by Andy McNab
I was also carrying one of the three partly constructed but folded tents on top of my pulk. It would be a pain in the arse fucking about with poles and holes in the freezing cold, especially if we had a drama and had to get someone out of the wind and into a sleeping bag at warp speed.
I’d positioned the waistband of my harness low on my hips so it could take the weight of the pulk as I slid one ski in front of the other. Dragging it felt a bit like trying to take a big dog for a walk when it just wanted to lie down. Every step demanded a firm tug on the reins, but I soon developed some kind of rhythm. It took me back to the times I’d played snow soldiers in Norway.
When the going was smooth the skis moved silkily across the surface of the ice, but as soon as it got bumpy we slowed to a crawl. We had to remind ourselves that the most important thing was to stick together and not let ourselves get strung out over a couple of hundred metres. If that happened with individuals who were already under pressure, they’d start to get isolated and grind to a halt – or, just as bad, they’d try to speed up, get themselves more fucked up, and string out the team even more.
After about ten minutes I started to heat up – but not too much. The trick was to keep warm without overheating. If you started to sweat you’d get wet and then you’d get cold and if you were losing your core body heat you were fucked because the next thing that happened was that you died.
We weren’t built to exist so far north. Human beings are homoeothermic: our bodies try to maintain a constant temperature, irrespective of their ambience. The skin, fat, muscle and limbs act as a buffer zone between our hot inner core and the outside world, protecting the brain and other vital organs in the skull, chest and abdomen as far as possible from catastrophic changes in temperature.
The maintenance of internal body heat is the most significant factor in determining survival. Even in extreme conditions, your core temperature will seldom vary more than two degrees either way. If it does, you’re history.
As it burns fuel, your body generates energy and heat. When you start to shiver, it’s telling you that you’re losing heat faster than you’re replacing it. The shivering reflex exercises a whole load of muscles, increasing heat production by burning more fuel, but it can’t work miracles.
A thermostat sited in the nerve tissue at the base of the brain controls the production and dissipation of heat, and monitors all your bits to maintain a constant temperature. When hypothermia kicks in, the thermostat instructs heat to be drawn from the extremities to the core. Your hands and feet start to stiffen.
As the core temperature drops, the body also draws heat from the head. Circulation slows. The brain no longer gets the oxygen and sugar it needs. You stop shivering, and you stop worrying too. You feel a kind of crazy exhilaration. You’re about to be set free.
But the truth is, you’re dying.
You’re dying, and you couldn’t care less. Your only hope to stop that happening is to add heat from an external source – dry clothes, a fire, hot drinks, another body.
I pulled my hood back and shared my Star Wars look – black fleece balaclava topped off with a black beanie, goggles and mask – with the world. Then I unzipped the vents under my arms to regulate what was going on inside my Gore-Tex outer shell. All I had on beneath it was a base layer of merino wool long johns and long-sleeved shirt. As far as I was concerned, a thin wool layer was still the best way of wicking away leakage while maintaining warmth. It certainly seemed to work for sheep.
Wool was a hygroscopic insulator, so could soak up a fair amount of moisture without feeling wet. The crimp in its fibres created tiny air pockets, unlike cotton in which each strand lay flat – hence the old saying: ‘In the hills, cotton kills.’
The downside to wearing less than I probably would have on a winter’s day in England was that if you weren’t moving you were freezing.
Every member of the team had now found their own rhythm, and was overcoming whatever fuckabout they had to deal with. I had some of my own. Number one was the condensation that had built up inside my goggles and instantly turned to ice. I had to turn my head every which way until I found a sliver of clear lens to check where I was going.
My face mask also grew a thick layer of ice, making it more difficult to breathe, and my nostrils filled with congealed moisture. I tried to blame the kit that Rune had begged and borrowed. But it was my problem and I needed to sort it out. After all, teams of lads were doing pretty much the same thing up here not long ago in polo-neck jumpers, waxed jackets and strips of canvas wrapped around their boots and they’d survived long enough to become First World War cannon-fodder.
There was nothing I could do about any of it for now. It would have to wait. Personal shit wasn’t allowed to slow or stop the line once it had kicked into gear.
52
The caravan club continued to pull its way north until the smaller guide, Jan, held up his poles and crossed them over his head. It was time for our first break. Every hour from now we would pause for a ten-minute munchie stop to drip-feed the eight thousand calories we were each going to need every day. We had covered maybe just under a nautical mile. The line had strung out – Gabriel and Jack were a little slower than the rest. Jan and Hal had no such excuse: they were simply covering the ground too quickly.
The team made a little extra effort to close up before stopping completely. That probably wouldn’t be happening by the end of the day.
The routine was simple: stop, back to the wind, poles down, zip up vents, hood up, and take out your duvet jacket from the front of the pulk bag, for easy access, and get it on over your harness, then zip up again so that as little heat as possible was lost.
Just before I completely zipped up my duvet, I pulled off my goggles and shoved them inside my jacket, pulling both the Gore-Tex and duvet hood over most of my face to keep the sun’s UV from bouncing off the ice and fucking up my eyes. Snow blindness wasn’t permanent, but it was really painful. I’d learned that lesson the hard way all those years ago in Norway.
I ripped off my neoprene mask and gave it a good beating against my leg to break off the ice while I closed each nostril in turn to clear all the shit that was up them. I could hear the same sounds coming from the rest of the team.
The munchie bags for each day were also at the front of the pulk’s bags, along with the two one-litre steel flasks filled with hot water. The munchies were the high-calorie items on the individual kit piles like chocolate and nuts. We had unpacked the chocolate from its wrapping, broken it down into bite-sized pieces, and shoved them into daily bags so our gloves could stay on during the breaks. We kept our skis on, too, ready to be on the move again in ten minutes.
I pulled out my bag and drink, and got ready to get stuck into a cube of salo. I thought I’d give it a go, seeing as the fat was nothing but calories. I’d got half a dozen of them from the cooks and cut them up.
Will and Jules were still standing, just as the rest of the team were. That was another thing that would change as the day went on. Will was shoving a glove full of nuts down his neck as Jules poured him some water. His head was up and moving, everything he looked at reflected in his gold-filmed goggles lenses with a couple of days’ growth underneath that had started to gather the first bits of ice. He gazed in awe at the empty white wilderness in front of him. We were on our own now: nothing between us and the Pole. All there was to see in any direction was a world of snow-covered ice, criss-crossed with pressure ridges, no points of reference, just white ice and brilliantly blue sky. All very nice, but a killer if your body didn’t generate heat.
I tried my first cube as Jack was getting his Gore-Tex bottoms open to have a piss. He was taking so long to get past his base layer I hoped he wasn’t desperate.
It might have been cold up there, but it was as easy to dehydrate in the Arctic as it was in the Sahara. A body could lose as much as four litres a day through the nose and mouth, like some panting dog. If you didn’t force yourself to take fluids you were fucked. But that wasn’t as
simple as it sounded, because one of the strange things the body did in extreme cold was not tell you when you were thirsty. On top of that, it wanted to urinate more. It closed down peripheral blood vessels so it could concentrate on maintaining its core temperature. As blood flowed round a smaller system, the body thought it was holding onto too much fluid and wanted to piss it out. Normally water loss would make the blood saltier, so you felt thirsty and replaced the lost fluid, but in cold regions the salt landed up on the ice with the urine, along with potassium, both of which should have stayed to keep the nervous system and muscles cracking on. That was why, on a munchie stop, we drank, whether we felt like it or not.
The salo was frozen, so I had to crunch into the meaty-tasting fat and suck on it, like an ice-lolly.
‘Hey, Will. No Costas here, mate, eh?’
I got some water down me to prepare for another salo cube and secretly wished there was a large cappuccino waiting for me at the next stop. I also hoped I’d closed my eyes enough to protect them from the UV that was bouncing off the ice.
‘You know what, Nick? That’s partly what I’m trying to get away from.’ Will handed back the flask cup to Jules. ‘One of the worst things about the whole recovery business is that it infantilizes you. You start behaving like a kid again because everybody wants to do things for you.’
Jules nodded slowly in agreement as she refilled the cup and handed it back to him.
‘After a while, Nick, it does your head in – not that my head isn’t already a bit …’ He pointed at his temple and twirled his index finger. It was hard to know to what extent he was joking.
‘I’m fucking terrified of all that space out there and it’s all your fault, Nick.’
There was a smile but he meant it.
‘What’s there to be frightened of?’
‘Except freezing to death.’
I held up my last salo cube for this stop. ‘This might kill you, though.’
Jules pushed up the last centimetre of zip on his duvet, then turned to me. ‘Be serious for a minute, Nick. Don’t you ever—’
‘Nope.’
Her face softened. ‘Your wife and child – Will told me.’
‘Well, you understand, then. It’s not like I’m going to escape and get off this planet alive, is it?’
Her eyes widened. ‘I guess that makes you just as much a casualty as this lot, then, in a way.’ She studied me levelly. ‘You’re not as bombproof as you look, you know.’
I didn’t like the implications of that. But she was in her comfort zone, telling people what was what.
‘You’ll have to face it sooner or later or you’ll suffer, like Will. Maybe that’s why you decided to come along at the last minute, or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe you just wanted an excuse, and sharing with Will was the excuse you needed.’
Half of me wanted to tell her to keep the fuck out of my business, but the other half said maybe she had a point. She waved at her husband, who was still sucking in the emptiness.
‘Ask Will and he’d say he thinks he’s just the luckiest man in the world to have survived relatively intact. But every night, when he finally goes to sleep, he dreams the same dream.’
‘Yeah, but he’s here, with you, with us.’
‘Everyone can always take a step back, Nick.’
This time I didn’t respond. Just took it in. For all her mother-hen bossiness, she knew what she was talking about, which was something, and she wasn’t demanding a response.
‘And don’t worry – I won’t tell anyone you’re human. Your secret’s safe with me.’
Salvation came from the head of the line. ‘Four minutes! Four minutes!’
The command was shouted down the line.
I wasn’t too worried about having every munchie stop becoming a therapy session. We’d all be too fucked to talk soon.
53
I packed the rest of my munchies and my flask, then waited until the very last second before stuffing my duvet away.
Ahead of me Gabriel was trying to push off, but having trouble staying on his skis. ‘Shite!’
Rio was still having a one-armed fight with his duvet and laughing at the spectacle as Jack, packed and ready, skied a couple of metres and held out a pole. ‘Come on, Braveheart. Rise up and be a nation. We don’t want to freeze our bollocks off before we’ve even started.’
I dug out my goggles while the rest of the team enjoyed the show. I bit into the fingers of my right glove, pulled out my hand and rubbed like a madman at the semi-melted ice coating the inside of the lens. Just breathing on it was no use: condensation froze instantly, and made the situation worse. I hoped I could soak up the damp with my merino wool inner before it refroze. Half a lens was better than none.
One more wipe and I got them back on my face. With luck, my body heat would keep the bits I’d cleared from icing over again. I smacked my face mask on my leg a couple more times and rigged it up.
Up front, Jan and Hal were ready to move off again. They leaned forward on their poles, twisting around to check what was happening behind them. I shoved my duvet away and assumed a similar position – hood up, vented up, back to the wind, ready to launch.
They started moving at what was probably the four-minute mark precisely, and so did I. But not everyone was following. Will and Jules were set: there was no fucking about from her. She should have been on the team from the start.
Stedman and Jack were sorted too, but were still busy helping Rio and Gabriel. Gabriel was now upright, and taking the piss out of Rio because he couldn’t grip the zip well enough to do it up. Jack was doing it for him, but having only three working arms between them complicated the process.
Rune reached them seconds before they finally got their shit together. ‘Please, we need to get moving – if you’re stuck in one place for too long out here, you die. We must move.’
We all knew we had to keep moving, but Rune was obsessed.
I got my mouth close to his ear, or at least the Gore-Tex over it. ‘Mate, it’s not a problem. Look at them taking the piss. It’s all good. They’ve trained together. They’re working together, like they’re still in the army. They’re helping each other. They’ll soon sort themselves out, you’ll see. Right now you need to grip those two …’
I pointed at Hal and Jan. They were way out in front and pulling further ahead. ‘Their job is to show us where to go and to help the team get there. It’s not to show us how fast they can move and fuck the rest of us. The team have a lot to contend with – not only the cold.’
He said nothing, just looked uncomfortable.
‘Mate, if you don’t tell them, I will.’
He waggled a fat gloved finger at me. ‘Well, you can try …’
‘They’re your people, aren’t they? You need to grip ’em.’
‘They are not mine.’ He went silent for a moment. I guessed he was sucking his teeth under his face mask. ‘They are Mr Cauldwell’s men. They are from Armancore. There was a last-minute change, not long before Mr Cauldwell told me you were arriving. Everything changed, I do not know why. You must ask Mr Cauldwell to explain these things.’
He paused, as the team made their way slowly by, heads down, hoods still back for a few minutes more. I couldn’t see Rune’s face, so I couldn’t tell whether the discomfort in his tone was simply to do with being pissed off or if he was frightened. That wasn’t my problem right now, but I’d need to keep an eye on our Scandi mates in case it became so.
‘So how come those two don’t give a fuck and Cauldwell gets to order you about?’
He shrugged. ‘I got into debt. Armancore bailed me out. There’s not much money in the campaign for the environment.’
‘So what does Armancore get for its money?’
‘Data.’
‘About the ice?’
‘The ice, the seabed. That’s all my area.’
‘So you’re now an oil prospector?’
‘Each party wants to get it before the other. That is why we need to
move as fast as possible, to plant the sensors before the ice melts.’
‘The Norwegians want to be first?’
He paused to get his breath back. Talking in these conditions was a challenge. ‘Not exactly.’
‘So who? Exactly.’
‘Armancore’s interests are with the Russians.’
‘So we aren’t providing cover for you to wage some eco war but to do something that might spark off a real one?’
‘Nick, I have no choice.’ Rune was flapping enough to start his own wind farm. ‘Please believe me, no choice …’
‘So why all the sneaky-beaky shit at Barneo? The Chechens would have waved you through, probably rolled out the red carpet for you. Why do you need us lot?’
‘I have no idea, Nick. What I have told you is all I know. I am sorry, but … Mr Cauldwell, he explained he knew of a way I could get onto the ice without anyone understanding the reason, and I had no choice. I am sorry.’
I felt better that I had an even bigger reason to dislike the guides. Just like Quisling, the Norwegian leader who’d collaborated with Hitler in the Second World War, they had crossed over to the darker side.
The front of the line was getting further away by the minute. I pointed a pole towards the two Quislings. ‘Mate, you will be if you don’t get those two to slow down.’
Rune moved off towards them, digging in his poles like he was competing in the Winter Olympics.
‘Rune!’
He stopped and twisted his top half back towards me.
‘The team must not know about this. Those two fuckers up front? They mustn’t know you told me. And definitely not Cauldwell. Got it?’
He nodded and moved off. I might have been imagining it, but there now seemed to be a bit of a spring in his step. And why not? He should have been over the moon, because he didn’t want anyone to know what he’d been getting up to.
Fuck it, so what? had always been my default position, because whatever shit I was in usually only affected me. But not now, not for the next seven days. I needed Rune to keep his mouth shut so the team could get on with what they were there for.