Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

‘We can work our way round the crevasse … maybe we can still catch him up…’ Sean began, but his voice faltered as he saw how far the fissure stretched across the glacier. Even if they had had a reservoir of strength left to get around the obstacle, he knew that Fitzgerald would be long gone, the headstart enough that he could now never be caught.

  Sean knew it was over; his body had given up the fight.

  Close to where they stood was one of the wrecked engines—a mess of mangled pistons, valves and pipes. Sean helped Lauren to take the few steps, and they collapsed with their backs to the hulk of metal while they struggled to catch their breath.

  Some distance behind them Lauren could see Mel and Murdo towing the sledge—plodding so slowly along they hardly seemed to move as the minutes rolled past.

  On the other side of the crevasse Fitzgerald was busy digging at the collapsed tent, searching for the transmitter.

  Lauren turned to Sean, her face puffy and swollen from wind blisters and solar radiation.

  ‘Is there anything we can do, Sean? Think one last time. Once he’s gone, we’ll never catch him again. How can we stop him?’

  Sean turned to consider the engine, pulling absently at the twisted metal. One of the broken fuel lines was jutting from the wreckage, and as he tugged at it, a thin trickle of avgas trickled from the metal line.

  ‘There’s still some aviation spirit in these fuel lines. If we could get enough out of this thing, we could fill one of the cans with it, use it as a weapon…’

  Sean’s voice petered out as he watched the pathetic trickle running from the slender fuel line.

  ‘Shit.’

  He crimped the aluminium fuel line to stop the flow and slumped back against the engine.

  ‘It’d never work anyhow,’ he concluded wearily.

  Soon Sean wandered off to help Mel and Murdo drag in the sledge, leaving Lauren on her own, leaning against the shattered engine.

  ‘Think,’ she whispered to herself, the scientist in her not quite ready to concede defeat. ‘There has to be a way.’

  Lauren turned her mind one more time to the problem, knowing that, if she couldn’t work out a solution, all six of them would die in that godforsaken place.

  107

  Fitzgerald stood on one side of the crevasse, Lauren and her team on the other. He was no more than twenty metres from them, but in that moment, those unbridgeable metres were the gulf between the living and the dead.

  ‘I found the transmitter,’ Fitzgerald told them, gesturing to the yellow object strapped to the back of his sledge.

  ‘So why don’t you activate it and we can all go home?’ Lauren asked him.

  Fitzgerald laughed.

  ‘Actually, I admire what you’ve done,’ he conceded. ‘I thought you’d lose most of your team on the way. Three hundred miles on those resources was a hell of a feat.’

  ‘Save your compliments,’ Lauren told him. ‘It makes no difference now.’

  ‘No … I suppose not. No one’s going to stumble across you by accident, and there’s nothing here to keep you alive.’

  ‘Our bodies will be found,’ Lauren told him bitterly. ‘We’ll make sure the truth will be known in the end.’

  Fitzgerald laughed. ‘How? By leaving a note? Who do you think will ever come to this place to find it? And how do you think they’ll find you under the three metres of new snow which will fall in the next couple of months? Besides, I’ll tell the world you all died a hundred miles from here.’

  ‘Where are you going to call in the plane?’ Sean called. ‘Just out of curiosity.’

  Fitzgerald thought carefully for some moments. ‘I don’t suppose it would hurt to tell you my plans,’ he said. ‘Actually, I’m going to continue down to the coast before I put in the mayday call.’

  ‘Eighty miles? Why go so far?’ Sean asked in surprise. ‘All you have to do is get out of this crevasse field and find a nice flat piece of ice. Ten miles would be enough. You know we haven’t got the strength to follow you.’

  ‘Oh, I just want to put a little distance between us,’ Fitzgerald replied. ‘I don’t want the pilot to be tempted into a quick overflight of this place, for one thing…’

  Suddenly, Lauren gave out a bitter laugh.

  ‘And for another thing,’ she said, ‘you’ll get to the coast and claim you made it across the continent on foot just like you originally planned. That’s about right, isn’t it?’

  Fitzgerald made no response to this but merely glared at her across the gap. Then he turned away and prepared to leave, tying bits of gear onto the back of the sledge.

  ‘One more thing,’ Lauren called out, her voice weak now and barely able to project.

  Fitzgerald paused in his packing. ‘What is it?’

  Lauren fished in her pocket and brought out the titanium tube she had so carefully guarded through the trek; she held it high in the air so he could see what it was.

  ‘The sample from the lake,’ she told him, the words heavy with resignation. ‘Will you take it with you and see it gets to my sponsor, Alexander De Pierman at Kerguelen Oils?’

  Fitzgerald laughed. ‘And why the hell should I do that for you?’

  ‘Because there are species in this sample that are new to science. It’s my last request, if you like. We know we’re going to die here now. The least you can do is let me die in the knowledge that something came of this.’

  Fitzgerald’s first inclination was to tell her to go to hell, but as his mind ticked over he saw another possibility.

  ‘Species new to science? I’ll do it. Throw it over.’

  Lauren gave the sample tube to Sean.

  ‘Will you…?’ she asked him. ‘I’m not sure I have the strength.’

  ‘You want to do this?’ Sean looked at her in amazement. ‘He’ll take the credit for it, Lauren; you know what he’s capable of. It’ll be another Fitzgerald scoop—“How I saved the vital specimen from destruction.” He’ll probably end up naming one of these life forms after himself.’

  ‘Do it, Sean,’ Lauren told him. ‘That sample has to be properly analysed and recorded, or it’s all been for nothing.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure…’

  Sean reluctantly took the tube and walked to the very edge of the crevasse. Then he threw it, underarm, across to Fitzgerald’s side, where it plopped unharmed into the soft surface.

  Fitzgerald plucked it out and looked at it closely.

  ‘How do I know you haven’t put a note inside?’ he demanded suspiciously.

  ‘Unscrew the top,’ Lauren called out. ‘The titanium tube is just an insulating outer shell. The sample is inside in a glass tube.’

  Fitzgerald did as she said, removing the top and sliding the glass test tube out. It was immediately obvious that there was no note inside—the tube contained only clear fluid.

  ‘Good enough.’ Fitzgerald placed the glass tube back into its snug titanium protector and carefully put the phial in the breast pocket of his windsuit.

  ‘Anything more?’ he called back sarcastically.

  Lauren and Sean said nothing.

  ‘Then I’ll be gone.’

  Fitzgerald flicked down his ski goggles and hitched the harness around his waist. Then, without a backward glance, he began his trek towards the coast.

  PART 5

  The Hero Returns

  108

  Alexander De Pierman was sitting in heavy London traffic on his way to a meeting when the call came through.

  ‘I’ve got Irene Evans on the line for you,’ his secretary told him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Julian Fitzgerald’s logistics manager. Says it’s top urgent.’

  De Pierman was perplexed. He’d had a few dealings with Fitzgerald’s team during the press annnouncement to break the news of the loss of Capricorn and its crew, but he could not imagine what Irene Evans was calling for now, so many weeks later.

  ‘Put her through.’

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Evans told him
, her voice alive with excitement. ‘I just got the most extraordinary news from Ushuaia. Fitzgerald’s emergency transmitter was reactivated yesterday. Someone out there is still alive.’

  De Pierman paused a moment while the information sank in.

  ‘Alive? But how can they be?’ he asked.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. But it’s definitely Fitzgerald’s transmitter. An Antarctic Air Service flight is on its way to investigate.’

  ‘But after all this time…?’ De Pierman was struggling to comprehend what he was hearing. ‘How the hell has anyone survived? And where’s the signal coming from?’

  ‘That’s the bizarre thing; in fact, I had to question AAS to make sure that they understood the coordinates properly. But they’re adamant there’s no mistake: the signal’s coming from the coast—on the edge of the continent, about four hundred miles from the Capricorn base.’

  ‘The coast? Where exactly?’ De Pierman opened his notepad and jotted down the figures as Irene gave him the coordinates. ‘When will we know more?’

  ‘In the next few hours. As soon as the flight gets there, we’ll get a radio call to say who it is.’

  After his meeting De Pierman went back to his office and pulled his world atlas from its shelf. He turned to the Antarctic double page and consulted the coordinates on his notepad to find the location of the transmitter. How on earth had any survivor ended up in that position? Surely, if anyone had survived the fire, they would have stayed at the Capricorn site?

  By midafternoon Irene Evans was back on the line.

  ‘I just got the call from AAS,’ she told him. ‘They picked up one survivor. It’s Julian Fitzgerald.’

  ‘Did he give any news of the others?’

  ‘They’re all dead. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that.’

  ‘Oh. Well … I…’

  There was a long pause as she waited for De Pierman to respond.

  ‘Mr De Pierman? Are you still there?’

  ‘Oh, I’m still here. I just don’t trust myself to speak right now.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I expect there was something inside you believed that Lauren and her team might have survived?’

  ‘Call me an old fool,’ De Pierman told her sadly, ‘but you’re right. All the experts said it was impossible, but you always come up with a way to convince yourself there might have been a factor they’d overlooked.’

  ‘Well, there obviously was something they overlooked or Fitzgerald wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale.’

  ‘How did he do it? And how did he end up where he did?’

  ‘We’ll all know soon enough. He’s sent me a message to connect him straight through to London and to get a press conference fixed up.’

  ‘My God, he must have a story to tell…’

  ‘That’s what the rest of the world has realised. There’s going to be quite a reception committee waiting for him when he gets back to civilisation. I’ll arrange the press conference at Heathrow. I’ll call you when I know the timings.’

  De Pierman terminated the call and stood, lost in thought, as he considered this startling piece of news. Fitzgerald alive? But how had he survived where Lauren and the others had died?

  And by what set of circumstances had he ended up on the edge of the continent, in the very opposite direction to the nearest base?

  Whichever way De Pierman looked at it, not a single aspect of this new development made any sense at all.

  He consulted the atlas again, considering Fitzgerald’s position, drawing a mental line from the place to the location of the Capricorn base.

  In a flash he had it.

  The plane. The crashed plane. Fitzgerald’s route would have taken him right past it. Of all the factors he had so painfully run through, De Pierman had never thought that the crashed plane might have offered salvation to the Capricorn survivors. Perhaps the transmitter had been left there?

  Next, De Pierman made a rough calculation of the distance from Capricorn to the aircraft; it was about three hundred miles. That was well beyond Dr Gresham’s estimate of what a survivor could achieve on foot … so how had Fitzgerald done it?

  Like the rest of the world, De Pierman would have to wait for the answers.

  109

  Julian Fitzgerald refused all interviews to the local press at Ushuaia, knowing he would get far more attention from the international press in London.

  He transferred to the first available 747 flight out of Buenos Aires, and, by the time the Aerolinas Argentinas jumbo put the wheels down at Heathrow, the airport press room was packed with news crews and reporters. CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and the BBC had all devoted crews to cover Fitzgerald’s miraculous reappearance from the dead, and they’d been joined by a host of local and other news agencies.

  As the frail, frost-ravaged figure of Fitzgerald was escorted into the room, there was a collective gasp from the reporters. Could this really be the renowned explorer? He looked like he’d aged a lifetime in the last six months. Cameras flashed as he held the side of the table for support.

  Alexander De Pierman was also present at the conference, as was Irene Evans. They sat uneasily behind the press-briefing table and waited while Fitzgerald lowered himself painfully onto a seat.

  Quickly, the volume of the shouts rose. For a while it seemed the press mêlée was going to turn into a fistfight as reporters jostled elbow to elbow in front of the explorer. Fitzgerald tried to talk but no words could be heard. Gradually, the row began to diminish.

  Someone handed Fitzgerald a plastic bottle of water.

  When the explorer finally managed to moisten his lips enough to speak, his words were not much more than a whisper. The press pack fell absolutely quiet as dozens of microphones were thrust towards him.

  ‘Mr Fitzgerald,’ one of the more strident reporters managed to ask, ‘what happened at Capricorn base?’

  ‘The fire?’ Fitzgerald said. ‘It was an electrical fault, something wrong with the wiring in the base. There was a strong wind, the flames took hold faster than we could fight them … Then the diesel tank exploded and destroyed everything.’

  ‘How many people survived the fire?’

  Fitzgerald took another swig of the water.

  ‘One died immediately, my team mate Carl Norland. Others were burned and died later.’

  ‘What happened after the fire?’

  ‘We had no food and no transport. We realised there would be no rescue, and we knew we could never make it to the nearest base. So we headed for the plane which crashed on the Blackmore Glacier … we knew there was an emergency transmitter there…’

  He stopped as he was hit by a violent coughing fit. The surrounding reporters let him recover before firing the next question at him.

  ‘How did you survive?’

  Fitzgerald looked into space for a long moment before replying; when he turned his attention back to the reporter, his stare was terrible, the blood-red eyes mesmerising as they fixed on the questioner.

  ‘There were depots with food and equipment,’ the explorer said. ‘Two of them, one hundred miles apart, heading towards the crashed plane. Dr Burgess had put them in place when she came to rescue me at the beginning of the winter, and they were still there.’

  Sitting next to the explorer, De Pierman cursed himself quietly as he heard this news. So that was the missing factor that they hadn’t built into the equation. Lauren had put down depots which could keep the team alive. Now it was all beginning to make a type of sense.

  ‘How did your companions die?’ the reporter asked.

  Fitzgerald paused once more.

  ‘We got them all to the first depot,’ he said, ‘but there wasn’t enough medical equipment to keep the injured alive. They were burned, you see, in the fire. They died of the infections … one after another … and there was nothing we could do. We buried them in the crevasses…’

  Fitzgerald’s face crumpled as he wept, the reporters keeping a respectful silence as he struggled to regain som
e composure.

  ‘Dr Burgess was the last,’ he continued. ‘My God, she was strong. But even she didn’t get much further than the second depot. Then it was just me and the fight to get to the crashed plane.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call in the rescue right away when you got to the transmitter? What made you keep going to the coast?’

  Fitzgerald took a deep breath.

  ‘There are two types of people in this world. There are starters. And there are finishers. I made a solemn promise some time ago that I would become the first person to cross the widest point of the Antarctic continent on foot. And I kept that promise by crossing those last eighty miles to the coast.’

  There was a murmur of admiration from the gathered reporters.

  ‘One more thing.’ Fitzgerald reached into his top pocket and brought out the titanium sample tube.

  The cameramen shuffled and bumped each other as they tried to focus on the phial.

  ‘Most of you will know,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘that Capricorn was a scientific base, but not many of you will know what its true aims were. In fact, Dr Burgess’s objective was to examine a subterranean lake … a lake which she suspected would contain life which had never been encountered on earth before. The day before the fire, the team drilled into that lake and retrieved this sample. It was Dr Burgess’s dying wish that this sample be delivered to her sponsor for analysis, and I honour that wish now by handing this test tube to Alexander De Pierman.’

  Fitzgerald handed the sample over to De Pierman with a flourish, the oilman nodding his thanks. Then the explorer broke off the interview and was escorted, with a policeman on each arm to support him, into a waiting ambulance. De Pierman left too, brushing the reporters’ questions aside and climbing into his limousine for the journey back to London.

  The last hope had died; De Pierman had to be realistic: there was no hope for Lauren and the rest of her team now. Fitzgerald had seen them die with his own eyes, and you only had to take one look at the man to know that he too had been through hell and back.

  De Pierman couldn’t help but feel that he’d failed Lauren in some crucial way. Why hadn’t he raised the alarm earlier? Why had he waited through more than two weeks of radio silence before wondering if something had gone badly wrong at Capricorn? How might this have ended if he’d been more alert?