Zodiac Station (6 page)

We moved down the glacier in harness. The snowmobile didn’t want to go slowly: if I feathered the throttle, it would rev but not move; if I pressed harder, it suddenly popped into gear and lurched forward. It took all my concentration not to mow down the rope … let alone watch for crevasses … let alone spare any thought for Hagger. I wasn’t even sure the rope would do any good. If Greta went into a crevasse, the rope would more likely pull me in on top of her than save either of us.

Greta stopped. I let go the throttle so suddenly I almost fell off.

‘Is it a crevasse?’ I shouted. Then I saw it. A blue snowmobile, parked where the glacier rubbed up against the mountains. Pieces of equipment were scattered over the ground around it, hard to make out in the gloom.

I got down from the snowmobile.

‘Wait,’ Greta called. ‘Hold on to the rope. And check the snow.’

‘I’ll follow your track.’

‘Check it,’ she repeated. ‘The snowmobile has better weight distribution than you do.’

I edged over the snow, one hand on the safety line, the other holding the barrel of my rifle, using the butt to probe the ground in front. A hard crust had formed on top of the snow, but that was deceptive. It squeaked under my boots like polystyrene – and, like polystyrene, it snapped under my weight. Each time it broke, my heart froze while I waited for the drop. Each time, my feet landed softly in the powder snow underneath.

Greta was prowling around, examining the equipment he’d left.

‘Don’t you have to worry about crevasses too?’

‘Martin knew the drill.’ She pointed to four fuel cans that made a rough diamond around the abandoned snowmobile. ‘He marked out a safe area.’

‘So where’s he gone?’ I looked at the snowmobile. I looked at the boxes of equipment. No sign of Hagger. A shovel stood planted in the snow beside a square pit, about a metre deep. An open Thermos stood upright on one of the boxes, lid off, cup beside it, as if Hagger had been about to pour himself a cup of tea. The water inside the Thermos had frozen solid.

‘Here.’ Greta bent down and lifted a red climbing rope out of the wind-blown snow. It had been tied off on Hagger’s snowmobile. She followed it across the glacier.

Then she stopped. She leaned forward. The rope went taut behind her. I hurried over.

A dark cut opened in the ice, a snaking fissure going down – I couldn’t see how far. Narrow enough that you didn’t see it until you were nearly there; wide enough you could easily climb in. Or fall. The rope trailed down into the void.

‘Martin,’ I shouted. I stepped forward. My foot caught a lump of ice half buried in the snow and kicked it over the edge. Loose snow showered down after it.

‘Careful.’

Greta took a head torch from her pocket. Wrapping the strap around her wrist, she shone the beam down into the gloom.

‘Keep watching for bears,’ she said. ‘They come up quick.’

I glanced around anxiously. The sun, never far off, was circling back. The sky had started to blue. Even so, the shadows were deep enough to hide all manner of evils.

‘Look at this,’ said Greta, and even she couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. She pointed the torch down, wrist trembling slightly.

The crevasse was deep, maybe eight or nine metres. The walls bent and bowed, primitive shapes that seemed pregnant with meaning. The torch beam reflected brightly off them, all the way to the bottom.

A dark shadow lay flat against the ice.

It was Hagger. Neither of us doubted it. We called his name; Greta threw down the cup from the Thermos to see if he would stir. He didn’t move.

‘I’m going down,’ she announced.

You don’t just go down into a crevasse – not if you want to make it out again. Greta spent half an hour driving screws into the ice, fixing pulleys and carabiners, and running a network of ropes between them. When she’d finished, she was webbed in a harness clipped to one end of the rope; I held the other.

‘Slowly,’ she told me. ‘I tug once, it means you stop. Two tugs, I’m down.’

Standing well back, I paid out the rope. I didn’t like to think what would happen if she fell. I imagined the jerk of the rope, my feet slipping over the ice towards the edge of the hole. Would I hold on? Let go? I remembered Quam:
the biggest danger in a situation like this is people trying to play the hero.

The rope went slack. Two tugs told me she’d got down safely. I crawled to the edge of the crevasse and peered in.

Hagger still hadn’t moved. Greta knelt beside him. She took off her mitten and wriggled her bare hand under the collar of his balaclava. It stayed there a long time.

‘Well?’ I called.

She shook her head.

Hagger was still wearing his climbing harness. Greta clipped him on to the rope, then added a loop around his chest so he wouldn’t spin. I lay on the ground and watched from above. Compact snow pressed hard against me; the cold seeped into my chest.

And something was digging into my ribs. I rolled over and scrabbled in the snow, expecting a pebble or a lump of ice. Instead, through my mitten, I felt something unmistakably man-made.

It was a key. A perfectly ordinary flat Yale key, attached to a teddy-bear key ring. The bear wore a T-shirt, grubby with fingerprints, that said I
♥
NY.

I stared at it and wondered how it had got there. Had it fallen out of Hagger’s pocket? There are no locks at Zodiac. Why did he need a key?

I zipped it into my pocket. Greta had finished with Hagger. She climbed the second rope, and together we pulled up the body. The hardest part was getting it over the cliff. Greta chopped a ramp in the crevasse lip with her ice axe, and I hauled him over. Like landing a fish.

‘He’s frozen stiff,’ I said. Not just the body – his coat and trousers were solid ice, as if they’d been soaked through and then frozen. How had he possibly contrived to get wet? The glaciers wouldn’t start melting for months, and we were a long way from the coast.

Of course, we didn’t have a body bag. We zipped Hagger into a sleeping bag from the emergency box and pulled the hood tight around his face. A tuft of his beard, frosted with ice crystals, stuck out.

The sun had come up. I felt the weariness of having seen a long night through – though really, it was only three in the morning. Greta fetched the sledges we’d left up the hill, and we strapped Hagger on the one I’d brought.
In case we have to bring anything back.

‘You take the emergency sled,’ Greta said. I was grateful. I didn’t fancy three hours dragging a dead man.

I pulled the starter cord and gunned the throttle. The engine roared, but the snowmobile didn’t move. Maybe the weight of the sled? I added more power; I smelled smoke. Too late, I saw Greta waving angrily at me.

‘You forgot to loosen the tracks,’ she shouted.

I jumped off as if I’d been shot. Together, we heaved the frozen tracks off the ice. I smelled scorched metal.

‘Will it be OK?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s a long way home.’

We followed our tracks back up the glacier. I tried to look at the ground, and not at the stiff bundle on the sledge in front. There were an awful lot of implications wrapped up in that sleeping bag, but I didn’t want to think about them.

And then I couldn’t. The engine note changed; I felt the power sapping. Every time I eased a fraction off the throttle, the engine stuttered as if it was about to cut out. Twice, I rescued it by jamming on the throttle again. The third time, it died.

For a heart-stopping moment, I watched Greta carry on into the distance. Then she circled round, drove back and pulled up beside me. She flipped up the snowmobile’s plastic nose and peered at the engine.

‘Kaput.’

The day had actually got darker since sunrise. Clouds had blown up, fed by a wind that scoured the ice dome. The moment I opened my visor, a volley of ice granules peppered my face. I didn’t know exactly where we were, but I knew it was still a long way from base.

‘Can you fix it?’

Ignoring me, she reached inside her coat and took out the satellite phone.

‘One of the snowmobiles broke down,’ she told whoever answered. ‘And Hagger’s dead.’

She waited, fingers drumming impatiently.

‘Have you got a fix on our position?’

Evidently they had.

‘We’ll stay here. I’m switching off the phone to save battery.’

She tucked the phone back in her coat and starting pulling equipment off my sledge. I stood there, helpless, feeling the warmth leaching out of me.

‘Can’t we both go on your snowmobile?’

‘It can’t carry both of us and two sleds. Two people, one snowmobile and no emergency gear isn’t a good equation.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’

‘We’ll put up the tent.’ She undid the bag and pulled out a large red tent roll. Another blast of wind almost blew it out of her hands.

‘Is it safe?’

She didn’t bother to answer. We laid the tent flat on the ground and weighted it with blocks of ice and steel canisters. Several times, we nearly lost it as we raised the poles. At last, we were able to crawl in. We spread mats and sleeping bags; I massaged my jaw, trying to get feeling back.

Greta lit the stove and reboiled water from one of the Thermoses. She pulled out two orange food sachets and offered them to me.

‘Chicken or fish?’

I chose chicken. Copying her, I ripped off the top and poured boiling water over the dehydrated meal. I was too hungry to wait for it to absorb: I shovelled it in too quickly, spilling it on myself like Luke did when he was a baby. Hard fragments caught in my throat. The rush of calories made me shake.

‘No hurry,’ Greta said. ‘Too much wind for the helicopter. They won’t come here for hours.’

‘Are we going to make it?’

I could feel my chest tightening with panic. The more I fought it, the more it pushed back. Forty-eight hours ago, I’d been at home with Luke. Now I was trapped in a tent on a glacier, the wind rising, with a broken snowmobile and a dead body outside. And I was so cold.

Greta didn’t offer any sympathy. ‘This is a Scott tent.’

‘Is that supposed to be reassuring?’

‘Scott survived eight days in one of these.’

‘I thought the point was he didn’t survive.’

‘That was on the ninth day.’

I scratched around at the bottom of my carton, trying to pick out the last bits of food. Without asking, Greta handed me another.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked, as I waited for the second serving to go soft.

‘All over.’

I wasn’t going to let her off so easily. ‘You have to come from somewhere.’

She thought about that. ‘My mother’s Norwegian.’

That explains the looks
, I thought. I almost said it, but chickened out. It would be a long wait in that tent if she took it the wrong way.

‘What brought you to Zodiac?’

She rolled over on her side. ‘I need some sleep.’

‘Me too. But I’m not tired.’

‘I’m kind of upset about Martin right now.’

‘Of course.’ I felt like a heel. The truth is, Hagger had made such a fleeting cameo in my life it was hard to remember he’d been there at all. In the blink of an eye, he’d gone from an email on a screen to a bundle on a sledge; I’d never even spoken to him. Whatever reason he’d had for bringing me there, I’d never find out now.

I stared at the roof of the tent. Ice crystals were beginning to form on the underside of the canvas. ‘He was like a father to me.’ I saw the look Greta gave me. ‘For a while.’

It sounded phoney, even to me. But it was true. The memory surprised me, like an embarrassing shirt found at the back of the wardrobe – something to make you wonder who you ever were.

‘As undergraduates, we were all in awe of him. So many stories went round. He was like Professor Challenger, or Indiana Jones. He overwintered in the Arctic on a wooden boat, collecting samples. They said he shot a polar bear and ate his own shoes.

‘The polar-bear story’s not true,’ Greta said.

It occurred to me that we weren’t talking about the same man. For me, Hagger was something from the past – a piece in a jigsaw I’d abandoned a long time ago. For Greta, he was now. Someone she passed in the corridor, ate with in the canteen, sat next to at their movie nights. No wonder she was taking it harder than me.

‘I should have kept in touch. He was an amazing scientist. He—’

She’d stopped paying attention – still listening, but not to me. She was staring at the tent door.

I reached for the rifle. ‘Is it a bear?’

She shook her head and took the gun.

‘It sounds like an engine.’

I heard it too. Deeper than a snowmobile’s gadfly whine – more bass, throbbing beneath the howling wind. The ice beneath us shook. Greta pulled on her boots and unzipped the tent.

The noise stopped. The shaking stopped. I heard the styrofoam squeak of footsteps crossing the snow, the crust snapping. Then that stopped, too – right outside our tent.

‘It’s triple-A,’ an American-accented voice said. ‘You want a lift?’

Anderson

A yellow Sno-Cat sat parked outside our tent. Not like the machine I’d seen at Zodiac, a relic of the 1960s; this one was low and shiny and powerful and very much of the twenty-first century. Even the snow blown over its door sills looked like it had been styled for the brochure. Three pairs of skis stuck out of a rack on the back, and three men in yellow parkas stood peering at our tent. The word ‘DAR-X’ was stencilled liberally on everything I could see: doors, coats, hats, skis.

‘Trouble?’ Even right there, the man outside the tent had to shout over the wind.

Greta nodded.

He gestured to his Sno-Cat. ‘You want out?’

The tent we’d raised so laboriously came down in a hurry. We left it with the snowmobiles. Hagger came with us on his sledge, wagging behind the Sno-Cat like a tin can tied to a car. I glanced out the rear window, and thought what a strange last journey it was for him.

There were only two seats in the cab. Greta and I and the man who’d rescued us sat in the passenger cabin mounted on the back. It was almost more luxurious than the Platform back at Zodiac, complete with folding bunks, a table and even a stove. Our host – the name on his coat said
Malick
; he introduced himself as Bill – brewed up coffee. We took off our coats in the heated cabin and cradled the mugs to stop them spilling over the bumps. Even the mugs said
DAR-X
.