Kitabı oku: «Alistair MacLean Arctic Chillers 4-Book Collection: Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island, Athabasca»

1
Monday midnight

It was Jackstraw who heard it first – it was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stove – curio collectors paid fancy prices for what they imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusks – rose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough.

‘Aeroplane,’ he announced casually.

‘Aeroplane!’ I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. ‘Jackstraw, you’ve been hitting the methylated spirits again.’

‘Indeed, no, Dr Mason.’ The blue eyes, so incongruously at variance with the swarthy face and the broad Eskimo cheekbones, crinkled into a smile: coffee was Jackstraw’s strongest tipple and we both knew it. ‘I can hear it plainly now. You must come and listen.’

‘No, thanks.’ It had taken me fifteen minutes to thaw out the frozen condensation in my sleeping-bag, and I was just beginning to feel warm for the first time. Heaven only knew that the presence of a plane in the heart of that desolate ice plateau was singular enough – in the four months since our IGY station had been set up this was the first time we had had any contact, however indirectly, with the world and the civilisation that lay so unimaginably beyond our horizons – but it wasn’t going to help either the plane or myself if I got my feet frozen again. I lay back and stared up through our two plate glass skylights: but as always they were completely opaque, covered with a thick coating of rime and dusting of snow. I looked away from the skylights across to where Joss, our young Cockney radioman, was stirring uneasily in his sleep, then back to Jackstraw.

‘Still hear it?’

‘Getting louder all the time, Dr Mason. Louder and closer.’

I wondered vaguely – vaguely and a trifle irritably, for this was our world, a tightly-knit, compact little world, and visitors weren’t welcome – what plane it could be. A met. plane from Thule, possibly. Possibly, but unlikely: Thule was all of six hundred miles away, and our own weather reports went there three times a day. Or perhaps a Strategic Air Command bomber testing out the DEW-line – the Americans’ distant early warning radar system – or even some civilian proving flight on a new trans-polar route. Or maybe some base plane from down by Godthaab—

‘Dr Mason!’ Jackstraw’s voice was quick, urgent. ‘It’s in trouble, I think. It’s circling us – lower and closer all the time. A big plane, I’m sure: many motors.’

‘Damn!’ I said feelingly. I reached out for the silk gloves that always hung at night above my head, pulled them on, unzipped my sleeping-bag, swore under my breath as the freezing air struck at my shivering skin, and grabbed for my clothes. Half an hour only since I had put them off, but already they were stiff, awkward to handle and abominably cold – it was a rare day indeed when the temperature inside the cabin rose above freezing point. But I had them on – long underwear, woollen shirt, breeches, silk-lined woollen parka, two pairs of socks and my felt cabin shoes – in thirty seconds flat. In latitude 72.40 north, 8000 feet up on the Greenland ice-cap, self-preservation makes for a remarkable turn of speed. I crossed the cabin to where no more than a nose showed through a tiny gap in a sleeping-bag.

‘Wake up, Joss.’ I shook him until he reached out a hand and pushed the hood off his dark tousled head. ‘Wake up, boy. It looks as if we might need you.’

‘What – what’s the trouble?’ He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared up at the chronometer above his head. ‘Midnight! I’ve been asleep only half an hour.’

‘I know. Sorry. But get a move on.’ I recrossed the cabin, passed by the big RCA transmitter and stove, and halted in front of the instrument table. The register showed the wind ENE, velocity 15 knots – near enough 17 miles per hour, on a night like this, with the ice-crystals and drift lifting off the ice-cap, clogging and slowing up the anemometer cups, the true speed was probably half as much again. And the pen of the alcohol thermograph was running evenly along the red circle of 40 degrees below zero – 72 degrees of frost. I thought of the evil combination of these two factors of wind and cold and felt my skin crawl.

Already Jackstraw was silently climbing into his furs. I did the same – caribou trousers and parka with reindeer fur trimmed hood, all beautifully tailored by Jackstraw’s wife – sealskin boots, woollen mittens and reindeer gloves. I could hear the plane quite clearly now, and so too, I could see, did Joss. The deep even throb of its motors was plain even above the frantic rattling of the anemometer cups.

‘It’s – it’s an aeroplane!’ You could see that he was still trying to convince himself.

‘What did you think it was – one of your precious London double-deckers?’ I slipped snow-mask and goggles round my neck and picked up a torch from the shelf beside the stove: it was kept there to keep the dry batteries from freezing. ‘Been circling for the past two or three minutes. Jackstraw thinks it’s in trouble, and I agree.’

Joss listened.

‘Engines sound OK to me.’

‘And to me. But engine failure is only one of a dozen possible reasons.’

‘But why circle here?’

‘How the devil should I know? Probably because he can see our lights – the only lights, at a guess, in 50,000 square miles. And if he has to put down, which God forbid, he stands his only chance of survival if he puts down near some human habitation.’

‘Heaven help them,’ Joss said soberly. He added something else, but I didn’t wait to hear. I wanted to get up top as quickly as possible.

To leave our cabin, we had to use a trap-door, not an ordinary door. Our cabin, a prefabricated, sectioned structure that had been hauled up from the coast on tractor sleds during the month of July, was deep-sunk in a great oblong hole that had been gouged out from the surface of the icecap, so that only the top few inches of its flat roof projected above ground level. The trap-door, hinged at both ends so that it could open either upwards or downwards, was reached by a short steep flight of steps.

I climbed the first two of these, took down the wooden mallet that hung there permanently by the wall and pounded round the already bruised and splintered edges of the trap to loosen the ice that held it locked fast. This was an almost invariable routine: whenever the trap had previously been opened for any length of time at all, the layer of warm air that always lay under the roof seeped slowly out, melting the surrounding snow – which promptly turned to ice when the trap was closed again.

Tonight the ice cracked easily. I got my shoulder under the trap, levered upwards against the accumulated drift of snow above, and scrambled out.

I was prepared for what awaited me up top – the gasping, panic-stricken feeling of suffocation as the warm air was sucked from my lungs by that deadly, numbing cold – but even so I wasn’t sufficiently prepared. The wind speed was far higher than I had feared. Bent double and coughing violently, breathing shallowly to avoid frosting my lungs, I turned my back to the wind, breathed into my reindeer gloves, slipped on my snow-mask and goggles and straightened. Jackstraw was already standing by my side.

The wind on the ice-cap never howled or shrieked. It moaned, instead, a low-pitched, unutterably eerie ululation: a requiem for the damned, if ever there was one, the agony of some soul lost in torment. That same moan had driven men mad before now: less than two months previously I had had to send our tractor mechanic, a completely broken youngster who had lost all contact with the last shadow of reality, back to our Uplavnik base. The wind had done that to him.

Tonight its desolate threnody boomed and faded, boomed and faded in the lower registers of sound with an intensity which I had seldom heard, while its fingers plucked at the tightly strung guy ropes of the radio antenna and instrument shelters to provide its own whistling obbligato of unearthly music. But I was in no mood then to listen to its music, and, indeed, that sepulchral wailing was not the dominant sound on the ice-cap that night.

The throbbing roar of big aero engines, surging and receding, as the wind gusted and fell away, like surf on some distant shore, was very close now. The sound lay to windward of us at that moment, and we turned to face it, but we were blind. Although the sky was overcast, there was no snow that night – at any time, heavy snowfalls, strangely enough, are all but unknown on the Greenland ice-cap – but the air was full of millions of driving, needle-pointed ice spicules that swept towards us out of the impenetrable darkness to the east, clogging up our goggles in a matter of seconds and stinging the narrow exposed area of my face between mask and goggles like a thousand infuriated hornets. A sharp, exquisite pain, a pain that vanished almost in the moment of arrival as the countless sub-zero spicules dug deep with their anæsthetising needles and drove out all sensation from the skin. But I knew this ominous absence of feeling all too well. Once again I turned my back to the wind, kneaded the deadened flesh with mittened hands till the blood came throbbing back, then pulled my snow-mask higher still.

The plane was flying in an anti-clockwise direction, following, it seemed, the path of an irregular oval, for the sound of its motors faded slightly as it curved round to north and west. But within thirty seconds it was approaching again, in a swelling thunder of sound, to the south-west – to the leeward of us, that was – and I could tell from Jackstraw’s explosive ejaculation of sound, muffled behind his mask, that he had seen it at the same moment as myself.

It was less than half a mile distant, no more than five hundred feet above the ice-cap, and during the five seconds it remained inside my line of vision I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thud heavily in my chest. No SAC bomber this, nor a Thule met. plane, both with crews highly trained in the grim craft of Arctic survival. That long row of brightly illuminated cabin windows could belong to only one thing – a trans-Atlantic or trans-polar airliner.

‘You saw it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw’s snow-mask was close to my ear.

‘I saw it.’ It was all I could think to say. But what I was seeing then was not the plane, now again vanished into the flying ice and drift, but the inside of the plane, with the passengers – God, how many passengers, fifty, seventy? – sitting in the cosy security of their pressurised cabin with an air-conditioned temperature of 70°F, then the crash, the tearing, jagged screeching that set the teeth on edge as the thin metal shell ripped along its length and the tidal wave of that dreadful cold, 110 degrees below cabin temperature, swept in and engulfed the survivors, the dazed, the injured, the unconscious and the dying as they sat or lay crumpled in the wreckage of the seats, clad only in thin suits and dresses …

The plane had completed a full circuit and was coming round again. If anything, it was even closer this time, at least a hundred feet lower, and it seemed to have lost some speed. It might have been doing 120, perhaps 130 miles an hour, I was no expert in these things, but for that size of plane, so close to the ground, it seemed a dangerously low speed. I wondered just how effective the pilot’s windscreen wipers would be against these flying ice spicules.

And then I forgot all about that, forgot all about everything except the desperate, urgent need for speed. Just before the plane had turned round to the east again and so out of the line of our blinded vision, it had seemed to dip and at the same instant two powerful lights stabbed out into the darkness, the one lancing straight ahead, a narrow powerful beam glittering and gleaming with millions of sparkling diamond points of flame as the ice-crystals in the air flashed across its path, the other, a broader fan of light, pointing downwards and only slightly ahead, its oval outline flitting across the frozen snow like some flickering will o’ the wisp. I grabbed Jackstraw’s arm and put my head close to his.

‘He’s going to land! He’s looking for a place to put down. Get the dogs, harness them up.’ We had a tractor, but heaven only knew how long it would have taken to start it on a night like this. ‘I’ll give you a hand as soon as I can.’

He nodded, turned and was lost to sight in a moment. I turned too, cursed as my face collided with the slatted sides of the instrument shelter, then jumped for the hatch, sliding down to the floor of the cabin on back and arms without bothering to use the steps. Joss, already completely clad in his furs but with the hood of his parka hanging over his shoulders, was just emerging from the food and fuel tunnel which led off from the other end of the cabin, his arms loaded with equipment.

‘Grab all the warm clothing you can find, Joss,’ I told him quickly. I was trying to think as quickly and coherently as I was talking, to figure out everything that we might require, but it wasn’t easy, that intense cold numbed the mind almost as much as it did the body. ‘Sleeping-bags, blankets, spare coats, shirts, it doesn’t matter whose they are. Shove them into a couple of gunny sacks.’

‘You think they’re going to land, sir?’ Curiosity, anticipation, horror – each struggled for supremacy in the thin, dark intelligent face. ‘You really think so?’

‘I think they’re going to try. What have you got there?’

‘Fire bombs, a couple of Pyrenes.’ He dumped them by the stove. ‘Hope they’re not solid.’

‘Good boy. And a couple of the tractor extinguishers – the Nu-Swifts, G-1000, I think.’ A great help these little things are going to be, I thought, if several thousand gallons of petrol decide to go up in flames. ‘Fire axes, crowbars, canes, the homing spool – for heaven’s sake don’t forget the homing spool – and the searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well.’

‘Bandages?’

‘No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?’

‘Full. But more ice than water.’

‘Put them on the stove – and don’t forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave.’ Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. ‘Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter.’

I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness.

‘How’s it coming?’ I shouted.

‘Easy.’ I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. ‘I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great help – he’s in a very bad temper at being woken up.’

Balto was Jackstraw’s lead dog – a huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of ’25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw’s Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master – although not above baring his wolf’s fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time – and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority now – snarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy.

‘I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll get the searchlight.’ I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind.

‘The plane – have you heard the plane, Jackstraw? I can’t hear a thing.’

Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood.

‘My God!’ I looked at him. ‘Maybe they’ve crashed already.’

Again the shake of the head.

‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘On a night like this you wouldn’t hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind.’

‘I’d have felt it, Dr Mason.’

I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in ever-widening circles trying to pick up our lights again, but at least there was hope yet.

I hurried across to where the tractor, sheeted in tarpaulin, lay close in to the high snow wall that had been cut down the middle of the drift. It took me a couple of minutes to clear away the accumulated snow at one end and wriggle in under the tarpaulin. There was no question of trying to lift it – its impregnated oils had frozen solid and it would have cracked and torn under any pressure.

The searchlight, fixed to a couple of bolts on the tractor bonnet, was held down by two quick-release butterfly nuts. In these latitudes, quick-release was a misnomer: the nuts invariably froze after even the briefest exposure. The accepted practice was to remove one’s gloves and close mittened hands round the nuts until body heat warmed and expanded them enough to permit unscrewing. But there was no time for that tonight: I tapped the bolts with a spanner from the tool box and the steel pins, made brittle by the intense cold, sheared as if made from the cheapest cast iron.

I crawled out at the foot of the tarpaulin, searchlight clutched under one arm, and as soon as I straightened I heard it again – the roar of aero engines, closing rapidly. They sounded very near, very low, but I wasted no time trying to locate the plane. Head lowered against the wind and the needle-sharp lances of the flying ice, I felt rather than saw my way back to the cabin hatch and was brought up short by Jackstraw’s steadying hand. He and Joss were busy loading equipment aboard the sledge and lashing it down, and as I stooped to help them something above my head fizzled and spluttered into a blinding white glare that threw everything into a harsh black and white relief of frozen snow and impenetrable shadow. Joss, remembering what I had completely forgotten – that dousing our cabin lights would have robbed the pilot of his beacon – had ignited a magnesium flare in the slats of the instrument shelter.

We all turned as the plane came into our vision again, to the south, and it was at once apparent why we had lost all sight and sound of it. The pilot must have made a figure of eight turn out in the darkness, had reversed his approach circle, and was flying from east to west: less than two hundred feet up, undercarriage still retracted, it passed within a couple of hundred yards of us like some monstrous bird. Both headlights were now dipped, the twin beams a glitter of kaleidoscopic light in the ice-filled darkness of the sky, the twin oval pools of light interlocking now and very bright, racing neck and neck across the snow. And then these pools, increasing as rapidly in size as they diminished in strength, slipped away to the left as the plane banked sharply to the right and came curving round clockwise to the north. I knew now what the pilot was intending and my hands clenched helplessly inside mittens and gloves. But there was nothing I could do about this.

‘The antenna!’ I shouted. ‘Follow out the line of the antenna.’ I stooped and gave the sledge its initial shove as Jackstraw shouted at Balto. Joss was by my side, head close to mine.

‘What’s happening? Why are we—’

‘He’s coming down this time. I’m sure of it. To the north.’

‘The north?’ Not even the snow-mask could hide the horror in his voice. ‘He’ll kill himself. He’ll kill all of them. The hummocks—’

‘I know.’ The land to the north-east was broken and uneven, the ice raised up by some quirk of nature into a series of tiny hillocks, ten, twenty feet high, tiny but the only ones within a hundred miles. ‘But he’s going to do it, all the same. A belly landing with the wheels up. That’s why he reversed his circle. He wants to land upwind to give himself the minimum stalling ground speed.’

‘He could land to the south, into the wind.’ Joss sounded almost desperate. ‘It’s a billiard table there.’

‘He could, but he won’t.’ I had to shout the words to make myself heard above the wind. ‘He’s nobody’s fool. He knows if he lands to windward of us, even a hundred yards to windward, the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don’t exist. He’s got to land upwind. He’s just got to.’

There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist level against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again.

‘Maybe he’ll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can—’

‘He’ll never see them,’ I said flatly. ‘Flying into this stuff he can’t possibly see a hundred yards in front of him.’

The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feet – the antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged.

Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on the vanishing plane and was literally blown head over heels by the tremendous slipstream from the four great propellers, slid helplessly across the frozen crust of the snow and fetched up on my back almost twenty feet from where I had been standing. Cursing, bruised and not a little dazed, I got to my feet again, started off in the direction where I could hear the dogs barking and howling in a paroxysm of fear and excitement, then stopped abruptly and stood quite still. The engines had died, all four of them had died in an instant, and that could mean only one thing: the airliner was about to touch down.

Even with the realisation a jarring vibration, of a power and intensity far beyond anything I had expected, reached my feet through the frozen crust of the ice-cap. No ordinary touchdown that, I knew, not even for a belly landing: the pilot must have overestimated his height and set his ship down with force enough to crumple the fuselage, to wreck the plane on the spot.

But he hadn’t. I was prone to the frozen snow again, ear pressed hard against it, and I could half hear, half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn’t be sure – six seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, by far more severe than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silence – a silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all.

Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-mask – it must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parka – it was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enough – and probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn’t like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin.

Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them.

‘You all right, sir?’ Joss asked. He took a step closer. ‘Good lord, you’ve lost your mask!’

‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’ It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. ‘Did you get a bearing on that plane?’

‘Roughly. Due east, I should say.’

‘Jackstraw?’

‘A little north of east, I think.’ He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind.

‘We’ll go east.’ Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. ‘We’ll go east – Joss, how long is that spool?’

‘Four hundred yards. More or less.’

‘So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we’ll cut across them. Let’s hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here.’

I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathers – weird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leeward – and made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fast – our lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen névé that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor.

We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring.

Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs.

The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-cap – if there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100°F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And even if we did get them all back, how to feed them – for our own supplies were already dangerously low? And where, in heaven’s name, were we going to put them all?