Black Ice (32 page)

‘I still think it's worth the risk,' Murdo persisted.

‘We can't accept any more risk. Can't you see that?' Lauren flared. ‘It's going to get harder, Murdo, a damn sight harder than you can imagine. Sean and I have driven this terrain, we know what's ahead. There's a bloody mountain range waiting for us! This is going to be the toughest physical challenge any of us have ever faced, and every single calorie is going to count. We might need that extra strength of yours to haul the sledge later on. With someone on it.'

This time no one responded.

‘There's one more thing,' Lauren added quietly. ‘Fitzgerald might be out there somewhere, waiting. He won't attack us while we stay together.'

With that the team fell quiet, and within an hour or so the ashes of the fire had died down to a dull glow.

69

From the start of the seventh day, Lauren's nerves were in a heightened state. They were approaching the first of the equipment dumps, and it was her responsibility—and hers alone—to locate it. She went through the calculations over and over again as they plodded wearily along, checking her compass every ten minutes for the bearing and calling a halt as they made it to the one-hundred-mile mark.

‘This is it,' Lauren told them. ‘By my reckoning we should be close to the equipment barrel.'

The tired team scanned in all directions but could see nothing unusual. The terrain was undulating, the surface broken by scoops and hollows; in places drifting snow had formed into hardened dunes. The light was dull, a blanket of cloud obscuring the scene and casting a watery grey sheen over the land. There seemed to be no definition in place, as if the entire scene had been sculpted from dirty bits of old cloud.

‘You must be mistaken,' Murdo told her. ‘I thought you said this thing had a flag on it? Surely we'd be able to see it straight away?'

‘Not necessarily. This ground is more uneven than it looks. Give or take a few hundred metres, it has to be here,' Lauren insisted. ‘Let's rest for a while, then get a search pattern organised.'

‘How are we going to conduct the search?' Sean asked her.

‘We'll measure a straight line of five hundred metres and spread out twenty metres apart. We walk that transect, then move down one hundred metres and start again.'

They rested their exhausted legs for a while, each locked in a private world of misery as they sat back to back on the ice. No one talked about the unthinkable—about what would happen if they couldn't find the depot.

‘It's lunchtime,' Richard said at one point. ‘They'll be eating scampi and chips and ploughman's lunches in every pub in Britain.'

In the first days of the trek such a statement would have been met with howls of outrage and pleas to keep his fantasies to himself. Now no one had the energy to tell him to shut up.

Frank began his singing again, this time an Irish tune that Lauren recognised but could not name. It made her want to cry. Periodically he would screw up his face as a wave of pain ran through his infected hands.

At length, Lauren got them onto their feet and the search began.

For two hours she kept them looking, urging them to try and concentrate even as the afternoon wind began to rise. Initially, they were enthusiastic, excited even at the prospect of the hot food and supplies that the barrel would bring. But, as the day stretched interminably on, morale began to slump.

A gnawing sensation of despair began to eat away at Lauren. How long could they continue to search? she asked herself. When would the weaker team members begin to collapse if they didn't get food? They would survive another night, she surmised, but not much more.

After a while the tight discipline of the search broke down, each of them moving off and wandering in aimless patterns as they looked for the elusive barrel. From time to time, Lauren reminded herself that it was dangerous for them to be separated in this way … that Fitzgerald might have followed them, might be waiting for a chance to stalk up and …

‘I had the same thought,' Sean told her, ‘and I've been keeping a good look-out behind us. So far nothing.'

‘I just don't want anyone to stray too far,' Lauren told him.

But she didn't have the energy to try and regroup the line and continued her own meandering search as her mind wandered erratically from one thought to another.

The mood when Lauren finally called them back together was one of unmitigated depression. No one, not even Lauren and Sean, had anticipated that the barrel would prove so difficult to find.

‘Maybe it got blown away,' someone said, flatly.

‘Or Fitzgerald got it.'

‘Or we're looking in the wrong place. Your calculations might be wrong.'

Lauren turned to Sean, the frustration clearly written across her face.

‘Come on, Sean. Think! What are we doing wrong?'

‘Well, the first thing we have to realise is that the flag obviously isn't upright any more. If it was, we'd have found it by now.'

‘Correct. But what about the barrel? Why can't we see it? It's a socking great bright blue barrel in the middle of a vast white wilderness, and we can't see it!'

‘Maybe the answer is … it's not blue any more. We've told everyone to look out for something blue, but what if it got completely coated in ice during a storm? That could happen, right?'

Lauren thought about it.

‘You think it could be that simple?'

‘Yes, I do. It's the only reason I can think of that we might have missed it. It's camouflaged. Everyone's so damn tired someone might have walked right past it!'

‘So we're looking for something white. Everyone got that?' Lauren told them.

‘Something white?' Murdo pointed out glumly, waving his arm to encompass the uniform white terrain that surrounded them. ‘That narrows it down nicely.'

Nevertheless, after they had rested for an hour the team began the search once more, fanning out again in pairs, continuing a rough search pattern even though most had lost hope they would ever find the depot.

Suddenly, a shout went up to the south of the camp position. It was Sean, waving his hands in the air about four hundred metres off.

‘Got it!' the others heard. ‘Here it is!'

The barrel was on its side; one of the anchors which had held it upright had been ripped out of the ice in a gale. The flag was long gone, nowhere to be seen, and—as Sean had predicted—the blue plastic was completely obscured by a coating of ice … and by a drift of snow which half covered it.

The team gathered round the barrel, elated and relieved that it had finally been found. Frank was the most emotional, gently touching the plastic as if he feared it was not real, then promptly breaking into a fit of unrestrained sobs.

Lauren hugged him until he stopped crying, while the others chipped the plastic object free from its mantle of ice.

‘You see that?' Sean pointed to a set of tracks which passed a few metres to the west of the barrel. ‘I was right. Someone did walk right past it on an earlier search and never saw it!'

As they broke open the barrel and began to sort through the contents, Lauren walked over and inspected the tracks, her cheeks burning as she recognised the tread. She never told the others that those boot prints were hers.

70

Fitzgerald had driven like the wind, pushed the snowcat so hard the exhaust glowed red hot in the night. He didn't dare sleep, knowing that if he could only get to that depot first …

It was a dangerous business, driving at speed across the plateau in the dark, but Fitzgerald was oblivious to the risk, pushing the machine harder and harder until the oil pressure gauge was high up in the red, the engine screaming as it powered onwards, eating up the miles to the target.

The explorer was not frightened of missing them in the night, he knew they would have been able to cover at least eighty or ninety miles by now if they'd been going strong.

He guessed he would make contact sometime in the afternoon, and, sure enough, just after three p.m., he saw the line of black specks on the horizon. There they were, crossing and recrossing an area perhaps a half-mile in width.

Fitzgerald parked the snowmobile behind the cover of a pressure ridge and began his observation. They were distracted. He was confident they would not be looking for any sign of him.

They were searching; he realised that straight away.

So there was still hope! Maybe they wouldn't find the depot after all. Perhaps they were looking in the wrong place.

What had Sean told him about the depots? The explorer had been sifting through his memory, frantically trying to recall. How many were there? Two, perhaps four. And
where
were they stationed along the route to the crashed plane?

Fitzgerald remembered the milometer on the snowmobile, perhaps that would hold a clue. It read ninety-seven miles. That was it! He felt a wave of satisfaction at the discovery, pleased he had thought to zero the gauge before pulling away from the base on the northwest heading.

The depot was one hundred miles from base. Simple, really.

As he watched them, he saw the team come together to a specific point. They were more animated now, the dejected stance of the search replaced by more activity.

They'd found it. Fitzgerald cursed his luck. An hour or two earlier and he would have been there first.

But at least he'd found them. He had to be grateful for that.

The position of the next depot wasn't hard to fathom; logic told him it would be placed an equal distance from the base, at the two-hundred-mile point, on the other side of the Heilman range.

He could overtake them whenever he chose.

Fitzgerald mounted the snowmobile and pressed the starter. The engine coughed once or twice but failed to start. He pressed again, realising now that he might have pushed the engine too hard on that hundred-mile dash from the base.

This time it started, but it didn't have the crisp note of before. Fitzgerald frowned as he engaged the gear. If he was honest, the whole machine felt a bit sick, like the belt drive wasn't engaging properly.

He lurched off to find a place to camp—a place where he could rest in safety. He hadn't slept for three days now, and he was tired to the bone.

The snowmobile coughed again. Damn this machine, the explorer thought, if it lets me down …

71

No child ever ripped open a Christmas stocking with more delight than the Capricorn team exploring the contents of that barrel. Seven days without eating a scrap had driven them to the point where the mere sight of so much food was enough to make them weak at the knees.

Dried fruit. Tea bags. Biscuits. Glucose energy tablets. Pre-packed foil sachets of bacon and beans, beef stew and dumplings, goulash. There was chocolate, sugar, tins of coffee and ham.

‘I hope you put a bloody tin opener in here, Frank!' Murdo told him.

Almost as precious as the food was the medical box containing antibiotics, bandages and painkillers which—crucially—included morphine. Mel took charge of the kit and immediately began to treat Frank's infected hands. Within a matter of minutes, she was cleaning and disinfecting the wounds.

Deeper down, packed tightly beneath the food and medical supplies, was cooking equipment, two tents and three sleeping bags. Lauren almost wept when she saw them. She walked over to where Frank was lying flat on his back on the sledge for his treatment.

‘You did a great job when you packed this depot,' she told him. ‘Thank God you thought this one out properly.'

‘I never dreamed we'd end up using it.'

‘How are his fingers?' she asked Mel.

‘The infection doesn't seem much worse than yesterday. I think the spell on the sledge did him good. This clean-up is exactly what they need, and I'll put him on a strong course of penicillin after he's had some food.'

Next the team made a careful stack of the provisions so that Lauren could compile a list of what they had. ‘By my calculations,' she told them, ‘we've got enough for six to eight meals each. If we take care we can eke this out so that we can eat at least one meal a day each until the next depot.'

‘Don't forget the next depot's a much tougher walk with the mountain range,' Sean reminded her.

‘Screw the calculations,' Murdo said. ‘Let's eat.'

They erected one of the tents, and Sean soon put the cooker to work, melting down ice and handing out a steaming plastic mug of cocoa to each of them. After seven days of tepid meltwater, the taste of the chocolate was exquisite.

Then each was allowed to choose one of the pre-cooked foil sachets of food—a process they undertook with elaborate care, comparing the contents and discussing which had more calories to offer.

Lauren chose beans and bacon and waited her turn for the sachet to be warmed in a pan of boiling water. When she placed the first spoonful in her mouth, it created an explosion of warmth and taste which almost took her breath away.

Normally, Lauren disliked fatty foods, but now she relished the chunky pieces of salted bacon, chewing the gristly meat over and over so as not to waste a single particle of taste. Every bean got the same treatment, the sweet tomato paste savoured for long moments before she reluctantly swallowed the food.

When she had demolished every last morsel, Lauren ripped the sachet open and licked it clean.

Afterwards came a handful of dried fruit (each apricot counted out individually so no one got more than anyone else), three squares of chocolate and a few boiled sweets.

‘We'll have to get a rota system going,' Lauren told them. ‘Four people will sleep while two keep watch. After two hours, the ones on watch go into the bags and another two come out to take their turn.'

‘You still think we need to mount a watch?' Mel asked her. ‘We haven't seen Fitzgerald since we left the base.'