? Two hundred and fifty? The three newcomers going crazy with the inactivity.

Winter was hard on any base personnel—it turned this fairytale land into something altogether darker and more intimidating. Storms were almost constant, temperatures obscenely low. A simple walk outside could cost a life if a whiteout swept the base from view.

A base was like a pressure cooker in the winter months, a slowly simmering human melting pot waiting for someone to snap. Antarctic veterans called it ‘Big Eye': the gradual retreat of an individual into a dark—and sometimes violent—world of their own. Lauren knew of incidents from other bases: the Russian scientist who killed his fellow crew member with an axe after an argument over a game of chess, the Argentine medic who deliberately burned down the Almirante Brown station to force his own rescue in 1983. That was why she had worked so hard to choose the right mix of people. And that was why she was beginning to worry now, as she contemplated what this winter would bring.

It was Fitzgerald who gave her most concern; even though he'd only been at the base for a few hours, Lauren could instinctively sense that his long-term presence might mean trouble. There was something about the way he'd snatched the radio handset from Frank, something irritating about the way he'd cradled Mel's personal mug in his hands. Tiny details like who drank from which mug were surprisingly important in the day-to-day running of a base like Capricorn; they defined personal territory, personal space, and somehow, Capricorn space already felt violated with Fitzgerald in their midst.

There was a proprietorial aura about him, Lauren realised, almost like he owned the place.

I'll have to watch him, she resolved, resigned to the fact that Capricorn, her cosy, personal little dream domain wasn't quite the same now and wouldn't be the same again until the three men were airlifted out.

She would have to double her efforts in the research, Lauren decided, sink herself into the science as she always did.

31

‘Can't we try one last time?' Richard pleaded, his voice desperate. ‘There
must
be a way to get out of this place. I can fax my editor if it's a question of money. I've got too much to do, there's so many things I'll miss … I don't even know if my job will still be there waiting for me after all that time.'

‘Let alone your girlfriend,' Fitzgerald added.

‘Precisely.' Richard's gloomy expression took on an extra seriousness as this new thought struck home.

‘These two know the reality,' Lauren told him, referring to the grim-faced explorers sitting on the bed. ‘Once winter strikes in Antarctica, there really is no way in … and no way out. Capricorn is going to be completely unreachable by air for at least two hundred days and maybe more.'

‘Because there's no daylight?'

‘Partly, and there's the added complication of the high likelihood of gale force winds or blizzards. But the real clincher is the temperature. Hercules C130s have an operating range down to a minimum of sixty below freezing; Twin Otters can only handle forty below. We're already below that, and this winter will take us down to minus seventy, even minus eighty or worse…'

‘Worse?' The journalist tried, and failed, to imagine what could possibly be worse than that.

‘Vostok Base gets the prize. Minus ninety-four point five degrees.'

‘And the RAF? What about the US Air Force? Haven't they got a base at the South Pole? Surely they've got the know-how to fly in and out regardless of the conditions?'

‘Amundsen-Scott base is in the same situation, even in a medical emergency they can't get a winter flight onto the ice there. Just a couple of years back a doctor called Jerri Neilsen was forced to perform biopsies on herself to analyse a suspect breast tumour. When they found it was cancerous, they
still
couldn't find a way to evacuate her, she had to administer her own chemotherapy.'

‘That's it then.' The journalist blinked back tears. ‘We really are trapped.'

‘I'm sorry,' Lauren told him gently. ‘I know this is going to be tough on you. We'll give you all the support we can.'

‘And you're not the only one,' Fitzgerald reminded him. ‘This is just as much a disaster for me.'

Carl said nothing, but just rocked slightly back and forth in his bed.

‘Anyhow, you're all a part of Capricorn now, so we have to find a way to make this work. The first thing is to familiarise you with the base. Mel and I will take you on a quick tour and give you some of the base rules.'

They helped Richard to dress and lifted him into a wheelchair, then turned to Carl, who had already returned to his bed.

‘Are you coming with us?' Mel asked him.

Carl's response was to pull the covers over his head.

‘It's OK,' Lauren told him. ‘If you want to rest, we'll take you on the tour when you're feeling stronger.'

They wheeled Richard into the mess room, Fitzgerald shuffling behind in a pair of slippers he had borrowed from Frank.

‘This is the heart of the base,' Lauren told them. ‘It's our meeting place, playroom and dining hall all in one. There's always coffee on tap here, and Murdo keeps these cookie jars full when he's not hungover. You can put any music you like on the stereo so long as it's not Dire Straits or The Carpenters.'

‘Those are Frank's favourites,' Mel told them with an apologetic smile.

Lauren opened the television cabinet.

‘Mondays and Fridays are movie nights, don't blame me for the selection, that was down to Mel. There's chess, go, backgammon and plenty of packs of cards here, and the dartboard's open to all comers.'

They crossed to the bar, where Murdo was busy cleaning away the previous night's beer stains off the formica top.

‘This is the sacred temple,' he told them, ‘and it opens from eight to eleven sharp every night. No alcohol at
any
other time or we'll run out of booze long before the fat lady sings.'

‘Everyone chose their alcohol allocation before we left Europe,' Lauren explained, ‘so if you want to drink you'll be dependent on the generosity of your fellow man.'

‘My advice with the tobacco,' Mel told them, ‘is smoke Murdo's not mine.'

‘The galley's out of bounds except when you're on duty with Murdo. We're strictly rationed on food supplies, and we don't have the surplus that you can just cook what you want when you want. Meal times are set so that we all eat together. Unless you're sick, we really want you there at every meal; often it's the only time we get to see each other.'

Back in the corridor they stopped at the noticeboard.

‘This is the duty rota.' Lauren read down the list. ‘Laundry, bathrooms, galley, drilling shed, ice cutting for the water maker, balloon duty. As soon as you're both fit enough, I want you signed on and sharing it with us. It gives you one task a day.'

‘Balloon duty?' Fitzgerald queried.

‘All Antarctic bases act as weather stations. We send up a radiosonde every day,' Lauren explained. ‘It measures temperature, pressure and humidity at different altitudes and radios the data back to us.'

She showed them into the laboratory, the microscopes neatly dressed with their dust covers, the shelves lined with research manuals.

‘This is where the real work happens,' she told them happily, ‘but the serious drama's going to come later in the winter when we break through to the lake that's sitting seven hundred metres beneath us.'

‘A lake?' Richard asked, not quite sure if he'd heard right.

‘Don't get her going,' Mel warned him. ‘She'll never stop.'

‘I'll tell you another time,' Lauren said. ‘As for now, I'm running two small-scale projects, both at the request of other agencies. The first is to construct a microparticle analysis of the ice core that Sean's bringing up. I'm looking for anions such as sulphates and nitrates, helping to fill in data on volcanic activity in Antarctica.'

She patted a suitcase-sized instrument which was built into the roof of the lab. ‘And we also have a small spectrophotometer for measuring ozone content above us. Want to know how that works?'

‘Another time, maybe.'

They left the lab, and Lauren opened the door to one of the bathrooms.

‘You can take two showers a week, but never more than three minutes at a time. Every litre of water we use in this base has to be melted down from ice and that takes precious energy, so go easy on it.'

They continued down the corridor to the next room, where a sun bed occupied most of the space.

‘This is the sun room. You have to spend two hours a week in here on doctor's orders.'

‘It's compulsory?' Fitzgerald asked.

‘Certainly is,' Mel told him. ‘If you don't, you'll end up the far side of winter looking like a cave-dwelling lizard. Oh, and you'd probably have anaemia and vitamin D deficiency thrown in.'

Lauren pointed out a red alarm button on the wall.

‘The one thing we can't take a chance on here is fire,' she continued. ‘There's smoke detectors in every bedroom, and the rule is no smoking whatsoever unless it's at the table in the mess room. If you do find a fire, the fire alarm buttons are never more than a few steps away. We'll be running fire drills every week through the winter, and you'll all be required to participate.'

‘Every week?' Richard questioned. ‘Isn't that overkill?'

‘Fire is the biggest single cause of loss of life in Antarctica,' Lauren told him. ‘There have been six major bases burned down in the last three decades, so we can't afford to take any chances.'

In the radio room, they found Frank manning the machines.

‘Good timing,' he told Fitzgerald. ‘There's another newspaper wanting to talk to you.'

He gave the handset to the explorer, who gladly quit the tour. Lauren and Mel wheeled Richard to the dressing area and explained the importance of the thermal weather gear.

‘You
never
leave the base unless you're properly dressed,' Mel told him. ‘Take a look out there, and you'll see why.'

Richard peered out of the window into the pitch-black world which surrounded them. Ice granules were flying through the air at surprising speed. A small way distant he could see two sheds, each spilling light out of frosted windows. A rope connected each shed to the base via a series of waist-high poles.

‘That's Sean's department. The shed on the left is the drilling operation and the generator. The right one holds all our fuel supplies. When you're fitter, you'll be over there to help him out as part of the rota. The rule is you use the handline at all times, even when conditions seem good. People have been lost from bases when they ignored that rule and got caught in a whiteout.'

‘How many days did you say we'll be trapped here?' the journalist asked.

‘Two hundred. At least. The earliest you'll be out of here is late September … the end of the Antarctic winter.'

Mel and Lauren watched a tear roll down Richard's cheek.

‘I'm supposed to be getting married in July. How the hell do you think I'm going to tell my fiancée?'

32

The days that followed were a period of adjustment, a shakedown stage during which Lauren and Sean got back into the rhythm of the base and the new arrivals began the monumental task of adjusting to a fate which was, in effect, not far removed from a prison sentence.

Richard had broken the news to his fiancée in a radio call which he later described as ‘the worst conversation of my life'. Then—partly to distract himself—he set about writing an account of the plane crash and the rescue.

‘I have to file my story,' he told Lauren stubbornly. ‘My editor will be waiting for it, and it's a type of therapy.'

They took him into the radio room and kept him stoked up with tea and painkillers as he recounted his incredible tale via satellite to the waiting editor.

‘I know a lot more about pain than I knew two weeks ago,' he dictated, reading from his notes, ‘and I also know a great deal more about the spirit of my fellow man.