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 17

Jackstraw, Corazzini and I took turns at driving the Citroën all through that evening and the following night. The engine was beginning to run rough, the exhaust was developing a peculiar note and it was becoming increasingly difficult to engage second gear. But I couldn’t stop, I daren’t stop. Speed was life now.

Mahler had gone into collapse shortly after nine o’clock that evening, and from the collapse had gradually moved into the true diabetic coma. I had done all I could, all anyone could, but heaven only knew it was little enough. He needed bed, heat, fluids, stimulants, sugar by mouth or injection. Both suitable stimulants and the heat were completely lacking, the lurching, narrow, hard wooden bunk was poor substitute for any bed, despite his great thirst he had found it increasingly difficult to keep down the melted snow water, and I had no means of giving an intravenous injection. For the others in the cabin it was distressing to watch him, distressing to listen to the dyspnoea – the harsh laboured breathing of coma. Unless we could get the insulin in time, I knew no power on earth could prevent death from supervening in from one to three days – in these unfavourable conditions, a day would be much more likely.

Marie LeGarde, too, was weakening with dangerous speed. It was with increasing difficulty that she could force down even the smallest mouthfuls of food, and spent most of her time in restless troubled sleep. Having seen her on the stage and marvelled at her magnificent vitality, it now seemed strange to me that she should go under so easily. But her vitality had really been a manifestation of a nervous energy: she had little of the physical resources necessary to cope with a situation like this, and I had frequently to remind myself that she was an elderly woman. Not that any such reminder was needed when one saw her face: it was haggard and lined and old.

But worried though I was about my patients, Jackstraw was even more deeply concerned with the weather. The temperature had been steadily rising for many hours now, the moaning ululation of the ice-cap wind, which had been absent for over two days, was increasing in intensity with every hour that passed, and the skies above were dark and heavy with black drifting clouds of snow. And when, just after midnight, the wind-speed passed fifteen miles an hour, the wind began to pick up the drift off the ice-cap.

I knew what Jackstraw was afraid of, though I myself had never experienced it. I had heard of the katabatic winds of Greenland, the equivalent of the feared Alaskan williwaws. When great masses of air in the heart of the plateau were cooled, as they had been in the past forty-eight hours, by extremely low temperatures, they were set in motion by a gradient wind and cascaded – there was no other word for it – downwards from the edge of the plateau through suitable drainage channels. Set in motion through their own sheer weight of cold air, these gravity or drainage winds, slowly warmed by the friction and compression of their descent, could reach a hurricane force of destructive violence in which nothing could live.

And all the signs, all the conditions for a gravity storm were there. The recent extreme cold, the rising wind, the rising temperature, the outward flowing direction of the wind, the dark star-obscuring clouds scudding by overhead – there could be no mistaking it, Jackstraw declared. I had never known him to be wrong about Greenland weather, I didn’t believe him to be wrong now, and when Jackstraw became nervous it was time for even the most optimistic to start worrying. And I was worried all right.

We drove the tractor to its limit, and on the slight downward slope – we had changed direction by this time and were heading due south-west for Uplavnik – we were making very good time indeed. But by four o’clock in the morning, when we were, I reckoned, not more than sixty miles from Uplavnik, we ran into the sastrugi and were forced to slow down.

The sastrugi, regular undulations in the frozen snow, were the devil on tractors, especially elderly machines like the Citroën. Caused by raking winds, symmetrical as the waves in an eighteenth-century sailing print, hard on the crest and soft in the trough, they made progress possible only by slowing down to a disheartening crawl. Even so the Citroën and the sledges behind rolled and pitched like ships in a heavy seaway, the headlights one moment reaching up into the lowering darkness of the sky, the next dipping to illuminate the barred white and shadowed black of the sastrugi immediately ahead. Sometimes it gave way to deceptively clear patches – deceptively, for snow had obviously fallen here recently or been carried down from the plateau, and we were reduced to low gear to make any headway at all on it.

Shortly before eight o’clock in the morning Jackstraw brought the Citroën to a halt, and as the roar of the big engine died the deep moaning of the wind, a wind carrying with it a rising wall of ice and snow, swept in to take its place. Jackstraw had drawn up broadside on to the wind and the slope of the hill and I jumped down to rig up a canvas shelter extending out from the cabin: it was nothing elaborate, just a triangular sheet of proofed canvas attached to the top of the cabin and the cleat of a caterpillar track on its vertical side, with its apex stretched out to a spike hammered into the surface of the ice-cap: there was no room for us all within the cabin at mealtimes, I wanted some protection when we kept our 8 a.m. radio schedule with Hillcrest, and, in particular, it was time that Zagero and Levin had some relief from their sufferings. They had ridden all night on the tractor sled, under the guard of either Jackstraw or myself, and though the temperature was now only a few degrees below zero and though they were sheltering under a mound of clothing, nevertheless they must have spent a miserable night.

Breakfast, such as it was, was waiting and ready to be eaten as soon as the tractor had stopped, but I had little appetite for it: it seemed to me I had forgotten what sleep was like, I had had none for almost three days, I was living now in a permanent state of physical and mental exhaustion and it was becoming almost impossible to concentrate, to think of the hundred and one things that had to be thought of all the time. More than once I caught myself nodding and dozing off over my cup of coffee, and it was only with a conscious effort of will that I forced myself to my feet to keep the radio schedule. I was going to call both Hillcrest and our base – Hillcrest had given me the frequency the previous evening. I decided to call Hillcrest first.

We got through without any difficulty, although Hillcrest said they could hear me only very faintly. I suspected some fault on the generator side, for our receiver was powered by a hundred-hour battery and we could hear Hillcrest’s voice clearly.

All the men except Mahler were gathered round me during the transmission – they seemed to find a peculiar reassurance in another voice – however distant and disembodied that voice – and even Zagero and Levin were only seven or eight feet away, sitting in front of the tractor sled with their feet still bound. I was on a canvas chair, with my back to the canvas screen, and Corazzini and Brewster were sitting on the tailboard, the canvas curtains drawn behind them to keep the heat in the cabin. The Rev Smallwood was behind me, turning the generator handle, and Jackstraw a few feet away, watchful as ever, the cocked rifle ready in his hand.

‘Receiving you loud and clear,’ I said to Hillcrest. My hands were cupped round the microphone and I was holding it close to my mouth to cut out as much as possible of the background noise of the wind. ‘What progress?’ I threw the receiver switch into the antenna, and Hillcrest’s voice came again.

‘Great!’ He sounded enthusiastic, excited. ‘My congratulations to your learned friend. Works like a charm and we’re going like a bomb. We are approaching the Vindeby Nunataks and expect to be through by this afternoon.’

This was wonderful news. With any luck he would be up with us late in the evening of that day, and we would have the moral support of his company and the even more important technical resources of everything his big modern Sno-Cat could offer. And Jackstraw and I could get some desperately needed sleep … I became aware that Hillcrest was continuing, his voice still charged with the same suppressed excitement.

‘The Admiralty or the Government or whoever it is have loosened up at last! Brother, you’re sitting on dynamite and you don’t know it. You’ve got it right there with you and you could exchange it tomorrow for a million pounds in the right place. No wonder the Government were so cagey, no wonder they knew something fishy was going on and mounted the biggest search ever. The carrier Triton’s going to collect it personally—’

I threw the receiving switch.

‘For heaven’s sake!’ I shouted in exasperation – an exasperation, I was dimly aware, shared by all the others who were leaning forward to hear Hillcrest’s voice. ‘What are you talking about? What was the plane carrying? Over.’

‘Sorry. It’s a guided-missile mechanism of such advanced design and so top-secret that its details, I gather, are known only to a handful of scientists in all the United States. It’s the only one of its kind, and was being sent to Britain for study under the recent agreement to share knowledge on atomic weapons and guided missiles.’ Hillcrest’s voice was calm now, measured and sober. There was a pause, then he went on, slowly, impressively. ‘I understand the governments concerned are prepared to go to any lengths – any lengths – to secure the recovery of this mechanism and prevent its falling into wrong hands.’

There was another, longer pause: Hillcrest, clearly, was giving me an opportunity to say something, but I just didn’t know what to say. The magnitude of the entire thing took my breath away, temporarily inhibited all thought and speech … Hillcrest’s voice was coming through again:

‘To help you identify this mechanism, Dr Mason. It’s camouflaged, made up to look like an ebonite and metal portable radio of fairly large size, with a braided leather carrying strap. Find that portable, Dr Mason, and you’ll—’

I never heard the end of that sentence. I was still sitting there, dazedly wondering why the words ‘portable radio’ should have triggered off such a clangorous bell in my mind – I can only plead my extreme physical and mental exhaustion – when Zagero catapulted himself off his seat on the sled, knocking Jackstraw staggering, took one tremendous hop with his bound feet just opposite where I was sitting and hurled himself bodily towards Corazzini who, his face twisted in a vicious and unrecognisable mask, had pushed himself off the tractor tailboard with one hand and with the other was fumbling desperately to bring something out from under his coat. He saw he couldn’t make it in time, threw himself to one side, but Zagero, bound though he was, was like a cat on his feet and I knew that instant, that instant that was too late, that Zagero was indeed the world-class boxer that he claimed to be. If the astonishing speed of his reflexes were not proof enough, that blurring right arm of his carried with it lethal conviction. Corazzini was a very big man, six feet two and at least two hundred pounds and he was swathed in many layers of heavy clothing, but when that fist caught him with such frightening power just under the heart he staggered back against the tailboard and slid slowly to the ground, unseeing eyes turned up to the first driving flakes of the newly fallen snow. I had never seen a blow delivered with such power: nor do I ever want to see it again.

For perhaps five seconds no one moved, no one spoke, men were held in thrall. The soughing, wailing moan of the wind on the ice-cap sounded weirdly, unnaturally loud. I was the first to break the silence. I was still sitting on my canvas stool.

‘Corazzini!’ I said. ‘Corazzini!’ My voice was barely more than a whisper, but Zagero heard me.

‘Sure it’s Corazzini,’ he said levelly. ‘It always was.’ He stooped, thrust his hand under the unconscious man’s coat and brought out his gun. ‘You’d better keep this, Doc. Not only do I not trust our little playmate here with toys like these, but the state prosecutor or district attorney or whatever you call the guy in England will find that the riflin’ on this barrel matches the riflin’ marks on some very interestin’ bullets.’

He tossed the gun across, and automatically I caught it. It was a pistol, not an automatic, and it had a strange-looking cylinder screwed on to the front of the barrel. A silencer, I supposed; I had never seen one before. Nor had I ever seen that type of gun before. I didn’t like the look of it at all, and I guessed it might be wise to have a gun in my hand when Corazzini came round. Jackstraw, I could see, already had his rifle lined up on the unconscious man. I placed the pistol on the ground beside me and pulled out the Beretta.

‘You were ready for him.’ I was still trying to put things in order in my own mind. ‘You were waiting for the break. How—’

‘Do I have to draw a diagram, Doc?’ There was no insolence in his voice, only weariness. ‘I knew it wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t Solly. So it had to be Corazzini.’

‘Yes, I see. It had to be Corazzini.’ The words were automatic, meaningless. My thoughts were in a state of utter confusion, as confused, no doubt, as those of Corazzini who was now pushing himself groggily into a sitting position, but for the past fifteen seconds another bell had been ringing far back in my mind, not so loud as the first but even more desperately insistent, and all at once I had it and began to rise to my feet. ‘But there were two of them, two of them! Corazzini had an accomplice—’ That was as far as I got when some metal object smashed across my wrist with brutal force, sending my Beretta flying, and something small and hard ground viciously into the back of my neck.

‘Don’t move, Dr Mason.’ The voice, flat, controlled but alive with a vibrant power that I had never heard before, was almost unrecognisable as the Rev Joseph Smallwood’s. ‘Nobody is to move. Nielsen, drop that rifle – now! Just one suspicious move and Dr Mason gets his head blown off.’

I stood stock-still. The man behind that voice meant every word he said. I didn’t need any convincing of that. The cold certainty in his voice only reinforced the knowledge I already had that the sanctity of human life was a factor which could never enter into this man’s considerations.

‘All right, Corazzini?’ Smallwood was speaking again, his voice empty of all concern for and interest in his accomplice: his only anxiety, if one could by any stretch of imagination call it that, lay in his desire for Corazzini’s effectively continued co-operation.

‘All right,’ Corazzini said softly. He was standing now and that both mind and reactions were back to normal was evident from the dexterity with which he caught the gun Smallwood threw back to him. ‘Never thought any man could move so fast with his feet tied. But he won’t catch me again. Everybody out, eh?’

‘Everybody out,’ Smallwood nodded. No question, he was the leader of the two, ridiculously improbable though that would have seemed only two minutes ago: but it didn’t seem improbable any longer, it seemed inevitable.

‘Jump down! All of you,’ Corazzini ordered. Gun in one hand, he held back a flap of canvas screen with the other. ‘Hurry it up.’

‘Mahler can’t jump down,’ I protested. ‘He can’t move – he’s in coma. He—’

‘Shut up!’ Corazzini interrupted. ‘All right, Zagero, inside and get him out.’

‘You can’t move him!’ I shouted furiously. ‘You’ll kill him if—’ My last word was choked off in a grunt of pain as Smallwood’s gun barrel caught me viciously across the side of the head. I fell to my hands and knees in the snow and remained there for several seconds, head down and shaking it from side to side as I tried to overcome the dizziness and the pain.

‘Corazzini said “shut up”. You must learn to listen.’ Smallwood’s voice was chillingly devoid of all emphasis and inflection. He stood waiting quietly until the last of the passengers had descended or been carried from the tractor cabin, then waved us all into a straight line facing towards Corazzini and himself. Both of them had their backs to the canvas screen, while we were placed just far enough clear of the shelter to be blinded by the increasingly heavy snowfall that swirled down into our eyes, but not so far off as not to be clearly seen by them. Whatever these two did, I was beginning to discover, betrayed that economy of movement and unquestioning sureness of the complete professionals who had long ago worked out the answers to and counters against any of a vast range and permutation of situations they were ever likely to encounter.

Smallwood beckoned me.

‘You haven’t finished your radio call, Dr Mason. Finish it. Your friend Hillcrest must be wondering at the delay.’ The gun in his hand came forward a fraction of an inch, just enough for the movement to be perceptible. ‘For your own sake, do nothing to arouse his suspicions. Don’t be clever. Keep it brief.’

I kept it brief. I excused the interruption of transmission on the grounds that Mahler had taken a sudden turn for the worse – as indeed, I thought bitterly, he had – said that I’d guard the missile mechanism with my life and apologised for cutting the call short, but said it was essential to get Mahler to Uplavnik with all speed.

‘Finish it off,’ Smallwood said softly in my ear. I nodded.

‘That’s the lot then, Captain Hillcrest. Will make the noon schedule. This is Mayday signing off. Mayday, Mayday.’

I switched off, and turned indifferently away. I had taken only one step when Smallwood caught my shoulder and whirled me round. For such an apparently slight man, he was phenomenally strong. I gasped as his pistol barrel dug into my stomach.

‘“Mayday”, Dr Mason?’ he asked silkily. ‘What is “Mayday”?’

‘Our call-sign, of course,’ I said irritably.

‘Your call-sign is GFK.’

‘Our call-up is GFK. Our signing-off is “Mayday”.’

‘You’re lying.’ I wondered how I could ever have thought this face meek and nervous and colourless. The mouth was a thin hard line, the upper eyelids bar-straight and hooded above the unwinking eyes. Flat marbled eyes of a faded light-blue. A killer’s eyes. ‘You’re lying,’ he repeated.

‘I’m not lying,’ I said angrily.

‘Count five and die.’ His eyes never left mine, the pressure of the gun increased. ‘One … two … three—’

‘I’ll tell you what it is!’ The cry came from Margaret Ross. ‘“Mayday” is the international air distress signal, the SOS … I had to tell him, Dr Mason, I had to!’ Her voice was a shaking sob. ‘He was going to kill you.’

‘I was indeed,’ Smallwood agreed. If he felt either anger or apprehension, no trace of either appeared in the calm conversational voice. ‘I should do it now – you’ve lost us four hours’ head start. But courage happens to be one of the few virtues I admire … You are an extremely brave man, Dr Mason. Your courage is a fair match for your – ah – lack of perspicacity, shall we say.’

‘You’ll never get off the ice-cap, Smallwood,’ I said steadily. ‘Scores of ships and planes are searching for you, thousands of men. They’ll get you and they’ll hang you for these five dead men.’

‘We shall see.’ He gave a wintry smile, and now that he had removed his rimless glasses I could see that the man’s smile left his eyes untouched, left them flat and empty and lifeless, like the stained glass in a church and no sun behind it. ‘All right, Corazzini, the box. Dr Mason, bring one of the maps from the driver’s seat.’

‘In a moment. Perhaps you would care to explain—’

‘Explanations are for children.’ The voice was level, curt, devoid of all inflection. ‘I’m in a hurry, Dr Mason. Bring the map.’

I brought it and when I returned Corazzini was sitting on the front of the tractor sled with a case before him. But it wasn’t the leather-covered portable radio: it was Smallwood’s robe case.

Corazzini snapped open the catches, pulled out Bible, robes and divinity hood, tossed them to one side then carefully brought out a metal box which looked exactly like a tape-recorder: indeed, when he shone his torch on it I could clearly see the word ‘Grundig’. But it soon became apparent that it was like no tape-recorder that I had ever seen.

The twin spools he ripped off the top of the machine and sent spinning away into the darkness and the snow, the tape unwinding in a long convoluted streamer. By this time I would have taken long odds that anyone suspicious enough to investigate would have found that tape perfectly genuine: probably, I thought bitterly, Bach’s organ music, in keeping with Smallwood’s late ecclesiastical nature.

Still in silence, we watched Corazzini undo and fling away the false top of the recorder, but not before I had time to notice the padded spring clips on its underside – the perfect hiding place for a couple of automatics: revealed now were controls and calibrated dials that bore no resemblance to those of a tape-recorder. Corazzini straightened and erected a hinged telescopic aerial, clamped a set of headphones to his ears, made two switches and started to turn a dial, at the same time watching a green magic eye similar to those found in tape-recorders and many modern radios. Faintly, but unmistakably, I could hear a steady whine coming from the earphones, a whine which altered in pitch and intensity as Corazzini turned the dial. When it reached its maximum strength, he turned his attention to a built-in alcohol compass about three inches in diameter. A few moments later he doffed the earphones and turned round, apparently satisfied.

‘Very strong, very clear,’ he announced to Smallwood. ‘But there’s too heavy a deviation factor from all the metal in the tractor and sledge. Back in two minutes. Your torch, Dr Mason.’

He walked away for about fifty yards, taking the machine with him: it was with intense chagrin that I realised that it was perfectly in keeping with all that had gone before that Corazzini had probably forgotten more about navigation than I was ever likely to know. He returned soon, consulted a small chart – correcting for variation, no doubt – then grinned at Smallwood.

‘It’s them, all right. Perfect signal. Bearing 268.’

‘Good.’ If Smallwood felt relieved or gratified at the news, no shadow of his feeling touched the thin immobile face. Their quiet certainty, their forethought, their foolproof organisation was dismaying, frightening. Now that I could see what manner of men they were it was unthinkable that they should have set themselves down in a vast featureless country such as this without some means of orientating themselves: what we had just seen in operation could only be a battery operated radio direction finder, and even to me, inexperienced though I was in such matters, it was obvious that Corazzini must have been taking a bearing on some continuous directional line-up signals transmitted by a vessel, or vessels, off-shore: trawlers, probably, or some other inconspicuous type of fishing vessel … I would have been less than human had I not wanted to shake this absolute confidence.

‘You’ve miscalculated the hornet’s nest you’ve stirred up. The Davis Strait, the coast of Greenland is alive with ships and planes. The scout planes of the carrier Triton will pick up every boat that’s larger than a skiff. The trawlers will never get away with it: they won’t get five miles.’

‘They don’t have to.’ Implicit in Corazzini’s words was confirmation of the accuracy of my guess about trawlers. ‘There are such things as submarines. In fact there is one, not far from here.’

‘You still won’t—’

‘Be quiet,’ Smallwood said coldly. He turned to Corazzini. ‘Two hundred and sixty-eight, eh – due west more or less. Distance?’

Corazzini shrugged, said nothing: Smallwood beckoned to me.

‘We’ll soon find it. That map, Dr Mason – indicate our position, accurately.’

‘You can go to hell,’ I said briefly.

‘I expected nothing else. However, I’m not blind and your clumsy attempts at concealment have done little to hide the growing attachment between yourself and the young lady here.’ I glanced quickly at Margaret, saw the faint colour beginning to stain the pale cheek and looked as quickly away. ‘I am prepared to shoot Miss Ross.’

I never doubted him. I knew he’d do it in an instant. I gave him our position, he asked for another map, asked Jackstraw to mark our position on the second, and compared the two.

‘They coincide,’ he nodded. ‘Fortunately for you.’ He studied the map briefly, then looked at Corazzini. ‘The Kangalak fjord, undoubtedly, at the foot of the Kangalak glacier. Approximately—’

‘The Kangalak fjord,’ I interrupted. My voice was bitter. ‘Why the hell didn’t you land there in the first place and save us all this?’

‘The plane captain deserved to die,’ Smallwood said obliquely. His smile was wintry. ‘I had instructed him to put down on the coast just north of the fjord where our – ah – friends had reconnoitred a section of the ice-cap, three miles long and absolutely flat, that is the equal of the finest runway in Europe or America, and it wasn’t until I saw the altimeter reading just before the crash that I realised he had deceived me.’ He made an impatient gesture and turned to Corazzini. ‘We waste time. Approximately sixty miles, you would say?’

Corazzini examined the map. ‘Yes, about that.’

‘So, come then, on our way.’

‘Leaving us here to starve and die of cold, I suppose?’ I said bitterly.

‘What becomes of you no longer concerns me,’ Smallwood said indifferently. Already, in a matter of minutes, it had become almost impossible to think of him, to remember him as the meek retiring minister we had known. ‘It is possible, however, that you might be foolish enough to take advantage of the cover of snow and darkness to run after us, waylay and try to overcome us. You might even succeed, even though unarmed. We must immobilise you, temporarily.’

‘Or permanently,’ Zagero said softly.

‘Only fools kill wantonly and unnecessarily. Fortunately – for you – it is not necessary for my plans that you die. Corazzini, bring some rope from the sled. There’s plenty of cord there. Tie their feet only. With their numbed hands it will take them an hour to undo their bonds: we will be well on our way by then.’ He moved his gun gently from side to side. ‘Sit in the snow. All of you.’

There was nothing for it but to do as we were told. We sat down and watched Corazzini bring a hank of cord from the sled. He looked at Smallwood, and Smallwood nodded at me.

‘Dr Mason first.’

Corazzini gave his gun to Smallwood – they missed nothing, that pair, not even the remote possibility that one of us might try to snatch Corazzini’s gun – and advanced on me. He knelt and had taken a couple of turns round my ankles when the truth struck me with the suddenness, the shocking impact of a physical blow. I sent Corazzini staggering with a violent shove and leapt to my feet.

‘No!’ My voice was hoarse, savage. ‘By God, you’re not going to tie me up, Smallwood!’

‘Sit down, Mason!’ His voice was hard, whip-like, and the light from the tractor cabin was enough for me to see the rock-like pistol barrel centred between my eyes. I ignored it completely.

‘Jackstraw!’ I shouted. ‘Zagero, Levin, Brewster! On your feet if you want to live. He’s only got one gun. If he starts firing at any of us, the rest go for him and get him – he can’t possibly get us all. Margaret, Helene, Mrs Dansby-Gregg – first shot that’s fired, run off into the darkness – and stay there!’

‘Have you gone crackers, Doc?’ The words came from an astonished Zagero, but for all that something namelessly urgent and compelling in my voice had got him to his feet, and he was bent forward, crouched like a great cat, ready to launch himself at Smallwood. ‘Want to get us all killed?’

‘That’s just what I don’t want.’ I could feel my spine, the back of my neck cold with a cold that was not of the Arctic, and my legs were trembling. ‘Going to tie us up and leave us here? Is he hell! Why do you think he told us of the trawler, its position, the submarine and all the rest of it? I’ll tell you why – because he knew it was safe, because he’d made up his mind that none of us would ever live to tell of these things.’ I was rattling the words out with machine-gun rapidity, desperate with the need to convince the others of what I was saying before it was too late: and my eyes never left the gun in Smallwood’s hand.

‘But—’

‘No “buts”,’ I interrupted harshly. ‘Smallwood knows that Hillcrest will be coming through here this afternoon. If we’re still here – and alive – first thing we’d tell him would be Smallwood’s course, speed, approximate position and destination. Within an hour the Kangalak glacier would be sealed, within an hour bombers from the Triton would have blasted him off the face of the glacier. Tie us up? Sure – and then he and Corazzini would shoot us at their leisure while we flopped around like birds with broken wings.’

Conviction was immediate and complete. I couldn’t see the faces of the others, but the fractional lowering of Smallwood’s gun was enough to tell me.

‘I underestimated you, Dr Mason,’ he admitted softly. His voice was devoid of all trace of anger. ‘But you almost died there.’

‘What’s five minutes more or less?’ I asked, and Smallwood nodded absently. He was already working out an alternative solution.

‘You – you inhuman monster!’ Senator Brewster’s voice was shaking with fear or anger or both. ‘You were going to tie us up and butcher us like – like—’ Words failed him for a moment, then he whispered: ‘You must be mad, Smallwood, stark raving mad.’

‘He’s not in the slightest,’ Zagero said quietly. ‘Not mad. Just bad. But it’s kind of hard to tell the difference at times. Figured out our next jolly little scheme, Smallwood?’

‘Yes. As Dr Mason says, we can’t possibly dispose of all of you inside a couple of seconds, which is all the time it would take for one – probably more – of you to reach the cover of the snow and darkness.’ He nodded towards the tractor sled, lifted his high collar against the snow and biting wind. ‘I think you had better ride a little way with us.’

And ride with them we did for the thirty longest miles I have ever driven, for nine hours that had no end. A relatively short distance, but this eternity of time to cover it: partly because of the sastrugi, partly because of the increasingly long stretches of soft snow, but mainly because of the weather, which was deteriorating rapidly. The wind had now risen to something better than thirty miles an hour, it carried with it a blinding wall of flying ice-filled drift, and, even though it was directly behind us, it made things troublesome for the driver. For all the others except Smallwood it made the conditions intolerable: had the temperature been what it was only twenty-four hours previously, none of us, I am sure, would have survived that trip.

I would have thought that with either Smallwood or Corazzini driving and the other navigating from the dog-sled we would have had a chance, slender though it might be, to overpower them or at least make good our escape. But Smallwood never offered even a shadow of a chance of either. Corazzini drove all the time, with the radio direction finder headphones clamped to his ears, so that compass navigation became an inaccurate superfluity. Smallwood sat alone in the back of the tractor cabin, his gun unwaveringly trained on the rest of us who were crammed aboard the big tractor sled, ten feet to the rear of him: when the snow eventually became too heavy he stopped the tractor, detached the portable searchlight and mounted it, facing aft, in the rear of the tractor cabin; this had the double advantage of illuminating us so that he could clearly see us even through the drift and making certain that none of us tried to drop off the sled, and of blinding us so that we were quite unable to see what he was doing, even to see whether he was watching us at all. It was frustrating, maddening. And, for good measure and to prevent any desperate attempt at escape in the occasionally blinding flurries of snow, he brought Margaret and Helene up into the cabin and bound their hands: they were the surety for our good conduct.

That left eight of us on the tractor sled, Theodore Mahler and Marie LeGarde stretched out in the middle, three of us sitting on each side. Almost immediately after we had moved off and pulled a pair of tarpaulins over ourselves for what meagre shelter they could afford, Jackstraw leaned across and tapped me on the shoulder with something held in his hand. I reached up and took it from him.

‘Corazzini’s wallet,’ he said softly. For all the chance of his being overheard by either Smallwood or Corazzini above the roar of the engine and the voice of the gale, he could have shouted out the words. ‘Fell from his pocket when Zagero knocked him down. He didn’t see it go, but I did – sat on top of it while Smallwood told us to squat in the snow.’

I stripped off my gloves, opened the wallet and examined its contents in the light of the torch Jackstraw had also passed across – a torch with the beam carefully hooded and screened to prevent the slightest chink of light escaping from under the tarpaulin: at this time, Smallwood had not yet switched on the searchlight.

The wallet provided us with that last proof of the thoroughness, the meticulous care with which these two men had provided themselves with false but utterly convincing identities: I knew that whatever Corazzini’s name was it wasn’t the one he had given himself, but, had I not known, the ‘N.C.’ stamped on the hand-tooled morocco, the visiting cards with the inscribed ‘Nicholas Corazzini’ above the name and address of the Indiana head office of the Global Tractor Company, and the leather-backed fold of American Express cheques, each one already signed ‘N. R. Corazzini’ in its top left-hand corner, would have carried complete conviction.

And, too late, the wallet also presented us, obliquely but beyond all doubt, with the reason for many things, ranging from the purpose of the crash-landing of the plane to the explanation of why I had been knocked on the head the night before last: inside the bill-fold compartment was the newspaper cutting which I had first found on the dead body of Colonel Harrison. I read it aloud, slowly, with infinite chagrin.

The account was brief. That it concerned that dreadful disaster in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where a commuters’ train had plunged through an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay, drowning dozens of the passengers aboard, I already knew from the quick glance I had had at the cutting in the plane. But, as I had also gathered in the plane, this was a follow-up story and the reporter wasted little time on the appalling details: his interest lay in another direction entirely. It was ‘reliably reported’, he said, that the train had been carrying an army courier: that he was one of the forty who had died: and that he had been carrying a ‘super-secret guided missile mechanism’.

That was all the cutting said, but it was enough, and more than enough. It didn’t say whether the mechanism had been lost or not, it most certainly never even suggested that there was any connection between the presence of the mechanism aboard the train and the reasons for the crash. It didn’t have to, the cheek-by-jowl contiguity of the two items made the reader’s own horrifying conclusions inevitable. From the silence that stretched out after I had read out the last words, I knew that the others were lost in the same staggering speculations as myself. It was Jackstraw who finally broke this silence, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact.

‘Well, we know now why you were knocked on the head.’

‘Knocked on the head?’ Zagero took him up. ‘What do you—’

‘Night before last,’ I interrupted. ‘When I told you I’d walked into a lamp-post.’ I told them all about the finding of the cutting and its subsequent loss.

‘Would it have made all that difference even if you had read it?’ Zagero asked. ‘I mean—’

‘Of course it would!’ My voice was harsh, savage almost, but the savagery was directed against myself, my own stupidity. ‘The fact of finding a cutting about a fatal crash which occurred in strange unexplained circumstances on the person of a man who had just died in a fatal crash in equally strange and unexplained circumstances would have made even me suspicious. When I heard from Hillcrest that something highly secret was being carried aboard the plane, the parallel would have been even more glaringly obvious, especially as the cutting was found on the man – an army officer – who was almost certainly the courier, the carrier of this secret. Anything larger than a match-box in the luggage the passengers were carrying I’d have ripped open and examined, radio and tape-recorder included. Small-wood knew it. He didn’t know what was in the cutting, but he – or Corazzini – knew it was a cutting and they were taking no chances at all.’

‘You weren’t to know this,’ Levin said soothingly. ‘It’s not your fault—’

‘Of course it’s my fault,’ I said wearily. ‘All my fault. I don’t even know how to start apologising. You first, Zagero, I suppose, you and Solly Levin, for tying you—’

‘Forget it.’ Zagero was curt but friendly. ‘We’re just as bad – all of us. All the facts that mattered were as available to us as they were to you – and we made no better use of them: less, if anything.’ In the tiny glow from the torch I could see him shaking his head. ‘Lordy, lordy, but ain’t it easy to understand everything when it’s too late. Easy enough to understand now why we crashed in the middle of nowhere – the plane captain must have been in on it, he must have known that the mechanism was aboard and thought it important enough to put the passengers’ lives second and crash-land in the middle of the ice-plateau, where Smallwood could never reach the coast.’

‘Not knowing that I was there waiting to oblige Smallwood,’ I said bitterly. I shook my head in turn. ‘It’s obvious now, all too obvious. How Corazzini damaged his hand in the shack – not by saving or trying to save the radio but by accelerating its fall after he’d pushed the hinges in. How and why he lost the toss and had to sleep on the floor – to give him a chance to smother the second officer.’

‘What you might call a good loser,’ Zagero said grimly. Then he gave a short laugh. ‘Remember when we buried the second officer? I wonder what Smallwood’s burial service would have sounded like if we’d really been close enough to hear?’

‘I missed that,’ I nodded. ‘I missed the suggestion you made inside the plane that we should bury the murdered men – if you had been guilty you’d never have dared make that suggestion for then the way these men died would almost certainly have been discovered.’

‘You missed it,’ Zagero said feelingly. ‘How about me – I said it, and I never even thought of it till now.’ He snorted. ‘Boy, am I disgusted with myself. As far as I can see the only thing I knew that you didn’t was that Corazzini clouted our friend Smallwood back in the pass there simply in order to throw suspicion on me: but, then, I knew that even trying to tell you that would have been crazy.’

There was a long moment’s silence, while we listened to the rise and fall of the Citroën’s exhaust note in the gusting, strengthening wind, then Solly Levin spoke.

‘The plane,’ he said. ‘The fire – how come?’

‘There was enough high-octane fuel in its tanks to take Hillcrest’s Sno-Cat a couple of thousand miles,’ I explained. ‘If Hillcrest’s tanks had been empty when he arrived back at base and if he’d found out right away that the spare fuel in the tunnel had been doctored – well, it wouldn’t have taken him long to siphon out the stuff in the plane. So, no plane.’

The silence this time was even longer, then Zagero cleared his throat, as if uncertain how to begin.

‘Seeing explanations are in the air – well, I guess it’s time we made one too.’ Zagero, to my astonishment, sounded almost embarrassed. ‘It’s about the phony conduct of that phony character to your left, Doc, one Solly Levin. We’d plenty of time to talk about it when we were lashed to this damned sledge all of last night and—’

‘Come to the point,’ I interrupted impatiently.

‘Sorry.’ He leaned across to Solly Levin. ‘Want I should make a formal introduction, Pop?’

I stared at him in the darkness.

‘Did I hear—’

‘Sure you did, Doc.’ He laughed softly. ‘Pop. The old man. The paternal parent. Says so on my birth certificate and everything.’ He was enjoying himself vastly. ‘Confirmation on the right here.’

‘It’s perfectly true, Dr Mason,’ Solly Levin smiled. The dreadful Bowery accent was quite gone, yielding place to a crisper, more decisive version of Zagero’s cultured drawl. ‘I’ll put it briefly. I’m the owner and managing director – or was till I retired a year ago – of a plastics factory in Trenton, New Jersey, near Princeton, where Johnny managed to acquire a splendid accent and very little else. It was not, I might add, Princeton’s fault; Johnny spent most of his time in the gymnasium, nursing his – ah – pugilistic ambitions, much to my annoyance as I wanted him to take over from me.’

‘Alas,’ Zagero put in, ‘I was almost as stubborn as he is himself.’

‘A great deal more so,’ his father said. ‘So I made him a proposition. I’d give him two years – it seemed enough, he was already amateur heavyweight champion – to prove himself, and at the end of that time if he hadn’t made it he was to take his place in the factory. His first manager was as corrupt as they come and Johnny literally kicked him out at the end of a year. So I took over. I’d newly retired, I’d time on my hands, I’d a very strong vested interest in his well-being apart from the fact that he was my son – and, quite frankly, I’d begun to see that he really was going to get to the very top.’ He broke off there – so I took the opportunity to interrupt.

‘Zagero or Levin. Which is it?’

‘Zagero,’ the elder man answered.

‘Why the Levin?’

‘Some state and national boxing commissions refuse to permit a close relative to be either manager or second. Especially second. So I used an alias. A practice by no means uncommon, and officially winked at. A harmless deception.’

‘Not so harmless,’ I said grimly. ‘It was one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen, and that was one of the primary reasons for my suspecting your son and, in turn, for Corazzini and Smallwood getting away with what they did. Had you come clean earlier on, I would have known that they were bound, even in the absence of all possible evidence, to be the guilty men. But with Solly Levin – I’ll find it very difficult to think of you as Mr Zagero, I’m afraid – with Solly Levin sticking out like a sore thumb as an obvious phony – well, I just couldn’t leave you two out of the list of suspects.’

‘I obviously modelled myself on the wrong person – or type of person,’ Levin said wryly. ‘Johnny ribbed me about it all the time. I’m deeply sorry for any trouble we may have caused, Dr Mason. I honestly never looked at it from your point of view, never realised the dangers involved in maintaining the impersonation – if you could call it that. Please forgive me.’

‘Nothing to forgive,’ I said bitterly. ‘A hundred to one I’d have found some other way of messing things up.’

Shortly after five o’clock in the evening Corazzini stopped the tractor – but he didn’t stop the engine. He came down from the driver’s seat and walked round to the cabin, pushing the searchlight slightly to one side. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar of the tractor and the high ululating whine of the still-strengthening blizzard.

‘Half-way, boss. Thirty-two miles on the clock.’

‘Thank you.’ We couldn’t see Smallwood, but we could see the tip of his gun barrel protruding menacingly into the searchlight’s beam. ‘The end of the line, Dr Mason. You and your friends will please get down.’

There was nothing else for it. Stiffly, numbly, I climbed down, took a couple of steps towards Smallwood, stopped as the pistol steadied unwaveringly on my chest.

‘You’ll be with your friends in a few hours,’ I told Smallwood. ‘You could leave us a little food, a portable stove and tent. Is that too much to ask?’

‘It is.’

‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’

‘You’re wasting your time, Dr Mason. And it grieves me to see you reduced to begging.’

‘The dog sledge, then. We don’t even want the dogs. But neither Mahler nor Miss LeGarde can walk.’

‘You’re wasting your time.’ He turned his attention to the sledge. ‘Everybody off, I said. Did you hear me, Levin? Get down!’

‘It’s my legs.’ In the harsh glare of the searchlight we could see the lines of pain deep-etched round Levin’s eyes and mouth, and I wondered how long he had been sitting there suffering, saying nothing. ‘I think they’re frozen or sleeping or something.’

‘Get down!’ Smallwood repeated sharply.

‘In a moment.’ Levin swung one of his legs over the edge of the sledge, his teeth bared with the effort. ‘I don’t seem to be able—’

‘Maybe a bullet in one of your legs will help,’ Smallwood said unemotionally. ‘To get the feeling back.’

I didn’t know whether he meant it or not. I didn’t think so – gratuitous violence wasn’t in character for this man, I couldn’t see him killing or wounding without sound reason. But Zagero thought differently. He advanced within six feet of Smallwood.

‘Don’t touch him, Smallwood,’ he said warningly.

‘No?’ The rising inflection was a challenge accepted, and Smallwood went on flatly: ‘I’d snuff you and him like a candle.’

‘No!’ Zagero said, softly and savagely, the words carrying clearly in a sudden lull in the wind. ‘Lay a finger on my old man, Smallwood, and I’ll get you and break your neck like a rotten carrot if you empty the entire magazine into me.’ I looked at him as he crouched there like a great cat, toes digging into the frozen snow, fists clenched and slightly in advance of him, ready for the explosive leap that would take him across that tiny space in a split second of time and I believed he could do exactly what he said. So, too, I suspected, did Smallwood.

‘Your old man?’ he inquired. ‘Your father?’

Zagero nodded.

‘Good.’ Smallwood showed no surprise. ‘Into the tractor cabin with him, Zagero. We’ll exchange him for the German girl. Nobody cares about her.’

His point was clear. I couldn’t see how we could offer any danger to Smallwood and Corazzini now, but Smallwood was a man who guarded even against impossibilities: Levin would be a far better surety for Zagero’s conduct than Helene.

Levin half-walked, was half-carried into the tractor cabin. With Corazzini and Smallwood both armed, resistance was hopeless: Smallwood had us summed up to a nicety. He knew we were desperate men, that we would fling ourselves on him and his gun in a moment of desperate emergency: but he also knew that we weren’t so desperate as to commit suicide when no lives were in immediate danger.

When Levin was inside, Smallwood turned to the young German girl seated opposite him in the cabin. ‘Out!’

It was then that it happened, with the stunning speed and inevitability that violent tragedy, viewed in retrospect, always seems to possess. I thought perhaps that it was some calculated plan, a last-minute desperate effort to save us that made Helene Fleming act as she did, but I found out later that she had merely been driven and goaded into a pain-filled unreasoning anger and resentment and despair by the agony she had suffered in her shoulder from having had her arms bound for so many long hours in the cruel jolting discomfort of the tractor cabin.

As she passed by Smallwood she stumbled, he put up an arm either to help her or ward her off, and before he had realised what was happening – it must have been the last quarter from which he expected any show of violence or resistance – she kicked out blindly and knocked the gun spinning out of his hand to land in the snow beneath. Smallwood sprang after it like a cat – the speed was unnecessary, the low growl of warning from an armed Corazzini put paid to any ideas we might have had of taking advantage of the situation – picked up the gun and whirled round, the gun lining up on Helene, his eyes narrowed to slits against the beam of the searchlight, his face twisted into an unrecognisable snarl, the lips drawn far back over the teeth. I’d been wrong once more about Smallwood – he could kill without reason.

‘Helene!’ Mrs Dansby-Gregg was the nearest to her, and her voice was high-pitched, almost a scream. ‘Look out, Helene!’ She plunged forward to push her maid to one side, but I don’t think Smallwood even saw her: he was mad with fury, I knew he was, and nothing on earth was going to stop him from pressing that trigger. The bullet caught Mrs Dansby-Gregg squarely in the back and pitched her headlong to fall face down in the frozen snow.

Already Smallwood’s moment of uncontrollable rage was spent as if it had never been. He said not another word, just nodded to Corazzini and jumped up on to the tail of the tractor cabin to keep us covered with searchlight and gun as Corazzini gunned the motor, engaged gear and lumbered off into the darkness to the west. We stood in a forlorn huddled little group and watched the train pass us by, the tractor, the tractor sled, the dog sledge and finally the huskies themselves, running on the loose traces astern.

I heard Helene murmur something to herself, and when I bent to listen she was saying in a strange, wondering voice: ‘Helene. She called me “Helene”.’ I stared at her as if she were mad, glanced down at the dead woman at my feet then gazed unseeingly after the receding lights of the Citroën until both the lights and the sound had faded and vanished into the snow-filled darkness of the night.