Black Ice (10 page)

The place was like a maze, one dead end leading to another. Lauren patiently explored every possibility, detouring round the impassable obstacles, revving the machine over the lighter ridges, always keeping an eye on the faithful glow of the compass. Thank God Frank had thought to rig up a small light for it, Lauren thought; progress at night would be all but impossible without that small touch.

The sledges took a pounding, the runners subjected to a constant battering, the loads shifting beneath their tarpaulins as the snowcats powered through the miles.

Be easy to lose something off the back, Sean thought, taking care to shine his torch back every once in a while to check the fuel barrels were in place. Lose one of those and the whole rescue would be off.

Gradually, the terrain became worse, the sastrugi piled high as upturned cars, the pressure ridges jumbled with chaotic blocks of dense ice.

At nine p.m., Lauren called a halt.

‘We're getting near to the mountains,' she told Sean. ‘This mess is getting worse. What do you say we set up camp, get some warm food and sleep? We can leave at first light.'

‘I'll go with that,' he told her. ‘We should rest up the snowmobiles anyway.'

Lauren found the dome tent in one of the kitbags, and they worked together to thread the kevlar poles through the loops. It was no easy task with the wind threatening to rip it out of their hands at any moment.

Finally, they had it constructed, Lauren crawling inside to weight the tent down while Sean banged ice stakes into the glacier to anchor the guy lines.

Lauren unpacked the cooking gear while Sean put the canvas covers over the snowmobiles to protect them from freezing in the night. When he was finished, he threw in the kitbags with their sleeping bags and crawled in after them to join her.

‘How many miles you reckon we cracked today? I forgot to check the milometer when we stopped,' Lauren asked him.

‘Mine was reading fifty-six.'

‘That bad ground really slowed us up. I figured we'd be over the eighty mark by now.'

That first night camping together was an awkward one, both Lauren and Sean experiencing the natural self-consciousness of two relative strangers forced into a space not much bigger than the average refrigerator.

Since arriving at Capricorn, the two of them had had little contact—Sean locked as he was in the drilling shed for ten hours a day and Lauren wrapped up in the lab work and the thousand and one small administrative tasks which are part of running an Antarctic base.

Before that they had spent just a few days in each other's company—forty-eight hours on the search for the drilling rig and a day in London when Sean had flown across on a whistlestop trip to meet the rest of the team.

Now the rescue had thrown them together and Lauren realised, as they tried to get the tent in some semblance of order, that she didn't really know much about him at all. She was attracted to him, her Capricorn colleagues had got that right, but Lauren had seen how messy base relationships could get—a complication she wanted to avoid at all costs.

‘I suppose I should ask you—you being the boss and all—do you like sleeping on the left or the right side?' Sean asked her with a cheeky smile.

‘I'll take the left side,' she told him. ‘That way you get the prevailing wind.'

‘Thanks a lot.'

They unpacked the things they would need for the overnight stop, fumbling like a couple of adolescents on a first date, a performance punctuated by plenty of ‘sorrys' and ‘whoopses' as they clashed shoulders and hips in their efforts to unroll the unwieldy sleeping bags out of their stuff sacks. The clumsy ballet had an unspoken sexual subtext about it, the awareness that this shared expedition could end in a
much
more intimate relationship between them … if they chose.

For a second or two, Lauren caught herself wondering if the sleeping bags would zip together. Then she put the idea out of her mind.

Lauren peeled off her outer layers of protective clothing and stored them neatly in her kitbag. It felt good to be out of the bulky cold-weather gear, but even in her fleece and thermal layers she couldn't help shivering at the chill air inside the tent.

‘We've got to warm this place up. I'll get the cooker going.' Lauren knelt in the entrance and sparked the little epigas into life, the blue flame licking around the bottom of the aluminium pan as she poured in water from a thermos flask.

They drank hot chocolate, then boiled up some pre-packed meals of casserole and potatoes. The warm food was gone in minutes, the heat it conveyed seeping quickly and welcomingly into their bodies.

‘So what more can you tell me about this Fitzgerald character?' Sean asked her as he lay back in his bag. ‘Since we're busting our asses to save him, it might be nice to know who he is.'

Lauren let out a curious laugh. ‘You really want to know?' she asked him. ‘I'm almost reluctant to tell you in case you decide to head back for base.'

‘Come on,' Sean responded. ‘He can't be as bad as all that.'

‘Well,' Lauren told him earnestly, ‘that would depend on who you talked to.'

22

‘In the UK, he's a legend. An exploration superstar. A successor to Scott and Shackleton … at least in his own eyes.'

‘We're talking about someone with a big ego?'

‘Ego?' Lauren snorted with laughter. ‘It's hardly an adequate word. He's got an ego the size of Antarctica. He's got charm too, coming out of his ears.'

‘Do you know him?'

‘When I was young, he used to be a sort of idol of mine, embarrassing though it is to admit it. Maybe I even had a crush on him. I can remember going to a few of his lectures when I was a child.'

‘You can? So he's pretty old?'

‘He has to be in his mid-fifties.'

‘Isn't that a touch ancient for the task? I mean, crossing the entire Antarctic continent on foot is not what you'd call an old man's game.'

‘He's still fantastically strong. Everyone who's ever been on an expedition with him says the same thing. He's got that type of natural fitness that means he can just keep going and going.'

‘So how come he's failed on this one?'

‘Oh, I imagine the same reason just about half of his other expeditions have failed. He's got the dream, but he hasn't always got the attention to detail that these things require.'

‘But he still gets sponsorship?'

‘Sure. He's a genius when it comes to getting press attention. He's everyone's favourite tame explorer. Including mine. Or he was until last year.'

‘What happened?'

‘He put a trip together called the Tierra del Fuego Youth Expedition—there was a girl from Senegal, a boy from Siberia, a few Europeans and Americans. The purpose was to cross the Patagonian ice cap on foot, a sort of international peace expedition; he got the UN and all sorts of other foundations to fund it.'

‘Sounds OK,' Sean replied. ‘A bit holy for my tastes, but I guess the kids had a great time.'

‘His critics say it wasn't really about the kids,' Lauren told him. ‘That he was in it for the reflected glory, for the kudos of flying this great humanitarian flag. They say all that one-world stuff was just another way of getting his smiling features in the colour supplements.'

‘What do you think?'

Lauren paused as she considered her response. ‘I suppose I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He's always encouraged kids to have an appreciation of the wild places of the world, and I don't see anything wrong with that.'

‘But?'

‘But on that Tierra del Fuego trip, things went seriously wrong. They got halfway up this mountain, the kids were already exhausted and badly scared, then a storm ripped in. Fitzgerald was the only one with a compass. He was the only one who knew where the camp was and the only one with any real idea of how to get off the mountain. The whole thing was caught by a documentary camera team filming a one-hour special about the expedition.'

‘You've seen the film?'

‘Sure, it's pretty strong stuff. Anyway, Fitzgerald must have taken a wrong route off the mountain, because they ended up wandering through this ice fall, the kids almost on their last legs, a few of them already suffering from frostbite and exposure. It went on for hours, right into the night, blundering around in circles with Fitzgerald screaming at them to keep up. In the end Fitzgerald forced the camera team to stop filming.

‘By the time they finally found the camp, three of those kids were in a serious state. They were helicoptered off the next day and taken to hospital at Punta Arenas. The girl from Senegal lost a hand to frostbite, one of the American kids lost both his feet … can you imagine the horror of that when you're sixteen? Fitzgerald was deeply fortunate no one got killed.'

‘What was the response when he got back to London?'

‘Initially, he was fêted as a hero. As far as the media saw it, he'd saved those children's lives in the face of a potentially fatal storm. The film went out at peak time and got phenomenal ratings.'

‘So how did things go sour?'

‘A couple of the kids' parents began to look a little closer at the story, started to piece together what had really happened that day. As far as they were concerned, the whole incident was Fitzgerald's fault from start to finish: he deliberately led the kids up the mountain when he knew that a storm was on the way.'

‘Why on earth would he do that?'

‘The parents reckoned he did it to pump up the film. He needed some drama along the way so he could end up being the great all-conquering hero of the moment.'

‘That's a pretty serious allegation.'

‘Yeah. And two of the kids backed it up, said that climbing the mountain had never been a part of the original plan, that Fitzgerald had sold it to them as a sort of fun excursion.'

‘How did Fitzgerald react?'

‘He did a big damage limitation job, cranked up a charm offensive. He spun the press a story about how it was a freak storm, conditions beyond his control and so on.'

‘They swallowed that?'

‘At first, but the tide's definitely turning against him. There was a critical radio documentary about him last month; I caught a review of it on the BBC's Internet news site.'

‘Maybe his fans will desert him.'

‘Don't be so sure. Most people think of him as a lovable eccentric, he does a lot of chat shows and radio stuff … always telling amusing stories about how he narrowly cheated death in some scrape or another. Millions of people are genuinely fond of him. It would take a lot to change that.'

‘How about you? You still got a soft spot for your childhood hero?'

‘I think his heart's in the right place, but I think he's losing the plot. This Antarctic expedition is a case in point: he's bitten off more than he can handle, and now it's us—and Capricorn—that's having to bail him out at the cost of precious time and resources.'

‘How many survivors do you think we'll be taking back?' Sean asked.

‘Depends on what happened with the plane. If it crashed on takeoff with the two explorers on board, we could come back empty-handed.'

‘I pray they're all still alive.'

‘Me too, Sean. And if we can save them, we will.'

Lauren and Sean brewed up a final cup of chocolate and fell silent as they drank it, lost in their own thoughts as they listened to the wind ripping at the outer shell of the tent.

23

Now the mountains were before them, revealed suddenly as the clouds parted in a rare moment of calm. Sean and Lauren paused as they drank in the scene, awestruck at the imposing ramparts of the Heilman range soaring many thousands of feet out of the glacier. The peaks were sharp, the frost-shattered rocks jutting like the shoots of early spring flowers from beds of winter ice, stark black towers competing side by side for prominence.

‘These are brutal when you see them close up,' Sean told Lauren, deeply impressed by the untamed beauty of the craggy peaks.

‘Depends on your definition of “close”,' she told him. ‘By my reckoning they're still fifteen miles away.'

‘How many of these have been climbed?'

Lauren laughed. ‘As far as I know, not a single one has ever been attempted, let alone climbed.'

‘Seriously?' Sean was astounded to think that so many tempting summits could remain untouched. ‘But how many people have been here?'

‘This region is hardly researched,' Lauren told him. ‘It's only been mapped by satellite, and I can't think of a single scientific expedition which has come out here. What you have to remember about Antarctica is that there are literally hundreds of mountain ranges like this … some are the size of the Alps, and most of them are virtually unexplored.'

‘But Fitzgerald and his buddy must have passed this way?'

‘Sure. And they'd have crossed the range on the shortest route. You don't do a single metre more distance than you have to when you're on foot out here.'

Lauren pulled her map from her windsuit pocket and folded it to the relevant section.

‘We got two choices here,' she told Sean. ‘We can continue parallel to the range for another eighty miles or so and sneak round the far end onto the glacier. Or we can tackle it head on and save a few hours.'

‘I say we go for it,' Sean told her after he'd scanned the route with the binoculars. ‘That pass doesn't look like it'll give us any major problems. It'll be much more interesting to cross the range,' he added. ‘All this flat terrain can get a little dull, don't you think?'

Lauren smiled. ‘OK. We'll go for it. But don't forget we have to put down the first depot before we hit the mountains.'

Just after three p.m., Sean checked his milometer and gave his snowmobile a burst of speed to catch up with Lauren.