Beneath the Ice

by Patrick Woodhead

  Luca slowly kicked off Katz’s deadweight and staggered to his feet. The right side of his face had smashed down on to a rock, bruising his cheek. As he stood up he swayed, almost unable to keep his balance. He could see Joel and Andy still seated on the snow machine directly behind, the one hunched into the other for warmth. They were both just sitting, waiting.

  Andy wasn’t moving. His arms had slipped off the handlebars and now lay limply at his sides. As Luca approached Joel attempted to say something, but the words fell from his mouth in an unintelligible slur. His entire lower jaw was numb, the cold freezing it like a powerful anaesthetic. He tried again, but with no better result.

  ‘Stay here,’ Luca shouted. He turned away and began staggering up the hill just in front. Katz was still on his hands and knees as Luca passed him. He weakly raised one arm, pleading for help, but his fingers only curled around the outline of Luca’s disappearing form.

  Away from the others now, he slowly rounded a low outcrop of rock about forty yards further on. He checked his GPS and stopped. He should be right on top of the old Soviet base by now. Where the hell was it? He was just about to curse Dedov’s name again when, to his left, he saw the beginnings of a structure rise out of the gloom.

  Luca stared in disbelief. He had been expecting something broken-down, but nothing quite so ruinous. Most of the base was little more than a pile of twisted metal and half-standing, pre-fabricated walls. It looked like it had never been completed, even in its heyday, and as Luca staggered back a pace, he was suddenly overcome by a sense of absolute hopelessness. For so long, he had built up the idea of the old base as their salvation. Now the very last of his faith drained away in bitter disappointment.

  Slowly, his eyes passed across the entire complex. It was a pitiful collection of three modules, connected in sequence and running nearly sixty feet in length. A central tower, maybe thirty feet high, was the only part still intact, but over the years sections of metal panelling had been stripped away by the wind, exposing the plasterboard beneath like a half-picked skeleton.

  Luca staggered closer, searching for anything resembling a door. He clambered over discarded wooden beams and around solitary metal poles jutting up from the ground like spears from a battlefield. Almost directly ahead of him was a dilapidated door leading into the central tower. It was still slightly ajar, with a long trail of hard-packed snow rimming its outer edge.

  Using his shoulder, Luca slammed his body weight against it. The wood budged a few inches, but was frozen solid. Luca shunted again, then stepped back and kicked; once, twice, then again, and again. With each blow, the door creaked a little further open, but didn’t relent. Luca could feel his heart thumping in his chest. With each kick he knew that he was getting weaker and weaker.

  ‘Come on!’ he screamed, stepping back a pace and making one last surge at the door. He crashed forward, with his shoulder then his face impacting on the raw wood at almost the same time. Finally it buckled, sending him sprawling into the room beyond with arms outstretched. He lay flat on the frozen ground for several minutes, the exhaustion too much for him to do anything other than let his eyes slowly pass over the piles of snowdrift that filled every corner of the room. He could see another door to the inside of the base. It was no more than ten feet away.

  The sudden quiet here made the storm outside seem all the more terrifying. He could see his breath condensing in the air around him. It hung there momentarily before sinking back down to the icy ground. For the longest time he just stared at it, the fear of going back outside too much for him to bear.

  Every instinct screamed at him to force the door closed again and shut out the wind. The entire situation had gone beyond anything that could be expected of a client-guide relationship. This was now a matter of survival. If the others made it up here then so be it, but it was for them to get here, not for him to go out and rescue them. This was Antarctica. Here you had to fend for yourself.

  Luca reached towards the door, his gloved fingers curling around the rickety frame. He stared at his hand for several seconds, willing it into action to seal out the storm.

  ‘Shit!’ he screamed, the sound of his voice quickly dying against the icy walls.

  A second later, he yanked the door back on its hinges and stepped outside once more.

  He returned to the Ski-Doos to find Katz and Joel still there. They were sitting on the hard ground, sheltering in the lee of the machine’s tracks. Snow had already started to drift over their legs and neither man was making any attempt to move.

  ‘Where’s Andy?’ Luca shouted, half-squatting to be level with them. Only Joel raised his head.

  ‘You said stay,’ he slurred. ‘Stay.’

  ‘Andy?’ Luca asked again, but already knew that he wouldn’t get any intelligible response. As he looked closer, he could see where the cold had stripped the skin from Joel’s cheeks in two neat lines beneath where his goggles had been. It looked almost surgical; the raw flesh peeling back towards his ears like a dissection from an anatomy class.

  ‘You two, get up!’ Luca ordered, pulling them by the straps of their rucksacks and on to their feet. They stood, swaying with bewilderment, until finally he pushed them forward in the direction of the base.

  The going was slow. Joel’s and Katz’s boots scraped across the rock, their every movement dogged by uncertainty. Minutes passed with Luca man-handling them forward, screaming at them to continue when they drifted to a standstill, and physically dragging them up the steeper incline of the slope. Finally, he managed to push them through the door and into the base.

  Luca remained by the door, panting from the effort. He knew that if he went back down and started looking for Andy he would be seriously endangering his own life. Again, his mind rationalised everything so clearly, pleading with him not to go back outside. He had done enough already, done everything he could possibly be expected to do.

  But something deep within already knew that he would go back one last time. Reason had nothing to do with it. It was just something that had to be done and had there been anyone else capable of doing it, Luca would gladly have deferred to them. This wasn’t heroics. It was absence of choice.

  ‘There’s an MSR in my rucksack,’ Luca called across to Katz and Joel, but neither of them was listening. They just lay against the broken wall, unable to muster the strength to do anything other than breathe.

  Luca dropped to his knees, fumbling with the top of his rucksack, and pulled out a small gas stove. Even out of the wind, Katz’s and Joel’s core heat would already be critical. If he didn’t do something to raise it right now, by the time he got back from finding Andy, all that would be left were two huddled corpses.

  A few minutes later Luca had them grouped around a low, roaring flame in the neighbouring room of the base, with their damp sleeping bags draped across their thighs. The sudden warmth was so alluring, the blue flame acting like a beacon, drawing him further into the room. It took the very last of his will-power to straighten his stiff legs and move back out into the storm.

  Andy . . . Why the hell had he left the Ski-Doo in the first place? Luca stumbled back down the hill, yanking the hood of his jacket a little lower on his face in a vain attempt to combat the wind. Slowly working his way across to the Ski-Doos, he then turned in a circle, trying to decipher which way the missing man might have gone. They were surrounded by gullies on both sides with a huge tabular rock lying to the right. It was immense, like some kind of ancient, sacrificial altar.

  Luca moved closer to it. Just past the leading edge of the rock, he suddenly spotted the top half of a figure seated on the far side. It looked almost serene, with its face turned into the wind and arms lying gently by its sides. Luca moved closer still, not trusting himself to believe what he was seeing.

  It was Andy. He had taken off his jacket and thermal layers and now sat bare-chested against the storm. His fleece hat and goggles were also gone, allowing his hair to flow horizontally behind him, tugged by each gust of wind. He se
emed to be just sitting there, staring out into the middle distance.

  ‘Jesus,’ Luca whispered, clambering towards him and quickly stripping off his own gloves. As he touched Andy’s shoulders, he could feel the ice-cold temperature of his skin, but the other man didn’t react. Instead his eyes continued staring into the void. Then Luca realised what had happened. His left eye had already frozen open. The lashes were fixed, while the eyeball itself had been robbed of its natural moisture, becoming waxy and lifeless.

  ‘Andy!’ Luca shouted, so close to him now that their faces were almost touching. Slowly, he turned towards him.

  ‘Yes?’ he said simply, as if confused by the urgency in Luca’s voice.

  ‘Your clothes! What the hell did you do with them?’ As Luca spoke, he desperately looked behind Andy, but all that remained was a single glove lying trapped underneath a rock a few yards distant. The rest had been taken by the wind.

  Luca began stripping his own jacket off his back, pulling open the zip and twisting his body out of the protective fabric, but then he stopped. Andy had raised a hand in protest.

  ‘Hot,’ he managed to say. ‘Too hot.’

  Luca suddenly felt tears welling up in his eyes, clouding his vision. He sniffed, zipping up his jacket again before reaching out with both arms and gripping Andy tight. His skin felt inhumanly cold and the last residue of colour had drained from his face, making him look more like a cadaver than anything living. This was the final stage of hypothermia, where extreme vasodilation could make a person experience illusory sensations of heat. Luca had only read about it before in mountaineering textbooks, but he knew that once a person was this far gone the result was always the same. Andy would be dead within minutes.

  ‘You got any family?’ Luca asked him.

  For the longest time Andy didn’t react, then his right hand slowly moved across to his trouser pocket, resting on top of it as if comforted by the thought of what lay within. Luca fumbled with the zip, his own fingers now stiff with cold. He pulled out the crumpled photograph that Andy had been keeping safe. Holding it tight against the strength of the wind, Luca caught sight of the image. An attractive, dark-haired woman was posing with a boy of about four years old, the pair of them staring towards the camera with heartfelt smiles.

  Luca held it up in front of Andy’s face and watched as the pupil of his good eye dilated for the briefest of seconds in recognition. Then he let out a shallow breath and started to lie down. As Luca reached forward to steady him, the photograph slipped from his grasp, twisting away on a current of air before bouncing across the rocks behind and becoming lost to the swirling grey storm.

  ‘Think of your family,’ Luca said, gently lowering the dying man down on to the rock. ‘Just rest for a moment and everything will be OK.’

  Andy seemed to hear the words and nodded vaguely, as if grateful to be tucked up to sleep in such a place. Luca stepped back, watching as the last embers of life finally drained from the good eye. Then all that had been Andy was gone. There was no earthquake or roll of thunder. No momentous natural event to signify his passing. There was only the cruel indifference of the wind.

  Luca stared at the dead man’s face, at the pale features and frozen skin. It would be like that for them all, he thought – a silent death in a landscape that could absorb a million others within the blink of an eye. They were alone out here. Utterly alone, and Luca had failed. He had let a man for whom he was responsible die.

  The inevitability of their fate became so clear to him. They were all destined to die the same death – it was now only a question of who would last the longest.

  But then, as he stood over Andy and stared down into his lifeless features, something else was triggered within Luca. He suddenly felt disdain. It was a kind of innate derision, like a mother pushing out the weakest from the litter. He wanted to get away from Andy, from all the failure and weakness that his dead body represented. Luca staggered back a pace, the impulse to survive steadily mounting with each beat of his living heart.

  He would not be the one to die out here like that. Not the one to have his eyes frozen open.

  Whatever happened, he was going to survive this storm.

  Chapter 15

  THE TWO MEN from the South African State Security Agency stood side by side staring out of the window. Dark wooden shutters shielded them from Cape Town’s harsh morning light. They waited in silence as the minutes passed. The shorter of the two had his arms folded across the bulge of his stomach, while the other had his fists firmly jammed into his trouser pockets. They were standing in Interjet’s private jet lounge. Although their drab suits and scuffed shoes looked decidedly incongruous against its plush décor, this was not the source of their angst.

  All around them deep, inviting sofas had been interspersed with contemporary glass tables. The entire setting had been designed to cater to the serious work ethic of the high-flying businessman, while also appealing to the families of the über-rich as they passed through on their latest summer jaunt.

  The smaller man was named Eugene de Toit. He let his gaze wander over to the right-hand side of the room where the owners had built their pièce de résistance – a twenty-foot brass plaque emblazoned by the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying-machines. Just below it stood a bank of refrigerators filled with soft drinks, while perched on top of the farthest one was a cylindrical-shaped SodaStream. One of the jet owner’s children had expressed their preference for the old-fashioned drink dispenser in passing, and only the next day it had been purchased and installed.

  ‘Fokken windgatte,’ Eugene muttered, lightly tapping the toe of his leather boot on the coffee table. Fucking snobs.

  He had grown up a farmer in the Eastern Cape and loathed such overt displays of opulence. It was something that had been hardwired into him from a very young age when he had witnessed the forced sale of his family’s farm. A lawyer from Transvaal had tied them up in court until his parents’ savings had been bled dry and they could no longer afford to fight. They had divorced a couple of months later, broken by it all, leaving Eugene to realise that, in the wrong hands, the law could be bent to only serve the rich.

  His taller colleague moved back from the window and turned to face him. He had a lived-in face, with pale blue eyes the same shade as the sky outside. The skin of his cheeks sagged a little, still bearing the pockmarks of adolescent acne, and as he stepped out from the shadow of the blinds, an unhealthy smudge of yellow became visible at the corners of his mouth. Years of heavy smoking had taken their toll.

  The two men stood facing each other. They had said very little on the plane down from Pretoria that morning, both absorbed in the file that a mining investigator called Beatrice Makuru had sent them late the previous evening.

  ‘You do realise, Frankie,’ Eugene said, breaking the deadlock, ‘that if this kaffir houdkop is right, we’re going to be in a whole heap of kak. You don’t just go around arresting a man like Richard Pearl. And you know who it’ll come round to bite? You and me, boet.’

  Frankie nodded, his watery eyes fixed on the entrance to the room, double-checking that no one else was within earshot.

  ‘Think about it,’ Eugene continued. ‘What’s a man like Pearl doing smuggling diamonds anyhow? I’ve read his profile. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Frankie shrugged, suggesting that the rich had to get that way somehow. ‘You read what the Makuru woman said. Pearl’s working with old Bob up in the Marange mines, using his plane to ferry the diamonds into Namibia and then on to Antwerp. That way, they keep their Kimberley certification.’

  ‘Come on. Mugabe and Pearl?’ Eugene hissed. ‘Wat die fok?’

  ‘I know how it sounds, but you’re wrong about her. She’s not just some kaffir. You know that blast up in Bloem a few years back?’ Eugene nodded vaguely. ‘She was the one who figured out it was an inside job.’

  Eugene grunted, still far from convinced. ‘Ja, well, I had them check through the plane logs, and the closest Pearl’s jet h
as been to Harare is here in fokken Cape Town.’

  Frankie shrugged again, much to the annoyance of his colleague. ‘We have to hear her out. And if Makuru gives us any kak, then I’ll be the first one to kick her back under the rock she came from.’

  They both fell silent as Bear entered the room. She wore a tailored grey suit and two-inch heels, while her long, jet black hair was neatly brushed back from her face and secured in a ponytail. Aside from a slight puffiness around her eyes, she bore no other signs of the terrible night’s sleep she had endured. With a work file pressed against her chest, she walked towards them, hand outstretched.

  ‘Pleasure,’ Eugene croaked, with a thin smile.

  With a gracious sweep of his hand, Frankie gestured for Bear to be seated. She perched sideways on a luxurious white sofa, knees clamping together as the skirt she was wearing hitched a little higher than she would have liked.

  ‘Now, my dear,’ Frankie began, his voice cool like water, ‘I am sure we don’t have to tell you that these are some very serious accusations to be making.’ He paused, feeling the impatience radiating off Eugene beside him. Half turning in his seat, he saw his colleague staring unblinkingly at Bear across the low coffee table. He knew how hot-headed Eugene could be, but they had to treat this Makuru woman with respect. As far as Frankie could tell from a few well-placed calls made earlier that morning, she was connected to just about every single person on the South African mining scene.

  ‘Mr Richard Pearl is a very prominent American who . . .’ Frankie hesitated, looking skywards as he struggled to find the right word. ‘Well, let’s just put it this way. If you want us to move on this, you are going to have to show us irrefutable evidence.’

  He dragged the word out as if the number of syllables alone would be a sufficient deterrent.

  ‘I have everything right here,’ Bear countered, placing the folder on the table in front of her. She wedged its corner under the bronze statue of a Cessna Sovereign private jet that stood between them, wingtips tilted upwards as if soaring across the open skies.