Rook: Snowman (22 page)

“But can we do it?”

“I guess we have a seventy per cent chance. With a little help from the Great Immortal Being.”

“Then here’s what we’re going to do. Jack and I will jump out of the Sno-Cat when the helicopter’s light is pointing the other way, and we’ll hide ourselves in the snow. You turn the Sno-Cat toward the crevasse and leave the gas pedal jammed down with that fire-extinguisher. Then you jump out, and hide yourself, too.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Do you have any better suggestions? Either we stop, and they arrest us, and take us back to Fairbanks; or else we don’t stop, and they shoot us; or else we try to get away.”

Henry hesitated for a moment, but then the helicopter came roaring closer, and three more high-powered bullets penetrated the engine compartment. Steam began to hiss from the hood, and the oil-pressure gauge swung dramatically downward.

“Henry – we don’t have any alternative. Not if we’re going to save Jack.”

“Okay,” said Henry. “Let’s do it. Jack – you take that rucksack with all the supplies. Jim – you carry the tent. What are you going to do with your cat?”

“TT can ride inside my coat. I don’t think any other cat would do it, but TT seems to be more determined to get to Dead Man’s Mansion than we do.”

Again they were blinded by bright blue halogen light. The helicopter marksman fired three more shots – one of which banged through the Sno-Cat’s cabin with a noise like somebody stamping on a tin roof.

“That’s enough for me,” said Jim. “Let’s get out of here.”

As the helicopter swung away, he opened the Sno-Cat’s door and climbed out onto the ladder. The wind was
screaming even more loudly now, so loudly that the noise of the helicopter was almost drowned out. Jack picked up a limp, unprotesting TT and handed her down. TT’s fur blurted in the wind, and she turned her face away, but she didn’t struggle. Jim hesitated for a moment, and then he dropped on to the ice. He stumbled and almost fell, but he managed to catch his balance and jog off sideways into the darkness, with TT dangling under his arm. It didn’t take him long to find an icy outcrop and drop down underneath it, covering his orange survival outfit with powdered snow. Jack jumped out next, rolling over and over with his backpack. He picked himself up and looked all around him, bewildered, but Jim gave him his taxi-hailing whistle and he came running over to join him.

The Sno-Cat trundled on, heading toward the crevasse. The helicopter swooped around it yet again, firing three more shots. But it didn’t slow down. Henry must have wedged the fire-extinguisher on top of the gas pedal by now, and it would be only seconds before he jumped out, too.

Just here, the crevasse was more than forty feet wide and it ran straight across the Sno-Cat’s slowly grinding path. It was impossible to tell how deep it was, but a crevasse as wide as that could reach down right to the underbelly of the glacier, where the unimaginable tonnage of ice above it melted the Sheenjek river into water.

“
Time to abandon ship, Henry
,” urged Jim, under his breath.

But the Sno-Cat roared onward, pouring out thick black smoke and high-pressure steam, and still Henry didn’t jump out.

“Come on, Dad,” said Jack, desperately.

“It’s okay,” Jim told him. “Your dad’s cutting it a little fine, that’s all.”

The Sno-Cat kept on going. Its engine was on fire now. They could see the bright orange flames licking out of the engine vents. It was less than ten feet from the edge of the crevasse, but even though the door was swinging open, there was still no sign of Henry Hubbard.

“Dad,” said Jack. It sounded like a prayer.

The Sno-Cat’s engine suddenly flared up; and the helicopter swung around and picked it out with its searchlight. It was only then that Jim saw the dark figure lying at an awkward angle over the control sticks, and the spray of red blood and yellow brains up against the perspex window. One of the last three shots must have penetrated the Sno-Cat’s cabin and hit Henry in the head.

Before the Sno-Cat reached the very edge of the crevasse, the ice began to collapse under its weight. Abruptly, it tilted sideways, its tracks racing, its engine flaring up. The last that Jim saw of Henry Hubbard was a silhouette of a man being flung to one side like a marionette, one arm raised in a jerky, involuntary farewell. Then, with an ear-splitting crack of ice, and a tortured scream of metal and machinery, the Sno-Cat dropped into the crevasse, and disappeared.

There was a long moment of tumbling and banging as it collided with one side of the crevasse, and then the other. The helicopter came dipping down to see what had happened, shining its seachlight right down into the depths.

Jack shouted, “
You bastards! You bastards! You killed my dad
!” He tried to scramble on to his feet but Jim snatched the strap of his rucksack and dragged him back.

“They killed him, and they’re going to pay for it. But if you let them see you now, this whole expedition is finished.”

“They shot him! They shot him! He was my dad and they shot him!”

“They’ll pay, I promise you! You and I were witnesses. They’ll pay.”

At that instant, there was a deafening explosion, and a thunderous ball of orange flame rolled out of the crevasse. The helicopter tilted away, but the huge upsurge of heat must have caught it off-balance, because it suddenly keeled over, and the tips of its rotor-blades bit into the ice.

It happened so fast that that Jim could hardly follow what was happening. The helicopter’s rotors burst into thousands of flying fragments, which whistled all around them like boomerangs. Its fuselage dropped on its side and hit the ice, but then it bounced off and toppled into the crevasse, following the Sno-Cat. There was a sharp series of crackles and cracks, and then a soft, emphatic
whoommfff
! Another ball of fire rolled up into the air, followed by a rolling column of acrid smoke.

With their hands lifted to protect their faces, Jim and Jack approached the crevasse and peered over the edge. Sixty feet below, fires raged like a medieval vision of hell. The heat was so intense that the ice on either side was melting in bubbling cascades and then boiling. Tangled together in a last destructive embrace, the helicopter and the Sno-Cat were both fiercely burning, and the crevasse was criss-crossed with ladders of wreckage. Jim saw the helicopter pilot still sitting in his seat, as if he were sitting on a high blazing throne, his head thrown back, his uniform charred black and fire pouring out of his open mouth.

Jim took hold of Jack’s arm and led him away. Jack’s eyes streamed with tears, but then Jim’s were streaming, too, from the heat and the smoke.

They sat down for a while, exhausted, shocked, saying nothing, while showers of sparks flew out of the
crevasse and danced amongst the snowflakes. Then Jim stood up and said, “Time to go on, Jack. They’ll be sending more helicopters soon. We can cry about this later.”

Thirteen

With each hour that passed, the blizzard grew fiercer. It was so dark that it could have been two o’clock in the morning instead of two o’clock in the afternoon. The wind screamed at them from the north-west, all the way across the Bering Straits from Siberia. Jim opened his stormproof coat and tucked Tibbles Two into his sweater. She didn’t struggle, even when he tugged the zipper right up over her ears.

Side by side, keeping so close together that they kept jostling each other, Jim and Jack plodded along the edge of the Sheenjek crevasse. Jim had seen the blizzards that Henry Hubbard had faced on his videotapes of his last expedition, but he had never appreciated how strong the wind was, and how stinging the snow, and to what agonizing degrees the temperature could drop. Although it was summer, it was probably forty-five below, but the windchill factor made it seem half as cold again. In spite of his hood and his gloves and all of his layers of clothing, Jim felt as if every last calorie of heat had been leached out of his bones, and that he would never again know what it was like to be warm.

The snow became furious. Jim and Jack clung close together. One of them would have to stray only five or six paces and he would disappear into all of that madly whirling whiteness, and be impossible to find. And the blizzard never relented: it went on and on, until Jim felt as
if he were being forced to stare at a blank television screen for hours on end. All that gave him any sense of direction was the edge of the crevasse, which he knew was taking them further and further west of the place they had been aiming for; and his compass, whose dial frosted over every time he brought it out to look at it; and Tibbles Two. Every time he unzippered his jacket to make sure that she hadn’t suffocated, her eyes were staring fixedly northward.

They reached the edge of the glacier shortly before sunset – although they couldn’t have known for sure, because they hadn’t seen the sun for hours. The wind was so strong now that they had to walk with their backs bent. They were both exhausted and Jim began to wonder if it was less of a risk to turn back to Lost Hope Creek. There had to be another way of fighting the Snowman, apart from trudging for miles and miles through sub-zero temperatures, looking for a mansion that was said to be nothing more than a mirage.

He patted Jack on the shoulder and they crouched down together behind a low curve of rocks. “Let’s take a rest,” he said. “We still have another ten miles to go, at least.”

Jack took off his snow-goggles. “You don’t think he suffered, do you?”

“Your dad? No way. He wouldn’t have known what hit him.”

“I don’t know whether he was a coward or a hero or just plain stupid.”

Jim didn’t say anything. He was too cold to think of anything witty and uplifting; and, in any case, Jack would have to make up his own mind, as time went by, about his father’s last expedition and his tragic death.

He took a Snickers bar out of his pocket and snapped it, handing half of it to Jack. “Watch your teeth. In this climate, it’s like taking a bite out of a crowbar.”

Jack said, “Forget it. I don’t want anything to eat.”

“I know how you feel, but force yourself. If we’re going to make it to Dead Man’s Mansion, you’re going to need the sugar.”

“Do you think it’s worth it?”

“What, carrying on? It’s not going to be easy, but what else are we going to do?”

“Turn back, maybe? Give it all up? My dad’s dead, what does the Snowman want with
me
any more?”

“Believe me, it wants you.”

“And what about you? Why should you be risking your life? We’ve lost all of our navigation equipment and we don’t even have enough supplies, do we?”

“Stop being so pessimistic. I’ve got twenty-three bars of rock-hard Snickers.”

“And what else? A cat, and a mirror that Laura Killmeyer gave you? How are we going to survive with
those
?”

The wind roared around the curve in the rocks like a living beast, and snow flew into their faces in a blinding frenzy. They were sitting only two feet away from each other, yet they could scarcely see each other. Jim said, “You can go on, or you can quit, it’s up to you. Personally, my survival instinct tells me to quit. But then I think about Ray and Suzie and I think about you … what’s going to happen to you if we don’t find out how to get this Snowman off your back. And I think about your father. He made a mistake, but he gave up everything to put it right.”

Jack brushed the snow off his face. “I don’t know. All my life, I’ve always seemed to be doing things because of
him
. Like living in Alaska, because he had such an obsession with the Arctic, and the Inuit. I’m half Inuit, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in some dogsled community eating fish and frozen caribou for the rest of my life. Coming to California – coming to West Grove College – that was the first time I ever felt independent,
the first time I ever felt free. And what did I find out? I couldn’t be free, because my father had sold my soul.”

“That sounds to me like a vote to carry on.”

“I don’t have any alternative. You know that.”

They climbed to their feet. Jim knotted a length of orange cord to his belt and tied the other end to Jack’s rucksack. That way, even if they lost sight of each other, they wouldn’t become separated. They began to trudge slowly eastward, making their way to the point where the Sno-Cat was supposed to have reached the far side of the glacier.

Jim gave Jack a thumbs-up sign. Then he bowed his head and carried on with the wearisome business of walking.

He thought about a whole jumble of things as he walked. He thought about Peary and Amundsen and Scott, and all the other men who had risked their lives to conquer the world’s coldest places. He wondered what it was that had given them the strength and the character to carry on. The cold itself induced a kind of madness. It was like being seriously drunk. Your brain had the confidence but your body didn’t have the co-ordination. And the flying snow was almost intolerable. It confused all sense of direction and distance. One second it was blowing to the right; then to the left; then it was swirling in circles.

They must have been walking for over three hours when Jim called a temporary halt for another Snickers bar and a check on their position. He took out his compass but his hands were so numb that he dropped it into snow. He bent down, furiously raking at the snow with his gloves, but there was no sign of it anywhere. He took one glove off, and carried on frantically searching, but Jack said, “Forget it, Jim. It’s gone. And put your glove back on. You don’t want to lose your fingers.”

“I don’t even know which direction we’re supposed to be headed.”

“It’s north, isn’t it, Dead Man’s Mansion?”

“Sure. North. But at what longitude? In this weather, we could pass within a couple of hundred feet and not even know that it was there. Maybe Tibbles can help.”

Jim pulled down his zipper. Tibbles Two was still there; but she was sleeping; and even when Jim shook her violently up and down she refused to respond.

“She’s bluffing,” he said. He took off his glove and pulled back one of her eyelids, revealing a staring green eye, but she immediately closed it again, and carried on purring.