Black Ice (36 page)

As usual, everything depended on the quality and texture of the snow they happened to be crossing; where it was granular and dry, the runners could pass without clogging up, needing only a quick going-over with a knife every hour to expose the smooth plastic surface. When the snow was wet, however, or, worse still, sticky, the runners would very quickly lose their efficiency, balling up with many kilos of congealed ice and minimising the efficiency of the sledge.

‘We're not crossing Antarctica,' Lauren observed one morning as she looked back on the two deep furrows the sledge was etching into the soft snow, ‘we're ploughing it.'

When it got to the point where they could barely make any headway, they would go through the tedious process of scraping the runners clean. Frank would be offloaded, along with the rest of their equipment and the remaining stack of wood, and the sledge would be turned over to reveal the undercarriage. Sean would take his knife and hack the ice away, taking great pains not to add to the nicks and scores which had already accumulated on the plastic runners.

When Sean was satisfied, the sledge would be turned, loaded, and the grind would begin again. For a few wonderful minutes the sledge would move freely, almost feeling to the exhausted team that the runners were coated with grease, there was so little friction. Then the balling would start anew, the runners growing ‘feet' of ice which inexorably increased the drag to the point where even the hardest pull of all four haulers could achieve just a foot or so of progress.

‘Did you know the Eskimos have more than two hundred words for snow?' Mel commented.

‘That's bugger all,' Murdo told her. ‘The Scots have more than a thousand, and every one of them is a swearword.'

Keeping the sledge intact was also occupying their thoughts. The aluminium frame had already been weakened and damaged in the fire, and, after three weeks of hauling, it was showing signs of metal fatigue.

‘This sledge isn't really built to take this sort of punishment,' Sean explained to Lauren as he showed her the problem areas. ‘Frank's a hell of a weight to be carrying, and we've already got hairline cracks starting to appear at these joints. This is where the frame takes the most flexing.'

‘Is it going to break?'

‘One or more of these struts might go. If they do, we'll be in trouble. Once one part of the structure starts to crack up, the rest won't be far behind. Then we'll be dragging Frank along on his arse.'

‘What can we do about it?' Lauren asked him.

‘Best I can do is to try and tie up the joints with some cord, but that's just a temporary measure. If the aluminium tubing decides it's going to snap, then there's not much we can do about it.'

Sean sacrificed his bootlaces to the cause and tied them in a series of cleverly devised knots around the worst-affected parts of the frame. For the time being it would suffice, but Sean wasn't at all confident that the sledge would survive the journey to the crashed plane.

The question of what would happen to Frank then was one that he chose not to dwell on.

For Lauren, the stop-start day passed in a haze. She pulled on her harness, pushed her legs into the endless cycle of push-rest-push, but her mind was fixed on Deep Throat, on the dilemma that Sean's proposal had opened up inside her.

Lauren knew that whatever happened the decision would divide her permanently in some way—a tear in the fabric of her own morality, a rip, with edges that were not clean. The type of wound that gets infected easily.

But Lauren was in the grip of the most powerful force any human being can experience—the imperative which has no equal: to survive.

Later, as they prepared one of the tents together, Lauren found a chance to speak with Sean. ‘I thought about it,' she told him quietly, ‘and I think it's worth a try. But the others can't know about this. They absolutely mustn't.'

‘You're in?'

‘Yes, Sean. I am.'

Sean showed no sign of surprise; he took her decision as a matter of fact.

‘We'll do it tonight when they're all asleep.'

80

At eleven p.m., Lauren followed Sean's dark shadow away from the tents, keeping her footsteps in the tracks of the empty sledge he was towing. Sean waited until they were out of earshot. ‘Let your eyes adjust,' he whispered to her. ‘We can't risk the headtorches.'

There was a sliver of moon burning through the cloud that night, the ridges and folds of the glacier gently illuminated with a weak cast of blue light.

‘This is crazy, Sean,' Lauren told him. ‘It's like Russian roulette wandering around this crevasse field in the dark.'

‘Most of these slots are pretty obvious,' he replied. ‘I'll use the flag pole to probe in front.'

They set out, Sean in the lead, testing the terrain for sudden holes as they pushed deeper into the most heavily crevassed area. Lauren concentrated her attention on his footsteps in the snow, the shadow-filled holes guiding her forward.

Thanks to the moon, the crevasses were not difficult to see. They bypassed the bigger ones and jumped the more slender cracks at their narrowest point.

Then Sean was moving with more caution. Lauren could not imagine how he knew he was close—there were no clues that she could see.

He stabbed the pole into the snow, then got down carefully to his knees.

‘OK,' he told her, ‘I think this is it. I'm pushing into thin air just in front of us.'

‘How can we be sure it's the one?'

‘I'll take a look with the light.'

Sean punched a small hole in the snow bridge which lay before him, then placed the headtorch inside it. Switching it on, he saw immediately that they had found Deep Throat, the feeble beam hinting at the great depth of the crevasse beneath him.

‘It's even more awesome in the night,' he whispered. ‘Want to take a look?'

‘No.' Lauren shivered at the thought. ‘What about the tracks? Even if he's tired, he'll notice them disappear.'

‘Don't forget he's on the skidoo. He might be moving too fast to stop. Besides, we have this.'

Sean pulled a length of cord from his pocket and cast it out onto the snow bridge. Then he dragged it back. After a dozen or so casts, Lauren could already see the faint lines in the soft snow, stretching out for metres in front of them.

Sean flashed his headtorch onto it for a second, revealing the marks and scratches.

‘That's not very convincing,' Lauren told him. ‘What about the footprints?'

‘You're right. Let's try something else.'

Sean took a gloveful of snow and squeezed it in his hand until he had created a hard ball. This he threw out onto the snow bridge as a test.

A dark hole appeared where it had sunk a little into the soft surface.

‘It's not perfect, but I can't think of any other way.'

Lauren joined him, and for some minutes they were busy moulding handfuls of snow to create small craters out across the snow bridge.

Sean risked another quick glimpse with the torch.

‘That's better,' he said. ‘It's never going to bear close scrutiny, but hopefully by the time Fitzgerald works out that something weird's happening it'll all be over.'

They retraced their steps, concentrating hard so as not to lose their trail back to the tent. Then they walked back to Deep Throat one more time, both stumbling with the utter fatigue of that long day. The end result was a confusion of footsteps and sledge tracks which certainly looked like it had been made by the whole party.

Then they returned to the tent a final time.

‘That's it,' Sean whispered, ‘trap set. Now it's down to Deep Throat to do the job for us.'

They crept into their sleeping bags, intensely grateful for the warmth they offered from that bitter night air.

‘We'll sleep for a few hours,' Sean said, ‘but we have to be out of here before first light.'

But Lauren could not sleep. She lay awake, tense and uncertain. In her mind she could see nothing but the elegant blue glass walls of that monstrous crevasse, so fatally smooth and uncompromising, leading down … and down …

81

At five a.m., they woke the others, rousing them with some difficulty from their sleeping bags. They stumbled out of their tents onto the glacier, sleep-filled and shocked by the brittle intensity of the cold.

‘We're breaking the routine today,' Lauren told them. ‘We've got to get out of here right away, but we'll stop for breakfast after a couple of hours. Try and keep as quiet as you can.'

No one questioned her; there was something in the clipped urgency of Lauren's tone which did not invite further enquiry.

In less than thirty minutes they had the two dome tents and the sleeping bags packed onto the sledge. Lauren and Murdo took the harness between them as Sean led the team away, finding a route further to the east of their nocturnal trip into the crevasse field, a route which skirted the hidden depths of Deep Throat entirely.

After a short distance, Sean left Lauren to continue with the route-finding and made his way back to the camp site. Using a ski pole, he smoothed over the trail they had just made, continuing until he had obscured some thirty or forty metres of their progress.

When it was done, Sean flashed his torch, seeing with satisfaction that his work had virtually covered up the tracks of their recent departure. Now the heaviest trail leading from the tent site was the false one he had marked up with Lauren the previous night.

He hurried back to the others, catching them easily with his faster pace.

Not long after daybreak, the team reached a large depression, a scoop in the glacier guarded by a low pressure ridge.

‘This is a good place,' Sean told Lauren. ‘Let's park the crew here.'

Lauren looked about, realising the location was perfect. Fitzgerald would not see the team huddled in here—and, perhaps just as importantly, the team would not see the drama unfolding back at Deep Throat, which was now a good mile behind them.

She took off her pack. ‘Let's stop for some food,' she said.

They didn't need to be told twice, within a few seconds their loads were scattered around the ice, the team resting gratefully on their packs while Lauren took out the epigas cooker and began to melt down some ice.

‘I'll keep an eye out for you-know-who,' Sean told her quietly. ‘Join me when you can.'

Once she had the first litre of water boiling, Lauren let Mel take over the preparation of the food. Then she slipped away to join Sean, sure that the team were so tired they would barely notice their absence.

‘Let's move fast,' Sean told her. ‘We don't want to miss the main event.'

Quickly, they made their way back up the glacier. The adrenaline was pumping so hard inside Lauren that the distance meant nothing to her.

As she walked, her mind began to play; the main event, Sean had called it. Murder, in other words. Lauren was beginning to feel physically sick at the thought of it. Was there no other route?

‘Sean?'

‘What?'

‘I'm still not sure. Maybe we should be thinking about this another way. He's out here all alone, perhaps he's sick or hypothermic—we don't know what state he's in. Maybe the two of us can get close to him somehow, overpower him?'

Sean stopped dead.

‘Can I remind you of something? He's killed already, and he'll kill again without any qualms. We're unarmed; he's got an axe and God knows what else. We've been on starvation rations for a two-hundred-mile trek, and he's been eating as much as he needs every goddamn day. We wouldn't stand a chance.'

‘But what if the rest of the team find out what we've done? That scares me, Sean…'

‘You know the only thing about this that worries
me
?' he replied. ‘It's the fact that in eliminating Fitzgerald we're going to lose his snowmobile. That's where I am, Lauren. I'm at that point, OK? The point where I'm regretting that a by-product of killing him is that we're going to forfeit a useful piece of machinery.'

‘Well, I'm not in the same place as you then,' Lauren told him. ‘I don't know if we have a right to do this.'

‘So go back and wait with the others if you want.'

Lauren shook her head, and they continued in silence.

Not far from Deep Throat—a hundred metres at most—they found a prominent block of ice which was big enough to hide behind. From that vantage point they could see the trap clearly, safe in the certainty that Fitzgerald would not spot them.

They sat there with their backs to the ice, waiting for the telltale buzz of the snowmobile to come across the glacier towards them.

One hour. Two hours. Time crept slowly by. Lauren and Sean began to freeze into their positions, their muscles cramping as the cold began to bite.

‘There's something wrong,' Lauren said, her teeth chattering as she checked her watch. ‘Where the hell is he?'

‘Relax,' Sean reassured her. ‘He's probably just having a hard time getting the snowmobile started.'

Suddenly, he stiffened as he spotted something. ‘Speak of the devil; I think that could be him.'

Away in the distance, the unmistakable black profile of the snowmobile was just coming into view.

‘Here we go.'

The minutes ticked past as Fitzgerald weaved a steady route through the crevasse field towards them. Now they could hear the engine, shockingly loud in the still air of the glacier.

‘He's lost his silencer,' Sean observed. ‘That's why it sounds like a pig.'

After what seemed to Lauren to be an age, the snowmobile arrived at their camp site of the previous night. Fitzgerald slowed perceptibly as he scanned the clues left on the ice, and for a few seconds he seemed to pause, distracted by something away to his right.

‘Come on, come on,' Sean muttered. ‘Take it. Take it!'