“What about spare parts, tools, all that stuff?” asked Earl.
“Shouldn’t be a problem — they always kept most of the essential equipment here, to save time commuting to Inner Willy. We can make do.”
“This is goddamn unbelievable,” Mike said. “So what’s your programme?”
“Penny and I go right back to Shacktown. I bring Simon and Kyril here, and maybe a few others, and we go to work. By the middle of the month we should know if the Herc will really fly. If it will, we take it to Shacktown and then fly out to New Zealand. If it won’t, we stay put until spring.”
“Sounds okay,” Bob said. “We can give you some help, too, but bring as many people as you need — there’s plenty of room in the other Jamesways, and enough food for everyone. Well, for ten or twelve if they end up staying all winter,” he added.
“Christ,” Penny groaned. “I’ll be back home washing dishes tonight.” The men laughed; Al patted her arm. “You’re sure Cape Hallett is out?” she asked.
“Gee, you really don’t want to wash dishes, do you?” Al smiled. “Yeah, Hallett is out. If you’ve got to gamble, you might as well play the odds.”
*
The three men walked out with them to the Otter, dragging a sledge loaded with supplies: coffee, canned food, cigarettes, sweets. Then they all shook hands again. Mike said, “When you’re gone we’ll be sure it was all a hallucination.”
“I already think you’re the hallucinations,” Penny answered. “Good luck — see you again in a few weeks, I guess.”
“I’ll be back by suppertime,” Al said. “Unless the weather breaks.”
They all looked up. The horizon was dark again, and the sky was full of stars. There was still no wind.
Al tried to follow his own tracks in taking off, to avoid hitting an unseen hole or sastrugi. As the Otter climbed and circled, three flares went off over the little base; Al blinked his running lights in reply.
“Are we really going to fly our way out of here?” Penny asked, feeling a little giddy.
“I believe we are. I truly believe we are.” Al rubbed his hands together, like a stage villain anticipating the success of his schemes. “We’re gonna freeze in that Herc for a couple of weeks, but it’ll be a lot of fun.”
“Whoopee,” Penny drawled.
“Aw, where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“It’s all very well for you — you’ll be having fun with your grease-monkey friends in a nice cool aeroplane while I’m slaving in that hot kitchen.”
After a while, she said: “The real piss-off is being back with Steve.”
“How so?”
“I don’t like failures. He’s not a failure, and I’m not a failure, but we sure failed together.” She waved at the cigar smoke filling the compartment. “And I kind of expected that, because he’s a lot like my ex-husband. But that lasted four years, and this lasted four months.”
“Being on the ice will do it,” Al said. “Whatever you are when you come here, this place will intensify it. Steve came here as an ambitious guy with a reputation to make. You came here as an outside observer. And I think you were kind of on the run from something.”
“What did you come as?” she asked quickly, feeling the subject was getting dangerous.
“I was on the run, too.” He looked at her, his expression almost unreadable in the dim light. “Guys Steve’s age, if they’re any good, are hungry. And they think about that hunger, and how they can feed it. It makes ’em kind of calculating sometimes, but it also makes ’em — oh, exposed. Like anybody who wants something really bad. I don’t know what made you guys decide to split up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had to do with his being involved in the quake.”
“Hey, Al, you and I were involved, too, remember?”
“Not the way Steve was — intellectually involved, emotionally involved. You and me, we just got knocked down. He’s the Frankenstein who invented the monster. And then it surprised him, and he’s had to try to understand it, get it all — get it all into his head, into words and numbers.”
She suspected Al was right; she had known a lot of men, and a few women, with that urge to reduce the world to a pattern of symbols. She had the urge herself. But to understand Steve was not to forgive him.
Conversation lapsed. For a long time there was only the rumble of the engines, the vibration of the plane and the darkness Al tried several times to raise either Shacktown or Outer Willy, with no luck. At 1500, after they’d been in the air almost an hour, he shook his head in annoyance.
“I’m still not getting TACAN. And we must be almost on top of Shacktown.”
Penny put on her helmet and plugged it in, but only static came through the headphones. Al took them down to five hundred metres, but there were no special landmarks — only the Shelf and a scattering of ice islands.
“I see a light!” Penny said. She pointed a few degrees to the right of their course. “See it?”
Al doused the instrument lights. “Yup. That must be the place.”
They flew towards the light for several minutes, but it seemed to grow no closer. The high cliffs of an ice island rose under them, scarcely visible in the darkness.
Now the light did grow: it pulsed and flared, a yellow-orange flower. They were over it, circling down, and their beacon was Shacktown itself, burning in the ice.
Chapter 12 – Fire
Reg Lewis had gone right to work to find the cause of the floodlights’ failure, but it hadn’t been an easy job. A hundred cables ran down Tunnel D into the hangar; some were exposed while others disappeared into the hangar walls. The floodlight cables were in the walls, and also supplied current to several other outlets. Reg methodically worked his way around the dark hangar from the machine shop, and it wasn’t until almost 1000 hours that he began to smell smoke. He yanked off a glove and held it against a wall panel without quite touching; then another. The fifth panel was noticeably warm. So were the sixth and seventh. The eighth was hot.
“Fire!” he shouted, and began running towards the nearest drum of fire extinguisher. It was a fine red powder that could be sprayed or even shovelled — ordinary fire retardants were liquid and therefore useless in the cold. He wrestled the drum closer to the hot panel, aware of footsteps thudding towards him from the machine shop.
“Where?” It was Gordon Ellerslee, with George Hills right behind him.
“Behind the bloody wall. That bloody old aluminium wiring they put in two years ago.” He ripped the shovel out of the drum and jammed its blade between two panels, then pried one panel loose. Smoke puffed out, black and acrid.
“Better be quick!” Gordon said. Reg heaved on the shovel and the panel screamed away from the studs. The smouldering wood ignited; Reg stumbled back and plunged the shovel into the top of the drum. As he threw the retardant over the fire, sparks scattered over the duckboards and oil-soaked ice beneath their feet.
Suddenly they were standing in a pool of blue and orange flames, a pool that spread erratically along the hangar wall and across the floor. The three men threw handfuls of retardant around themselves.
“Aw, hell,” Reg said. “We better get out of here.”
“No shit,” Gordon snapped.
They stumbled through the flames, coughing. The hangar looked strange in the bluish firelight, and they almost lost their bearings. The forty seconds it took to reach the machine shop seemed much longer.
George Hills, in first, slapped the FIRE button on the wall by the door to Tunnel D. A shrill clanging began at once. Gordon snatched up the phone and punched Hugh’s number. No answer. He tried the lounge.
“Fire in the hangar!” he bellowed as soon as someone picked up the phone. “It’s bad. We need everybody.” Then he dropped the phone and lunged towards the switches controlling the hangar doors.
“Gord — don’t,” George said. “You’ll just feed the fire.”
“We gotta get the fucking vehicles out. The fucking fire will burn right through the ro
of anyways. Jesus — the fuel bladders.”
Two big fuel bladders, one for Diesel Arctic and the other for JP4, were buried in the ice just beyond the burning wall. The diesel was probably safe — it was farther away from the fire, and not easily ignited — but the JP4 bladder could go off like a bomb.
Men began to pour into the machine shop, and up the ramp directly into the hangar. The big doors banged open, and the fire reached farther back in the hangar, sweeping delicately around the snowmobiles, Sno-Cats and the D4 bulldozer. Oily black smoke retreated, thickening, before the cold air from outside.
Hugh was suddenly in the machine shop, his anorak open and his head bare. “Get on those vehicles and get ’em outside,” he said calmly. “Howie, take the D4. Then come back for the Nodwell. Steve, the snowmobile by the rear wall. Will, the other one. Simon, take Sno-Cat 1. Gordon, Sno-Cat 2.” He stopped the three Russians. “Get the sledges down from the wall on this side, and get as many crates on to them as you can. Take them outside, dump them — ”
“Dump?” asked Ivan.
“Turn over. In the snow. Then come back with the sledges and take more crates.”
“Okay.”
The fire was eating rapidly into the far wall, and part of the floor was now a pond of burning oil and gas, floating on a few centimetres of meltwater. Steve’s snowmobile snarled through the fire and outside into the dark. The Sno-Cats and the other snowmobile followed, skidding in the water. Terry and Suzy, along with Don Treadwell, joined the men spraying and shovelling fire retardant along the edge of the burning pond.
Howie O’Rourke loped back in and headed straight for the huge green Nodwell tractor, which looked like a house on caterpillar treads. The pond had already spread around it. Howie bent and wrenched a three-metre length of duckboards right out of the ice and slid it into the flames. It began to burn, but it gave him a chance to sprint across to the tractor. He climbed over the tread and into the cab. The Nodwell’s engine, not started in weeks, refused. Howie leaned out of the cab.
“Get the cable, somebody — we gotta winch this stupid beast outa here.”
Max Wilhelm dragged the cable in, and Howie came back across the duckboards. He pulled them to within a metre of the front of the Nodwell, carried the cable out and hooked it up. Then he waved a signal to Hugh, up in the machine shop, and the cable went taut.
Very slowly the big tractor began to grind across the floor. No one but Howie paid it any attention; most were trying to get to the burning wall and keep the fire away from the JF4 bladder. The hangar was filling with ice crystals as well as smoke: as the fire melted the floor, steam escaped through the flames into air that was -45°C. The crystals fell back into the fire, or swirled in the turbulent air, glittering like sparks. It took over ten minutes to haul the Nodwell outside into the darkness. By that time Howie had gone to join the others along the wall.
They worked clumsily but systematically, coughing in the smoke as they shovelled retardant. Tears poured down their faces and froze when they stepped back from the flames. The overhead lights went out; emergency lamps tripped on, but had little effect in the smoke. The men fought the fire by its own light.
Without warning, a jet of fire rose almost to the ceiling. Howie knew at once what had happened: the fuel line from the JP4 bladder had burned through, and fumes from the bladder, drawn out by the rising air, had ignited.
“Everybody out!” he screamed. “Out, out!”
Those near the back of the hangar raced for the ramp to Tunnel D, Howie and the others turned and went outside. The vehicles gave a little shelter from a rising breeze, but it was horribly cold.
“Okay,” Howie rasped, “when the bladder goes, we gotta sneak back in and keep the fire outa the tunnel.”
“How?” Gordon panted. An instant later the snow lit up, a lambent red-orange, and the men saw each other clearly. They crouched behind the Sno-Cats as the bladder exploded in a geyser of fire and steam. The wall of the hangar, already weakened, caved in. The roof sagged and cracked; flames shot up through it into the smoking dark.
“Hugh’s still in the machine shop,” Steve yelled over the roar. “Let’s get in there.”
“Wait a minute,” Howie yelled back. “He’ll be down in the tunnel. Go in there now and you’re dead.” He looked grimly at the fire, and swatted at a fragment of glowing ash that settled on his sleeve. Despite the flames, it was hard to see the interior of the hangar, but the floor was still burning, sending still more black smoke into the air.
“Let’s bulldoze it,” Steve said. “Get the D4 and D8 moving, and bury the fire on the floor.”
“Good.” Howie grabbed Simon Partington and hustled him over to the D4. As its engine started, Howie went on to the D8, which had been outside for days. The night before, he’d had to blowtorch its pony engine to thaw it enough to start the diesel so he could clear the snow from the hangar doors. The pony engine was frozen again, but Howie stolidly dug the blowtorch out of the cab and went to work. Ben Whitcumb lurched up beside him.
“I got the flamethrower,” Ben said. “It ought to work faster.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Yes.” Ben didn’t bother to put on the flamethrower’s backpack; he leaned it against his leg and put the nozzle close to the engine. A long yellow flame gushed out, and Ben hastily twisted the nozzle until the flame was hot and blue. It took over five minutes, but the pony engine caught the first time Howie tried it, and the diesel bellowed into life a moment later.
Simon meanwhile had driven the D4 back to the hangar, with the bulldozer’s blade pushing a mound of snow ahead of it. A cloud of ice crystals formed around the D4 as it entered the hangar; the snow was melting, vaporising and refreezing. But most of it stayed solid, and Simon was able to lay a two-metre strip along the edge of the burning pool. He backed out, scraped out more snow and went in again.
Howie, with the D8’s huge blade, rapidly made up for lost time. The smoke was less of a problem, since the fire had burned through the rear wall and more of the roof. After four runs, however, Howie had to stop: most of the floor fire had been smothered, but the burning fuel bladder was so hot that it was impossible to get close to it, and chunks of the roof were falling around the tractors in showers of sparks.
Steve clambered up into the cab. “What about the diesel bladder?”
“It oughta be okay. There’s thirty metres of ice between it and the JP4.”
“I hope you’re right. Let’s see what needs doing in the tunnel.”
Howie, Simon, Steve and three or four others went into the hangar at a clumsy trot, coughing in the smoke. Behind the machine shop the fire had spread along the rear wall and down the ramp towards Tunnel D. The men went through the machine shop and down the stairs to the tunnel, where they found almost twenty people fighting the fire. Smoke hung like a black fog under the tunnel lights.
From the top of the stairs, Steve watched the fire spreading down the ramp, through the high stacks of crates along the walls. In the dry cold every scrap of wood, fabric and plastic seemed to ignite instantly. The flames glazed through a pink cloud of retardant, slowed but not stopped. He went down the stairs and found Hugh in the crowd.
“It’ll burn right down both sides of the tunnel, and along the duckboards,” Steve said. “The hangar’s a dead loss. But if we can clear out some of these crates — like a firebreak — ”
“Good. Ray, George, Ivan! Come on back. And you chaps, too.” Hugh soon had a team working on each side of the tunnel, moving crates away from the approaching fire.
“Anyone hurt?” Steve asked Hugh.
“No, thank God.” Hugh coughed. “Smoke’s a nuisance. Anything left of the hangar?”
“The far side is completely gutted. We kept it away from the machine shop, but if any more of the roof comes down, that could be wrecked, too.”
“Bloody hell. And tonnes of snow on the roof.” He looked quickly up at the roof of the tunnel. Long icicles were forming from it, and above the ra
mp the frost was entirely gone. Where the crates had been removed, the tunnel walls glistened unnaturally. “We may lose part of the roof here as well,” Hugh said.
“That ought to put out the fire, anyway,” Steve answered.
Despite all their efforts, the fire spread through the crates right up the firebreak. Hugh ordered everyone down the tunnel. The icicles had vanished; twenty metres of roof plate, four whole sections, were bare and dry above the fire. The walls were hidden in smoke and steam; burning crates crashed to the floor of the tunnel. The stink of roasting meat drifted through the smoke, and canned goods exploded with muffled bangs.
“About time we had a cook-out,” Gordon laughed, and everyone else laughed, too. No one seemed dejected; the mood, as far as Steve could tell, was a mixture of annoyance and excitement.
“All right,” Hugh shouted. “Everyone into the huts. I think the roof is about to go.”
It went before anyone could move. The right-hand wall gave way, and an instant later the roof plates sagged and fell. The lights went out all the way to the junction with Tunnel E; out of the murk came a hissing cloud of smoke, steam and powdery snow, driven by cold outside air. It filled the tunnels like a grey smog, but dissipated almost as quickly as it had come.
Someone went into Tunnel C and came back with some flashlights. Steve, Hugh and Carter took them and walked cautiously into the darkened end of Tunnel D. An irregular mound of snow choked it, rising in places to three or four metres above the floor. Beyond it was the orange glare of the still-burning hangar. Above it was a ragged rectangle of blackness, out of which snow still sifted in tiny cascades. The men could hear the distant hoarse roar of the burning JP4, but other than that there was little sound.
Hugh shivered. “Damned cold. Well, that’ll teach us not to play with matches.”
They became aware of a faint buzzing overhead. Steve looked up, expecting to see a sparking wire. There was nothing. The buzzing turned to a deep drone, and then they saw the Otter’s running lights as it crossed the black rectangle of sky.
Icequake Page 18