Black Ice (47 page)

The applause died down as Fitzgerald squinted into the dark recesses of the hall, half recognising the voice but not quite sure.

‘That sounds like Mr De Pierman?'

De Pierman stepped forward to the front of the hall.

‘It is. Perhaps you would be kind enough to introduce me to the audience?'

‘Alexander De Pierman was the sponsor of Dr Burgess's Capricorn base,' Fitzgerald told the crowd. ‘One of those rare industrialists who put their money into the world of scientific research.'

There was a polite scattering of applause.

‘Do you have news of the test-tube analysis?' Fitzgerald asked him. ‘Perhaps there are some results we can share with the audience here and now?'

‘I have more questions than results, Mr Fitzgerald.'

Fitzgerald could not mistake the undercurrent of hostility in De Pierman's tone.

‘How so?'

‘Are you absolutely sure that that sample was given to you by Lauren Burgess?'

Fitzgerald licked his blistered lips, giving the audience a quick, exasperated glance.

‘Of course,' he snapped. ‘How could I be mistaken on that?'

‘And that sample never left your possession from the moment that Lauren gave it to you until you handed it to me?'

‘Absolutely not,' Fitzgerald spluttered indignantly. ‘I was well aware of the vital importance of what that test tube contained. It was Lauren Burgess's dying wish that I guard that test tube with my life. And that was what I did.'

The lecture theatre was quiet now, the many hundreds of people uneasy at the exchange they were witnessing.

‘So there is no way at all that anyone could have switched the contents of that test tube after Lauren handed it to you?' De Pierman asked.

‘Correct.'

De Pierman took a few steps onto the stage, where he positioned himself next to Fitzgerald. A low muttering began to sweep through the hall, there were a couple of cries of ‘Shame!' from some of the audience.

De Pierman referred to the huge map of Antarctica which was projected on the screen behind Fitzgerald.

‘Would you be kind enough to show me where Lauren died?'

Fitzgerald began to redden with anger. ‘Sir! I no longer see that your questions are relevant. Kindly leave the stage.'

‘Show me where she died.' De Pierman was insistent.

Fitzgerald glared at him and took up a pointer. He tapped it on a midway position on the Blackmore Glacier.

‘As I have already said, Dr Burgess died here.'

‘And the location of the crashed aeroplane?'

Fitzgerald moved the pointer, tapping impatiently again.

‘Here. About one hundred miles away. Now, will you kindly let me continue with my lecture?'

‘So, Lauren Burgess never made it to that aeroplane?'

‘She certainly did not. I was the only one.'

‘What did Lauren tell you that test tube contained, Mr Fitzgerald?'

‘I already told you. It was a sample of fluid from the lake they had drilled into. It contained microscopic species new to science.'

‘Then perhaps you can help me with one perplexing thing. That test tube contained no life, Mr Fitzgerald. What it actually contained was avgas. One hundred per cent aviation spirit.'

There was a collective gasp from the audience as his words sank in. Fitzgerald rocked visibly on his feet, clutching for the side of the desk as the blood drained from his face.

‘I checked the Capricorn base inventory,' De Pierman continued. ‘There was no avgas there at all. The only place Lauren Burgess could have got that aviation spirit was at the site of that crashed plane. That proves she was there and filling that sample container was a way of telling us that.'

Fitzgerald said nothing.

‘So. One more question.' De Pierman spoke quietly in the hush which had descended. ‘If you are lying about this vital piece of information, Mr Fitzgerald, how are we to trust a single word of your story?'

Suddenly, Fitzgerald was sweeping up his notes from the lectern.

‘I don't need to listen to this … this rubbish!' he exclaimed, and headed out of the door.

112

De Pierman strapped himself into the front seat of the chartered Agusta 109 and watched as the lights of Battersea heliport dropped away beneath him. Twenty-one nautical miles to the north, his personal Gulfstream jet was already being wheeled out of the executive hangar at Luton Airport, ready to be fuelled.

If there was one thing De Pierman's lifetime in the oil industry had taught him, it was the art of moving fast across vast swathes of the planet. He was on a mission, and he wasn't going to waste a second he didn't need to.

The Gulfstream was ready to roll as soon as De Pierman took his seat, the pilot reporting a strong tailwind to assist them on the southerly route. The stewardess served De Pierman smoked salmon and his favourite Sancerre as they tracked at a shade over six hundred miles an hour across France and the Pyrenees.

The Gulfstream touched down at Madrid Barajas Airport at eleven fifteen p.m. De Pierman paid for a VIP limousine transfer directly across the tarmac and took a first-class seat on the midnight Aerolineas Argentinas flight to Buenos Aires. He could have taken the Gulfstream across the Atlantic, but it would have meant a refuel at Dakar and a subsequent loss of time.

While De Pierman slept, his London office was already on the phone to South America, sorting out the next leg of the journey, a chartered Learjet which would take him down in a single hop to Tierra del Fuego.

The connection was smooth, and by eight a.m. local time he was in Ushuaia, where the Antarctic Air Service operations manager greeted him and took him for a briefing. Also present was the local medic who had been alerted by De Pierman's office. For a modest fee, he had agreed to accompany the oilman on the flight, ready to treat any survivors they should find.

‘We were surprised to get the call from your office,' the operations manager told him. ‘May I ask what the purpose of this flight is?'

‘If my hunch is right, we'll be picking up survivors from Capricorn at the site where your plane crashed some months ago.'

‘On the Blackmore Glacier?' The operations manager was perplexed. ‘But how could they be there? And more to the point, perhaps, how could they still be alive? As I understood Mr Fitzgerald's account, all of the other Capricorn team members died as they crossed the ice.'

‘I really don't know,' De Pierman had to admit. ‘But I owe it to the base commander to check this out. It's their last chance, and I wouldn't want to deprive them of that.'

‘You have dollars?'

De Pierman flashed him a credit card, the limit on which would have enabled him to buy the aeroplane if he'd so wished.

‘You realise, Mr De Pierman,' the operations manager told him regretfully as he swiped the card, ‘that your journey will probably be a wasted one. It is a long way to fly for such a disappointment.'

‘I appreciate that,' De Pierman told him, ‘but I think—no, I
pray
—you may be wrong.'

De Pierman signed the credit slip and was escorted to the waiting plane.

113

Lauren was dreaming, just as she seemed to have been doing for every moment of the weeks they had been waiting. Or were they hallucinations? In these days of wasting away it was difficult to tell.

Frank and Sean were still by her side, but they might have been ghosts for all the conversation they offered. Maybe they
were
ghosts, Lauren sometimes thought; they could have died without a sound. Frank's breathing was now so light his chest barely rose and fell. Days were passing without a single word being exchanged between them.

Sometimes Sean held her hand, radiating heat and care into her by some magic force.

It was a gentle experience now the pain had receded, dying little by little like this. Lauren almost found it fascinating, the way her body had metamorphosed. She'd always been good at endurance; she had little doubt she would be the last to go.

Her world was green, a calming enough colour, the dome above her head creased and rucked where the wind had stretched and tested it. In the early stages the tent walls had become a cell, a prison, a tomb or worse. Hope was hanging on in there, but by such a slender thread it might have been spun from gossamer.

But then Lauren learned to relax. Their fate was no longer in their own hands but in the hands of Alexander De Pierman and a titanium tube filled with aviation spirit which he might or might not have received. Would Fitzgerald have destroyed it? Maybe he had thought twice about delivering it. And even if he had handed it to her sponsor, would the oilman recognise the cry for help it contained?

Then it happened, the noise of the approaching Twin Otter as it flew towards them across the glacier. How many days had they waited? How many countless, sleepless hours had they wished for that very noise?

Lauren thought her heart would burst.

She tried to speak, but her lips and throat were so blistered she could not form a single word. Instead she just squeezed Sean's hand, the answering pressure telling her that he too was still alive and that he too had heard the sound and understood it.

Lauren now knew for sure what heaven sounded like. In heaven, two 578-horsepower Pratt & Whitney turbo-props were swooping out of the sky, buzzing low over the tent and fading off once more into the distance. Lauren prayed there would be a medic on board, she knew that Richard and Murdo were both close to death in the next-door tent. It was at least two days since she had had the strength to visit them, and Mel too had been almost incoherent with starvation and dehydration when she had seen her last.

She knew that the aircraft could land; their last actions before their final retreat into the tents had been to recce and mark a new landing strip a short distance from Fitzgerald's original—and deadly—choice.

Next to her she sensed that Sean was trying to say something. But his words, like hers, could not be formed, and they came out as a series of murmured gasps. Then the engine noise increased to a roar, and through that echoing chaos in her head her mind exulted in the knowledge that her message
had
got through. That someone out there in the world beyond
had
cared to discover whether or not the Capricorn team was still alive.

Lauren tried to lift her arms out of her sleeping bag, but found she did not have the strength. Shadows merged at the front of the tent, then, astonishingly strong hands helped her to undo the zip. She was carried out onto the ice where the bright red aircraft sat, as unexpected and surprising in that place as an alien spaceship.

Things went weird for a while, and somewhere in that black spell Lauren was dimly aware that she might have passed out. She came to in the recovery position, her head cradled on her arm, but tried to raise herself up, wanting to know who was still alive. Had Frank died? Was Richard even now cold and lifeless in that tent?

A face loomed over her, and she had to concentrate hard to recognise who it was. Her vision was blurred, the edges fuzzy and lacking definition. An echoing voice called to her as if from a great distance.

‘Lauren? Can you understand me? Do you know who I am?'

Lauren wondered why the face above her seemed so shocked. She could not know that her appearance was terrifying, that she looked to be little more than flesh and bone, that she had aged beyond belief. Nor could she know that her face was almost black, stained by months without washing and by the rigours of the solar radiation from which they had had no protection.

Lauren's lips tried to form the ‘A' of Alexander, but then a new face took over and Lauren felt herself lifted onto something hard. It felt like canvas … a stretcher, she thought. Then the sharp point of a needle penetrated her arm, and she was lifted into the cabin of the aircraft.

There was activity around her, and she began to be more aware. The drug, she thought; whatever it was that they injected me with, it's starting to take effect.

‘Take some tea,' a voice said. Someone unscrewed a flask and offered her the piping hot fluid. She sipped minute quantities through blistered lips.

A figure was carried past her on another stretcher, she recognised Frank's face. Minutes later, others were placed in the spaces on the floor.

She managed to grasp a hand which was nearby, pulling weakly at it until De Pierman's concerned face came close to her.

‘Are they all…?' she managed to croak. She could tell De Pierman was crying.

‘They're all alive, Lauren, and they're going to be fine. You're all going to be fine.'

De Pierman, the medic and the pilots loaded the last of the Capricorn survivors and closed up the door of the Twin Otter. Then the engines were powered up, and the aircraft bounced round in a tight circle as it taxied to the end of the makeshift strip. Lauren felt the airframe shuddering as the engines revved strongly, then the brakes were released and the plane accelerated fast before biting into the frigid air and gaining height.

That was when Lauren knew that this was no dream, that they really had made it and that she really had brought her team through it all alive.

She tried to raise her head to look out of the small aircraft window but could not muster the strength. De Pierman realised what she was doing and gently cupped his hand behind her neck to support her.

Lauren found herself gazing out of the window as the Twin Otter banked round in a big arc and began to head north. Beneath her she could see the creased surface of the glacier, the interior of each crevasse coloured a delicate powder blue. Far, far away, she could see the mountain range they had crossed, the peaks only just visible against the darkening sky.

Beyond that range was Capricorn, gone for the moment, but not from her heart. Lauren knew that one day she would be back.

POSTSCRIPT

London