Black Ice (8 page)

Lauren took a deep breath as she considered her options. ‘Hold the line, Irene; I need to talk to my colleague here. Over.'

‘Roger that.'

Lauren turned to Frank. ‘Give me the meteo for the next seven days, will you?'

He consulted a weather fax. ‘Deep low sweeping across from the Bellinghausen Sea. Average wind speeds forty to fifty knots. Estimated temperature forty below. Plus the wind chill.'

Lauren put her head in her hands. ‘Why now, Frank? Just when everything's going so well.'

‘If it has to happen, who's going to go?' Frank asked her.

‘I will. Plus one. We have to keep this rescue small or the logistics will get ridiculous. As it is, we'll have to load up the snowmobiles with so much fuel they'll barely be able to move.'

‘Won't you need a doctor out there?'

‘I can handle that. I did three months in a casualty ward in central London before my first Antarctic posting. It's enough to keep any survivors alive until they're back here; then I'll hand them over to Mel.'

‘I'll volunteer to be the second driver if you want.'

Lauren half smiled at the offer; Frank was way too old for this one, and he knew it.

‘That's sweet of you, Frank, but I'd rather you were here on the radio.'

‘So who will you get to go with you?'

Lauren looked out of the window into the teeth of the blizzard. Through the driving snow she could just see the faint yellow light of the drilling shed.

‘Who do you think?'

She picked up the handset again. ‘Irene? All right, here's my decision. It will take us twenty-four hours to organise a rescue expedition. In that time I think you should try every avenue to find out what has happened to the plane. I'm not giving the rescue a green light until I have positive identification from AAS that it has crashed or is incapacitated. Otherwise I might risk my people's lives and get down there to find it was just waiting out the storm and has flown happily back with your team. Is that clear? Over.'

‘Affirmative. I'll put as much pressure as I can on them to fly down and recce the site. But they're terrified of losing a second aircraft. Over.'

‘We need some more details before you sign off,' Lauren continued, taking the pencil from Frank. ‘Give us the names of everyone involved and what you know about their condition. Over.'

Lauren scribbled the information down and terminated the call.

‘This is the last thing we need,' she told Frank.

‘They might still get a plane in.'

Lauren gestured to the window, to an exterior world which was black with the raging storm.

‘In this?' she asked him. ‘I wouldn't hold your breath. I think it looks like me and Sean are going on a little trip.'

‘And the drilling?'

‘The drilling?' This time Lauren couldn't disguise her misery. ‘For the moment, the drilling will have to stop.'

18

José Antonio Romero and Claudio Vargas flew the second AAS Twin Otter out of Ushuaia some fourteen hours after the radio call which had alerted Capricorn to the situation. It was a full three days since Villanova and Ariza had disappeared. They were exploiting a predicted lull in the storm, a met survey which had spotted a possible window of clearer weather that might enable them to get a sighting.

Even if the met men were right, it was a precarious enough journey, but both pilots agreed it was worth the risk. These men would do anything to try and determine the fate of their two friends.

The disappearance of Villanova and Ariza had been a big shock for the other AAS pilots. They were a small company—just eight aviators and a few office staff.

They had discussed it endlessly in those days, returning home, muted and sombre, to their families.

Romero had been to see Villanova's wife and child, prayed with them, held the boy tightly when he cried and told the kid his father was the best pilot who ever flew to Antarctica—that he must surely have landed in a storm and would be back just as soon as it passed.

He came back home with tear stains on the shoulder of his jacket.

Privately, Romero had a bad feeling about this one. Villanova was good, he would concede that, but he was a touch arrogant too.

All pilots hated to concede defeat—to turn back because a landing place was too tight, too uneven, too close to a crevasse. But they had all done it—except Villanova. In the canteen, the pilots had discussed this subject urgently, sipping gourds of bitter maté and sharing around their cigarettes.

No one could recall, in all their years of flying, Villanova turning back from a bad landing place. Romero didn't like that. It felt wrong to him. You had to fail sometimes, didn't you?

Romero's wife had given him a crucifix on a golden chain as he left the house for the airport. He could feel the metal against his skin where it lay beneath his shirt.

Conditions were bad, the freezing storm still raging across the northern flanks of Antarctica. Both pilots knew they were in for a rough journey, but they could not delay this reconnaissance flight any longer. The thought that their fellow pilots were waiting, perhaps injured, with a wrecked plane, was enough to make the two men volunteer.

They flew at midnight, over Cape Horn and out across the Drake Passage, a tail wind chasing them at eighty miles an hour. Like Ariza and Villanova, they took turns to sleep in the back. Unlike them, their rest was troubled by bad dreams and by the constant buffeting of the high winds.

Just before nine that morning they reached the target area where the storm was raging ever stronger. Thick, near-black clouds were obscuring the ground, giving them just the occasional frustrating glimpse of the glacier surface.

What they could see filled them with foreboding. The glacier was alive with airborne ice. They saw no place which would give them a realistic chance to land.

For fifty minutes the two pilots doggedly maintained their search, sometimes getting a few seconds of visibility, but mostly with nothing beneath them but the seething tops of clouds.

Then, as the grey mass briefly parted, Vargas cried out.

‘I saw something black!' he cried. ‘Go around.'

Romero executed a three-sixty and headed back on the same bearing. The clouds were thicker; Vargas held his breath—had he really seen something down there, or was it a trick of the ice?

The clouds held back, both pilots could see it, almost invisible to the eye: a solitary tent with a waving figure beside it. Next to it, etched into the ice in uneven black lines, were three large letters: SOS.

As clouds ran across, obscuring the scene, Romero saw something else—a black object, perhaps one hundred metres from the tent. It was large—a boulder, perhaps? Sometimes rocks were carried on the surface of these glaciers.

No. An engine.

‘That's what he's used to write the letters,' he told Vargas. ‘Engine oil. Villanova crashed on landing.'

‘And the plane?'

Romero did not reply; he was concentrating on keeping a level flight path as more vicious turbulence bounced them through the air. He knew these conditions; it would be easy to get disorientated, lost. They could fly into one of the nearby mountains and never know what they had hit.

‘How much fuel?' he asked.

‘Right on the limit. Tank three half full.'

They came around once more, but now the clouds had engulfed the glacier again. Two circuits later and the decision was made for them. Unless they could land, there was no assistance they could give the survivors … and in those conditions such a landing was completely out of the question.

‘There's nothing more we can do,' Romero said, his voice choking as he spoke. ‘It'll have to be a land rescue. Let's go home.'

He put the Twin Otter into a climb, breathing a sigh of relief as they broke through the dense cloud into lighter cover.

He set the compass and began the fight, against the wind, back towards the north.

‘You think those guys from the base can get there overland in time?' Vargas asked.

‘Maybe. But I reckon Villanova and Ariza are dead anyway, you saw the wreckage.'

‘What are we going to tell their wives?' Vargas asked, distraught. ‘What about Villanova's kid?'

Romero did not reply.

Save the odd radio call, the two pilots passed the rest of the ten-hour flight back to Ushuaia without sharing another word.

19

Lauren summoned the team to the mess room.

‘All right,' she told them. ‘This rescue has to happen, so let's make it good. Every day Sean and I are away from base is a day of drilling lost, so I want this to be as fast and painless as possible.'

She referred to a clipboard in her lap.

‘I've split the logistics down into five categories: communications, transport, provisions, medical and special equipment. Frank, what can you do for us on comms?'

‘I'm going to pack you up with two Argos hand-held transmitters running on one-eighteen-point-five megahertz. I'll give you plenty of back-up batteries and a lead so you can run them off the twelve-volt cigarette socket on the snowmobiles if you need.'

‘Should we take an aerial? We'll be six thousand feet lower once we get down on to the Blackmore.'

Frank nodded. ‘Those Argoses are pretty punchy; you should be OK. But, fair enough, I'll throw in a five-metre aerial and an extension pole.'

Lauren turned to Sean. ‘What do we need for the snowcats, Sean?'

‘How many miles are we talking about?'

‘Six hundred and ten, give or take.'

Sean scribbled some figures down on a scrap of paper.

‘Well, assuming we've got a full load in both directions, I'd estimate even in the worst case those Yamahas are going to be averaging at least five miles to the litre. That's roughly one hundred and twenty litres of petrol. If we throw in a contingency for deviations, getting lost and so on, we should be packing one hundred and fifty litres. Per machine. Minimum.'

‘Very well. I want you to sort that out as soon as you can please. Now, Murdo, how about provisions?'

‘How many days? How many people?' he asked.

Lauren thought quickly.

‘Sean and myself for six days max. Plus a maximum of five more on the return trip if by some miracle the pilots and the journalist are still alive. That's an extra fifteen man-days.'

‘How many are you
expecting
?'

‘From the plane crash? I doubt there will be any survivors. My guess is we'll be coming back with Fitzgerald and his partner and no one else.'

Murdo sucked on his pipe. ‘No problem. I'll pack you up with four gas stoves and the coleman pans and cutlery. I'll give you fifty man-days of high-energy rations plus a ten per cent contingency. That way you've got enough whatever happens.'

‘Thank you. Moving on to medical. What can you spare, Mel?'

Mel read from her list. ‘I'm not expecting that you can do much more than the basics out there in the field, so the whole operation is geared to keeping the victims alive and as free from pain as possible until you can get them back here to the base. We're talking broad-spectrum antibiotics, saline drips, sterile swabs and assorted bandages, excision kit with syringes and gloves, iodine, painkillers, morphine and pethidine for oral and intravenous application, four stretchers with fastenings for the sledges, inflatable splints to cover fractures to the arms and legs, neck braces, one back brace for spinal injury … we've only got the one here, unfortunately. Finally, medical oxygen. You might be dealing with someone in a coma.'

‘Anything for burns?' Lauren asked. ‘There might have been a fire involved.'

‘Good point.' Mel added a few items to her list.

‘To what extent are we depleting our own medical supplies?' Lauren asked. ‘Let's not lose sight of the fact that we are all going to be locked into this camp for the winter. I don't want to get into a situation where we have another medical emergency further down the line and we don't have the drugs to deal with it.'

Mel nodded her head. ‘Obviously, we haven't got unlimited supplies; this batch I'm sending with you represents approximately a third of our drug cabinet.'

‘Just so as I know.' Lauren made a note on her pad. ‘Now, how about special equipment?'

‘I'll throw in some ropes, ascendeurs and pulleys in case we need to perform a crevasse rescue at some stage,' Sean told her.

‘Have you thought about cutting gear?' Frank suggested. ‘I know it's a hell of a long shot, but what if someone was trapped inside the fuselage of the plane down a crevasse? How would you get them out if you couldn't cut into the metal?'

‘I'll add some cutting gear to my tool kit,' Sean told him.

Lauren checked her watch. ‘Anyone got any last suggestions?'

Frank raised a hand. ‘Sorry to be a pain, but no one has talked about the possibility of laying down a couple of depots en route.'

‘Like Scott?' Lauren had to smile. ‘On what basis?'

‘Well, being a natural pessimist, how about you lose both skidoos, both radios and all your supplies in a crevasse fall? Then you're completely stuffed. But if you lay down a barrel of supplies every fifty miles on the outward leg, then you've at least got a fighting chance of survival until we can get out and find you.'

‘What would you propose the barrels contain?' Lauren asked him.

‘Keep it simple. A tent or two, a few days of emergency rations, cooking gear, a couple of sleeping bags.'

Lauren looked over to Sean.

‘You think we can carry that extra weight?'

Sean looked doubtful.

‘It's going to make the snowcats awful slow. How about we lay one depot at the hundred-mile marker and another at two hundred miles? That's easier on the machines, and it still gives us a margin.'

Lauren nodded. ‘That sounds like a good compromise. You happy with that, Frank?'