by Peter Tonkin
Powerdown
Peter Tonkin
© Peter Tonkin, 1999
Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1999 by Headline Book Publishing.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Cham, Guy and Mark
in memory of two good friends:
Douglas Leeds and Peter Waugh
and respectfully dedicated to the man who inspired it:
Hammond Innes
1913-1998
The Master
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Richard Mariner looked down at the urgent telex then stared narrow-eyed out at the Southern Ocean for perhaps a heartbeat. ‘We have to go south,’ he said tersely.
As Richard spoke, he handed the flimsy to Colin Ross who towered at his right hand. The Scottish glaciologist gave the matter an instant’s more thought before he, too, turned to the captain. ‘Aye,’ he rumbled. ‘South.’
‘And I concur,’ said young Captain Pitcairn, turning from his guests to the duty helmsman. ‘Take her south, please. Not that there’s much south left.’ It was a feeble enough quip, particularly as they were still north, just, of the Antarctic Circle, but it lightened the tension on Erebus’s spartan bridge — tension which had arrived so suddenly with the westerly storm and the unexpected cry for help.
Even as the British Antarctic Survey support vessel began to turn onto her new heading, a ram of wind, threatening, ice-laden and six months out of its allotted time, slammed in from the west. It roared out of the Bellingshausen Sea across the Bismarck Strait and tried to push Erebus onto the forbidding coast of Graham Land. Richard strode over to the starboard bridge wing, first recipient of the dangerous new weather, and looked speculatively westward. ‘This’ll put the visit to Faraday behind schedule,’ he said to Colin Ross.
‘Aye,’ agreed Colin. ‘And it’ll pull us back towards Rothera. Make a mess of our schedule altogether.’ The pair of them were referring to the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS’s) two main bases nearby, bases Erebus was here to supply as they prepared for the millennium.
‘Nothing that can’t be put right with a bit of energy and ingenuity,’ said Richard quietly. ‘And anyway, it isn’t every day that a NASA astronaut goes missing at the South Pole.’
*
Robin Mariner sat silently in their cabin, ten minutes later, and listened while her husband explained. Even their twins subsided into uncharacteristic quietude at the magic acronym NASA. The ship’s sudden turn had warned the sea-wise Robin that something was up even before her vividly excited husband had arrived with the first gusts of the unseasonal westerly. Now Richard had to raise his voice to near quarterdeck bellow to make himself heard as the weather thundered against the west-facing portholes of their cabin.
‘We’ve just received a distress call from the NASA experimental base at Armstrong. One of their men went out this morning and the weather closed down on them. They’ve lost contact with him and they’re very concerned. Like everywhere down here they’re running on skeleton staff until after the millennium and they need all the help they can get. They have one snow team of their own still on base — but they lost contact with them for a while earlier. Now they’ll only send out search and rescue parties if we can offer back-up at the very least. The local scientific stations, even the Argentinian and Chilean ones, are all short-staffed or closed, so they’ve put out a general alarm which we’re answering. It means we’re turning back along the track towards Rothera, but not too far. Armstrong experimental base is on the coast at the foot of an empty glacial valley. Not far out of our way. With luck we’ll still make Faraday for Christmas.’
‘NASA,’ breathed daughter Mary, the scientist of the family. ‘What are they doing down here?’
‘Getting ready to go to Mars,’ Richard stated. ‘NASA have had teams at Lake Fryxell for years, on the coast opposite Ross Island way down in McMurdo Sound. They used the dry valleys to test their vehicles for the Mars probes. But once they decided to try a manned mission, they moved up here to Armstrong where the conditions were similar and there were more people close by. But something went wrong this morning and now there’s an astronaut out there on the mainland, on the edge of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the universe and he’s lost in this storm. We have to help look for him.’
As if to emphasise the seriousness of Richard’s words, the westerly storm thudded against Erebus’s side again. Richard and Robin both felt the ship’s head yaw round under the onslaught, then fight doggedly back on line. The whole cabin tilted over a good few degrees to port. Half-packed suitcases slid dangerously near the edges of bunks.
‘Wow,’ said their son William. ‘That was cool.’
‘Is Mummy going with you?’ demanded Mary. Even at eight, she was sensitive to the slightest hint of a sexist slight, all too well aware even during the few hours she had spent down here so far that the South Pole was something of a Man’s Club. Women and children were looked at very much askance.
‘Mummy can come if she’s asked,’ said Richard, glancing up at Robin over the fierce expression on his daughter’s face.
Even under the steely light of an Antarctic midsummer storm, Robin’s golden ringlets contrived to glitter. And there was a sympathetic light in her grey eyes too, though whether this was amused understanding for his predicament or the fact that her eyes were identical in colour to the strange light, he would have been hard put to say. Certainly, he had put his last phrase badly. It sounded as old-fashioned and patronising as some of the crusty old characters they had met in the brief interim between leaving the British Antarctic Survey’s Dash-7, which had popped them down from Ushuaia to Rothera, and boarding Erebus. ‘Beards’ they were called, these taciturn Antarctic scientists. And it was easy to see why. As Richard had quietly observed to Robin, the natural conservatism of the Polar group — to whom Captain Scott’s death seemed an all too recent tragedy — was enhanced by the fact that the only scientists still down here were the men with no reason to be anywhere else for the millennium celebrations. Such Antarctic celebratory plans as had been made seemed largely to involve daring each other to shave, ogling garish pin-ups, dressing up in the kind of clothes the pin-ups were so spectacularly lacking, and wearing an assortment of underwear outside their thermals. Erebus, with her more strictly naval regime, seemed to offer the most promising haven from the proposed excesses — but that was far in the future. The immediate plans were for Christmas at the British Antarctic Survey’s base Faraday, if the current crisis could be resolved in time. Otherwise, it might well be Christmas at Armstrong, courtesy of the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Richard himself found the promise of
this possibility as exciting as did his children.
Colin Ross suddenly thrust his face into the crowded little cabin. ‘You’ll need to get your cold-weather gear on quickly,’ he said. ‘Captain Pitcairn says there’s a break in the weather due. They want to send the Westland helicopter on ahead with half a dozen of us in it.’
‘On my way,’ responded Richard. Colin vanished, no doubt to warn his wife and ice partner Kate. Richard hesitated infinitesimally, glancing across at Robin.
‘It’s not really my game,’ she said, with just the faintest hint of regret in her voice. ‘I’ll be better here with the twins, though I know we can rely on Leading Seaman Thompson if push comes to shove …’
‘Never mind,’ said Richard. ‘You’ll only be a couple of hours behind us anyway. Erebus should dock at Armstrong before tea time.’
‘Tony Thompson says we should call it smoko, not tea time,’ said William belligerently, his mood threatening to darken. ‘Smoko with sausages at eleven hundred and smoko with scones at sixteen hundred. That’s the Navy way. Never elevenses or tea — smoko!’
‘There you are then,’ said Richard as though these facts explained everything. ‘Though how you can think of smoko after the lunch you’ve just packed away is beyond me.’ As he spoke, he rose and crossed to the wardrobe built against the wall partitioning the sleeping quarters from the shower room.
Idly, over the head of the quiescent Mary, Robin Mariner’s still grey eyes followed her husband as he pulled out a bright all-in-one cold-weather suit, kicked off his shoes and forced his huge frame into it. Only the strength of the suit’s construction and the triple stitching of the seams, apparently, stopped it from splitting as he zipped it closed across the barrel of his chest already wrapped in naturally-oiled Shetland wool. But this was illusion, of course. No sooner was he secure within the bright suit with the zips tight up to the huge rollneck of the pullover than he shrugged, settling the all-in-one comfortably, and stooped to catch up a huge pair of fur-lined boots. Of all the things that had almost spoilt their southward-looking plans, finding a pair of boots big enough for him had come the closest — for, with the exception of Colin Ross, it seemed that the men of the South — the beards — were great in spirit rather than in stature. In the end, on Cohn’s advice, they had simply had them hand-made. Richard stamped his feet into them now and straightened. His eyes met Robin’s and he gave a slightly rueful grin. ‘Right,’ he said.
The door opened again as he spoke and there was Colin Ross, equally garish in his vermilion parka. ‘We’re off,’ said the Scot as though completing Richard’s thought, and they were gone, leaving Robin feeling a little becalmed in the backwater of so much energy. Becalmed and faintly regretful. In the past it had been she who shared Richard’s every thought so intimately that they finished each others’ sentences.
*
As Richard and Colin stepped out of the port bridgehouse door onto the main deck, they were staggered by the icy force of the squall. The deck beneath their heavily booted feet was awash with water so cold that it was freezing against the metal. The driving snow swirled around the forward face of the bridgehouse, its effect intensified by the overhang of the bridge wing just above their heads. The cold was literally breathtaking and even in their cold-weather outfits they had to stand and acclimatise to the shock.
The ship heaved under them and they were thrown towards the suddenly downhill guard rail then forward as the ship’s head dipped again. They had hardly taken a step before they were brought up short by the safety lines. The last thing each man had done before exiting the bridgehouse was to shrug on the safety harness and now it was a matter of instants for each heavily gloved and mittened hand to clip the harness to the lines before they staggered off into the roiling murk.
And yet, such were the vagaries of the Antarctic summer weather that they were only halfway towards the aft-mounted helipad when the wind stopped as though someone had switched it off and the blizzard transformed itself from a snow tiger to a kitten. Big, soft flakes tumbled playfully over each other and somewhere high above the suddenly listless snowfall the sun came out. Visibility was not much improved by the light — or rather the glare. To the landside, eastwards, the departing skirts of the squall still concealed everything behind curtains of snow. Seaward, away to the west, loomed a fog bank whose thickness could have hidden islands or icebergs with equal ease.
Although the deck became steady in the sudden calm, neither Colin nor Richard unclipped their harnesses. One after the other they followed the safety lines down to where the Westland helicopter crouched under an igloo of snowdrift. Colin’s wife Kate was already there, working with the others to clear the snow, and she, too, had kept her safety harness clipped to the line. The pilot, however, had not been so wise. He had unclipped his safety harness as he climbed onto the undercarriage, reaching up to clear the cockpit of snow. So it was that, when the last heave of the squall came like the flick of a snow leopard’s tail, he dived head first onto the decking and tumbled away into the scuppers. As he slid across the icy deck, he left a thin, bright smear of blood which froze solid even before it could be dulled by oxygenation. And behind him came the mass of snow from his helicopter.
‘Catch him and brace yourself,’ called Richard, suiting the words with the action. Colin heard and obeyed. They were down-slope from the helicopter — it was all sliding down towards them. Even as Erebus began to right herself, with much groaning from the Westland, the two men caught the body of its pilot and hung on for dear life. A wall of soft snow, perhaps two metres high, swept over them like a big surf. The weight of it crushed them. The cold of it burned them. But Richard’s quick thinking had given them just enough time to prepare themselves and their grips were as tight as death, so that when the wave of snow washed through the guard rail and over the side, there were still three bodies woven together like flotsam at the tide line.
Kate was beside them at once. In thoroughly unwifely style she shoved aside the bulk of her husband’s gasping form and pulled the pilot back into the clear and level deck. She hissed as she saw the wound on his forehead. ‘Dan,’ she called to the crewman with the radio, ‘call the doc down here at once. Do you have another chopper pilot aboard?’
‘No, ma’am,’ the sailor replied. ‘Skeleton crew. One chopper man.’
‘Then we’re screwed,’ said Kate roundly.
‘No we’re not,’ said Richard, struggling into a sitting position. ‘Robin’s chopper licence is up to date. If the conditions stay as clear as this, she’ll get us down to Armstrong, no trouble at all.’
*
Robin handed the not too truculent twins over to Leading Seaman Thompson who promised to spend the next couple of hours showing them how sixteen-hundred smoko was prepared and then allowing them to consume most of it. As she checked her cold-weather gear she thought of her twin children with more than a twinge of guilt. Mary and William had been sent to the boarding school at a very tender age largely because their parents’ business commitments kept Richard and Robin rushing all over the world — they had only just extricated themselves from a long-running business entanglement in Hong Kong, for instance, and the last six months had been the first time the family had been in the same continent for any length of time since the Crown Colony’s handover to China. It was typical of the Mariners’ strange family life that they should be spending the last Christmas of the millennium not safely and quietly at home — but down here at the bottom of the world. Still, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and the twins seemed to be having the time of their lives.
Robin left the cabin and walked purposefully along the narrow passage to the companionway. Even now, after the unexpected invitation from Kate and Colin, nearly three months ago, after the excitement and the lengthy preparations, the packing and the never-ending journey via Buenos Aires and Ushuaia to get down here, Robin could scarcely believe that they had made it to Antarctica. But as she shrugged on her safety harness and stepped over the sill of the big
door out onto the deck, the lingering snowfall left her in little doubt. It was as unmistakable as the blue icebergs lurking at the heart of the seaward fog bank, as unmistakable as the midnight sun. She had just clipped her harness onto the safety line when an eddy of wind brought a handful of massive flakes into her face. ‘Give me a break,’ she said to the frozen South — the Big White, as the Americans called it. ‘It’s only three days after midsummer …’
The controls of the Westland were familiar enough to Robin for all that the cabin was bigger than on the little Wasps she was used to. It was designed to take pilot and six passengers. As she went through pre-flight and got to know a couple of new men on Erebus’s bridge, Colin, Kate, Richard and a team of bearded scientists from Erebus piled in their snow gear and strapped in behind her. So far she and Richard had met only Captain Pitcairn’s spruce, clean-shaven Navy crew. The scientists had probably been introduced to them, thought Robin, surveying her passengers in the cabin mirror, but one beard looked much like another to her, and like their companions at the BAS base at Rothera they apparently approved of neither women nor children.
‘Fasten your seat belts,’ she ordered, quoting from some half-forgotten movie. ‘We’re in for a bumpy ride.’
In fact to begin with the ride was anything but bumpy. Robin lifted off Erebus’s helideck in a dead calm and took the Westland straight up above the swirl of snow and loom of fog bank. Up here she could see the tops of the outer islands to the west and the Antarctic mountains to the east. More immediately, she could see the tops of the nearest bergs, though none seemed large enough or close enough to pose any threat to Erebus as she fell away behind and below them.
Robin passed all this back as she received heading information, weather and radio frequencies from the NASA base at Armstrong. As she talked, tuned, talked again, she dropped the Westland’s pert nose and opened up the throttles. The bright orange helicopter roared south and swung east, whirling with the squall’s skirts across the leaden heave of the Bismarck Strait, over the iridescent sprinkle of berg, bergy bits and growler until the black scythe of the coast chopped in beneath them. Then Robin was turning onto her final approach and pulling the chopper’s nose up again as the basalt beach became glacier-topped basalt cliff. And, breathtakingly, beyond this first great outcrop of volcanic coast, a sudden bay fell back into a low, broad reach. In calm, clear conditions the view would have been utterly spectacular, but here the southern arm of the squall lingered, pulling a deadly white shroud over black beach and equally black water. Robin was caught in the classic quandary of the pilot in extreme conditions. Should she go up high and try to fight back down onto the landing place — assuming she could make it out — or should she come in low, cutting through the murk, ready to take evasive action should anything unexpected loom?