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 18

The white hell of that night, the agony of the bitter dreadful hours that followed – and God only knows how many hours these were – is a memory that will never die.

How many hours did we stagger and lurch after that tractor like drunk or dying men – six hours, eight, ten? We didn’t know, we shall never know. Time as an independent system of measurement ceased to exist: each second was an interminable unit of suffering, of freezing, of exhausted marching, each minute an æon where the fire in our aching leg muscles fought with the ice-cold misery of hands and feet and faces for domination in our minds, each hour an eternity which we knew could never end. Not one of us, I am sure, expected to live through that night.

The thoughts, the emotions of these hours I could never afterwards recall. Chagrin there was, the most bitter I have ever known, an overwhelming mortification and self-condemnation that I had all along been deceived with such childish ease, that I had been powerless to offer any hindrance or resistance to the endless resourcefulness of that brilliant little man. And then I would think of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, and of Margaret bound and hostage and afraid and looking at Smallwood in the dim light of that lurching tractor cabin, looking at Smallwood and the gun in Smallwood’s hand, and with that thought anger would flood in to supplant the chagrin, a consuming hatred and a fury that flamed throughout my entire being, but even that anger wasn’t all exclusive: it couldn’t be, not so long as fear, a fear such as I had never before known, was the dominating factor in my mind. And it was.

It was, too, I should think, in Zagero’s mind. He hadn’t spoken a word since Mrs Dansby-Gregg had died, had just flung himself uncaringly, ruthlessly, into what had to be done. Head bowed, he plodded on like an automaton. I wondered how many times he must have regretted that impetuous slip of the tongue when he had betrayed to Smallwood the fact that Solly Levin was his father.

And Jackstraw was as silent as we were, noncommittal, speaking only when he had to, keeping his thoughts strictly to himself. I wondered if he was blaming me for what had happened but I didn’t think so, Jackstraw’s mind just didn’t work that way. I could guess what he was thinking, I knew the explosive temper that slumbered under that placid exterior. Had we met an unarmed Smallwood and Corazzini then, I do not think we would have stopped short of killing him with our hands.

I suppose, too, that we were all three of us exhausted as we had never been before, frostbitten, bleeding, thirsty and steadily weakening from lack of food. I say ‘suppose’, because logic and reason tell me that these things must have been so. But if they were I do not think they touched the minds of any of us that night. We were no longer ourselves, we were outside ourselves. Our bodies were but machines to serve the demands of our minds, and our minds so consumed with anxiety and anger that there was no place left for any further thought.

We were following the tractor. We could, I suppose, have turned back in the hope of stumbling across Hillcrest and his men. I knew Hillcrest well enough to know that he would know that those who had taken over our tractor – he had no means of knowing who they were, for all he knew Zagero might have suddenly overpowered us – would never dare make for Uplavnik but would almost certainly head for the coast. The likelihood was that Hillcrest, too, would head for the Kangalak fjord – together with a small bay beside it, the Kangalak fjord was the only break, the only likely rendezvous in a hundred miles of cliff-bound coast – and he could go there arrow-straight: on board his Sno-Cat he had a test prototype of a new, compact and as yet unmarketed Arma gyroscope specially designed for land use which had proved to have such astonishing accuracy that navigation on the ice-cap, as a problem, had ceased to exist for him.

But, even should he be heading towards the coast, our chances of meeting him in that blizzard did not exist, and if we once passed them by we would have been lost for ever. Better by far to head for the coast, where some patrolling ship or plane might just possibly pick us up – if we ever got there. Besides, I knew that both Jackstraw and Zagero felt exactly as I did – under a pointless but overpowering compulsion to follow Smallwood and Corazzini until we dropped in our tracks.

And the truth was that we couldn’t have gone any other way even had we wished to. When Smallwood had dropped us off we had been fairly into the steadily deepening depression in the icecap that wound down to the Kangalak glacier and it was a perfect drainage channel for the katabatic wind that was pouring down off the plateau. Although powerful enough already when we had been abandoned, that wind was now blowing with the force of a full gale, and for the first time on the Greenland ice-plateau – although we were now, admittedly, down to a level of 1500 feet – I heard a wind where the deep ululating moaning was completely absent. It howled, instead, howled and shrieked like a hurricane in the upper works and rigging of a ship, and it carried with it a numbing bruising flying wall of snow and ice against which progress would have been utterly impossible. So we went the only way we could, with the lash of the storm ever on our bent and aching backs.

And ache our backs did. Only three people – Zagero, Jackstraw and myself – were able to carry anything more than their own weight: and we had among us three people completely unable to walk. Mahler was still unconscious, still in coma, but I didn’t think we would have him with us very much longer: Zagero carried him for hour after endless hour through that white nightmare and for his self-sacrifice he paid the cruellest price of all for when, some hours later, I examined the frozen, useless appendages that had once been his hands, I knew that Johnny Zagero would never step into a boxing ring again. Marie LeGarde had lost consciousness too, and as I staggered along with her in my arms I felt it to be no more than a wasted token gesture: without shelter, and shelter soon, she would never see this night out. Helene, too, had collapsed within an hour of the tractor’s disappearance, her slender strength had just given out, and Jackstraw had her over his shoulder. How all three of us, exhausted, starved, numbed almost to death as we were, managed to carry them for so long, even though with so many halts, is beyond my understanding: but Zagero had his strength, Jackstraw his superb fitness and I still the sense of responsibility that carried me on long hours after my legs and arms had given out.

Behind us Senator Brewster blundered along in a blind world all of his own, stumbling often, falling occasionally but always pushing himself up and staggering gamely on. And in those few hours Hoffman Brewster, for me, ceased to be a senator and became again my earliest conception of the old Dixie Colonel, not the proud, rather overbearing aristocrat but the embodiment of a bygone southern chivalry, when courtesy and a splendid gallantry in the greatest perils and hardships were so routine as to excite no comment. Time and time again during that bitter night he insisted, forcibly insisted, on relieving one of the three of us of our burdens and would stagger along under the load until he reached the point of collapse. Despite his age, he was a powerful man: but he had no longer the heart and the lungs and the circulation to match his muscles, and his distress, as the night wore on, became pitiful to see. The bloodshot eyes were almost closed in exhaustion, his face deep-etched in grey suffering and his breath coming in painful whooping gasps that reached me clearly even above the thin high shriek of the wind.

No doubt but that Smallwood and Corazzini had left us to die, but they had made one mistake: they had forgotten Balto. Balto, as always, had been running loose when they had left us, and they had either failed to see him or forgotten all about him. But Balto hadn’t forgotten us, he must have known something was far wrong, for all the hours we had been prisoners on the tractor sled he had never come within a quarter-mile of us. But as soon as the tractor had dumped and left us, he had come loping in out of the driving snow and settled to the task of leading us down towards the glacier. At least, we hoped he was doing that. Jackstraw declared that he was following the crimp marks of the Citroën’s caterpillars, now deep buried under the flying drift and new-fallen snow. Zagero wasn’t so sure. Once, twice, a dozen times that night, I heard him muttering the same words: ‘I hope to hell that hound knows where it’s goin’.’

But Balto knew where he was going. Sometime during the night – it might have been any time between midnight and three o’clock in the morning – he stopped suddenly, stretched out his neck and gave his long eerie wolf call. He seemed to listen for an answer, and if he heard anything it was beyond our range: but he seemed satisfied, for he suddenly changed direction and angled off to the left into the blizzard. At Jackstraw’s nod, we followed.

Three minutes later we came upon the dog-sledge, with two of the dogs curled up beside it, their backs to the wind, their muzzles to their bellies and long brushes of tails over their faces, the drift wailing high around them. They were comfortable enough – so splendid an insulation does a husky’s thick coat provide that snow at forty degrees below zero will lie on its back indefinitely without being melted by body heat but they preferred freedom to comfort, for they were on their feet and vanished into the swirling whiteness beyond before we could lay hands on them. That left only the sledge.

I suppose that after Smallwood had gone far enough to consider that we would never be able to reach that point, he had cut loose dogs and dog-sledge as a needless encumbrance – but not before he had severed all the traces attaching the dogs to the sledge and, I noticed grimly, removed all the wraps and the magnetic compass that had been there. He thought of everything. For a moment, admiration for the man’s undoubtedly remarkable qualities came in to supplant what had become the motivating reason for my existence, a reason that, as the hours crawled by, were crowding out even the feelings I had for Margaret Ross: my hatred for Smallwood burned like a cold steady flame, an obsession with the idea of sinking my fingers into that scrawny throat and never letting go.

Within three minutes of finding the sledge we had tied together the severed remnants of the traces, changed them to the front and were on our way again, Marie LeGarde, Mahler and Helene propped up on the thin wooden slats. We had, of course, to pull the sledge ourselves, but that was nothing: for Jackstraw, Zagero and myself, the relief was beyond measure. But it was only momentary.

We were running on to the smooth, slick ice of the Kangalak glacier, but our progress was no faster than it had been before we found the sledge. The wind was climbing up to its maximum now, the blizzard shrieking along horizontally to the ground and coming in great smoking flurries that cut visibility to zero and made us stop and grab one another lest one of us be knocked flying and for ever lost to sight: several times Theodore Mahler, restless in unconsciousness, rolled off the sledge until I at last made Brewster sit at the back and watch. He protested violently, but he was glad to do as I said.

I don’t remember much after that, I think I must have been unconscious, eyes shut, but still plodding along in my sleep on leaden, frozen feet. My first conscious memory after installing Brewster on the back of the sledge was of someone shaking me urgently by the shoulder. It was Jackstraw.

‘No more!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it’s blown itself out. We can’t live through this.’

I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn’t all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster.

‘Good God!’ I cried in Jackstraw’s ear. ‘The Senator – we’ve lost him! I’ll go back and look. I won’t be a minute.’

‘Stay here.’ The grip on my arm was promise enough that Jackstraw meant to detain me by force, if necessary. ‘You’d never come back. Balto! Balto!’ He shouted a few Eskimo words which meant nothing to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw’s pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes.

‘He’s found him?’ I asked Jackstraw.

Jackstraw nodded silently.

‘Let’s bring him in.’

Balto led us there, but we didn’t bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn’t have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I’d seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn’t matter now. But he had been a man.

How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw’s torch. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning.

I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake – I was pretty sure he’d never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakening – and Zagero was stirring. That they – and I – would survive, I didn’t doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene’s seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as her sole anchor in an alien sea … I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde.

‘They don’t look so hot to me.’ Zagero, too, was studying them. ‘What’s their chances, Doc?’

‘I just don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘I don’t know at all.’

‘Don’t take it to heart, Doc. It’s no fault of yours.’ Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. ‘Your dispensary ain’t all that well stocked.’

‘No.’ I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. ‘Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end’s coming pretty close. Ordinarily I’d say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don’t know – he’s got the will to live, sheer guts, his beliefs – the lot … But in twelve hours he’ll be dead.’

‘And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?’

I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice.

‘Good lord, you’ve come to!’ I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. ‘This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?’

‘How do you think I feel?’ she said with a flash of her old spirit. ‘Don’t try to put me off, Peter. How long?’

‘About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi.’ The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. ‘Seriously, the fact that you’ve recovered consciousness is a good sign.’

‘I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can’t think of any dramatic words.’ I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. ‘You’re a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?’

‘Certainly,’ I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. ‘We’ll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoon – this afternoon, rather. It can’t be more than twenty miles from here.’

‘Twenty miles!’ Zagero interjected. ‘In this little lot?’

He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard.

‘It won’t last, Mr Zagero,’ Jackstraw put in. ‘These williwaws always blow themselves out in a short time. This already has gone on longer than most and it’s easing a lot. Tomorrow will be clear and calm and cold.’

‘The cold will be a change,’ Zagero said feelingly. He looked past me. ‘The old lady’s off again, Doc.’

‘Yes.’ I stopped massaging her hands and slid the gloves on. ‘Let’s have a look at these paws of yours, Mr Zagero, will you?’

‘“Johnny” to you, Doc. I’ve been dismissed without a stain on my character, remember?’ He thrust his big hands out for inspection. ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’

They weren’t pretty, they were the worst case of frostbite I had ever seen, and I had seen all too many, in Korea and later. They were white and yellow and dead. The original skin had vanished under a mass of blisters, and from the few warm spots I could detect on either hand I knew that much of the tissue had been permanently destroyed.

‘’Fraid I was a mite careless with my gloves,’ Zagero said apologetically. ‘In fact, I lost the damn’ things about five miles back. Didn’t notice it at the time – hands were too cold, I reckon.’

‘Feel anything in them now?’

‘Here and there.’ He nodded as I touched some spots where the blood still flowed, and went on conversationally: ‘Am I goin’ to lose my hands, Doc? Amputation, I mean?’

‘No.’ I shook my head definitely. I saw no point in mentioning that some of his fingers were beyond hope.

‘Will I ever fight again?’ Still the same casual, careless tone.

‘It’s difficult to say. You never know—’

‘Will I ever fight again?’

‘You’ll never fight again.’

There was a long pause, then he said quietly: ‘You’re sure, Doc? You’re absolutely sure?’

‘I’m absolutely sure, Johnny. No boxing commission doctor in the world would ever let you climb into a ring. It would cost him his listing in the Medical Register.’

‘Okay, so that’s how it is. Consolidated Plastics of Trenton, New Jersey, have just got themselves a new factory hand: this boxin’ racket was too damn’ strenuous anyway.’ There was no regret in his voice, no resignation even, but that meant nothing: like me, he had more important things to worry about. He looked away into the darkness, then twisted round: ‘What’s the matter with that hound of yours, Jackstraw?’

‘I don’t know. I think I’d better find out.’ Twice while we had been talking Balto had left us, vanished into the snow, and returned after a few minutes: he seemed restless, uneasy. ‘I won’t be long.’

He rose, followed Balto into the darkness, returned in a short time: ‘Come and see this, Dr Mason.’

‘This’ was a spot less than a hundred yards away, close into the side of the glacier valley. Jackstraw flashed his torch on to the snow-dusted ice. I stooped, made out a black circular patch on the ground and, a few feet away, a smaller discoloured area where the surface snow had frozen solid.

‘Oil from the gearcase or sump, water from the radiator,’ Jackstraw said briefly. He altered the torch-beam. ‘And you can still see the crimp marks of the caterpillars.’

‘And very recent?’ I suggested. The drifting snow, the scouring effect of the flying ice-particles had scarcely begun to obliterate the traces left by the treads.

‘I think so. And they were stopped here a long time, Dr Mason – look at the size of that oil patch.’

‘Mechanical trouble?’ I hazarded. I didn’t really believe it myself.

‘Riding out the storm – Corazzini must have been blind,’ Jackstraw said definitely. ‘If the engine had stopped on that pair, they’d never have got it started again.’

I knew he was right. Neither Smallwood nor Corazzini had shown any mechanical ability at all, and I was convinced that it had been no act.

‘Perhaps they were still here when we arrived back there? My God, if we’d only carried on another hundred yards!’

‘Spilt milk, as you say, Dr Mason. Yes, I’m sure they were here then.’

‘We wouldn’t have heard their engine?’

‘Not in this wind.’

‘Jackstraw!’ A sudden thought, a flash of hope. ‘Jackstraw, did you sleep back there?’

‘No.’

‘How long were we stopped?’

‘Half an hour, maybe less.’

‘And you think they were still here – Good God, man, they can’t be more than a mile away. The wind’s dropping right away, it’s getting colder and we’ll only freeze to death if we stay here, maybe there’ll be crevasses on the glacier to hold them up—’

I was already on my way, running, slipping, stumbling, Jackstraw by my side, Balto leading the way. Zagero was standing up, waiting – and the young German girl by his side.

‘Helene!’ I caught her hands. ‘You all right? How are you feeling?’

‘Better, much better.’ She didn’t sound all that much better. ‘I’m sorry I was so silly, Dr Mason. I don’t know—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I cut in, rather brusquely. ‘You can walk? Fine, fine.’ I could feel new hope surging through me as I rapped out a brief explanation to Zagero, within a minute we had Mahler and Marie LeGarde bundled aboard the sledge and were on our way.

But the hope was short-lived. We made the best speed we could, at times breaking into a kind of staggering run, but the sledge slowed us up terribly on that uneven surface of the glacier. Once it overturned, throwing both Mahler and Marie LeGarde heavily on to the snow, and after that we were forced to slow down. Another such violent capsizing, or even too severe a jolting, and that sledge would become a bier. From time to time Jackstraw flashed his failing torch on the crimp marks we were following, and even to my inexperienced eye it was obvious that the tracks in the snow were becoming progressively fainter every time we looked at them until the time came at last when I knew we must call a halt to this pursuit, admit defeat: we had fallen so far behind now, three or four miles I was certain, that the hope and chance of overtaking them no longer existed: we were only chasing a hopeless dream, and killing ourselves doing it.

Jackstraw and Zagero agreed. We put Helene aboard the sledge to steady the two sick people, took a trace apiece over our shoulders and plodded on slowly down the glacier, backs bent, heads bowed, each one of us lost in his own hopeless thoughts.

As Jackstraw had prophesied, the storm had blown itself out. Completely. The wind had gone so that not a breath stirred across the glacier. The snow had vanished, with the dark and heavy clouds that had carried it: the white stars stood high in a dark and frozen sky. It was cold, with a temperature well below zero, but cold was an old friend now. By eight o’clock that morning, some three hours and six miles after we had left our resting place, the conditions for travel were perfect.

The weather conditions, that was – underfoot, they varied from the indifferent to the abominable. We were now fairly into the Kangalak glacier and the going was often difficult indeed. A glacier is seldom a smooth river of ice that flows evenly down-hill, but much more frequently an irregularly surfaced fissured and crevassed mass descending as often as not in a series of rounded steps and ledges like a sea of petrified lava. The Kangalak was no exception. Here and there we found some straight stretches, but, for the most part, progress was possible only at the sides where the rate of flow was less and the ice smoother. It was the left-hand side that we were following, but even so it was heavy work, for our path was frequently blocked by the debris of ground moraines that had been forced out on the sides, and when these were absent we were as often as not floundering through the thick drifts that the great wind of the night just gone had piled up high against the sides. The one consolation I found was that if it were difficult for us, it was proving doubly so for the tractor whose irregularly weaving twisting crimp marks we were so doggedly following.

I wondered how far away Hillcrest and the Sno-Cat were. I was as certain as I could be of anything that he would have headed due west as soon as he would have emerged from the Vindeby Nunataks, and he’d had time and to spare to make the coast by this time – not even the blizzard of last night could have stopped the Sno-Cat, the engine was a completely enclosed unit, its great caterpillars would take it over the loosest, the most newly fallen snow. But even had he backed his hunches and headed for the coast, as I hoped, he might still be anything up to twenty miles to the north or south of us, or he might be not only north or south but fifteen miles ahead of us – we had no maps left but I was fairly certain we were about that distance from the coast. Or was it possible that Hillcrest, a shrewd and thoughtful man, might have thought the gambit of a break for the coast too obvious a move? Could it not be that he might have indeed pressed on for Uplavnik, or even turned due north after he had come through the hills? Or, if he were coming west, would he not perhaps be driving in a search pattern, quartering the ground between the Vindeby Nunataks and the coast in a series of wide advancing zigzags? If that were so, he might still be anything up to thirty miles behind. It was infuriating beyond measure to know that he was almost certainly within two or three hours’ driving time from where we were, but without a wireless or any other means of contacting him he might as well have been a thousand miles away for any hope there was of two tiny moving objects encountering each other by chance in that vast and featureless land.

Soon after eight o’clock in the morning I stopped to have a look at the two sick people on the sledge, professional instinct, I suppose, but an empty token gesture: there was nothing we could do for them, except give massage at frequent intervals. The sound of Mahler’s dyspnœa, his whooping gasping breathing, was the tolling of a death-bell to our ears, and this effort to breathe was extinguishing the last embers of life in his emaciated and frozen body. In three hours’ time, by noon at the latest, Mahler would be dead. Nothing could ever save him now, it was madness, an utterly wasted effort to continue to drag him along on a sledge: he was past caring or knowing or feeling now, he could die just as peacefully if we left him lying on the glacier. Or so I have thought since then. But Mahler was more than a man to us that day, he was a symbol: we would leave Mahler when he had drawn his last gasping breath, but never before.

Marie LeGarde was dying too, but quietly, softly, peacefully, like a little candle flame flickering to extinction. Maybe she would go first, maybe Mahler. But both of them would die this day.

The going was becoming increasingly difficult now, not so much because of the gradually steepening slope of the glacier which made the sledge overrun us more and more frequently, but because of the fact that Jackstraw’s torch had all but completely given out, and the fissures and crevasses that, earlier, had merely been nuisances to be negotiated, now became menaces to be avoided at the cost of our lives. It was now that Balto proved of his greatest value yet: as Jackstraw had said on our first day out from the IGY cabin, the big Siberian had an uncanny nose for crevasses, both open and hidden, in daytime or dark, and he made never a mistake that morning, constantly running ahead and then back towards us to guide us in the safest direction. Even so, progress was heartbreakingly slow.

Shortly after half-past eight in the morning we came across the tractor sled lying at an angle against a moraine. Even in the near darkness it was plain to see what had happened. The steepness of the glacier, not to mention sudden unaccountable dips to left and right across its width, must have made the heavy sled a dangerous liability, for, from its tracks, we had several times seen where it had slewed wildly at an angle, pivoting round on its iron tow-bar as, brakeless, it had sought to overrun the tractor. Obviously, Smallwood and Corazzini must have feared – and with reason – that on one of these occasions it would pull round the tail of the tractor after it and topple the tractor on its side, or, worse, drag it into a crevasse: so they had unhooked the tow-bar and left the sled.

It was surprising that they hadn’t done this earlier: apart from carrying their fuel and food, which reserves could easily have gone into the tractor cabin itself, it had been a useless encumbrance to them. As far as I could judge they had abandoned it with all its contents – apart, of course, from the portable radio – including the wraps we had given Zagero and Levin when they had ridden on it at the point of a gun. We took these, tucked them round Mahler and Marie LeGarde and passed on.

Three hundred yards later I stopped so abruptly that the sledge, bumping into me, made me lose my footing on the slippery ice. I stood up, laughing softly, laughing for the first time for days, and Zagero came up close and peered into my face.

‘What gives, Doc?’

I laughed again and was just on the point of speaking when his hand struck me sharply across the face.

‘Cut it out, Doc.’ His voice was harsh. ‘That ain’t goin’ to help us any.’

‘On the contrary, it’s going to help us a very great deal.’ I rubbed a hand across my cheek, I couldn’t blame him for what he had done. ‘My God, and I almost missed it!’

‘Missed what?’ He still wasn’t sure that I wasn’t hysterical.

‘Come on back to the tractor sled and see. Smallwood claims he thinks of everything, but he’s missed out at last. He’s made his first big mistake, but oh, brother, what a mistake! And the weather’s just perfect for it!’ I turned on my heel and actually ran up the glacier towards the sled.

Many items were carried as standard equipment in IGY parties, both in the field and at base camps, and none more standard than the magnesium flares which first came into common use in the Antarctic over a quarter of a century ago – they are indispensable as location beacons in the long polar nights – and radio-sondes. We carried more radio-sondes than any other item of equipment, for our primary purpose on the ice-cap – the garnering of information about density, pressure, temperature, humidity and wind direction of the upper atmosphere – was impossible without them. These sondes, still crated with the tents, ropes, axes and shovels which we had found no occasion to use on this trip, were radio-carrying balloons which wirelessed back information from heights of between 100,000 and 150,000 feet. We also carried rockoons, radio rockets fired from balloons which took them clear of the denser parts of the atmosphere before releasing them. But right then rockoons were useless to me. So, too, were balloons at their normal operating height: 5000 feet should serve our purpose admirably.

The dim glow from the torch was more than sufficient, Jackstraw and I had worked with these things a hundred times. To couple the balloon to the hydrogen cylinder, disconnect the radio and substitute a group of three magnesium flares fused with RDX took only minutes. We lit the fuse, cut the holding cord and had a second balloon coupled on to the cylinder before the first was 500 feet up. Then, just as we had the third on the cylinder and were disconnecting its radio, the first flare, now at about a height of 4000 feet, burst into scintillating brilliant life.

It was all I could have wished for, indeed it was more than I’d ever hoped for, and Zagero’s heavy thump on my back showed how joyfully he shared my feelings.

‘Dr Mason,’ he said solemnly, ‘I take it all back, all I ever said about you. This, Dr Mason, is genius.’

‘It’s not bad,’ I admitted, and indeed if anyone, in those perfect conditions of visibility, couldn’t see the coruscating dazzlement of those flares at any distance up to thirty miles, he would have to be blind. If they were looking in the right direction, that was, but I was sure that with Hillcrest carrying five men and everybody almost certainly on the lookout for us, the chances of missing it were remote.

The second flare, considerably higher, burst into life just as the first went sputtering into extinction and the further thought struck me that if there were any ships patrolling out in the sea beyond, it would give them a bearing the significance of which none of them could surely overlook. And then I saw Jackstraw and Zagero looking at me and though I couldn’t read their expressions in the darkness I knew from their stillness what they were both thinking and suddenly I didn’t feel so happy any more. The odds were high that Corazzini and Smallwood – they could be no more than a few miles distant – had seen the flares also. They would know what it signified, they would know it was the first tug on the drawstring of the net that might even then be starting to close round them. In addition to being dangerous, ruthless killers, they would become frightened killers; and they had Margaret and Johnny Zagero’s father with them. But I knew I’d had no option, tried to thrust all thought of the hostages from my mind, turned to look at the third balloon that we had just released, then winced and closed my eyes involuntarily as the third flare, through some flaw or misjudgment in the length of the fuse, ignited not more than five hundred feet above us, the blue-white intensity mingling almost immediately with a bright orange flame as the balloon also caught fire and both started drifting slowly earthwards.

And so intently was I watching this through narrowed eyes that I all but missed something vastly more important, but Jackstraw didn’t. He never missed anything. I felt his hand on my arm, turned to see the strong white teeth gleaming in the widest grin I had seen for weeks, then half-turned again to follow the direction of his pointing arm just in time to see low on the horizon in the south-east and not more than five miles away the earthward curving red and white flare of a signal rocket.

Our feelings were impossible to describe – I know, at least, that mine were. I had never seen anything half so wonderful in all my life, not even the sight, twenty minutes later, of the powerful wavering headlight beams of the Sno-Cat as it appeared over a rise in the plateau and headed towards the spot – we had scrambled up from the glacier to the flat land above – where we had just ignited the last of our flares and were waving it round and round our heads on the end of a long metal pole, like men demented. It seemed an age, although I don’t suppose it was much more than ten minutes, before the great red and yellow Sno-Cat ground to a halt beside us and willing arms reached down to help us into the incredible warmth and comfort of that superbly equipped and insulated cabin.

Hillcrest was a great bull of a man, red-faced, black-bearded, jovial, confident, with a tremendous zest for living, a deceptive external appearance that concealed a first-class brain and a competence of a very high order indeed. It did me good just to sit there, glass of brandy in hand, relaxed – if only for a moment – for the first time in five days and just to look at him. I could tell that it hadn’t done him the same good to look at us – in the bright overhead light I could clearly see our yellowed, blistered, emaciated faces, the bleeding, black-nailed, suppurating all but useless hands, and I was shocked myself – but he concealed it well, and busied himself with handing out restoratives, tucking away Mahler and Marie LeGarde in two deep, heat-pad-filled bunks, and supervising the efforts of the cook who had a steaming hot meal ready prepared. All this he had done before he had as much as asked us a question.

‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘First things first. Where’s the Citroën? I presume the missile mechanism is still aboard it. Brother, you just don’t begin to have any idea how many heart attacks this thing is causing.’

‘That’s not the first thing,’ I said quietly. I nodded to Theodore Mahler, whose hoarse gasping breath filled the room. ‘This man is dying.’

‘All under control,’ he boomed. He jerked a thumb at Joss who, after the first delighted greeting, had returned to his radio set in the corner. ‘The boy here hasn’t left his set for over twenty-four hours – ever since we got your “Mayday” call.’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘You took a chance there. I wonder you didn’t stop a bullet for your pains.’

‘I just about did … We were talking about Mahler.’

‘Yes. We’ve been in constant contact, same wave-length, with two ships in that time – the destroyer Wykenham and the carrier Triton. I had a fair idea your friends must be heading in this direction, so the Wykenham has been moving up overnight and is lying off the coast. But the leads and patches in the ice aren’t big enough for the Triton to manœuvre to fly off planes. She’s about eighty miles south, in clear water.’

‘Eighty miles!’ I didn’t bother to conceal my shock and my disappointment, I’d begun to have a faint irrational hope that we might yet save the dying man. ‘Eighty miles!’

‘I have news for you, Doctor,’ Hillcrest announced jovially. ‘We have moved into the air age.’ He turned towards Joss and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

‘A Scimitar jet fighter is just taking off.’ Joss tried to speak unemotionally, but failed. ‘It’s airborne – now. Time-check 0933. We’re to fire our first rocket at 0946 – thirteen minutes from now. Then two more at intervals of thirty seconds. At 0948 we’re to set off a slow-burning magnesium flare where we want the stuff dropped, at least two hundred yards from the tractor.’ Joss listened for another few moments and grinned. ‘He says we’re to get the hell out of it after we’ve lit the flare or we’re liable to collect a headache or worse.’

I didn’t know what to say, where to look, moments like this came all too seldom. Not until that moment did I realise how much of a symbol Theodore Mahler had become, how much his survival had meant for me. Hillcrest must have had some intuitive understanding of how I felt, for he spoke at once, his voice normal, matter of fact.

‘Service, old boy. Sorry we couldn’t have laid it on earlier, but the Triton refused to risk an expensive plane and an even more expensive pilot flying low over virtually uncharted territory unless they definitely knew that Mahler was alive.’

‘They’ve done all anyone could ask.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘These planes don’t usually carry ammunition in peace-time, do they?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Hillcrest said grimly. He ladled some steaming stew on to our plates. ‘Nobody’s playing any more. There’s been a flight of Scimitars standing by since midnight, and every cannon’s loaded … Right, Doctor. Give with the story.’

I gave, as briefly and concisely as possible. At the end, he clapped his hands together.

‘Maybe five miles ahead, eh? Then it’s tallyho down the old glacier and after ‘em.’ He rubbed his hands in anticipation. ‘We’re three times as fast and we’ve three times as many rifles. This is the way any decent IGY expedition should be run!’

I smiled faintly, a token response to his bubbling enthusiasm. I never felt less like smiling: now that the worry of Mahler – and in that warmth and with hot food, almost certainly also the worry of Marie LeGarde – was off my hands, my anxiety about Margaret had returned with redoubled force.

‘We’re not tallyho-ing down any old glacier, Captain Hillcrest. Apart from the fact that it’s a rotten surface, which would bring your speed down to about the same as the Citroën’s, open pursuit is a pretty sure way of guaranteeing that Margaret Ross and Mr Levin get a bullet through their heads. Incidentally, Mr Levin is the father of Mr Zagero.’

‘What?’ Both Hillcrest and Joss had spoken at the same time.

‘Yes. But later. Have you a map of the area?’

‘Sure.’ Hillcrest handed it over. Like most Greenland maps it showed topographical detail for no more than the first twenty miles inland, but it was sufficient for my purpose. It showed the twisting Kangalak glacier debouching into the Kangalak Fjord, the wide deep bay beyond the southern headland of the fjord, the northern headland continuing in a wide shallow smooth curve for many miles to the north.

‘Where did you say the destroyer was?’ I asked.

‘The Wykenham? I’m not sure.’

‘Blocking the Kangalak Fjord here, perhaps?’ I indicated the spot on the map.

‘No, that I’m certain of.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘Captain said the pack-ice was too heavy, he couldn’t risk his destroyer in any of the leads in case they closed.’ Hillcrest snorted in disgust. ‘I gather its hull is made of paper.’

‘It’s not much thicker – I’ve served in destroyers. I don’t blame him. But I’ll bet his trawler, probably a specially strengthened job, is well inside the fjord – and a submarine no great distance away. Look, this is all we can do.’ I traced my finger on the map. ‘We must parallel the glacier, maybe a mile away. With the slope of the valley sides Smallwood won’t see us, and with his own engine running he can’t hear us. Down here—’

‘What’s to stop him from cutting his engine now and again to listen?’ Hillcrest demanded.

‘Because what Smallwood and Corazzini don’t know about engines would fill an encyclopedia. They’d be dead scared to stop it in case they couldn’t start it again … Down here, at the base of the headland separating the fjord from the bay to the south – about a mile from the end of the glacier, I would say – the sides of the glacier valley fall away and level off into the plateau on either side. But there’s bound to be some kind of moraine or shelter there. That’s where we’ll ambush them.’

‘Ambush?’ He frowned at me. ‘What’s the difference between that and pursuing them? It’ll still come to a fight – and they can still hold pistols to the heads of Levin and the stewardess, and bargain from there.’

‘There’ll be no fight,’ I said quietly. ‘They’ve been following the left-hand side of the glacier all the way down, I see no reason why they should change. They should come into sight maybe fifty yards from where we’re hiding – farther out on the glacier the going is impossible for tractors.’ I nodded at the telescopic sighted .303 in the corner. ‘With that Jackstraw can hit a three-inch target at a hundred yards. A man’s head at fifty yards is six times that size. First he gets Corazzini, who’s probably driving, and when Smallwood sticks his head out the back as he certainly will – well that’s it.’

‘But, good God, man, you can’t do that!’ Hillcrest was horrified. ‘Without a chance, without warning? It’s murder, simple murder!’

‘Want me to go over the number of people they’ve murdered?’ I shook my head. ‘You just don’t begin to know those two, Hillcrest.’

‘But—’ He broke off, turned to Jackstraw. ‘It’s you he’s asking to do it. What do you say?’

‘It will be a pleasure,’ Jackstraw said very softly.

Hillcrest stared at us both, baffled incomprehension in his eyes. I suppose he thought he knew both of us well. And he did. But he didn’t know what we had been through, words couldn’t even begin to make him understand. The atmosphere was uncomfortable, tense even, and I was grateful for Joss’s sudden calm words.

‘0943, Captain Hillcrest. Three minutes to go.’

‘Good.’ He was, I could see, as glad of the interruption as I was. ‘Barclay’ – this to the cook, the only other of Hillcrest’s men there, the other three were in the big driving cabin to make room for us – ‘three Wessex rockets. Line them up on the stand and wait for the word. I’ll go myself with the flare, two for safety. Give a beep on the horn, Joss, when it’s time to set ‘em off.’

I went with him to watch and the whole thing went off without a hitch. Dead on time, just seconds after the third rocket had been fired to curve upwards and explode into incandescent light in the star-dusted darkness above, we heard the high-pitched whine approaching out of the south-west, and in an incredibly short space of time a vague dark blur, carrying no navigation lights, screamed by five hundred feet overhead, banked in the distance, came at us again at much reduced speed, banked a second time and then, with a crescendoing banshee shriek of the jet engine, had vanished again into the vaguely lightening darkness to the south-east before we had realised that the pilot had made his drop. It was a measure of his complete self-confidence that he didn’t even trouble to check the accuracy of his drop: but for a man skilled in landing on the handkerchief-sized flight deck of a carrier in the middle of the night this must have been a childishly simple exercise.

There were two packages, not one, attached not to parachutes but to insignificant little drogues that seemed to let them fall much too fast for safety: they landed almost together not forty yards from the magnesium flares and with such force that I was sure that their contents must be smashed. But I had underestimated the Fleet Air Arm’s skill and experience in these matters, the contents were so beautifully packed and cushioned that everything was completely intact. The packages were duplicated: two ampoules of insulin and three hypodermic syringes in each package: whoever had packed these had been taking no chances. But gratitude was the last thought in my mind at that moment: I just tucked the boxes under my arm and made for the tractor at a dead run.

For close on two hours Hillcrest’s driver pushed the big Sno-Cat along at its maximum speed, and despite the inherent stability afforded by its four wide caterpillars, the tractor swayed and lurched in terrifying fashion. This was bad country, this was crevasse country, and we had been forced to make a wide detour that had carried us more than three miles away from the Kangalak glacier. And once again Jackstraw’s big Siberian wolf proved how invaluable he was: running tirelessly ahead, he repeatedly guided the Sno-Cat away from dangerous territory, but even so our route was a necessarily devious and twisted one, though the picking out of a path became considerably easier after the pale grey light of the arctic noon spread across the ice-cap.

For all of us it was a time of tension, of an ever-mounting anxiety that reached intolerable proportions. For the first half-hour or so I was busy enough in broaching the tractor’s first-aid kit and doing what doctoring I could to Mahler – a Mahler whose dyspnoea was already dramatically easing – Marie LeGarde, Helene, Jackstraw and, above all, to Zagero’s shattered hands. Then I myself submitted to Hillcrest’s rough and ready ministrations, but after that there was nothing for me to do, nothing for any of us to do except try to avoid the bitterness of thinking what must happen if the Citroën reached the tongue of the glacier before us.

Suddenly, exactly on noon, the tractor stopped abruptly. We jumped out to see what the matter was, and it became apparent soon enough the driver was awaiting instructions. We had abruptly rounded the humpback of the last ice ridge that had lain between us and the glacier itself.

Even in the half-light of the arctic day the panorama suddenly unfolded before us was a breathtaking one. To the north, the ice-sheet extended all the way down to the coast, forming vertical and in some places overhanging cliffs, the well-known phenomenon of the Chinese Wall fronts: nobody, nothing, could hope to land there.

To the south and separated from the fjord by the mile-long ridgeback of the seaward-projecting southern wall of the fjord, was a wide bay, fringed by a low, ice-bare rocky coast, quilted here and there with drifts of snow blown off the ice-cap. There, if anywhere, was where we would have to leave.

In the centre, between the low walls of the fjord, the Kangalak glacier itself, here, at its tongue, about 300 yards wide, ran down to the waters of the fjord in a great dog-leg curving sharply thirty degrees right about half-way down its length, ending abruptly with its upper surface a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the pack-ice-strewn water beneath. For the first half of its length the tongue of the glacier sloped fairly sharply from right to left down to the nunataks, crescent-fringed by the debris of moraines, that thrust up through the ice at the far corner of the dog-leg: the surface of the glacier was a nightmare of transverse and longitudinal fissures, some of them anything up to two hundred feet deep, great gaping chasms fanged with seracs – the irregular, often needle-pointed ice pinnacles that reached up between the walls of the larger crevasses. Surely Smallwood could never be so desperate, so insane as to drive the Citroën out on that: apart from the fissures, the very steepness of the slope downwards and to the left would be enough to send him into an uncontrollable slide.

And beyond everything lay the sea, the island-studded, ice-filled waters of Baffin Bay. Off-shore there was a mile-wide belt of loose pressure ice – the season was not yet far enough advanced for the fantastic shapes it would assume in the early spring – streaked with open, ever-changing leads and dotted at rare intervals with small icebergs – probably ones that had broken off from the east coast, drifted south round Cape Farewell and then moved north again, the whole half-lost, unearthly, and impossibly, weirdly, continuously altered in configuration by the white drifting fog that hung miasma-like over the sea.

But two things there were that were not lost: two ships. The one to the south-west, wraith-like and blurred though its lines were through the swirling mist, was quite unmistakable, that raked and slender silhouette would have been unmistakable anywhere: it was a destroyer, it could only be the Wykenham, moving slowly, cautiously shorewards through the ice-filled waters of the bay to our left. A heart-warming, immensely reassuring spectacle – or it should have been: but after the first cursory identifying glance I lost interest, my attention was taken and completely held by the second ship.

I couldn’t see all of it, most of its hull was hidden by the precipitous end of the glacier, but its small squat bridge, two masts and broad, bluff seaward-pointing bows were clearly etched against the mirror-calm waters of the head of the fjord and the sloping ice-bare rock that brushed its portside fenders. I could see no flag. It was a trawler, unmistakably so, and I thought grimly that it must have been a very special trawler indeed to have battered that still-visible path through the ice-choked mouth of the fjord.

My gaze moved back to the trawler again and a second later I was grabbing Hillcrest’s binoculars without so much as by your leave. One glance was enough, even in that shadowed gloom of the depth of the fjord I could see all I wanted to see by the grey noon-light. I could see a great deal more than I wanted to. For a few seconds I stood stock-still listening desperately for the sound of the Citroën’s engines: moments later I was in the tractor cabin, by the radio table.

‘Still in contact with the Triton, Joss?’ He nodded, and I rushed on: ‘Tell them there’s a group of men coming ashore from a trawler in the Kangalak Fjord. Ten, twelve, I’m not sure. And I’m not sure whether they’re armed. I’ll be damned surprised if they aren’t. Tell them I’m certain they’re going to move up on the glacier.’

‘Now?’

‘Of course!’ I snapped. ‘Send a message immediately. And—’

‘No. I meant are they moving up the glacier now?’

‘Take them ten, fifteen minutes – the fjord walls are pretty steep and it’s tricky to climb … After that ask the Wykenham if they will send a landing party ashore. An armed party. And for God’s sake tell them it’s urgent.’

‘Will they get here in time, Doc?’ Zagero was behind me. ‘By the time they lower a boat, row ashore, cross this headland – it’s half a mile if it’s an inch – it’ll take them fifteen minutes, maybe more.’

‘I know,’ I said irritably – irritably, but softly, for Joss was already talking into the table microphone, in the swift, staccato yet strangely unhurried voice of the trained radioman. ‘If you have any better suggestions—’

‘It’s coming!’ Hillcrest’s excited face had just appeared at the door of the cabin. ‘Come on! We can hear it coming down the glacier.’

And indeed they could. The deep throaty roar of that heavy engine was recognisable anywhere. Hurriedly we moved about a hundred yards away from the moraine-ringed depression where we had parked the tractor, Jackstraw, Hillcrest and I each with a rifle in our hands, and crouched down behind the concealing protection of some ice-covered debris at the edge of the glacier. From where we lay we could command a view of the glacier across its entire width and up to a point several hundred yards away, where it curved sharply out of sight.

We needn’t have hurried. The Citroën was still some good way off, the sound of its engine being funnelled down through the glacier valley well ahead of it, and I had time to look around me. What I saw seemed good. I was banking everything on the hope that the Citroën would still be on the same side of the glacier as when we had last seen it, and, from what I could see, the chances were high that it still would be. The entire centre of the glacier was a devil’s playground of crevasses ranging from hairlines to chasms twenty and more feet in width, transverse, longitudinal and diagonal, and as far as I could see they extended clear to the other wall. But here, on the left side, close in to the lining wall of moraine, was a relatively clear path, fissured only at long intervals, and not more than thirty yards broad. Thirty yards! Jackstraw could never miss at this point-blank range, even with a moving target.

I stole a glance at him, but his face might have been carved from the glacier itself, it was immobile and utterly devoid of expression. Hillcrest, on the other hand, was restless, forever shifting his cramped position: he was unhappy, I knew; he didn’t like this one little bit. He didn’t like murder. Neither did I. But this wasn’t murder, it was a long overdue execution: it wasn’t life-taking, it was life-saving, the lives of Margaret and Solly Levin …

There came the sudden click, abnormally loud even above the closing roar of the tractor, and Jackstraw, stretched his length on the snow, had the rifle raised to his shoulder. And then, suddenly, the Citroën had come clearly into sight and Jackstraw was gently lowering his rifle to the ground. I had gambled, and I had lost. The tractor was on the far side of the glacier, hugging the right bank as closely as possible: even at its nearest point of approach it would still be three hundred yards away.