Black Ice (3 page)

The co-pilot, Ariza, escorted him out to the aircraft.

Finally, some action, Richard thought as he buckled himself into his seat. Desperate explorers, tales of derring-do, skeletons on the ice: maybe this story was going to get his byline on the front page after all.

Hope they've got some food on this old crate, he mused, his stomach hollow after the missed lunch.

The co-pilot came to check he had mastered the lapbelt.

‘Got any food for the flight?' Richard asked him. ‘I'm starving.'

Ariza's English was not as good as Villanova's.

‘Starving? What is starving?'

‘Don't worry,' the reporter told him, patting his substantial stomach. ‘Just my little joke.'

5

The two men lay side by side in their sleeping bags, suspended in that miserable hinterland between sleep and despair.

For the moment, the wind was light, playing lazily about the fly sheet of the tent, rustling the fabric in that soothing way, as if apologising for the days—the weeks—in which it had been so hard.

But from the hunger there was no respite. Carl was astonished at how painful starving to death was proving to be. He had considered the early days hard—those days when he had fantasised endlessly about roast meats, sweet chocolate, plates of fried rice, peaches and strawberries, and butter and curry. But those days had been nothing, a pathetic prelude to what he was experiencing now.

Now, after seventeen days without a single scrap of food, he was hunger, he had become it. Every cell of his body was putting out chemicals which were causing him pain. His kidneys throbbed and ached in his sides, and urination had become a dreaded event. His head pulsed permanently with a brilliant sharp pain, his teeth had loosened and fractured in his jaw, tiny unknown infections deep in their roots flaring into abscesses which wept with pus.

They had run out of antibiotics long ago.

Carl had done his research; he knew in perfect detail what was happening to him, how his systems were breaking down. He knew his muscles had been robbed of their sugars and fats, that his liver was being forced to give up its own reserves.

They still had gas to melt ice, but no one can keep going on water alone. There would be a point at which he would not recover. Carl was terrified he was already there.

‘We have to put out the flares,' he said, switching his thoughts to the rescue. The pilots would need a landing strip to be identified and marked out.

Fitzgerald grunted. ‘You do it. I'll melt down some ice.'

Carl slowly unzipped himself from his sleeping bag and dressed in his cold-weather gear, every painful movement costing him a few more precious calories of energy, bringing him a few tiny chemical steps closer to the point where his body would cease to function at all.

He found the flares and went out on to the glacier, scanning the terrain for an area with potential to mark out a strip. His progress was erratic, wandering backwards and forwards, looking for a good enough site, trying to ignore the constant stars in his vision, the sensation that at any moment he might faint. Each time he found a possible stretch of ice, he would slowly pace its length, counting his steps laboriously before coming to the next obstacle and realising that it was not enough.

The Twin Otter needed a minimum of four hundred metres. Nothing less would do. Carl reckoned that was about six hundred and fifty of his shuffling steps.

So far he had failed to find any strip of ice longer than half that. Not for the first time on the journey, Carl had the feeling that the terrain was conspiring against them; surely there was
somewhere
to land a plane in this godforsaken wilderness?

He sat, despairing, on a hummock of ice, his head cradled in his hands as the wind began to rise. Even in his exhausted state, Carl had registered the further deterioration in the weather. Last time he had looked, the determined-looking clouds on the horizon seemed to have moved a little closer.

Fear brought him back to his feet. If he couldn't give the pilots a place to land, they would have to return empty-handed to South America. Would they come back and try again? Carl wasn't at all sure.

‘Come and help me!' he shouted back towards the tent. But there was no sign that Fitzgerald had heard him. Carl was sure that the rising wind had swallowed up his words.

6

Captain Manuel Villanova walked out across the tarmac at Ushuaia airport, his leather flight jacket hunched up against the bitter wind which was ripping off the waters of the Beagle Channel.

Co-pilot Juvenal Ariza had already completed the pre-flight checks, and the starboard turbo-prop was coughing into life as Villanova climbed up the steps into the ageing Twin Otter aircraft.

The captain sealed the door, nodded briefly to the journalist, who was sitting in the back, and made his way into the cramped cockpit. He strapped himself in, not bothering to question Ariza on the pre-flights, the two men had flown so many hours together, they trusted each other implicitly.

Both men were ex-Argentinian air force, veterans of the ill-fated Guerra de las Malvinas. Between them they had more than forty thousand logged hours, much of it on supply runs to the numerous Argentine bases which were scattered around the Antarctic Peninsula.

Their civilian employer, Antarctic Air Service, was one of the most unusual airlines in the world; its sole trading purpose was to place, supply and retrieve people, fuel and equipment on the Antarctic continent. It was a lucrative niche; in an average year there were dozens of scientific and other expeditions heading south, and they paid big money to do so. The minimum fare per passenger was thirty thousand US dollars. Each way.

Villanova took the controls for the take-off, easing the Twin Otter smoothly into the air and putting in a right-hand turn to avoid an incoming Aerolinas Argentinas 737. It was not a view to tire of easily: to the north he could see the permanent ice cap covering Tierra del Fuego, with the towering summit of Mount Sarmiento glinting on the horizon. To the south was the tail end of South America and the myriad islands marking the ends of the earth.

Beneath them the red-and-green-painted houses of the outpost town were quickly slipping away. They circled over the port and headed for the wooded slope above the bay.

Villanova knew he wasn't supposed to do it, but hell, he thought, if you make a promise to your six-year-old son, you'd better keep it.

He picked out the woodbuilt house on the hill and flew directly towards it. He could see his wife Lola standing in the yard in a red dress, little black-haired Luis jumping and waving excitedly by her side.

Villanova passed over the roof at about a hundred feet, dipped his wings and rolled back out over the Beagle Channel.

‘That's a nice kid you got there,' Ariza told him.

Villanova put the aircraft into a climb, keeping to the left of the channel to avoid straying into Chilean airspace. The disputed border between the two countries ran loosely down the middle of the naturally straight passage and had been the scene of numerous skirmishes and minor wars. Crossing the line would be an embarrassment, to say the least.

The Beagle was a remarkable sight from the air, a feature so straight and deeply cut it could have been a Norwegian fjord. Named after the ship which had so famously carried Charles Darwin to his discoveries, the Beagle had been the gateway to the Southern Ocean for as long as men had sailed, or flown, to the south.

The water of the channel was as dark as night, the land to either side densely forested, the higher slopes home to hardy shrubs which had learned to resist one of the windiest environments on the planet. A couple of ranches had been carved out of the flatter ground, tough estancias producing scrawny cattle and a few malnourished chickens.

Tierra del Fuego was a very hard place to scrape a living. Better experienced from the air, Villanova was sure.

After a while the islands of Lennox and Wollaston came into view, brown heathery outcrops of salt-lashed rocks, home to pelagic birds and not much more. Then, to the right, the distinctive camel hump of Cape Horn, absolute south to centuries of mariners, graveyard of ships and dreams.

Villanova raised the Cape Horn station on his radio, telling them his callsign and asking them for the latest weather.

Their report confirmed the earlier satellite map: a huge depression was sweeping up from the west, one of the seemingly endless storms which race clockwise around the bottom of the planet. They would be in for a battering as they fought their way back.

Cape Horn passed on the starboard side, the cockpit compass set to one hundred and eighty degrees. The water beneath them now was the Drake Passage, the turbulent one-thousand-mile ocean corridor separating the landmasses of South America and Antarctica.

Far away, deep in the continent across that most intimidating of seas, the two explorers would be anxiously waiting for them. Villanova figured they would bring them back successfully, as they had done on every other emergency call over the years. Villanova and Ariza were a ‘lucky' team, according to their fellow pilots; somehow they always seemed to bring off the rescues, no matter how dangerous the location.

Villanova was proud of that one-hundred-per-cent record.

After a couple of hours in the air, Ariza left Villanova at the controls. One of the advantages of a lightly loaded run was that they could take turns to steal a little sleep on the stretcher in the passenger area.

In the cockpit, Villanova was ever observant. Unlike some of the other pilots, he was not in the habit of reading newspapers or completing crosswords to pass the time. Instead, he let his body tune to the pitch of the engines, alert for any change which would indicate a problem.

Fifteen thousand feet beneath him, he could see whitecaps rolling across the Southern Ocean.

Nine hours flying time to the target. Villanova lit up a Chesterfield and switched the heater onto full.

7

Out on the glacier, Carl was cursing his bad luck. An hour had passed, and he still hadn't found a suitable landing strip. The area was more fractured with crevasses than he had thought, and where there were no fissures the ice was ridged and pocked with sastrugi—the rock-hard ridges like miniature dunes of ice.

He scrunched up his eyes, viewing the glacier with increasing frustration, trying to remember the pilots' briefing. ‘It doesn't have to be flat,' he recalled them telling him back in Ushuaia, ‘but it has to be smooth. We can land on a slope, but we can't land with too many sastrugi.'

He forced his body to move, this time skirting round the end of a huge crevasse and exploring the area to the west of the tent. He was taking risks on this terrain, walking on his own; a snow bridge across a crevasse could collapse as he walked across it.

Finally, one possibility emerged: a long, slightly curving swathe of ice between two parallel crevasses. It was wide enough, he was sure, but was it long enough?

Carl looked at the stretch of ice, trying to gauge its length. Was that four hundred metres? Or was it less? It was certainly going to be a tight spot to land an aircraft, but that was what these pilots were good at, wasn't it?

He rested for a while then began to pace it out, concentrating hard so as not to lose count as he ticked off the steps in his head. He had reached six hundred and ten steps by the time he came to the end of the available ice. It was an uncompromising fall into one of the biggest crevasses he had ever seen.

Carl kept well away from the edge, he had already tripped and fallen a couple of times during this search, and he didn't trust himself to get too close to that gaping mouth.

Making his way back to the front end of the strip, Carl found another problem: there were two large sastrugi directly in the line the pilot would have to take as he landed, each more than a metre high. Carl kicked at one with his boot, but the impact didn't leave a mark. There was nothing he could do to remove them.

Could the pilots hop over these mounds of ice and still bring the plane to a halt before that monster crevasse? Carl felt hopeless; he simply didn't know.

Perhaps there was a better place. Groaning with the pain the effort brought to his atrophied muscles, Carl managed to climb up onto one of the sastrugi to give himself a better vantage point over the surrounding terrain.

The answer was what he expected: no matter where he looked, he could see no run of ice which offered more than this one.

Carl knew the strip he had found was far from perfect, but what else could he do? They certainly couldn't move out of the crevasse field—neither he nor Fitzgerald had the strength for the two or three days of effort that that would involve.

He didn't feel good about it, but Carl made the decision, putting in the first of the flares, twisting the sharpened base into the ice. Then he stumbled for one hundred and fifty paces and placed the second. Thirty minutes later he had completed the task, the four flares in as straight a line as he could achieve.

He put in a ski pole to mark the spot and tied a scarf to it so it could be seen from a distance. When they heard the aircraft approach, one of them would have to find the strip and light the flares.

It would have to be Fitzgerald. Carl knew he would himself barely be able to exit the tent again once he lay down. He had given everything to complete this task.

He took one last look at the landing place, a mixture of hope and dread filling his heart. Then he began to pick his way back through the maze.

By the time he got back to the tent he was crawling on his hands and knees.

8

To relieve the boredom of the flight, Richard flipped open his laptop and watched the flickering rows of data as it booted into life.

Next to him the co-pilot was still sleeping.

Richard selected Word and brought up his Fitzgerald file. What was he going to call this piece? He thought for a while, then typed:

Mercy flight plucks explorers to safety.