Читать книгу Alistair MacLean Arctic Chillers 4-Book Collection: Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island, Athabasca - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 11

For the first time in four months I had forgotten to set the alarm-clock before I went to sleep, and it was late when I awoke, cold and stiff and sore all over from the uneven hardness of the wooden floor. It was still dark as midnight – two or three weeks had passed since the rim of the sun had shown above the horizon for the last time that year, and all the light we had each day was two or three hours dim twilight round noon – but a glance at the luminous face of my watch showed me that it was nine-thirty.

I pulled the torch out from my parka, located the oil-lamp and lit it. The light was dim, scarcely reaching the far corners of the cabin, but sufficient to show the mummy-like figures lying huddled on the bunks and sprawled grotesquely across the floor, their frozen breath clouding before their faces and above their heads, then condensing on the cabin walls. The walls themselves were sheeted with ice which had extended far out across the roof, in places reaching the skylights, a condition largely brought about by the cold heavy air that had flooded down the opened hatchway during the night: the outside temperature registered on the drum at 54° below zero.

Not everyone was asleep: most of them, I suspected, had slept but little, the numbing cold had seen to that: but they were as warm in their bunks as they would be anywhere else and nobody showed any inclination to move. Things would be better when the cabin heated up a little.

I had trouble starting the stove – even though it was gravity fed from a tank above and to one side of it, the fuel oil had thickened up in the cold – but when it did catch it went with a roar. I turned both burners up to maximum, put on the water bucket that had lain on the floor all night and was now nearly a solid mass of ice, pulled on snow-mask and goggles and clambered up the hatchway to have a look at the weather.

The wind had died away almost completely – I’d known that from the slow and dispirited clacking of the anemometer cups – and the ice-drift, which at times could reach up several hundred feet into the sky, was no more than gentle puffs of dust stirring lazily and spectrally, through the feeble beam of my torch, across the glittering surface of the ice-cap. The wind, such as it was, still held out to the east. The cold, too, was still intense, but more bearable than it had been on the previous night. In terms of the effect of cold on human beings in the Arctic, absolute temperature is far from being the deciding factor: wind is just as important – every extra mile per hour is equivalent to a one degree drop in temperature – and humidity far more so. Where the relative humidity is high, even a few degrees below zero can become intolerable. But today the wind was light and the air dry. Perhaps it was a good omen … After that morning, I never believed in omens again.

When I got below, Jackstraw was on his feet, presiding over the coffee-pot. He smiled at me, and his face was as fresh and rested as if he’d had nine hours on a feather bed behind him. But then Jackstraw never showed fatigue or distress under any circumstances: his tolerance to sleeplessness and the most exhausting toil was phenomenal.

He was the only one on his feet, but far from the only one awake: of those in the bunks, only Senator Brewster was still asleep. The others were facing into the centre of the room, a few propped up on their elbows: all of them were shivering, and shivering violently, their faces blue and white and pinched with the cold. Some were looking at Jackstraw, wrinkling their noses in anticipation of the coffee, the pungent smell of which already filled the cabin; others were staring in fascination at the sight of the ice on the roof melting as the temperature rose, melting, dripping down to the floor in a dozen different places and there beginning to form tiny stalagmites of ice, building up perceptibly before their eyes: the temperature on the cabin floor must have been almost forty degrees lower than that at the roof.

‘Good morning, Dr Mason.’ Marie LeGarde tried to smile at me, but it was a pathetic effort, and she looked ten years older than she had on the previous night: she was one of the few with a sleeping-bag, but even so she must have passed a miserable six hours, and there is nothing so exhausting to the human body as uncontrollable night-long shivering, a vicious circle in which the more one shivers the more tired one becomes, and the more tired the less resistance to cold and hence the more shivering. For the first time, I knew that Marie LeGarde was an old woman.

‘Good morning,’ I smiled. ‘How did you enjoy your first night in your new home?’

‘First night!’ Even in the sleeping-bag her movements of clasping her arms together and huddling her head down between her shoulders were unmistakable. ‘I hope to heaven that it’s the last night. You run a very chilly establishment here, Dr Mason.’

‘I’m sorry. Next time we’ll keep watches and have the stove on all night.’ I pointed to the water splashing down to the floor. ‘The place is heating up already. You’ll feel better when you have some hot coffee inside you.’

‘I’ll never feel better again,’ she declared vigorously, but the twinkle was back in her eye. She turned to the young German girl in the next bunk. ‘And how do you feel this morning, my dear?’

‘Better, thank you, Miss LeGarde.’ She seemed absurdly grateful that anyone should even bother to ask. ‘I don’t feel a thing now.’

‘Means nothing,’ Miss LeGarde assured her cheerfully. ‘Neither do I. It’s just that we’re both frozen stiff … And how did you survive the night, Mrs Dansby-Gregg?’

‘As you say, I survived.’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg smiled thinly. ‘As Dr Mason observed last night, this is not the Ritz … That coffee smells delicious. Bring me a cup over, Fleming, will you?’

I picked up one of the cups Jackstraw had poured out and took it across to the young German girl who was struggling to unzip her sleeping-bag with her one good arm. Her embarrassment and discomfort were obvious, but I knew I’d no option, the time to stop this nonsense was before ever it had a chance to start.

‘You stay where you are, young lady, and drink this.’ She took the cup reluctantly, and I turned away. ‘You’ve surely forgotten, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, that Helene has a broken collar-bone?’

The expression on her face made it quite obvious that she hadn’t forgotten, but she was no fool. The gossip columnists would murder her for this, if they got hold of it. In her circle, an outward if meaningless conformity to the accepted mores and virtues of the day was a sine qua non: the knife between the ribs was permitted, but only to the accompaniment of the well-bred smile.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’d quite forgotten, of course.’ Her eyes were cold and hard, and I knew I had an enemy. That didn’t worry me, but I found the very triviality of the whole thing irritating beyond measure when there were so many other and vastly more important things to talk about. But less than thirty seconds later we had forgotten all about it, even, I am sure, Mrs Dansby-Gregg herself.

I was just handing Marie LeGarde a cup when someone screamed. It wasn’t really loud, I suppose, but in that confined space it had a peculiarly piercing and startling quality. Marie LeGarde’s arm jerked violently and the scalding contents of the coffee-cup were emptied over my bare hand.

I hardly noticed the pain. It was Margaret Ross, the young stewardess, who had screamed, and she was now kneeling, half in and half out of her sleeping-bag, one rigidly spread-fingered hand stretched out at arm’s length before her, the other clasped over her mouth as she stared down at the figure lying near her on the floor. I pushed her to one side and sank on to my own knees.

In that bitter cold it was impossible to be any way sure, but I felt reasonably certain that the young pilot had been dead for several hours. I knelt there for a long time, just looking down at him, and when I finally rose to my feet I did so like an old man, a defeated old man, and I felt as cold, almost, as the dead man lying there. Everyone was wide awake now, everyone staring at me, the eyes of nearly all of them reflecting the superstitious horror which the presence of sudden and unexpected death brings to those who are unaccustomed to it. It was Johnny Zagero who broke the silence.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he, Dr Mason?’ His low voice sounded a little husky. ‘That head injury—’ His voice trailed off.

‘Cerebral hæmorrhage,’ I said quietly, ‘as far as I can tell.’

I lied to him. There was no shadow of doubt in my mind as to the cause of death. Murder. The young boy had been ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly murdered: lying there unconscious, gravely injured and with his hands strapped helplessly to his sides, he had been smothered as easily, as surely, as one might smother a very little child.

We buried him out on the ice-cap, not fifty yards from the place where he had died. Bringing his stiffened body out of the hatch was a grisly job, but we managed it and laid him on the snow while we sawed out a shallow grave for him in the light of one of our torches. It was impossible to dig it out: that frozen ringing surface turned shovel blades as would a bar of iron: even at eighteen inches, the impacted névé of snow and ice defied the serrated spearpoints of our special snow saws. But it was deep enough and within a few hours the eternal ice-drift would have smoothed its blanket across the grave, and we would never be able to find it again. The Reverend Joseph Smallwood murmured some sort of burial service over the grave but his teeth chattered so violently in the cold and his voice was so low and indistinct and hurried that I could hardly catch a word of it. I thought wryly that heavenly forgiveness for this indecent haste was unlikely to be withheld: by all odds it must have been by far the coldest funeral service that Mr Smallwood had ever conducted.

Back in the cabin, breakfast was a sketchy and silent affair. Even in the steadily rising warmth, the melancholy gloom was an almost palpable blanket under the dripping ceiling. Hardly anybody said anything, hardly anybody ate anything. Margaret Ross ate nothing, and when she finally set down her coffee-cup, the contents had scarcely been touched.

You’re overdoing it, my dear, I thought viciously, you’re carrying the grief-stricken act just a little too far: a little longer, and even the others will start wondering – and they have no suspicions at all, you damned inhuman little murderess.

For I had no suspicions either – only certainty. There was no doubt in my mind at all but that she had smothered the young pilot. She was only slightly built – but then it would have required only slight strength. Lashed to the cot as he had been, he wouldn’t even have been able to drum his heels as he had died. I could feel my flesh crawl at the very thought.

She had killed him, just as she had broken the radio and doped the passengers. He had been killed, obviously, to keep him from talking – about what, I couldn’t even begin to guess, any more than I could guess the reason for the destruction of the radio, except that she clearly did not want the news of the crash broadcast to the outer world. But why in the world destroy the radio in the first place, surely she must have known how essential it was for survival? But then, after all, how was she even to have guessed that: she might well have thought that we had big fast tractors that could have whipped them down to the coast in a matter of a couple of days. For that matter, she might have thought she was a great deal nearer the coast than we really were – it was impossible, surely, that she had genuinely imagined that we were in Iceland. Or was it?

My thoughts were spinning now in an unbreakable circle. I knew I was getting nowhere, couldn’t possibly get anywhere without some fresh information. As it was, I was only confusing myself the more with the passing of every moment. I gave it up then, promising myself that from now on I would watch her every possible minute of the day. I looked at her again, covertly, and she was staring vacantly at one of the glowing embers of the stove. Planning her next move, no doubt, planning it as cleverly as the last: asking me last night about the pilot’s chances of survival, doubtless to decide whether he would have to be killed or could safely be left to die, had been clever enough, but insisting on sleeping next to the man she had meant to kill had been nothing short of brilliant. On that account alone no one would ever suspect her, even if the fact that it had been murder became known. And it wouldn’t: I intended keeping that to myself. Or did she suspect I suspected? Heaven only knew. All I knew was that she must be playing for tremendous stakes. Or that she was mad.

It was just after eleven o’clock. Joss and Jackstraw were in a corner by themselves, stripping down the smashed transmitter, while the rest were grouped in a large semi-circle round the stove. They looked wan and sickly and were sitting very still indeed. They looked unwell because the first greyness of the noon twilight was stealing through our rimed skylights and it did unflattering things to any complexion: and they sat so still because I had just explained to them in detail exactly what their situation was, and they didn’t like it one little bit. Neither did I.

‘Let’s get this quite straight, Dr Mason.’ Corazzini leant forward, his lean brown face intent and serious. He was worried all right, but he wasn’t scared. Corazzini didn’t look as if he would scare easily: I had the idea that he would be a pretty good man to have around. ‘The others left here three weeks ago in a big modern Sno-Cat, and aren’t expected back for another three weeks. You’ve overstayed your welcome on the ice-cap, you say, and things have been cut a trifle too fine – you had already started rationing yourselves to make your food spin out until they returned. With thirteen of us here we have food for less than five days. Therefore we may be a fortnight without food before they return.’ He smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘My arithmetic is correct, Dr Mason?’

‘It is, unfortunately.’

‘How long would the tractor you have take to get to the coast?’

‘There’s no guarantee that it ever would. I told you, it’s falling to pieces. I’ll show you later. Maybe a week – given the right conditions. Any bad weather would stop it in its tracks.’

‘You doctors are all the same,’ Zagero drawled. ‘Always spreadin’ sweet cheerfulness and light. Why don’t we wait for the other machine to get back?’

‘Indeed?’ Senator Brewster said heavily. ‘And how do you propose to live in the meanwhile, Mr Zagero?’

‘People can live for longer than fourteen days without food, Senator,’ Zagero said cheerfully. ‘Think what it would do for that figure of yours. Tush, Senator, you surprise me. Too gloomy by half.’

‘Not in this case,’ I said flatly. ‘The Senator is right. Sure you can live a long time without food in normal conditions. You might even do it here – if you had proper day clothes and night coverings. You haven’t – and how many of you have stopped shivering since you came here? Cold burns up your energy and depletes your reserves at a fantastic pace. Do you want me to list all the Arctic and Antarctic explorers – and Himalayan climbers – who have died within forty-eight hours of their food running out? And don’t kid yourselves about the life-giving warmth of this cabin. The floor temperature is about zero now – and that’s as hot as it’s likely to get.’

‘You said there was a radio on your old tractor,’ Corazzini said abruptly. ‘What range does it have? Couldn’t you possibly reach your friends – or your Uplavnik base – with that?’

I nodded in Joss’s direction. ‘There’s the man to ask.’

‘I heard,’ Joss said without enthusiasm. ‘Do you think I’d be trying to salvage this wreckage, Mr Corazzini, if there was any chance? It’s an eight-watt transmitter with hand-cranked generator and battery receiver, it came out of the ark and was never meant for anything more than walkie-talkie use.’

‘But what is its range?’ Corazzini persisted.

‘Impossible to say.’ Joss shrugged. ‘You know how it is with transmission and reception. One day you can hardly pick up the BBC a hundred miles away, another you can pick up a taxi-cab at twice the distance, if you have the right receiver. All depends on conditions. This one? Hundred miles, maybe – hundred fifty in perfect conditions. In the present conditions, you’d be better with a megaphone. I’ll have a go with it this afternoon, perhaps. Might as well waste my time that way as any other.’ Joss turned away and it was obvious that, as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.

‘Perhaps your friends will move within transmission range?’ Corazzini suggested. ‘After all, you said they’re not much more than a couple of hundred miles away.’

‘And I said they’ll be staying there. They’ve set up their equipment and instruments and they won’t move until they have to. They’re too short of petrol for that.’

‘They can refuel here, of course?’

‘That’s no worry.’ I jerked a thumb towards the tunnel. ‘There’s eight hundred gallons out there.’

‘I see.’ Corazzini looked thoughtful for a moment, then went on. ‘Please don’t think I’m being annoyingly persistent. I just want to eliminate possibilities. I believe you have – or have had – a radio schedule with your friends. Won’t they worry if they fail to hear from you?’

‘Hillcrest – that’s the scientist in charge – never worries about anything. And unfortunately, their own radio, a big long-range job, is giving trouble – they said a couple of days ago that the generator brushes were beginning to give out – and the nearest spares are here. If they can’t raise us, they’ll probably blame themselves. Anyway, they know we’re safe as houses here. Why on earth should they worry?’

‘So what do we do?’ Solly Levin asked querulously. ‘Starve to death or start hikin’?’

‘Succinctly and admirably put,’ Senator Brewster boomed. ‘In a nutshell, one might say. I propose we set up a small committee to investigate the possibilities—’

‘This isn’t Washington, Senator,’ I said mildly. ‘Besides, we already have a committee – Mr London, Mr Nielsen and myself.’

‘Indeed?’ It seemed to be the Senator’s favourite word, and long years of practice had matched it perfectly to the lift of his eyebrows. ‘You will remember, perhaps, that we have rather a personal stake in this also?’

‘I’m unlikely to forget it,’ I said dryly. ‘Look, Senator, if you were adrift in a hurricane and were picked up by a ship, would you presume to advise the captain and his officers of the course they should adopt to survive the hurricane?’

‘That’s not the point.’ Senator Brewster puffed out his cheeks. ‘This is not a ship—’

‘Shut up!’ It was Corazzini who spoke, his voice quiet and hard, and I could suddenly understand why he had reached the top in his own particularly tough and competitive business. ‘Dr Mason is absolutely right. This is their own backyard, and our lives should be left in the hands of experts. I take it you have already reached a decision, Dr Mason?’

‘I reached it last night. Joss – Mr London – stays here to contact the others when they return. He will be left enough food for three weeks. We take the remainder, and we leave tomorrow.’

‘Why not today?’

‘Because the tractor is at present unfit for winter travel, especially travel with ten passengers. It’s still got the canvas hood on it that it had when we hauled stuff up from the coast. We have the prefabricated wooden sides and top that we need to arcticise it, plus the bunks and portable stove, but it will take several hours.’

‘We start on that now?’

‘Soon. But first your luggage. We’ll go out to the plane now, and bring that back.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg said stiffly. ‘I was beginning to think I’d never see my stuff again.’

‘Oh, you will,’ I said. ‘Briefly.’

‘Just what do you mean by that?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘I mean that you’ll all put on as many clothes as you’re able to stagger about in,’ I said. ‘Then you have a small attaché-case for your valuables, if you have any. The rest of the stuff we’ll have to abandon. This is no Cook’s tour. We’ll have no room on the tractor.’

‘But – but I have clothes worth hundreds of pounds,’ she protested angrily. ‘Hundreds? – Thousands would be nearer it. I have a Balenciaga alone that cost over five hundred pounds, not to mention—’

‘How much do you reckon your own life is worth?’ Zagero said shortly. He grinned. ‘Or maybe we should abandon you and save the Balenciaga. Better still, wear it on top of everything – you know, how the well-dressed woman leaves the ice-cap.’

‘Excruciatingly funny.’ She stared at him icily.

‘Frequently fracture myself,’ Zagero agreed. ‘Can I give you a hand with the stuff, Doc?’

‘You stay here, Johnny Zagero!’ Solly Levin jumped up in agitation. ‘One little slip on that ice—’

‘Calm yourself, calm yourself.’ Zagero patted his shoulder. ‘Merely goin’ in a supervisory capacity, Solly. How about it, Doc?’

‘Thanks. You want to come, Mr Corazzini?’ I could see he was already struggling into a parka.

‘I’d be glad to. Can’t sit here all day.’

‘These cuts on your head and hands aren’t sealed yet. They’ll sting like the devil when you get out into this cold.’

‘Got to get used to it, haven’t I? Lead the way.’

The airliner, crouching in the snow like some great wounded bird, was faintly visible in the twilight now, seven or eight hundred yards away to the north-east, port wing-tip facing us, lying at exactly right angles to our line of sight. There was no saying how often we might have to go out there, the quasi daylight would be gone in another hour or so, and it seemed pointless to follow in darkness the zigzag route we had been compelled to make the previous night, so with help from Zagero and Corazzini I staked out a route, with bamboo markers about five yards apart, straight out to the plane. Some of the bamboos I fetched from the tunnel, but most of them were transplanted from the positions where they had been stuck the previous night.

Inside the plane itself it was as cold as the tomb and as dark as the tomb. One side of the plane was already thickly sheeted in drift ice, and all the windows were completely blanked off, made opaque, by rime frost. In the light of a couple of torches we ourselves moved around like spectres, our heads enveloped in the clouds of our frozen breath, clouds that remained hanging almost stationary above our heads. In the silence we could faintly hear the crackling of our breath in the super-chilled air, followed by the curious wheezing noise that men make in very low temperatures when they were trying not to breathe too deeply.

‘God, this is a ghastly place,’ Zagero said. He shivered, whether or not from cold it was impossible to say, and flashed his torch at the dead man sitting in the back seat. ‘Are we – are we going to leave them there, Doc?’

‘Leave them?’ I dumped a couple of attaché-cases on to the pile we were making in the front seat. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I don’t know, I thought – well, we buried the second officer this morning, and—’

‘Bury them? The ice-cap will bury them soon enough. In six months’ time this plane will have drifted over and be vanished for ever. But I agree – let’s get out of here. Give anyone the creeps.’

As I made my way to the front I saw Corazzini, a doleful look on his face, shaking an ebonite and metal portable radio and listening to the rattling that came from inside.

‘Another casualty?’ I inquired.

‘Afraid so.’ He twiddled some dials, without result. ‘Battery and mains model. A goner, Doc. Valves, I expect. Still, I’ll tote it along – cost me two hundred dollars two days ago.’

‘Two hundred?’ I whistled. ‘You should have bought two. Maybe Joss can give you some valves. He’s got dozens of spares.’

‘No good.’ Corazzini shook his head. ‘Latest transistor model – that’s why it was so damn’ expensive.’

‘Take it with you,’ I advised. ‘It’ll only cost you another two hundred to get it repaired in Glasgow. Listen, there’s Jackstraw now.’

We could hear the barking of dogs, and we lost no time in lowering the odds and ends down to Jackstraw who loaded them on the sledge. In the forward hold we found about twenty-five suitcases of various sizes. We had to make two trips to bring all the stuff back, and on the second trip the rising wind was in our faces, already lifting the drift off the ice-cap. The climate on the Greenland plateau is one of the most unstable in the world, and the wind, which had all but stopped for a few hours, had now veered suddenly to the south. I didn’t know what it presaged, but I suspected it wasn’t anything good.

We were all chilled to the bone by the time the luggage had been lowered down into the cabin, and Corazzini looked at me, his eyes sober and speculative. He was shaking with cold, and his nose and one of his cheeks were white with frostbite, and when he pulled off one of his gloves the hand, too, was limp and white and dead.

‘Is this what it’s like to be exposed to this stuff for half an hour, Dr Mason?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘And we’re to be out in this for maybe seven days and seven nights! Good God, man, we’ll never make it! And the women, old Miss LeGarde, and Brewster and Mahler, they’re no chickens either—’ He broke off, wincing – and I was beginning to suspect that it would take a great deal to make this man wince – as the circulation returned under the influence of vigorous rubbing. ‘It’s nothing short of suicide.’

‘It’s a gamble,’ I corrected. ‘Staying here and starving to death is suicide.’

‘You put the alternative so nicely.’ He smiled a smile that never touched the cold and determined eyes. ‘But I guess you’re right at that.’

Lunch that day was a bowl of soup and crackers, poor fare at any time, shockingly insufficient to stay and warm men who would have to work for the next few hours in these bitter sub-zero temperatures above. But there was no help for it: if it would take us a week to reach the coast, and in all optimism I couldn’t count on less, rationing would have to start now.

In a matter of a couple of hours the thermometer reading had risen with astonishing speed – these dramatic temperature variations were commonplace on the ice-cap – and it was beginning to snow when we emerged from the hatch and moved across to where the tractor lay. The rise in temperature flattered only to deceive: the south wind brought with it not only snow but a rapidly climbing humidity, and the air was almost unbearably chill.

We ripped off the covering tarpaulin – it cracked and tore but I was no longer concerned with preserving it – and our guests saw for the first time the vehicle upon which all their lives were to depend. Slowly I played my torch over it – the dark shroud of the arctic night had already fallen across the ice-cap – and I heard the quick indrawn hiss of breath beside me.

‘Drove it out when the museum attendant wasn’t looking, I suppose.’ Corazzini kept his voice carefully expressionless. ‘Or did you just find it here – left over from the last ice-age?’

‘It is a bit old,’ I admitted. ‘Pre-war. But all we can afford. The British Government isn’t quite so lavish with its IGY expenditure as the Russians and your people. Know it? It’s the prototype, the ancestor of the modern arctic tractor.’

‘Never seen it before. What is it?’

‘French. A 10–20 Citroën. Underpowered, narrow-tracked as you can see, and far too short for its weight. Lethal in crevasse country. Plods along fairly well on the frozen ice-cap, but you’d be better with a bicycle when there’s any depth at all of new-fallen snow. But it’s all we have.’

Corazzini said no more. As the managing director of a factory producing some of the finest tractors in the world, I suppose his heart was too full to say any more. But his disappointment made no difference to his drive, his sheer unflagging determination. For the next few hours he worked like a demon. So, too, did Zagero.

Less than five minutes after we had started work we had to stop again to rig up a canvas screen, lashed to aluminium poles brought up from the tunnel, round three sides of the tractor: work had been impossible in that snow and knifelike wind that lanced through even the bulkiest layers of clothing – and most of them were now wearing so many that they could move only with difficulty – as if they were tissue paper. Behind this screen we placed a portable oil stove – the very illusion of warmth was better than nothing – two storm lanterns and the blow-torches without which we could have made no progress at all. Even with this shelter, practically everyone had to go below from time to time to rub and pound life back into his freezing body: only Jackstraw and I, in our caribou furs, could stay up almost indefinitely. Joss was below all the afternoon: after spending a couple of hours trying to raise our field party on the tractor’s emergency radio he gave up and went doggedly back to work on the RCA.

Our first job, the removal of the hoped canvas hood, gave us some measure of the difficulty of the task that lay before us. The hood was secured by only seven bolts and nuts, but these had been in position for over four months now, were frozen solid and took over an hour to remove: each set had to be thawed out separately by blow-torch before the heavy wrenches could get the nuts to turn.

Then came the assembly of the wooden body. This was in fifteen prefabricated pieces, three each for the floor, sides, roof and front – the back was only a canvas screen. Each set of three pieces had to be brought out singly through the narrow hatchway before assembly, and it was the devil’s own job, in that numbing cold and flickering semi-darkness, to locate and line up the bolt-holes in the wood with the matching holes in the connecting iron cross-pieces. It took us well over an hour to assemble and fit the floor section alone, and it was beginning to look as if we would be here until midnight when Corazzini had the idea – and a brilliant one it seemed at the time – of assembling the various sections in the comparative warmth and brightness of the cabin, sliding the complicated piece out vertically into the food and fuel tunnel, sawing a long narrow slit through the snow roof, which was no more than a foot thick in the middle, and hauling the sections up from below.

After this we made rapid progress. By five o’clock the entire body shell was completed and with the end in sight less than a couple of hours away, everyone worked more furiously than ever. Most of them were unskilled, ham-handed and completely unused to any physical work at all, far less work of this cruel, exacting nature, but my opinion of them was rising all the time. Corazzini and Zagero especially, were tireless, and Theodore Mahler, the silent little Jew whose entire conversational range so far had been limited to ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’, was indefatigable, completely selfless and uncomplaining, driving his slight body to lengths of which I would never have believed it capable. Even the Senator, the Rev Smallwood and Solly Levin did what they could, as best they could, trying their best to hide their misery and their pain. By this time everyone, even Jackstraw and myself, was shaking almost uncontrollably with the cold so that our hands and elbows rat-tat-tatted like machine-guns against the wooden sides of the tractor: and our hands themselves, through constant contact with metal were in a shocking state, puffed and bleeding and blistered, the mittens continuously filled with lumps and slivers of ice that never melted.

We had just installed the four collapsible bunks and were fitting the stove-pipe through its circular hole in the roof when someone called me. I jumped down and all but knocked over Marie LeGarde.

‘You shouldn’t be out here,’ I scolded. ‘It’s far too cold for you, Miss LeGarde.’

‘Don’t be silly, Peter.’ I could never bring myself to call her ‘Marie’, though she had asked me to several times. ‘I have to get used to it, don’t I? Would you come below for a moment or two, please?’

‘Why? I’m busy.’

‘But not indispensable,’ she retorted. ‘I want you to have a look at Margaret.’

‘Margaret – oh, the stewardess. What does she want?’

‘Nothing. It’s I who want it. Why are you so hostile towards her?’ she asked curiously. ‘It’s not like you – at least, I don’t think it is. She’s a fine girl.’

‘What does the fine girl want?’

‘What in the world’s got into you? Why – oh, forget it. I’m not going to fight with you. Her back hurts – she’s in considerable pain. Come and see it, please.’

‘I offered to see it last night. If she wants me now why doesn’t she come and ask me?’

‘Because she’s scared of you, that’s why,’ she said angrily. She stamped a foot in the frozen snow. ‘Will you go or not?’

I went. Below, I stripped off my gloves, emptied the ice out of them and washed my blistered, bleeding hands in disinfectant. I saw Marie LeGarde’s eyes widen at the sight of my hands, but she said nothing: maybe she knew I wasn’t in the mood for condolences.

I rigged up a screen in the corner of the room remote from the table where the women had been gathering and dividing out the remaining food supplies, and had a look at Margaret Ross’s back. It was a mess, all right, a great ugly blue and purpling bruise from the spine to the left shoulder: in the centre, just below the shoulder blade, was a deep jagged cut, which looked as if it had been caused by a heavy blow from some triangular piece of sharp metal. Whatever had caused it had passed clean through her tunic and blouse.

‘Why didn’t you show me this yesterday?’ I asked coldly.

‘I – I didn’t want to bother you,’ she faltered.

Didn’t want to bother me, I thought grimly. Didn’t want to give yourself away, you mean. In my mind’s eye I had a picture of the pantry where we had found her, and I was almost certain now that I could get the proof that I needed. Almost, but not quite. I’d have to go to check.

‘Is it very bad?’ She twisted round, and I could see there were tears in the brown eyes from the pain of the disinfectant I was rubbing on none too gently.

‘Bad enough,’ I said shortly. ‘How did you get this?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said helplessly. ‘I just don’t know, Dr Mason.’

‘Perhaps we can find out.’

‘Find out? Why? What does it matter?’ She shook her head wearily. ‘I don’t understand, I really don’t. What have I done, Dr Mason?’

It was magnificent, I had to admit. I could have hit her, but it was magnificent.

‘Nothing, Miss Ross. Just nothing at all.’ By the time I had pulled on my parka, gloves, goggles and mask she was fully dressed, staring at me as I climbed up the steps and out through the hatch.

The snow was falling quite heavily now, gusting in swirling ghostly flurries through the pale beam of my torch: it seemed to vanish as it hit the ground, freezing as it touched, or scudding smoke-like over the frozen surface with a thin rustling sound. But the wind was at my back, the bamboo markers stretched out in a dead straight line ahead, never less than two of them in the beam of my torch, and I had reached the crashed plane in five or six minutes.

I jumped for the windscreen, hooked my fingers over the sill, hauled myself up with some difficulty and wriggled my way into the control cabin. A moment later I was in the stewardess’s pantry, flashing my torch around.

On the after bulkhead was a big refrigerator, with a small hinged table in front of it, and at the far end, under the window, a hinged box covered over what might have been a heating unit or sink or both. I didn’t bother investigating, I wasn’t interested. What I was interested in was the for’ard bulkhead, and I examined it carefully. It was given up entirely to the small closed doors of little metal lockers let in flush to the wall – food containers, probably – and there wasn’t a single metal projection in the entire wall, nothing that could possibly account for the wound in the stewardess’s back. And if she had been here at the moment of impact, that was the wall she must have been flung against. The inference was inescapable – she must have been elsewhere at the time of the crash. I remembered now, with chagrin, that I hadn’t even bothered to see whether or not she was conscious when we’d first found her lying on the floor.

Across the passage in the radio compartment I found what I was looking for almost immediately – I’d a pretty good idea where to look. The thin sheet metal at the top left-hand corner of the radio cabinet was bent almost half an inch out of true: and it didn’t require any microscope to locate or forensic expert to guess at the significance of the small dark stain and the fibres of navy blue cloth clinging to the corner of the smashed set. I looked inside the set itself, and now that I had time to spare it more than a fleeting glance it was abundantly clear to me that the wrenching away of the face-plate didn’t even begin to account for the damage that had been done to the set: it had been systematically and thoroughly wrecked.

If ever there was a time when my thoughts should have been racing it was then, but the plain truth is that they weren’t. It was abominably cold inside the chilled metal of that dead plane, and my mind was sluggish, but even so I knew that this time I couldn’t be wrong about what had happened. I could see now why the second officer had sent out no distress messages. I could see now why he had almost certainly been sending out his regular ‘on route – on time’ checks to base. Poor devil, he hadn’t had much option – not with the stewardess sitting there with a gun on him. It must have been a gun. It was no consolation at all that the crash had caught her unprepared.

A gun! Gradually, ever so gradually, in infuriating slow-motion process, thoughts were beginning to click into place in my numbed mind. Whoever had landed that plane, landed it so skilfully into the blinding maelstrom of last night’s blizzard, it hadn’t been a dead man. I straightened, walked forward into the control cabin and shone my torch on the dead captain of the plane. As I’d noticed when I’d first seen him, he appeared to be completely unmarked, and I don’t know whether it was some unconscious process of logical reasoning or some strange instinct that made me right away lift up the crackling ice-stiffened tunic jacket enough to see the black powder-ringed bullet hole in the middle of the spine. I had been expecting it, I had been uncannily certain that I would find such a hole, and find it just there: but my mouth was suddenly dry, dry as if I had drunk nothing for days, and my heart was thudding heavily in my chest.

I lowered the jacket, pulled it down into position, turned away and walked slowly towards the rear of the plane. The man the stewardess had called Colonel Harrison was still sitting as I had left him, propped up stiffly in a corner, as stiffly as he would remain there for heaven only knew how many frozen centuries to come.

The jacket was fastened by a central button. I undid it, saw nothing except a curious thin leather strap running across the chest, undid a shirt button, another, and there it was, the same deadly little hole, the same powder-ringed evidence of point-blank firing staining the whiteness of the singlet. But in this case the powder marks were concentrated on the upper part of the ring, showing that the pistol had been directed in a slightly downward angle. On a hunch, but still like a man in a dream, I eased him forward, and there, less like a bullet hole in the jacket than an inconsequential rip one might easily overlook, was the point of exit, matched by an equally tiny tear in the padding of the upholstered seat behind. At the time, that carried no special significance for me. Heaven knows that I was in no mental frame of mind at the moment, anyway, to figure anything out. I was like an automaton, the movements of which were controlled by something outside me. I felt nothing at the time, not even horror at the hideous thought that the man’s neck might well have been cold-bloodedly broken after death to conceal its true cause.

The leather strap across the man’s chest led to a felt-covered holster under the arm. I took out the little dark snub-nosed automatic, pressed the release switch and shook the magazine out from the base of the grip. It was an eight shot clip, full. I replaced it and shoved the gun into the inside pocket of my parka.

There were two inside breast pockets in the jacket. The left-hand one held another clip of ammunition, in a thin leather case. This, too, I pocketed. The right-hand pocket held only passport and wallet. The picture on the passport matched the face, and it was made out in the name of Lieut-Colonel Robert Harrison. The wallet contained little of interest – a couple of letters with an Oxford postmark, obviously from his wife, British and American currency notes and a long cutting that had been torn from the top half of a page of the New York Herald Tribune, with a mid-September date-mark, just over two months previously.

For a brief moment I studied this in the light of my torch. There was a small, indistinct picture of a railway smash of some kind, showing carriages on a bridge that ended abruptly over a stretch of water, with boats beneath, and I realised that it was some kind of follow-up story on the shocking train disaster of about that time when a loaded commuters’ train at Elizabeth, New Jersey, had plunged out over an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay. I was in no mood for reading it then, but I had the obscure, unreasonable idea that it might be in some way important.

I folded it carefully, lifted up my parka and thrust the paper into my inside pocket, along with the gun and the spare ammo clip. It was just at that moment that I heard the sharp metallic sound coming from the front of the dark and deserted plane.