Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  Fitzgerald froze, watching the two men warily as they entered.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Murdo said, ‘if it isn’t Harry fucking Houdini. Complete with half a ton of stolen supplies by the look of it. Help yourself, mate, won’t you?’

  ‘Don’t get any closer,’ Fitzgerald warned them. ‘I’m leaving, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’

  Murdo picked up a ten-pound torque wrench from the toolbox.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so cocksure about that theory.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Sean added, ‘least of all on one of my snowcats. Now put that can of fuel down.’

  Sean and Murdo each took a pace towards the cornered man, the explorer’s eyes widening with fear as they approached.

  ‘Stay back…’ Fitzgerald stammered. ‘I won’t be stopped!’

  Suddenly, the explorer kicked out violently, knocking over one of the open jerrycans which were lined up in front of him. Sean and Murdo watched in horror as five gallons of fuel glugged out of the open can, running in oily blue rivers across the wooden floor of the hut and collecting in a pool at the base of the main fuel tank.

  Fitzgerald pulled a cigarette lighter from his top pocket and held it with his thumb against the flint.

  ‘Want to put me to the test?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘Now I know you’re crazy,’ Sean told him. ‘Have you any idea what fire can do to us here?’

  ‘Step back.’ Fitzgerald made a movement with his hand, as if to throw the lighter on the fuel.

  Murdo and Sean retreated a few paces, back towards the door, as Fitzgerald picked up the filled jerrycans with his free hand and placed them on the back of the sledge. He secured them in place with a length of elastic bungee cord and climbed onto the snowcat.

  ‘Open the main door,’ he ordered Sean.

  Sean swung the door open, exposing the interior of the shed to whirling flakes of snow.

  ‘Stand aside.’

  The two men did as he said as Fitzgerald kicked the snowcat into gear. Seconds later he would have been gone, but the rubber of the snowcat belt had frozen slightly to the floor, enough that when he applied the throttle, the machine gave a little lurch forward and stalled.

  ‘Now!’ Murdo sprung on the explorer and smashed the torque wrench against his hand, the cigarette lighter clattering harmlessly away towards the open door as Sean grabbed Fitzgerald’s parka hood and pulled him backwards off the machine. The explorer hit the floor with a thud, rolling to avoid Murdo’s lunging kick as Sean landed a punch to the side of his face. Fitzgerald roared with fury as he pulled Sean down, the two men collapsing into a stackpile of snow shovels which were standing in the corner. Murdo got a kick in, Sean pummelled with his fists and Fitzgerald continued to yell, biting and punching back at his assailants as he tried to break free.

  Attempting to regain his feet, Fitzgerald grabbed at the dexion shelving above him. But Sean and Murdo pulled him back down, their combined weight sending the six-foot-high shelving unit toppling over towards the kerosene tank, where it crashed with a resounding clatter of metal tools.

  At the time, all Sean and Murdo were aware of was the shed being plunged into sudden darkness, followed a split second later by the flash of a spark and the roar as five gallons of fuel erupted in a fireball. Later they worked out that the spark had come from the inspection light which had been clipped to the side of the shelving, its bulb smashing as it hit the floor and providing the one critical spark which created the blaze that was now raging out of control.

  Instantly, the fight was forgotten. Sean and Murdo pulled themselves free from Fitzgerald, staggering to their feet as they contemplated the inferno which was already consuming the shed walls and licking around the base of the main kerosene storage tank.

  ‘Get the extinguisher!’ Sean screamed at Murdo as he beat at the flames with a tarpaulin, the chef running to the BCF unit which was clipped to the wall.

  Behind them Sean was aware of Fitzgerald starting up the snowcat and driving away. Now the fire had a hold on the floor, thick dark smoke billowing up as it blocked their approach to the tank. Murdo fired the extinguisher into the conflagration, making little impact as the intense wall of heat drove them back.

  ‘It’s no use,’ Murdo shouted in despair. ‘The tank’s going to blow.’

  ‘We’ve still got a chance,’ Sean shouted, lunging back once again to try and beat down the flames which had now engulfed the entire front half of the kerosene tank.

  Murdo grabbed him by the arm and dragged him from the shed.

  53

  Lauren stood at her bedroom window, the horror of the vision numbing her for some seconds. Not thirty metres from where she stood, two thousand four hundred gallons of kerosene were burning out of control.

  Of the fuel shed there was now no sign; the whole thing had been ripped apart in the enormous explosion which had woken her, the engine shed behind it also virtually atomised by the blast. Pieces of twisted metal were scattered about the ice, fragments of lighter material were still falling out of the flame-lit night sky.

  As Lauren watched, the wind picked up its strength, directing the fireball of combusted fuel straight for the main block. Rivers of burning kerosene began to race across the ice. Lauren ran out into the corridor.

  ‘Fire! Everybody out!’ She banged her fists against each door as she ran to the hall, where she threw on her clothes in record time.

  Outside, she took a step towards the fire, the ice slippery beneath her boots. There was fuel all over the ground, Lauren realised. Even as she watched, it was acting as a conduit for the fast-moving flames. Then, from a rolling black cloud of smoke, she saw Sean and Murdo emerge.

  ‘Fitzgerald…’ Sean managed to quell his coughing for a moment. ‘He’s escaped, and he’s got an axe!’

  ‘What?’ Lauren’s mind struggled with this confusing piece of information even as she saw the explorer accelerating away from the base on a snowmobile, the back of the sledge heavily laden.

  Then she snapped back. The flames were spreading, feeding on the fuel, whipped by the wind, leaping aggressively up the walls of the accommodation block and penetrating the wooden frame of the clinic.

  Lauren shouted out orders.

  ‘Murdo. Get hold of Frank and Mel. Find Carl and Richard. Get them out of the building. Fast.

  ‘We have to save the snowmobiles,’ she told Sean. ‘If we lose the base, they’re our only chance.’ Together they ran to the vehicle shed, pulling back the sliding door. But the interior was already an inferno. The remaining snowmobiles were burning out of control, their fuel tanks exploding one after the other, spraying the interior with petrol and sending flames to the ceiling of the shed.

  ‘Shit!’

  Only the right-hand side of the shed was still untouched, the side containing the ski equipment and other gear.

  Sean moved quickly into the store, shielding the side of his face with his hand.

  ‘Get the skis. A sledge. Anything we can use if we have to abandon the base,’ Lauren shouted.

  ‘Leave me here,’ Sean told her. ‘I’ll save what I can. Help the others.’

  Lauren reached the door, saw that the accommodation block was being consumed with astonishing speed. The wind had directed the fireball like a blowtorch into the bedrooms. Lauren ran back to the main block, her heart pounding uncontrollably with a mixture of adrenaline and fear.

  She entered a doorway. There was a figure in front of her, coughing with the fumes. It was Murdo.

  ‘Mel’s out of her room. So’s Frank, but I can’t get down to the far end of the block, there’s too much smoke.’

  Lauren pushed past him, hearing a series of piercing screams at that moment.

  ‘Help me!’ came the voice. ‘Help me, for God’s sake!’

  ‘That’s Richard!’ Lauren pushed her way down the corridor, falling to her hands and knees as the smoke filled her lungs. ‘He’s in Fitzgerald’s room!’

  Murdo shouldered his way
into one of the bedrooms and soaked two towels in the sink.

  ‘Wrap this round your head and stay low,’ he told her. ‘You won’t pass out if you stay on the floor.’

  Lauren and Murdo crawled towards the room in which Richard was trapped. They could see virtually nothing through the dense smoke and so used his screams as a guide.

  They beat down the door. Inside was a desperate scene: the journalist tied tightly to the bed frame, the far wall already alive with a sheet of fire.

  ‘Get me out of here!’ he screamed. ‘Undo it!’

  Lauren fumbled in her pocket, finding her knife. She severed the climbing rope which bound Richard to the metal frame, and they dragged him out into the corridor just as the external wall collapsed into the room, showering them with sparks.

  ‘What about Carl?’ Lauren screamed.

  Lauren bundled Murdo and Richard up the corridor and out of the doorway, watching as Murdo dragged the nearly unconscious journalist clear of the base. Then she took a big gulp of clear air and ducked back inside to the smoke-filled corridor, heading for the medical bay, where Carl had last been seen.

  When she got there, she realised there was no hope at all: the medical room was a wall-to-wall inferno, not even the beds visible through the hungry orange fire. To enter would be fatal, and she knew immediately that if Carl hadn’t managed to scramble clear in the first seconds after the blast his chances would have been as good as nil. Perhaps he was somewhere else, she prayed, out on the ice … anywhere but trapped in those flames.

  A smoke-blackened figure emerged beside her; it was Frank.

  ‘Help me get the back-up radio!’ he called as he disappeared into the passage. ‘We’re fucked if we can’t get the radio.’

  Lauren took the passage in three long strides, shouldering through the door into the radio room, where the instrument panel was already ablaze. Through the smoke she could see Frank trying to beat the flames down with his hands.

  Where was the fire extinguisher? Every room had one. Lauren groped in the corner where she knew it should be. Nothing. The clips were empty.

  ‘Use this!’

  Lauren ripped the curtain from the wall and tried to smother the fire. In seconds the curtain too was ablaze, the intense heat driving them back just as the flames began to get a hold on the interior workings of the instrument panel.

  The smell of melting plastic intensified as the components began to dissolve.

  ‘Leave it. The radio’s dead,’ Lauren told Frank. ‘Let’s try and save the mess room.’

  Choking and spluttering on the fumes, they felt their way back along the corridor into the mess room where two figures were fighting a losing battle. Murdo had made his way back into the building and, with Mel, was trying to quell the flames with a fire extinguisher.

  The ceiling was already ablaze, the partitions erupting with searing blue flames which curled and snaked as they took hold.

  ‘I’ll get water,’ Murdo called, heading for the galley with Lauren close behind him. They made for the sinks, but the smell of butane was overpowering.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Murdo saw flames licking around the butane store.

  ‘The gas!’ Lauren screamed. ‘That’s it. I want everyone out of the base. Grab anything you can! Mel, take that sleeping bag.’

  Lauren began to push them towards the exit, shoving them forcibly in front of her as they snatched at the bundles of cold-weather clothing which were hanging in the lobby. They reached the ice and began to hurry to safety. Then a sudden realisation hit Lauren.

  ‘Oh my God … the sample! It’s still in the lab!’

  Ignoring the screams around her, Lauren ran back to the burning building.

  54

  Now the corridor was a tunnel of flame, the ceiling acting like a giant grill as Lauren tried to get her bearings. She kept low, holding a last giant breath of pure air in her lungs as she counted off the doorways with her hands.

  The lab. Fourth doorway on the right. Or was it the fifth? Lauren knocked against something hard, ran her hands over the unfamilar shape in confusion. A weight machine. She was in the wrong room.

  Back in the corridor, staggering around the next doorway shielding her face from the heat, she found the lab. Lauren crawled in on all fours, the sharp cutting edge of broken glass lacerating her hands and knees. Visibility was almost zero; she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Brittle explosions were coming from the storeroom to her left as aerosols of cleaning fluid detonated one by one.

  Lauren fumbled her way blindly along the workbench, running her hands along the edge until she found the microscope. She could feel her lungs screaming for air, the desire to take a deep breath almost impossible to resist.

  She found the fridge, opened the door, her hands closing round the smooth titanium sample tube. The specimen was still intact.

  ‘Lauren!’

  It was Sean’s voice punching through the smoke.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Lauren tried to call, but felt herself gagging as she spluttered for breath.

  Suddenly, his hands were grabbing her by the shoulders. Lauren felt herself pulled to her feet, her legs buckling beneath her as she felt a black wall of smoke run through her body. Then he was pulling her along the corridor, the two of them stumbling as low as they could beneath the flames.

  Sean dragged her, retching, out onto the ice and man-handled her away from the inferno until they collapsed amid the others on the safe ground.

  An instant later the fire worked its way through to the galley, igniting the gas in an immense fireball. One gas cylinder erupted, then another, consuming the base in a hungry avalanche of combusted butane, which sent dense black clouds of smoke billowing into the dark sky.

  The clinic roof collapsed in a flurry of sparks, then the main wall of the accommodation block fell with a muffled crash. The laboratory was next, gone in a pyrotechnic crackle of igniting chemicals and splintering glass.

  ‘Where’s Carl? Did he make it?’ Lauren gasped.

  No one replied.

  Lauren lay coughing on the ice, her team gathered around her in shock, feeling the heat of Capricorn on her cheeks as her one and only dream burned itself to the ground.

  PART 4

  The Trek

  55

  Lauren and Mel tended to the wounds, checking what injuries each of the team had sustained. The other four sat in appalled silence, unable to tear their eyes away from the terrible carnage which was playing out before them.

  To Lauren’s relief, their injuries were not life-threatening, although each would be scarred by this day in one way or another. Lauren herself had numerous painful burns to her hands and her scalp where melted plastic from the ceiling had rained down on her during the battle to save the mess room. Murdo and Mel had similar injuries, although Mel had been spared the damage to her head thanks to a woollen hat she had been wearing.

  Sean and Murdo were also fortunate in one way: both had been wearing gloves and were thus free from burns to their hands, although Murdo had a number of blisters on his face.

  Frank had come off worst: his battle to save the radio had cost him third-degree burns to both hands. Even as he sat there, the blisters were filling rapidly with fluid.

  Having no water to treat him, Mel packed snow around the burned tissue.

  ‘He’s the one I’m most worried about,’ she confided to Lauren in a quiet moment. ‘The other burns will be painful, but they’ll heal on their own. Frank needs antibiotics at least if he’s going to prevent the tissue necrotising. We could be talking gangrene.’

  ‘He mustn’t know that,’ Lauren told her. ‘Don’t even mention that word in his presence, OK? He’s going to have enough to deal with with the pain, let alone that shadow hanging over him.’

  ‘I understand.’

  As they sat there, watching the smoke curling from the ruins of the base, the sky began to lighten a little, the buried sun struggling, and failing, to clear the horizon. A luminous
grey light was cast over the ice cap, not quite daylight, but enough to see the misery in each other’s faces.

  ‘You think one of the other bases might see the smoke?’ Murdo shivered forlornly.

  ‘The nearest is eight hundred miles,’ Lauren reminded him. ‘We’d virtually have to set off a nuclear bomb to get their attention.’

  As the flames began to subside, Sean noticed that Fitzgerald had reappeared, the headlight of the snowmobile clearly visible a mile or so from the base.

  Suddenly, Murdo was on his feet, screaming.

  ‘Murderer! You fucking murderer! Come and get what’s owed to you, you fucking…’

  He picked up a piece of metal and threw it hopelessly in Fitzgerald’s direction.

  ‘What’s his problem? Why’s he sitting there like that, gloating over the dead? You come here, you bastard, and we’ll see who’s going to burn!’

  ‘Calm down,’ Lauren told him. ‘He can’t hear you. Save your energy for more important things.’

  Murdo kept up his tirade.

  ‘I’m going to kill him,’ he cried. ‘That evil monster is going to die.’

  ‘Murdo, will you please keep quiet!’

  The authority in Lauren’s tone finally pulled the chef out of his rage. He stared at her in stunned silence, the burn marks already raised into livid welts on his face.

  ‘Everyone gather round me,’ she told them, ‘and try and be calm. If we panic now, we’re certainly going to make things worse.’

  ‘Worse? Make things worse?’ This time it was Mel who raised her voice. ‘Everything’s destroyed, Lauren; we’ve got injured people here. They need treatment; look at Frank’s hands, for God’s sake. What do we do about that with no drugs?’

  Lauren struggled to keep the tears out of her voice. ‘I know, Mel. I know. This is the most screwed up it could ever be. But I also know that we’ll find a way out of this one way or another. If we keep our heads.’

  Sean was also calm. ‘She’s right. As soon as they find out our radio’s down, they’ll send a plane out to investigate what’s wrong. They’ll drop us food, equipment, even if they can’t land. We may have to survive a week here, but I doubt it’ll be more than that.’