Black Ice (2 page)

Carl told Fitzgerald about his home town of Trondheim, on Norway's western shore, and about his current role as fisheries researcher on a three-year postgraduate attachment to London University. He told him of his English wife, Sally, about his six-month-old daughter, Liv, but mostly he talked about what Fitzgerald was really interested in—his passion for polar travel and overland expeditions.

Like many of his countrymen, Carl was a natural on cross-country skis—a skill which enhanced his passion for the extreme limits of the earth. Nansen and Amundsen had been his early inspiration, and their tales of polar exploration had led him to seek places on expeditions whenever the opportunity arose. His crossing of the Greenland ice cap had been a great triumph, and now he had his sights set on bigger things …

Carl had done his Antarctic research, had read the expedition accounts of Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Fuchs. He had attended lectures by contemporary explorers, been inspired by the extraordinary achievements of modern Antarctic stars such as Reinhold Messner, Robert Swan and Ranulph Fiennes.

If he was offered the opportunity to go south, Carl told Fitzgerald, he would jump at the chance.

Fitzgerald had been impressed with the young Norwegian's enthusiasm and proposed—straight out—that they might team up for the attempt.

‘Publicity is vital on these things,' Fitzgerald had told him. ‘A Brit and a Norwegian teaming up will get the press stirred nicely. They'll want to know if it's going to be a race between us!'

Carl smiled, disguising the slight unease Fitzgerald's comment had roused inside him: the idea of capitalising on the ancient South Pole rivalries of Scott and Amundsen was not in the least attractive to him.

Nevertheless, Carl was flattered by the approach, and realistic enough to realise that such an opportunity was unlikely to come his way again.

‘Just one thing,' Fitzgerald had added. ‘Even though there'll only be two of us out there, I'm still the leader of this expedition. You accept that my decisions will be final?'

‘Yes, sir.' Carl gave a mock salute in a failed attempt to make the moment a humorous one.

But Fitzgerald did not smile.

‘Just so long as it's understood.'

3

‘I can't take another step,' Carl told Fitzgerald, ‘and that's all there is to it.'

Fitzgerald stared right at him for long moments before he spoke, the booming, operatic voice of which he was so proud reduced to a plaintive croak.

‘You want to quit?' he asked. ‘When we're so close?'

‘I don't want another fight,' Carl told him quietly. ‘We're talking life and death now, and I think you know it.'

Fitzgerald pulled a map from his pocket and stabbed at it with a finger.

‘Eighty miles, Carl. It's nothing after what we've been through. Eighty miles and the widest crossing is ours. Write our names in the history books once and…'

Fitzgerald's voice fell away. Carl would have laughed if he could have found the energy. Instead he felt the stab of tears prick at his eyes as a vision of his wife and daughter flashed momentarily through his mind. He breathed deeply to recover.

‘You think anyone gives a damn?'

‘Just three or four more days…'

Carl felt the familiar frustration well up inside him.

‘And if the weather closes in? Think about it, for Christ's sake. We haven't eaten for a week. Winter is just around the corner. If that plane can't get to us, we'll both starve to death.'

‘I should have gone solo.' Fitzgerald retreated to his habitual mantra. ‘I'd have been faster without you.'

They sat in silence for many minutes, looking out across the unending expanse of ice, while Carl pondered the manner in which his relationship with Fitzgerald had deteriorated. Locked into each other's presence, Fitzgerald's hoped-for balancing act of the master and his apprentice had been way off the mark. The concept of Carl deferring to Fitzgerald's greater range of experience had been sorely tested by a number of bitter arguments between the two men: rows over navigation, over food, over Fitzgerald's use of the radio for endless media interviews even when their battery supply was dwindling fast.

Carl had tried to make it work, tried so hard he sometimes felt the rigours of living at close quarters with his fellow explorer were sapping more of his energy than the physical demands of the sledge journey itself.

But his attempts came to little. On an emotional level, Fitzgerald had been reserved, taciturn even, giving little away. Carl's mission to peel back a few protective layers resulted in little by way of revelation. On the subject of his single status, Fitzgerald's only comment was a brief ‘Marriage? Never had the time.' About his family background he was similarly tight-lipped, adding nothing to what Carl had already gleaned from press cuttings and biographies about a restless, globetrotting childhood spent moving from one embassy to another with his diplomat father.

The one subject on which Fitzgerald
could
get emotional—and Carl had seen him flare up into a rage more than once—was on his past failings, whether imagined or real. Criticism, particularly by the media, of any of his previous expeditions could leave the explorer apoplectic with fury. When he heard on the radio that an investigative reporter was putting a damning documentary together about his recent disastrous Tierra del Fuego Youth Expedition—a trip which had ended with several of the participants hospitalised with serious injury—Fitzgerald went ballistic, going into a sulk which lasted for weeks.

Faced with a virtually silent travelling companion, Carl sought solace with his diary. He wrote for hours in the tent each night, venting his frustration at what he saw as his companion's increasingly irrational decision-making and his growing fears that the trip would end in disaster.

The crux had come at the South Pole, halfway point and effectively the moment of no return. According to Carl's calculations, their food would run out before the challenge was over. He was tempted to call a halt.

Fitzgerald had turned to Carl and fixed him with a look he had not seen before.

‘You can't pull out,' he said quietly. ‘I won't let you.'

Carl had experienced a curious stab of emotion which, at the time, he was hard pressed to recognise. Was it apprehension? Or a new wariness about what lay beneath Fitzgerald's protective layers?

Only later, way too much later, would the young Norwegian come to realise that what he experienced in that moment was fear.

But now it was too late to turn back the clock. They
had
tried to achieve the impossible, and, as Carl sat there, he knew that he should never have continued beyond the pole.

‘The saddest thing of all,' Carl told Fitzgerald, ‘is that I used to love this place. Now I think of it as the enemy.'

‘We can still do it,' Fitzgerald repeated. ‘It's your mind which is letting you down.'

Carl tugged at Fitzgerald's arm, forcing him to turn towards him.

‘Look at me,' Carl pleaded. ‘I've lost too much weight. I can taste ammonia in my mouth … do you know what that means? Our bodies are consuming themselves.'

Fitzgerald turned away in disgust. ‘If you're so desperate to get out, why didn't you just push the ruddy switch anyway?'

Carl sighed.

‘Because I'm working to the principle that we should take all the important decisions together.'

‘Very noble, I don't think.'

They sat in strained silence for a while, both exhausted by the expenditure of nervous energy.

‘Do it if you want,' Fitzgerald told him, finally, ‘but I want it to be understood between us that it's you who is calling the expedition to a halt. Not me. It's not in my nature to quit.'

Carl took the emergency beacon and ripped the protective plastic seal away.

‘I'm doing this for both of us, Julian, and I hope in time you come to appreciate that.'

He clicked the switch to ‘on'. A faint bleep could be heard emitting from the tiny loudspeaker.

It was done. Carl looked up into the sky, fantasising that he could already hear the drone of an incoming aircraft.

There would be food on board. Carl felt the craving deep inside him as he thought about that.

4

Richard Leighton was in his hotel room in Ushuaia, playing a little pre-lunch patience on his laptop, when the telephone rang. It was Julian Fitzgerald's radio operator, Irene Evans, calling from the expedition control room at the airport.

‘We just got a call. They let off the beacon. Get down here as fast as you can.'

‘Thank Christ for that. I'll be right with you.'

Richard stuffed his thermal clothing into a kitbag and packed his laptop and camera. Please God, he thought as he walked the now-familiar dusty road down towards Ushuaia airport, don't let this be a false alarm. If he had to spend one more day in this dead-and-alive hole, he'd start talking to the penguins. Kicking his heels in Tierra del Fuego wasn't what Richard Leighton had expected when he'd been offered the reporting job of his dreams.

Just a month earlier he'd walked into the offices of the
Daily Mail
feeling ten feet tall. This wasn't just the beginning of a job, Richard felt, this was the beginning of an illustrious media career. Getting the royal tour to Brazil had been a great excitement, his first foreign assignment. Granted, it wasn't exactly the Gulf War, or a Washington posting, but it was a start.

He filed his daily reports, diligently stayed awake during the interminable official meals and slipped easily into the reporters' ‘club' which followed the British royals around the globe.

It was five-star all the way.

Then the bad news, just as he was packing his bags for the business-class flight home: the call from his editor back in London.

‘Ever heard of a place called Ushuaia?'

‘Can't say I have.'

‘I want you down there as soon as possible. Seems that explorer Fitzgerald has gone missing in Antarctica. They haven't had any radio contact for ten days.'

Richard listened to his brief with dismay. He had heard of Fitzgerald and his overblown exploits, but as far as he was concerned the man was a dinosaur. What the hell was the point of trying to walk across a bloody continent when you could fly? It all seemed a bit of a farce.

Still, he couldn't say that to the editor.

‘How long's the assignment?' he asked.

‘Can't say. They should have reached the edge of the continent some days ago. Their control people are pretty sure they're in trouble … so get your ass down there.'

There was no business class to Ushuaia. Richard sat in an economy seat with a stale chicken sandwich and a cup of fake Pepsi, watching miserably out of the window as hundreds of miles of Altiplano rolled endlessly by.

Where the hell is this place? he thought. It feels like we're flying to the ends of the bloody earth.

They were, as Richard found out when he finally got round to seeing a map. Ushuaia is the southernmost human habitation of any size on the planet, a frontier town cursed with a year-round wind so cutting and intrusive it frequently drives inhabitants insane.

‘A gold-rush town without the gold,' Richard wrote in one of his first scene-setting pieces, ‘a place which feels like it is being punished for some forgotten crime, where even the dogs look like they are contemplating suicide.'

He made contact with Irene, Fitzgerald's stressed-out radio operator, who filled him in on the nuts and bolts of the story. The two explorers had been out there for well over three months and should have been making radio contact every day or two. In fact there had been silence for eleven days.

‘What does that mean?' he asked her.

‘It means I don't sleep until we get that emergency signal. Those men are dying out there now, and winter's about to strike.'

‘Winter?'

‘It's the southern hemisphere,' she snapped impatiently, ‘upside-down land. The Antarctic winter happens in our summer.'

‘Oh yes. Of course. Gets a bit chilly down there, does it?'

Irene gave him a frosty look. ‘Once winter sets in,' she explained, ‘there's no daylight at all. The temperature gets too low for a plane to land.'

That was the beginning of the wait, the beginning of Richard Leighton's forced exile at the southernmost tip of South America. The days had dragged so slowly he actually began to believe time had a different pace to it down here in nowhere land. He bought himself thermal clothes. He visited the nearby penguin colony. He took a boat trip around the Beagle Channel. He learned a few words of Spanish from the almost-attractive girl at the reception of his hotel.

He masturbated. And he played patience on his laptop.

Now Irene's call had broken the spell, and the waiting was over. Richard bustled into the tiny expedition control room at the airport, where Fitzgerald's radio coordinator and a local pilot were consulting a large map.

‘What's the news?' Richard asked.

‘They're here,' Irene told him, tapping a position on the map, ‘at the far end of the Blackmore Glacier. I'm just discussing the rescue with Captain Villanova here.'

Richard shook the captain's hand.

‘Think you can get them out?'

‘There are many crevasses in that area,' Villanova told him, ‘but we can try.'

‘How about the weather?'

‘There's a big storm front coming in from the west, but that's normal for Antarctica. We'll try and get in and out before it hits.'

Richard made a quick call home. He knew his fiancée would be excited to hear the news, but all he got was the answerphone.

‘Sophie, it's me. We got an emergency signal from Fitzgerald and his mate; we're leaving for Antarctica right now to pick them up. I'll call when I can, OK? Love you.'