Black Ice (38 page)

He looked out of his window, feeling tense and irritable. As usual, London was awash with rain, the gutters gurgling, the shop-front canopies sagging fit to bust, rivulets and minor streams coursing through alleys and thoroughfares as the drains flowed over and spilled. The doorways were filled with trapped shoppers, looking out into the sheeting downpour, wondering bleakly how they'd let themselves get caught without an umbrella again.

At first, the radio blackout from Capricorn had been a blessed relief for Alexander De Pierman and his public relations team at Kerguelen Oils. Dealing with the media had been time-consuming and fraught, and Lauren's satellite gremlin was a fast and effective way to turn down the heat.

Once the media realised that they could get no further news from Capricorn, or from Fitzgerald, they quickly lost interest in the story. The twenty or thirty calls a day to De Pierman's press office rapidly fell off to five or ten, and within a week the telephone traffic was down to a couple of calls a day.

Breathing an inward sigh of relief that the whole affair had not reflected too badly on the company, Alexander De Pierman turned his attention back to the business of running one of the world's biggest oil companies.

He flew out to Venezuela for five days of negotiations with the Minister of Energy, then on to Borneo to sign an exploration deal for a new field in Sabah. The following week he was in Riyadh, then back to London to supervise the takeover of a small prospecting operation he'd been admiring for a while.

The days ticked by; one week stretched into two, De Pierman expecting to hear from Lauren at any stage. When no call came from Capricorn, he told himself they must still be having problems with their satellite gear.

Dr Michael Collins, the director of the Scott Polar Institute, who were also part sponsors of Capricorn, called on day thirteen. He too was beginning to be concerned at the duration of the blackout, and wondered if De Pierman had any news.

But there was none.

As the days went by, and the radio silence continued, Alexander De Pierman was getting increasingly concerned … and so was the Scott Polar. It wasn't like Lauren to leave them in the dark, they agreed. She would know they would be itching for news of the drilling project, which would surely have produced some results by now.

‘Any call from Capricorn?' De Pierman would ask his office every time he called in. But the answer was always the same. No call. No call.

‘What's the longest you've ever known a base to be out of touch?' De Pierman asked Collins in one of their now daily calls.

‘A week, maybe ten days. But never longer.'

A week. Ten days. But now it was the fifteenth day since anyone had heard any news from Capricorn. It didn't feel right.

Day sixteen. Relatives of the Capricorn team were beginning to contact De Pierman's office, disturbed that they had heard nothing for so long. Frank's mother was particularly concerned, insisting on talking to De Pierman even though he was in Sulawesi at the time.

‘Last Thursday was my birthday, Mr De Pierman,' she told him. ‘Frank has never, ever missed wishing me a happy birthday, no matter where he is.'

De Pierman began to explore other means of contacting Capricorn. He got radio hams to try to raise the base on different frequencies. No response. He asked a Chilean base—the nearest to Capricorn—to try them in case bad atmospherics were disrupting long-range communications to the South American relay station. Again, no response at all.

Capricorn wasn't just quiet, it was downright dead. De Pierman was beginning to lose sleep.

Day nineteen. He consulted with the Scott Polar, and they decided to give it a couple more days. If there was no news by the end of the week, they would consider funding a flight to find out what the hell was going on down there.

85

Misery wormed its way into their souls like a parasite setting up home in a gut. The deepest depression had struck them, a sense of exposure and helplessness as solid and intractable as the two kilometres of ice beneath their feet.

Even the weather conditions seemed to have renewed the battle against them, the cold so invasive it actually froze them in their sleeping bags. Lauren had to dig deep to conquer her own apathy as she crawled out into the wind-scoured world of ice which surrounded their two lonely tents.

‘What's the point?' Murdo snapped at Lauren when she tried to rouse him from his sleeping bag. ‘We lost the battle, and we're going to die. Better to die in a sleeping bag than slogging our guts out there in the deep freeze for nothing.'

‘I'm taking the tents down in five minutes,' Lauren warned him. ‘We'll leave you here alone if you don't get up.'

Lauren hated to play the bully, but this was really the only way.

Murdo groaned, and Mel joined him.

‘My back…' she pleaded with Lauren. ‘I can't tow the sledge any more.'

The medic rolled up her clothing to reveal a bloodied mass of blisters virtually covering her entire back.

‘We're all the same,' Lauren told her firmly. ‘I'll show you mine if you want…'

‘Give me one reason…' Murdo mumbled from his bag. His head was turned away; he didn't want to look Lauren in the eye. ‘One good reason to carry on.'

‘Because if we quit now, we definitely can't win. There's still a chance, Murdo, that we can get to the plane before Fitzgerald. His snowmobile might break down … he might get lost in a storm … fall down a crevasse.'

As she spoke the words, Lauren was painfully aware of how thin they sounded.

‘He's got all the food…' Murdo sulked. ‘That was
our
food … you promised it to us, remember?'

‘I know…' Lauren placed a hand gently on Murdo's shoulder. ‘But we can still survive. You
can
get to the plane if you really want it.'

‘I don't care about the plane. The whole thing is shit.' Murdo burrowed his head even deeper into the bag as Mel and Richard reluctantly began the process of sorting out their gear ready for the departure.

Lauren returned to the other tent and found the biscuit she'd been saving. It was a custard cream, the soft filling frozen hard. She waited until Mel and Richard had left Murdo alone in the tent and took the biscuit to him.

‘Breakfast,' she told him, placing the precious object next to his head. ‘But only if you get your ass out of that sack and come and join the rest of us.'

Murdo unfolded the sleeping bag, his mouth filling immediately with saliva as he saw the biscuit.

‘Where the hell did you get that from?'

‘Saved it,' Lauren told him, ‘for a moment like this.'

‘I can't eat that,' he told her. ‘You should give it to Frank.'

‘It's yours. It'll help get you going. The others won't know.'

Murdo couldn't resist the food. He placed the biscuit in his mouth, chewing it hard. In a few moments it was gone.

‘Now will you get out of the tent?'

Murdo nodded, feeling suddenly ashamed of his greed.

‘We should have kept it…' he started. ‘Maybe someone else is going to need it more…'

Lauren left Murdo to extract himself from his bag and went to help Sean with Frank. The radio man was now incapable of using his hands at all. Every zip, every button had to be fastened for him; they helped him out of the tent and pulled him clumsily to his feet.

‘I need to piss, Sean,' Frank said. ‘Would you be so kind?'

Frank stumbled a short distance away, and Sean helped him to piss.

‘Do you want Mel to take a look at your hands today?' Lauren asked him when he came back.

Frank shook his head violently. ‘No, no.'

‘Is it my imagination,' Lauren asked Sean when they were out of earshot, ‘or are Frank's fingers beginning to smell real bad?'

‘They sure are,' Sean agreed. ‘I never smelled an infection like that before.'

‘We should watch him carefully today. I think he's sicker than he's letting on.'

After a long struggle, Lauren finally had the team out on the ice, the tents packed and loaded. Richard was strangely silent, rocking slightly on his feet, his hands placed gingerly inside his wind jacket.

‘How are your feet?' Lauren asked him.

Lost in a world of his own pain, Richard didn't respond.

‘Richard?'

‘I'll walk,' he told her quietly. ‘The hurt keeps my mind from thinking of food.'

Richard pulled down the hood of his jacket so Lauren couldn't see his eyes.

The temperature was breathtakingly low, somewhere down in the minus fifties, Lauren estimated. It paralysed them; the severity of the cold seemed to turn them to statues where they stood. The very idea of walking fifteen or twenty miles that day, with nothing to eat, seemed so ridiculous it almost made Lauren want to cry.

Murdo suddenly threw back his head. ‘I hate this place!' he screamed into the air. ‘I hate this fucking place!'

His shout echoed back from the ice.

No one said anything, but Mel put her hand behind Murdo's back and gently pushed him to make a step.

‘Jesus. Has anyone any idea how my feet feel?' Murdo was close to tears as he shuffled onwards.

Lauren was biting her own lip as she forced herself to take a step. The rope began to build pressure against her hips, the familiar deep-set pain of the friction burns reigniting again.

Sean pulled next to her, as strong as ever, his body leaning into the work as the first seconds of the shift passed in a blur of agony. ‘How many miles to the plane?' he asked her quietly.

‘Ninety. Plus.'

‘Frank's not going to make it. He's going down fast.'

‘I know. And so is Richard,' Lauren replied. ‘You reckon we can pull him
and
Frank on this thing?'

Sean did not reply.

86

Frank had a fever when he woke the next day and complained that his fingers were feeling worse.

‘Not that I want to get a reputation as a whinger,' he told Lauren, ‘but I'm beginning to feel a little rough.'

He was beginning to look a little rough too; in fact, Lauren had been alarmed at the permanent green tinge to his complexion and the sweat which was beginning to plague him in the night. His eyes had become bloodshot as the days had worn on, and his brow was deeply creased with the habitual frown of an individual who was in constant, severe pain.

He finally agreed for the medic to examine his fingers. Mel winced when she peeled back the bandages; the smell was absolutely putrid, the skin black and obviously decaying.

‘Well, we've certainly had a deterioration here,' she said as she examined the tissue. ‘These have to hurt like hell. Can you bear me to touch them?'

Frank nodded as she took a sterile swab and began to clean away the weeping fluid which had congealed around the burned tissue of his fingers, the only indication of his acute discomfort the occasional sharp intake of breath.

When she had finished the task, Mel looked at Lauren, her eyes conveying the bad news that was about to come. She took a deep breath.

‘I'm going to be honest with you, Frank. You've got the first indications of gangrene in three of these fingers.'

Frank was distraught. ‘Oh Christ. What about the antibiotics? Aren't they clearing it up?'

‘No. A broad-spectrum antibiotic like amoxycillin can keep the infection at bay, but it can't beat something this strong. Also, as the days go by, your own body defences are getting weaker with the lack of food and the general conditions.'

‘When does the course of antibiotics run out?' Lauren asked.

‘In two days. And that's it. We only had the one course packed in the first barrel. This infection will probably progress very rapidly without the curbing effects of the antibiotics.'

‘And the long-term prognosis?' Frank's voice sounded so thin and frightened it brought a lump to Lauren's throat.

Mel sucked her cheeks for a while, plucking up the courage.

‘We're talking about amputation,' she said, finally. ‘In the end, that's really the only sure way to sort this out.'

87

‘Get up, Richard; it's time to go.'

The journalist buried his head further into the warmth of his sleeping bag, murmuring incoherently.

‘Richard! Get out of the bag!' It was a woman's voice, but he was unsure if it was Lauren or Mel.

Getting out of that bag was the last thing Richard wanted to do. This was his healing time, time to devote to thoughts of home, time to teleport his mind back to the life which had once belonged to him—if that really had been him at all. He wouldn't be the same person now, he was sure of that, if he ever got out of this alive.

He rarely thought of his fiancée any more. And all thoughts of sex had weeks ago disappeared as his body had degenerated. No, now it was curious things which drifted into his mind—drifted the way that dreams did just before the waking moment, more vivid somehow, and leaving him wondering if they were dreams at all.

Sometimes he imagined himself driving his car, not going anywhere in particular, but just driving along a motorway with the heater turned on full. Other times he was standing in a lift, the lift that took him to the fifth floor of the office block in which he worked. There were other journalists around him, joking as they discussed the breaking news stories of the day. It was real, real enough that he could smell the start of day scents of deodorants and dry-cleaned clothes.

A hand pulled at his shoulder, followed by the sound of the sleeping-bag zip being unfastened. Richard groaned, then reluctantly sat, the stiff muscles in his shoulders and stomach sending dull shivers of pain through him as he moved.

He found Lauren squatting in the entrance to the tent.

‘The others are already out there,' she told him. ‘We've got miles to kill.'