Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  Lauren looked over to Sean.

  ‘You think we can carry that extra weight?’

  Sean looked doubtful.

  ‘It’s going to make the snowcats awful slow. How about we lay one depot at the hundred-mile marker and another at two hundred miles? That’s easier on the machines, and it still gives us a margin.’

  Lauren nodded. ‘That sounds like a good compromise. You happy with that, Frank?’

  ‘Yep. I’ll supervise the preparation of the barrels for you.’

  Lauren scanned the room.

  ‘One last thing. While I’m absent, I appoint Frank as deputy base commander. If … if it so happens that I don’t return from this rescue mission for whatever reason, Frank becomes base commander. Is that clear?’

  There were mumbles of agreement.

  ‘Anyone got anything to add?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Go to it. Sean and I leave in one hour. I want everything packed and stowed on the sledges by then.’

  As she watched the team disperse, Lauren couldn’t help but feel a quiet stab of pride. Not only was this the happiest base she had ever worked on, it was also the most efficient. She shuddered to think how many committees the bigger bases would have required to achieve a similar result—how many faxes back to London and Washington seeking permissions and advice.

  Capricorn was different, smaller, much slicker.

  Lauren walked through to the laboratory and began to stow her equipment. She put the microscopes in their storage boxes and made sure the electron micrograph was covered with its dust jacket.

  It broke her heart, but for the moment there was no option but to put the science on hold. Out there, somewhere in the wasteland, men were dying. And the Capricorn rescue attempt was their only hope.

  20

  Ice had sealed the door in its frame. Sean had to push his shoulder hard against the wood to get access to the interior of the shed.

  This was where the snowmobiles were housed, an unheated shack approximately thirty metres from the main accommodation buildings of Capricorn. There were four in total, brand-new 600cc Yamaha snowcats sprayed up with dayglo go-faster stripes.

  They were rugged, powerful machines, winterised with special lubricants and seals by the manufacturer for the extreme lows of Antarctica. Each had heated hand grips and a heated seat—a small concession to comfort to anyone crazy enough to want to drive one in minus sixty degrees or less.

  In the early days of Capricorn, the snowcats had been clocking up two or three hundred miles a week as Lauren and her team searched with their echo locators for the best position to sink the bore. Since then they had been more or less redundant, a transport contingency in case of emergency rather than an essential part of the day-to-day operation.

  They were Sean’s responsibility, a duty of care he was happy to perform. Once a week he would warm up a few litres of engine oil and introduce it to the frozen engines. He could literally hear the alloy casing crackle as the warm oil met the supercooled metal.

  He would fire them up one by one, letting them idle for ten minutes, and then take each for a gentle twenty-minute run around the camp.

  After the drive, when the Yamahas had cooled sufficiently, he would perform a basic service, checking the spark plugs for correct clearance and signs of damage, adjusting the fuel mixture and tipping each snowcat on its side to put a torque wrench on the thick rubber belt which gave traction against the ice.

  The sledges were stacked in a pile next to the snowcats, each sturdy—and long—enough to carry two incapacitated bodies if someone had to be evacuated in a hurry. Shackled together, snowcat and sledge provided a highly versatile unit; light enough to cross over snow bridges, gutsy enough to cover a hundred miles a day even on bad ground. They could be loaded with up to three hundred kilos of payload, and thanks to extra-large fuel tanks and a couple of spare jerrycans, each had a maximum range of up to a thousand miles.

  Sean had never anticipated that they would be used in anger. But now, thanks to Julian Fitzgerald, they were.

  So. Which two machines to take on this journey? Sean savoured the decision rather as a trainer might deliberate which of his horses to take out of the stable for an early-morning canter. For four supposedly identical pieces of machinery, the Yamahas were astonishingly different.

  ‘You want to go for a run?’ Sean picked out his favourite and began to prepare it for the trip. ‘No point rotting in here when there’s fun to be had.’

  The subject of Sean’s conversations with engines had been debated often in the base canteen, Sean getting the rough end of his colleagues’ humour for his eccentric habit.

  ‘What would you think if I started talking to my cooker?’ Murdo had laughed. ‘Like, Hello, my darling, may I say what a gorgeous couple of dumplings you’ve baked up for me this afternoon?’

  Sean ignored their laughter, sticking to his beliefs.

  ‘Machines have a personality,’ he told them. ‘They’re more than the sum of their parts. An engine is a life form. It understands you when you speak to it.’

  Some weeks after this, an incident occurred which shut Sean’s critics up for good.

  A small petrol generator had been included in the base supplies. It was a battered old 50cc unit about the size of a large suitcase, a veteran of at least one other Antarctic base, if not more. It was intended as a portable power unit for odd welding jobs around the base.

  That was Frank’s department, but, try as he might, the base construction manager could not get that generator running. He spent a morning etching two sores in his palms trying to pull-start it. Murdo came to his aid, together they stripped the engine down, blew out and adjusted the carburettor and checked all the jets.

  They put it all back together again.

  Pull. Pull. Still nothing. Pull. That generator was as stubborn as a dead mule. Not so much as a cough of life. Hour after hour went by, until both men were sweating with frustration.

  When Sean came out of the drilling shed for a break, he found them sitting furiously by the generator, consulting the manual for the umpteenth time.

  ‘You got a problem?’ he asked them.

  Frank snorted. ‘You might say that. This damn machine is never going to start.’

  Sean looked at him curiously. ‘Now, why would you believe that? That’s an engine—it wants to run more than it wants to stop.’

  Murdo gave a cynical laugh. ‘And I suppose you’re going to lay hands on it and it’s going to roar into life?’

  Sean knelt by the generator. ‘I’ll take a look at it if you want.’

  Murdo was delighted. ‘All right. All right, you do that. Let’s see what type of conversation you can get out of this little bastard, shall we?’

  Frank laughed with him, and they retreated to the steps of the main shed, where they sat sharing a smoke.

  For a few minutes Sean didn’t do much other than kneel on one side or another of the generator, rubbing the back of his hand against the metal casing. After a while Frank and Murdo thought they could hear him talking in a low voice. Then he looked out across the ice for a while.

  Sean placed his hands carefully beneath the unit, cradling it for a moment. Then he gently lifted it and turned it on its back so that it was completely upside down.

  He took the black bakelite handle of the pull start and held it in his hand for a further passing of time. Again, Frank and Murdo thought they could hear him murmuring something.

  With one smooth, unhurried draw of his arm, Sean pulled the cord back to its full length. The engine coughed once, apologetically, then began to run, purring beautifully like a cat.

  Not quite believing what they had witnessed, the two men walked across and stood above the humming generator in stunned silence.

  Sean turned it back upright.

  ‘You won’t have any more problems with her now,’ he told them and walked off to the mess room for his lunch.

  ‘Who was that masked man?’ Frank stammered.
r />   That was the last time anyone at Capricorn laughed at Sean’s tendency to talk to machines.

  Now Sean shackled on the sledge and pressed the starter on the second snowmobile, enjoying the throaty burble of the engine as it quickly warmed. He slipped the clutch and drove it the short distance to where the first was already being loaded.

  ‘All set?’

  Lauren was dressed in her cold-weather gear, her face hardly visible through the balaclava and goggles, worn beneath a motorbike helmet with a full face visor.

  Sean checked the straps securing the loads to the first sledge, noting that Frank had done a good job.

  When the second was ready, Sean slipped his ski goggles on and gave Lauren a nod.

  ‘I’ve got the bearing,’ she told him, indicating the prismatic compass mounted on the front of her snowmobile. ‘We shouldn’t have any problems for the first sixty miles or so.’

  Lauren looked quickly around the assembled team.

  ‘So,’ she said, a little breathlessly, ‘no speeches. We’re out of here.’

  Lauren climbed onto the snowmobile and accelerated away from the base in a dead straight line. Sean gave her a few seconds’ start and followed on. In her rear-view mirror, Lauren could see Capricorn receding quickly as she picked up speed, the buildings rapidly disappearing from view as the blizzard swallowed them up.

  For an instant a feeling of sadness swept through her, a half-sense that she might never see that precious place again.

  ‘Focus on the task,’ Lauren reminded herself, banishing that pessimistic feeling to the back of her consciousness as she steered the snowmobile on, into the teeth of the storm.

  21

  The first thirty miles were straightforward enough, a dead flat run of ice with little in the way of obstructions. Lauren stayed in front, navigating by way of the compass she had mounted on the front of the snowmobile and checking constantly in her mirror to confirm that the yellow beam of Sean’s headlight was still following on.

  The conditions were diabolical, visibility down to five or ten metres at most, ice collecting on their goggles so rapidly that they were forced to stop and clear them every mile or two. Lauren kept the speed low, throttling back and fixing her attention on the terrain ahead, ever alert for any change in the surface texture which would indicate a trough or crevasse.

  Competing with the windrush of the storm, the snowmobile engines were revving hard, the engine note mixing with the sound of the wind until the two were virtually indistinguishable. Sean kept an eye on the temperature gauge and the revometer, his senses tuned to the brittle roar of the exhaust as the 600cc power unit struggled with the seven-hundred-kilo payload of the sledges. They were pushing it to carry so much weight, Sean knew, and the probability of a mechanical problem was high.

  Thirty-seven miles from base. Two and a half hours into the journey. The ground began to change, the flat surface breaking up into something much less predictable. There were sudden dips, the snowmobiles crashing down without warning, holes which threatened to rip off a belt. Lauren called a halt.

  ‘It gets a little rougher from here,’ she shouted to Sean. ‘Stay as close as you can and watch my back light. It’ll give you a clue what’s ahead.’

  Lauren had an insulated pack strapped on top of the petrol tank. She pulled a thermos flask out and poured sweet coffee into a mug.

  ‘Sure wish we could see some scenery,’ Sean told her, raising his face visor so he could get at the fluid. ‘It gets a bit wearing on the nerves to be driving into this whiteout.’

  ‘You think the machines can take it?’

  ‘If we treat them right.’

  ‘How about you?’

  Sean grinned at her. ‘Actually, I’m enjoying it. But I wouldn’t want to try this without the heater packs.’

  Lauren agreed with him. The heated seats and handgrips were essential, transferring just enough warmth to their hands to enable their fingers to operate … and just enough warmth to their asses to prevent them from freezing to the seats.

  They set out again, Sean tailing Lauren as close as he dared, staring hard into the gloomy light as the blizzard—and the lateness of the hour—conspired to reduce the world to black. It was a rough ride, the snowmobiles bucking and sometimes becoming airborne as they hit hidden ridges and pits.

  Facing into the spindrift, the headlights were largely ineffective, the tiny beam of light casting such a small pool of illumination that the ground was apt to play tricks on the eye. They both had falls: Lauren when her sledge suddenly slewed sideways as she crossed a pressure ridge, causing her machine to tip over and dump her in the snow, and Sean when the nose of his snowcat suddenly dived into a small crevasse, catapulting him over the handlebars to land with a crash on some hard ice.

  Lauren stopped her machine and went to his aid.

  ‘That one took me by surprise,’ Sean told her as he picked himself up. ‘Didn’t even see it.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Nothing broken. More worried about the snowcat: a dive like that could break a front runner.’

  They turned their headtorches on the small crevasse, just a thin black indentation, no wider than a couple of feet. It looked like it had been cut with a knife, Sean thought.

  ‘It’s just a baby,’ Lauren told him, ‘probably no more than a few metres deep.’

  They unshackled the sledge and pulled it back from the coupling so they could manoeuvre the snowcat out from the slot. It took some heavy pulling, and they were both breathing hard when it was done.

  ‘Hope we don’t get a sledge stuck in one of these,’ Sean observed. ‘That would really slow us up.’

  They pushed themselves on, tensing fingers and toes inside their gloves and boots to try and prevent them from freezing altogether. Lauren had already lost all feeling in her nose and was dreading the moment when she would have to thaw it out. She made a mental note to try and seal the bottom of the face visor with another scarf when they set out for the following day’s ride. Frostbite was a real danger, and she knew from bitter previous experience how painful it could be.

  Now they hit sastrugi, roughing up the ride even more. Sometimes they were small, creating a surface like the furrows of a newly ploughed field; more frequently they were big enough to bring the riders to a halt. Some were shaped like sails, some rounded like motorway bollards. One area they got into was sculpted by the forces of wind so that every sastrugi resembled a breaking wave. Like a frozen sea, Sean thought, a force-ten tempest frozen in mid-flow.

  The place was like a maze, one dead end leading to another. Lauren patiently explored every possibility, detouring round the impassable obstacles, revving the machine over the lighter ridges, always keeping an eye on the faithful glow of the compass. Thank God Frank had thought to rig up a small light for it, Lauren thought; progress at night would be all but impossible without that small touch.

  The sledges took a pounding, the runners subjected to a constant battering, the loads shifting beneath their tarpaulins as the snowcats powered through the miles.

  Be easy to lose something off the back, Sean thought, taking care to shine his torch back every once in a while to check the fuel barrels were in place. Lose one of those and the whole rescue would be off.

  Gradually, the terrain became worse, the sastrugi piled high as upturned cars, the pressure ridges jumbled with chaotic blocks of dense ice.

  At nine p.m., Lauren called a halt.

  ‘We’re getting near to the mountains,’ she told Sean. ‘This mess is getting worse. What do you say we set up camp, get some warm food and sleep? We can leave at first light.’

  ‘I’ll go with that,’ he told her. ‘We should rest up the snowmobiles anyway.’

  Lauren found the dome tent in one of the kitbags, and they worked together to thread the kevlar poles through the loops. It was no easy task with the wind threatening to rip it out of their hands at any moment.

  Finally, they had it constructed, Lauren crawling inside to weight t
he tent down while Sean banged ice stakes into the glacier to anchor the guy lines.

  Lauren unpacked the cooking gear while Sean put the canvas covers over the snowmobiles to protect them from freezing in the night. When he was finished, he threw in the kitbags with their sleeping bags and crawled in after them to join her.

  ‘How many miles you reckon we cracked today? I forgot to check the milometer when we stopped,’ Lauren asked him.

  ‘Mine was reading fifty-six.’

  ‘That bad ground really slowed us up. I figured we’d be over the eighty mark by now.’

  That first night camping together was an awkward one, both Lauren and Sean experiencing the natural self-consciousness of two relative strangers forced into a space not much bigger than the average refrigerator.

  Since arriving at Capricorn, the two of them had had little contact—Sean locked as he was in the drilling shed for ten hours a day and Lauren wrapped up in the lab work and the thousand and one small administrative tasks which are part of running an Antarctic base.

  Before that they had spent just a few days in each other’s company—forty-eight hours on the search for the drilling rig and a day in London when Sean had flown across on a whistlestop trip to meet the rest of the team.

  Now the rescue had thrown them together and Lauren realised, as they tried to get the tent in some semblance of order, that she didn’t really know much about him at all. She was attracted to him, her Capricorn colleagues had got that right, but Lauren had seen how messy base relationships could get—a complication she wanted to avoid at all costs.

  ‘I suppose I should ask you—you being the boss and all—do you like sleeping on the left or the right side?’ Sean asked her with a cheeky smile.

  ‘I’ll take the left side,’ she told him. ‘That way you get the prevailing wind.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  They unpacked the things they would need for the overnight stop, fumbling like a couple of adolescents on a first date, a performance punctuated by plenty of ‘sorrys’ and ‘whoopses’ as they clashed shoulders and hips in their efforts to unroll the unwieldy sleeping bags out of their stuff sacks. The clumsy ballet had an unspoken sexual subtext about it, the awareness that this shared expedition could end in a much more intimate relationship between them … if they chose.