by Peter Tonkin
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?
Confident of her reactions, and all too well aware of the need for speed, Robin chose the latter option. She dropped the Westland’s nose again and followed the course laid down by Armstrong’s radio man all but blindly.
She had just settled onto the course across the bay when some half-glimpsed glimmer of light or movement had her pulling the controls back into the pit of her stomach as her feet danced on the pedals. Out of the deadly smoke-swirl of the squall, so close that the whip antenna on the highest reach of the radio mast ticked the fat swell of undercarriage, there came and went a ship. Richard, hurled sideways against the Perspex of a window by the helicopter’s wild gyration, saw the white bridge of a big icebreaker. He saw the bustle of crewmen on the deck, clustered round a big, red Sikorsky helicopter. He saw her name, painted starkly on her ice-destroyer’s bows: Kalinin.
*
The NASA people at Armstrong had put out a series of flares to mark the landing spot. The square of mauve lights gleamed brightly, though the smoke that they gave out streamed away down the wind with the dark swirls of snow. The wind, so much stronger here than north of the ice-capped volcanic headland, was at least steady so Robin was able to factor it in to her landing. The track of the final approach brought them over the bay, past the deep-water anchorage facilities so generously provided by Nature herself at the foot of a southern brother to the black headland, past the less spectacular manmade docking facility on the black beach and over the complex of green Jamesway huts. Out of one of these huts, halfway between prefabricated buildings and canvas-sided tents shaped like strange, sectioned tunnels, a little welcoming committee dashed, so that when Richard, Colin, Kate and the beards leaped out into the blizzard they were swept immediately into the next phase of the search without a break.
While Robin moved the helicopter off the landing pad to make way for another chopper that was apparently due to arrive any moment, her passengers were briefed and equipped in the vestibule of the nearest Jamesway hut. Five minutes later Richard was sitting in the back of a bucking John Deere pick-up clutching his borrowed skis and poles, craning to see over Colin’s shoulder to the screen of the American scientist Billy Hoyle’s laptop. Out of the windscreen he could see that the Westland had vanished and he wondered briefly where Robin could have got to. Then he turned back and gave all his attention to Hoyle and his laptop. On the bright square of the screen there blazed a 3D schematic of the terrain immediately in front of them, broken up into a grid by red lines.
‘The lines are the tracks of the laser net we laid down,’ the American was bellowing. ‘Like I said during initial briefing, we have just enough scientific staff left to keep it running. It shouldn’t be possible for him to go out of touch; even if his equipment all goes down, he should still register in one of these quadrants. It’s supposed to be foolproof. We were relying on that — especially as there are so few of us left to handle any emergency. I guess nobody told the Big White to lay off us, huh?’ Hoyle’s thick mitten dangled from a clip at the wrist as his gloved finger danced over the laptop keys. Quadrants on the schematic dulled. ‘These are the areas our one little snow-team searched before we went off the screen too and the boss hit the panic button,’ he continued. ‘Only the distant and difficult sections are left. There must be holes and hollows out here which fooled the hell out of the net. Like the one we went into when we vanished off the instruments back at base. Or maybe the laser beams froze, what do you think?’
‘What’s that feature there?’ Richard leaned forward, pointing at a lateral mark bisecting the topmost sector.
‘You got sharp eyes and a good nose, sir. That’s a nasty little feature. The whole of this section, everything on the map here, is the floor of a glacier that vanished maybe five million years ago. There’s no ice there now, just the huge boulders you can see on the schematic here, some the size of a pick-up, some a little larger than Titanic. But on the ground we still got some subglacial features, even though the glacier is gone. And that is one. It’s a moraine hill. Crushed rock gathered into a hollow in the original ice-sheet and dumped here. We don’t know exactly what it’s made of but it acts funny and fucks up our equipment. ’Scuse me, ma’am, sirs. Technical phrase there. And in the middle of this moraine hill there’s this deep lateral fissure. If this was ice it’d be a crevasse. It’s narrow, mean and nasty.’
‘And it’s where we’d better start, I guess,’ rumbled Richard and Colin together.
‘Our chopper flew over it right at the outset, but there was nothing to be seen,’ the American said. ‘The boss would only authorise chopper searches this far off-base — especially after he lost contact with us.’
‘Even so,’ said Richard.
Colin nodded in agreement. ‘It’s not the same as doing it on the
ground. What do you think, Kate?’
‘There’s supposed to be no snow on this ground,’ said Kate. ‘But there are deep drifts everywhere.’
‘Likely be gone in the morning,’ said Billy Hoyle. ‘Not that there is actually a morning, this time of year.’
‘You could hide a regiment out here in this and never see them from the air,’ Kate observed.
‘A tank regiment at that,’ agreed Richard feelingly. And after his experiences in Central Africa he knew all too well what he was talking about. Colin and Kate were the ice experts — that was why they were in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, after all — but Richard had spent some time in close association with them delivering a massive iceberg, codenamed Manhattan, from the North Atlantic to the African coast before becoming embroiled in a civil war there. A war which had involved several regiments of tanks. He was, as a consequence, no slouch around ice. Nor around tanks, come to that.
*
The strange moraine had the eerie appearance of a big black Neolithic burial mound. With the snow streaming off its cleft crest like intense grey smoke, the look of it was deeply disturbing, even from a distance. The sound of it was worse, for the wind caught in the throat of that strange lateral crevasse and it sobbed, cried and howled according to the squall’s intensity. This sound began to overpower even the revving of the John Deere’s engine. As they drew up beside it, Hoyle spun the 3D graphic with a precise scale. The moraine was the better part of three hundred metres high and three hundred metres wide at its widest point, and perhaps four hundred metres long, tear-shaped as such things tend to be. Its tail pointed up the desolate valley towards the distant, invisible massif which had given the glacier birth, before flicking round into a blunt, south-facing hook.
When they got out and stood beside it, they saw that its sides were nearly sheer and disturbingly smooth, reaching up into the near invisibility of the howling overcast. The squall had cloaked its sides with massive concavities of pallid snow, made all the more stark by the fact that the rock face of the moraine and the floor of the valley itself were obsidian, basalt black. The John Deere had dropped them not far from the central fissure and towards this, up the slope of sugary snow, Colin Ross led them after some lengthy, painstaking ground work worthy of a Native American tracker. The snow, although crystalline and temporary, was firm enough to carry them upwards until they attained the cleft and shuffled forward into it.
For Richard it was as though he had stepped from one circle of the Inferno into another. With ruthless perspective the moraine cliffs on either hand stretched upwards to the tiniest strip of sky above and forwards to the merest, fading glimmer of grey. Everything else was sheer, featureless black, giving the illusion that the towering black walls were closing inexorably in on him, like a vice in Vulcan’s smithy. So vivid and disorientatingly overpowering was this claustrophobic impression that Richard was hardly surprised to see Colin Ross suddenly collapse before him, as if borne down by the weight of those terrible, howling rock jaws.
But no. When Richard got to Colin’s side, he found his old friend examining a bright piece of equipment.
Hoyle was at their side almost at once. ‘That’s his back-up radio,’ he bellowed.
Richard looked around. ‘He came in here to shelter and signal but gave up and went out again?’
‘Looks like it. And in a bad way too or he would never have left this. But why would he need shelter?’ Hoyle mused aloud. ‘The whole point of the suit he’s wearing is that it can shrug off conditions like this. Even if there was a fault with the comms he should still have been able to walk out. He could call up the schematic from my laptop on the head-up display inside his visor. Our fifteen minutes in the John Deere is maybe a forty-minute walk home, ten kilometres all in all — and downhill into the bargain — but that was what he was out here to do.’
‘Sounds like a power failure to me,’ said Richard. ‘What sort of power unit was he wearing?’
‘That’s just it. The whole suit is the power unit. Powerdown is just impossible …’ Hoyle’s vice tailed off. He had clearly said more than he meant to. And Richard, in a moment of revelation, thought of the bulky, five-layered, two-part space suits he was familiar with. Whatever the missing man had been wearing must have been very different to that. Lighter. Less unwieldy. Experimental. And it had obviously failed somehow. What had Hoyle called it? Powerdown.
‘Over here,’ called Colin, and they followed him silently.
Every now and then Colin would pause and study some sign, but it was not until they got to the far side that he showed his true worth. On the outer, south-facing, slope, the snow seemed to Richard to be as fine and undisturbed as the one they had walked up on the north side. But not to Colin’s snow-wise eyes.
‘Look,’ he bellowed to Kate, gesturing at something invisible to the others.
‘I see,’ she called, and they plunged forward, side by side, following an uneven track down and back along the hissing slope, away from the wind, inland up the valley.
Richard floundered along in their wake, awed by their ability to read the featureless surface of the snow. As they did so, the wind began to falter and the light to brighten. By the time they reached the teardrop tail of the great moraine, there was bright sunshine in a hard blue sky through which drifted the last few innocent swan’s-down flakes. Here the tail of the rock curled right round into a little amphitheatre perhaps three metres high and across. The whole of the hollow was packed with snow, like the curve of a beach-groin packed with sand.
Colin began to dig, with Kate at one side and Richard at the other. Hoyle, protecting his equipment, stood back. As they worked, the day settled into a bright clear afternoon, apparently full of midsummer heat, though in fact it was still about zero degrees Celsius. So still did it become in those few minutes as they worked that the sudden thunder of the Sikorsky burst upon them like a disquieting revelation, and as it did so they found their missing astronaut. As a result, they scarcely spared a look at the hovering chopper. The only recognition they gave it was to be grateful that the outwash of its rotors moved the snow and made their digging easier. It made Hoyle’s job harder, however, as he tried to report in to Armstrong over the noise of the Sikorsky.
As though creating a bizarre snowman, they revealed a tall, silver-clad, snow-crusted figure frozen erect there, mirrored visor looking urgently but all too hopelessly westwards to where unattainable safety lay, reaching out with his right arm. How light the suit seemed, thought Richard as the snow fell away. It looked to be little more substantial than tin foil. By the time they had uncovered the body down to the thighs, there was enough of a platform for Hoyle to step in and undo the clasps of the helmet. He lifted it clear to reveal a still, white, wide-eyed face.
Kate pushed her naked fingers onto his throat at once. ‘No pulse,’ she yelled. ‘Frozen solid.’
Richard looked up then, distracted by the fact that she had had to shout at all. Black against the hard blue sky, the Sikorsky still hung immediately above the cleft. As he raised his hand to shade his dazzled eyes, he saw a figure throw itself out of the helicopter’s side. Hardly able to credit what he was seeing, Richard watched the falling body curl into a surfer’s stance and he realised there was a board strapped to its feet. With a whoop just audible even at this distance — and over the clatter of the motor and the rotor — the figure straightened as the board settled onto the crest of snow which sat along the topmost curve of the black moraine like the fin on a curled eel. Arms spread for balance, gold hair streaming free above the folded parka hood, Ray-Bans gleaming in the hard light, the wild figure hurled down the thin, precipitous line of snow until its momentum dissipated in the jumble their digging had created.
In a fine flurry, the snowboarder came to a stop and kicked his board up into the air. Catching it deftly and swinging it under his arm, he strode forward.
‘Hi,’ he called. ‘The name’s Maddrell, Thomas S. I see you found your missing astronaut. Armstr
ong radioed that you had before we came out on our little pleasure jaunt. Hi there, buddy …’ He came breezily forward, still on a high from his wild ride, arm outstretched to shake the hand of the frozen corpse.
Chapter Two
The centre of NASA’s Armstrong Antarctic base was a collection of Jamesway huts which served for accommodation, storage and laboratories. It was typical that the laboratories were by far the most luxurious. To the west of these lay the bay, with its two black arms like the antlers of a gigantic stag beetle. To the east lay, in succession, an open area with a flagpole, the landing pad for the helicopter, the secure engineering areas and the vehicle dispersal area. Beyond that lay the flat-floored vastness of the glacial valley stretching up to the distant Antarctic mountains.
During the next couple of days Richard, Robin and the twins got to know the camp’s facilities pretty well. For Richard and Robin, that acquaintance began in the big central hut which functioned as mess hall, church, assembly hall, recreation room, communal office and, today, coroner’s court. The camp’s meagre supply of chairs was supplemented by packing cases, plastic boxes, anything of the right height which promised a relatively comfortable seat. The corpus delicti was not present. Together with the radio retrieved by Colin Ross and the helmet removed by Hoyle, it lay in a cold store area — in other words an outer hut which had no heating. No disrespect was intended, but practicalities had to be observed as well as due process.
At one end of the wooden-floored area a table stood athwart the long, narrow room. Behind this sat the man Hoyle called ‘the boss’, base commander Eugene Jaeger, who carried the rank of full colonel, USAF, but who never seemed to use it. Beside him sat one of Armstrong’s two remaining communications experts with a laptop on open two-way video link with NASA headquarters in Washington DC via a powerful dish outside, a couple of satellites and an Internet provider.