Black Ice (37 page)

Then Fitzgerald was accelerating once more, driving confidently down the trail Lauren and Sean had laid towards Deep Throat.

‘Oh yes!' Sean couldn't hide the excitement in his voice. ‘Now just build up a little more speed and everything's going to be over real quick.'

Lauren could taste blood on her tongue where she had bitten into it. ‘This is so wrong, Sean,' she hissed. ‘There has to be another way!'

‘Not now there isn't,' Sean told her. ‘He's halfway to hell already.'

The snowmobile rounded a small crevasse and continued on track, close enough now that they could see Fitzgerald's ice-encrusted beard beneath his ski goggles.

‘We can't do this! It's not right. I'll never forgive myself if we don't try and talk him round.'

‘Lauren, no!'

Sean lunged forward, but he was too late. Lauren had left the hiding place and was already stumbling across the glacier towards Deep Throat.

‘Stop! You have to stop!'

Fitzgerald could not hear her above the noise of the engine. He was fifty metres from the edge of the crevasse.

Lauren was running now, waving her hands frantically in the air. She was approaching the far side of Deep Throat.

‘Stop!' she screamed.

Fitzgerald glanced up, his attention caught perhaps by the movement in front of him, by Lauren's dark clothing contrasted against the ice.

Lauren was so close to him she could actually see his jaw drop down in astonishment. Then he slammed hard on the brakes, slewing the snowmobile round in a clumsy arc and bringing it to a halt just half a pace away from the place at which the solid ice he was driving on became the wafer-thin snow bridge of Deep Throat.

Fitzgerald took in the scene: the clumsy fake tracks which petered out midway across the snow bridge; the sag in the middle which hinted at the drop below.

For a while they were both silent, the only noise the brittle crackle of the snowmobile engine as it ticked over.

‘You can see what we wanted to do,' Lauren called out across the crevasse, ‘but I think there's a better way.'

She paused, expecting a response from Fitzgerald, but he made none.

‘Two of my team are sick, Julian; they're really sick. If you help us with the snowmobile, maybe we can sort things out between us. You'll have to answer for what happened at the base when we get back to civilisation. But if you help us … and we all get out alive, we can make things easier for you.'

Fitzgerald said nothing, just continued to stare directly at Lauren. She thought she could see him shivering, but it might have been her imagination.

Then he revved up the engine, turned back on his tracks and drove away, the snowmobile bobbing and tilting as he navigated the route back through the crevasse field.

Then Sean was standing next to her.

‘That was our chance, Lauren,' he said quietly. ‘And you threw it away.'

Lauren turned to him, her eyes filling with tears which straight away began to freeze.

‘I had to try.'

‘But what did you think? That you could talk him round to
helping
us? You're crazy if you thought that!'

Lauren could not find the words to reply. Soon Sean turned his back on her in disgust and began to walk back to where the group was waiting.

Lauren stood for a while longer, lost in her own misery. From time to time she could see Fitzgerald in the distance, driving erratically back and forth on the glacier.

‘You won't win.' She spoke beneath her breath. ‘I still won't let you win…'

Snow began to fall as she wearily turned back to follow Sean's tracks, her feet like lead as she dragged them through each step.

Thirty miles still to go to the second depot. The thought of all that distance in front of them was beginning to eat into Lauren like a cancer.

82

Fitzgerald creased over and retched his breakfast onto the ice. It formed a little puddle at his feet for a few seconds before freezing hard. He breathed in deeply, trying to regain control, to recover from the shock.

So close. He'd been a hand's-breadth from death. And he'd been right all along. They
had
been plotting to kill him. They
did
know he was following. Secret meetings had discussed the best way of crushing him, of sending him to hell.

Oh, they'd relish that. The unyielding ice beating his destiny out of him as he cartwheeled down into depths where light had never penetrated. How long might he have lain there in that crevasse … wedged and trapped, watching his lifeblood seep away as the vice cracked and tightened in on him?

And then … The explorer frowned. Had it really happened? He ran it back through his mind. Lauren had run to warn him! In fact, she had saved his life. Why had she done that? Fitzgerald climbed off his snowmobile and stood uncertainly. He began wandering at random through the ice pinnacles that surrounded him. It was like a maze, this place; you could so easily get lost.

He took off a glove, ran his bare hand across a blue shard of ice, savouring the bite as it stuck and peeled.

Lauren had been weak. It was her first mistake. But there was no longer any doubt about the team's intention to kill him.

Fitzgerald returned to the snowmobile and sat on the seat. He wiped the snow from his goggles. Far off, he could see Lauren and her team picking their way through the crevasses of the glacier, a weaving line of dark figures heading off into the darkening void.

Things would be different from now on, Fitzgerald promised himself. So far he'd been passive, content to follow, to watch.

Now that time was over.

83

Lauren scraped the stubborn layer of ice off the face of the compass and checked the bearing, turning the plastic bezel until north was aligned. The red needle was sluggish and slow to swing round, the fluid inside the case close to freezing now the temperature had dropped so low.

They were seventeen days into the trek, and for the last twenty-four hours a dense low cloud had enveloped the glacier, reducing visibility to just fifty metres or less. It made progress more dangerous for the team and made navigation even more critical for Lauren; without the compass bearing, they would be stumbling in circles, hopelessly lost.

The fog was all-embracing—it felt like a blanket, like a shroud. It deadened all noise, muffling the metallic clinks of equipment, dulling the crisp swish-swish of skis sliding over ice, confusing the sense of orientation so that it was impossible to say which direction a shout had come from.

Psychologically, the fog was bad for morale, increasing the team's sense of isolation, enhancing the growing conviction amongst them all that this desperate trek might end in disaster. Mariners through the ages have experienced the same despair encountering fog at sea; there is nothing quite as effective as an impenetrable mist at imparting a sensation of impending doom.

Lauren's tactic in these conditions was the only one she could adopt—keeping the team as closely packed as she could, encouraging the stragglers to keep up at the tail of the group.

‘No one loses sight of the person in front,' she told them. ‘That's the rule. We can't be sure of finding you again if you get separated from the group.'

The team, utterly terrified at the prospect of becoming lost in the whiteout conditions, did as she asked, bunching into a tight unit, the stronger members dropping their pace to allow the weaker ones to keep up.

As night encroached, they made camp for the seventeenth time.

‘We can forget about the watch rota for tonight,' Lauren told them as they settled in for the night. ‘Fitzgerald couldn't find us in this stuff even if he wanted to.'

‘We should get the food inside us now,' Sean said, ‘while we've still got the energy.'

They melted down ice and drank lukewarm tea, bitter to the tongue without sugar, and ate a half-cup of muesli each. The muesli had to be portioned out in advance, mainly because the raisins were so sought after that they had to be counted out individually. Where there was one over the odds, Frank would invariably be offered it. They melted down yet more ice and added warm water to the cereal, the gritty sweetness of the grain putting welcome sugar into their stomachs. They all saved the raisins in the bottom of their mugs, placing them one by one in their mouths only when they could resist the temptation no longer. Each hard nodule of the dried fruit was chewed over and pulped against the roofs of their mouths until the juices began to flow.

Next morning the fog was still with them, but at least there were fewer crevasses to worry about. They set out at dawn, making steady progress for five hours or so, bringing them to the area in which Lauren calculated the second barrel should be found.

They pitched camp and ate a miserly lunch, just half a granola bar each, washed down by a third of a mug of watery cocoa.

‘What can you remember about this place?' Lauren asked Sean.

‘It was close to a boulder,' Sean recalled, trying to picture the terrain, ‘a boulder the size of a car. If we had good visibility, we'd see the damn thing from ten miles away. That's why we chose it.'

‘Why don't we wait for tomorrow, save our energy?' Mel asked. ‘Maybe it'll clear up and we'll see it right away.'

‘It could be like this for days,' Lauren told her. ‘In fact, it could get worse. We'll just have to go out and search, like we did at the other depot.'

At the first depot, all the members of the team had joined in the search for the barrel. Now, eight days later, only Murdo and Mel were fit enough to join Sean and Lauren in the hunt.

They worked by the compass, following a bearing for ten minutes, then turning as close as they could estimate to ninety degrees for a further ten-minute line. The same procedure repeated twice again brought them full circle, or rather, full square, back to the vicinity of the tent. Having drawn a blank, they would pause to rest, then set out on a different bearing five degrees to the west.

Here and there, criss-crossing the ice in seemingly random patterns, they came across the indentations of snowmobile tracks.

‘Fitzgerald has been in this area,' Sean confirmed, examining the indentations, ‘and recently too. These tracks would have been blown away within forty-eight hours.'

‘You think he was looking for the depot?' Lauren asked.

Sean shrugged. ‘We have to credit the guy with some intelligence. If he worked out that the first depot was exactly one hundred miles from the camp, he'd certainly make the two-hundred-mile point a likely place to look.'

Lauren said nothing, but her heart sank a little further every time they found more tracks. Fitzgerald had been shuttling back and forth like crazy … his trail was scattered all over the area.

Please God he hadn't found the depot, Lauren prayed; please God he hadn't done that.

After some hours of this, they were all too exhausted to concentrate on such niceties as straight lines. They abandoned the search, retreating, aching and despondent, to the tents, where they ate just a quarter of a tin of processed meat each before huddling close for the night.

Lauren was on the outside, her back against the goretex outer wall of the tent. No matter how hard she tried to ignore it, the penetrating fingers of cold worked their way through the down, eating into her flesh and making sleep an impossibility.

She was losing her insulation layers, Lauren realised; all her subcutaneous fat was being burned up by the trek. She buried her head inside the sleeping bag, letting her breath create a precious pocket of warmth around her face so that at least one part of her would be warm.

The following morning, after one of the most miserable nights Lauren could remember, she joined Sean once more for a foray out into the void. Her warning of the previous afternoon had not been unduly pessimistic, in fact the conditions
were
worse than the day before, with the precious visibility diminished to fifteen metres at most.

‘We've got to cast the net wider,' Lauren told Sean. ‘I think we're further from it than we realise.'

They began the process again, now going out for twenty minutes on each bearing, peering into the void in the hope of seeing something—anything—other than the spectral swirling of the fog.

They did this many times, so many times that Lauren lost count, pushing themselves to do just one more circuit when their bodies cried for rest.

At last, looming out of the frozen mist, a dark, bulbous shape emerged.

‘Is that it?' Lauren asked, hardly daring to hope.

Sean peered through the swirls of fog, trying to find some definition in the shape.

‘It has to be.' He took a step forward. ‘But…'

The boulder was in front of them with the barrel nearby, lying on its side. The black plastic lid and metal sealing ring were scattered on the ice nearby.

Sean pulled the barrel upright. It was empty. For a while they both stood there, staring dumbly into the interior.

‘Oh Christ.' Lauren's voice faltered as she realised the full significance of the development. ‘He's left us with nothing. We don't even have any drugs for Frank's hands.'

They were paralysed, nailed to the spot.

‘How much further can we go, Sean?' she asked him, trying to get her mind round the distance which still separated them from the plane. ‘How much further can we go without food?'

Sean leaned forward, looking inside the barrel again as if the empty interior might have somehow magically recharged with the supplies they so desperately needed.

He shook his head as he looked over at Lauren, his face as white as the ice that clung to it.

‘And how are we going to tell the others?' Lauren asked him, the tears already welling up in her eyes. ‘What can we possibly say?'

84

Back in London, Alexander De Pierman was a worried man.

It was nineteen days since he'd last heard from Capricorn. Now the alarm bells were beginning to ring.