Night Without End
Night Without End
Alistair MacLean
From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all time classic.An airliner crashes in the polar ice-cap. In temperatures 40 degrees below zero, six men and four women survive.But for the members of a remote scientific research station who rescue them, there are some sinister questions to answer – the first one being, who shot the pilot before the crash?
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Night Without End
HARPER
To Bunty
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5f0731a3-1844-5a29-acf2-8b157c90188c)
Title Page (#u5c1dd9d3-e648-534e-ae2b-a27bf396ea92)
ONE: Monday midnight (#ucd45c75f-08d0-5f3f-80b0-ca5b7a9eb329)
TWO: Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m. (#uff4e41fd-9b42-5f75-aff1-511c4f15c276)
THREE: Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m. (#u2886549a-c548-54e5-81a2-4bd53acf1b10)
FOUR: Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m. (#u5b589d47-6a45-5baf-bba9-b909d1b8592d)
FIVE: Monday 6 p.m.–7 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX: Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVEN: Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT: Wednesday 4 a.m–8 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE: Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN: Thursday 4 p.m.–Friday 6 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
ELEVEN: Friday 6 p.m.–Saturday 12.15 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
TWELVE: Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
HMS Ulysses: Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)
Where Eagles Dare: Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)
What’s next? (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE Monday midnight (#ulink_087370e3-d1d3-52bd-ba9f-bfb17c41db56)
It was Jackstraw who heard it first – it was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stove – curio collectors paid fancy prices for what they imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusks – rose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough.
‘Aeroplane,’ he announced casually.
‘Aeroplane!’ I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. ‘Jackstraw, you’ve been hitting the methylated spirits again.’
‘Indeed, no, Dr Mason.’ The blue eyes, so incongruously at variance with the swarthy face and the broad Eskimo cheekbones, crinkled into a smile: coffee was Jackstraw’s strongest tipple and we both knew it. ‘I can hear it plainly now. You must come and listen.’
‘No, thanks.’ It had taken me fifteen minutes to thaw out the frozen condensation in my sleeping-bag, and I was just beginning to feel warm for the first time. Heaven only knew that the presence of a plane in the heart of that desolate ice plateau was singular enough – in the four months since our IGY station had been set up this was the first time we had had any contact, however indirectly, with the world and the civilisation that lay so unimaginably beyond our horizons – but it wasn’t going to help either the plane or myself if I got my feet frozen again. I lay back and stared up through our two plate glass skylights: but as always they were completely opaque, covered with a thick coating of rime and dusting of snow. I looked away from the skylights across to where Joss, our young Cockney radioman, was stirring uneasily in his sleep, then back to Jackstraw.
‘Still hear it?’
‘Getting louder all the time, Dr Mason. Louder and closer.’
I wondered vaguely – vaguely and a trifle irritably, for this was our world, a tightly-knit, compact little world, and visitors weren’t welcome – what plane it could be. A met. plane from Thüle, possibly. Possibly, but unlikely: Thule was all of six hundred miles away, and our own weather reports went there three times a day. Or perhaps a Strategic Air Command bomber testing out the DEW-line – the Americans’ distant early warning radar system – or even some civilian proving flight on a new trans-polar route. Or maybe some base plane from down by Godthaab—
‘Dr Mason!’ Jackstraw’s voice was quick, urgent. ‘It’s in trouble, I think. It’s circling us-lower and closer all the time. A big plane, I’m sure: many motors.’
‘Damn!’ I said feelingly. I reached out for the silk gloves that always hung at night above my head, pulled them on, unzipped my sleeping-bag, swore under my breath as the freezing air struck at my shivering skin, and grabbed for my clothes. Half an hour only since I had put them off, but already they were stiff, awkward to handle and abominably cold – it was a rare day indeed when the temperature inside the cabin rose above freezing point. But I had them on – long underwear, woollen shirt, breeches, silk-lined woollen parka, two pairs of socks and my felt cabin shoes – in thirty seconds flat. In latitude 72.40 north, 8000 feet up on the Greenland ice-cap, self-preservation makes for a remarkable turn of speed. I crossed the cabin to where no more than a nose showed through a tiny gap in a sleeping-bag.
‘Wake up, Joss.’ I shook him until he reached out a hand and pushed the hood off his dark tousled head. ‘Wake up, boy. It looks as if we might need you.’
‘What – what’s the trouble?’ He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared up at the chronometer above his head. ‘Midnight! I’ve been asleep only half an hour.’
‘I know. Sorry. But get a move on.’ I recrossed the cabin, passed by the big RCA transmitter and stove, and halted in front of the instrument table. The register showed the wind ENE, velocity 15 knots – near enough 17 miles per hour, on a night like this, with the ice-crystals and drift lifting off the ice-cap, clogging and slowing up the anemometer cups, the true speed was probably half as much again. And the pen of the alcohol thermograph was running evenly along the red circle of 40 degrees below zero – 72 degrees of frost. I thought of the evil combination of these two factors of wind and cold and felt my skin crawl.
Already Jackstraw was silently climbing into his furs. I did the same – caribou trousers and parka with reindeer fur trimmed hood, all beautifully tailored by Jackstraw’s wife – sealskin boots, woollen mittens and reindeer gloves. I could hear the plane quite clearly now, and so too, I could see, did Joss. The deep even throb of its motors was plain even above the frantic rattling of the anemometer cups.
‘It’s – it’s an aeroplane!’ You could see that he was still trying to convince himself.
‘What did you think it was – one of your precious London double-deckers?’ I slipped snow-mask and goggles round my neck and picked up a torch from the shelf beside the stove: it was kept there to keep the dry batteries from freezing. ‘Been circling for the past two or three minutes. Jackstraw thinks it’s in trouble, and I agree.’
Joss listened.
‘Engines sound OK to me.’
‘And to me. But engine failure is only one of a dozen possible reasons.’
‘But why circle here?’
‘How the devil should I know? Probably because he can see our lights – the only lights, at a guess, in 50,000 square miles. And if he has to put down, which God forbid, he stands his only chance of survival if he puts down near some human habitation.’
‘Heaven help them,’ Joss said soberly. He added something else, but I didn’t wait to hear. I wanted to get up top as quickly as possible.
To leave our cabin, we had to use a trap-door, not an ordinary door. Our cabin, a prefabricated, sectioned structure that had been hauled up from the coast on tractor sleds during the month of July was deep-sunk in a great oblong hole that had been gouged out from the surface of the icecap, so that only the top few inches of its flat roof projected above ground level. The trap-door, hinged at both ends so that it could open either upwards or downwards, was reached by a short steep flight of steps.
I climbed the first two of these, took down the wooden mallet that hung there permanently by the wall and pounded round the already bruised and splintered edges of the trap to loosen the ice that held it locked fast. This was an almost invariable routine: whenever the trap had previously been opened for any length of time at all, the layer of warm air that always lay under the roof seeped slowly out, melting the surrounding snow – which promptly turned to ice when the trap was closed again.
Tonight the ice cracked easily. I got my shoulder under the trap, levered upwards against the accumulated drift of snow above, and scrambled out.
I was prepared for what awaited me up top-the gasping, panic-stricken feeling of suffocation as the warm air was sucked from my lungs by that deadly, numbing cold – but even so I wasn’t sufficiently prepared. The wind speed was far higher than I had feared. Bent double and coughing violently, breathing shallowly to avoid frosting my lungs, I turned my back to the wind, breathed into my reindeer gloves, slipped on my snow-mask and goggles and straightened. Jackstraw was already standing by my side.
The wind on the ice-cap never howled or shrieked. It moaned, instead, a low-pitched, unutterably eerie ululation: a requiem for the damned, if ever there was one, the agony of some soul lost in torment. That same moan had driven men mad before now: less than two months previously I had had to send our tractor mechanic, a completely broken youngster who had lost all contact with the last shadow of reality, back to our Uplavnik base. The wind had done that to him.
Tonight its desolate threnody boomed and faded, boomed and faded in the lower registers of sound with an intensity which I had seldom heard, while its fingers plucked at the tightly strung guy ropes of the radio antenna and instrument shelters to provide its own whistling obbligato of unearthly music. But I was in no mood then to listen to its music, and, indeed, that sepulchral wailing was not the dominant sound on the ice-cap that night.
The throbbing roar of big aero engines, surging and receding, as the wind gusted and fell away, like surf on some distant shore, was very close now. The sound lay to windward of us at that moment, and we turned to face it, but we were blind. Although the sky was overcast, there was no snow that night – at any time, heavy snowfalls, strangely enough, are all but unknown on the Greenland ice-cap – but the air was full of millions of driving, needle-pointed ice spicules that swept towards us out of the impenetrable darkness to the east, clogging up our goggles in a matter of seconds and stinging the narrow exposed area of my face between mask and goggles like a thousand infuriated hornets. A sharp, exquisite pain, a pain that vanished almost in the moment of arrival as the countless sub-zero spicules dug deep with their anæsthetising needles and drove out all sensation from the skin. But I knew this ominous absence of feeling all too well. Once again I turned my back to the wind, kneaded the deadened flesh with mittened hands till the blood came throbbing back, then pulled my snow-mask higher still.
The plane was flying in an anti-clockwise direction, following, it seemed, the path of an irregular oval, for the sound of its motors faded slightly as it curved round to north and west. But within thirty seconds it was approaching again, in a swelling thunder of sound, to the south-west – to the leeward of us, that was – and I could tell from Jackstraw’s explosive ejaculation of sound, muffled behind his mask, that he had seen it at the same moment as myself.
It was less than half a mile distant, no more than five hundred feet above the ice-cap, and during the five seconds it remained inside my line of vision I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thud heavily in my chest. No SAC bomber this, nor a Thule met. plane, both with crews highly trained in the grim craft of Arctic survival. That long row of brightly illuminated cabin windows could belong to only one thing – a trans-Atlantic or trans-polar airliner.
‘You saw it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw’s snow-mask was close to my ear.
‘I saw it.’ It was all I could think to say. But what I was seeing then was not the plane, now again vanished into the flying ice and drift, but the inside of the plane, with the passengers – God, how many passengers, fifty, seventy? – sitting in the cosy security of their pressurised cabin with an air-conditioned temperature of 70°F, then the crash, the tearing, jagged screeching that set the teeth on edge as the thin metal shell ripped along its length and the tidal wave of that dreadful cold, 110 degrees below cabin temperature, swept in and engulfed the survivors, the dazed, the injured, the unconscious and the dying as they sat or lay crumpled in the wreckage of the seats, clad only in thin suits and dresses …
The plane had completed a full circuit and was coming round again. If anything, it was even closer this time, at least a hundred feet lower, and it seemed to have lost some speed. It might have been doing 120, perhaps 130 miles an hour, I was no expert in these things, but for that size of plane, so close to the ground, it seemed a dangerously low speed. I wondered just how effective the pilot’s windscreen wipers would be against these flying ice spicules.
And then I forgot all about that, forgot all about everything except the desperate, urgent need for speed. Just before the plane had turned round to the east again and so out of the line of our blinded vision, it had seemed to dip and at the same instant two powerful lights stabbed out into the darkness, the one lancing straight ahead, a narrow powerful beam glittering and gleaming with millions of sparkling diamond points of flame as the ice-crystals in the air flashed across its path, the other, a broader fan of light, pointing downwards and only slightly ahead, its oval outline flitting across the frozen snow like some flickering will o’ the wisp. I grabbed Jackstraw’s arm and put my head close to his.
‘He’s going to land! He’s looking for a place to put down. Get the dogs, harness them up.’ We had a tractor, but heaven only knew how long it would have taken to start it on a night like this. ‘I’ll give you a hand as soon as I can.’
He nodded, turned and was lost to sight in a moment. I turned too, cursed as my face collided with the slatted sides of the instrument shelter, then jumped for the hatch, sliding down to the floor of the cabin on back and arms without bothering to use the steps. Joss, already completely clad in his furs but with the hood of his parka hanging over his shoulders, was just emerging from the food and fuel tunnel which led off from the other end of the cabin, his arms loaded with equipment.
‘Grab all the warm clothing you can find, Joss,’ I told him quickly. I was trying to think as quickly and coherently as I was talking, to figure out everything that we might require, but it wasn’t easy, that intense cold numbed the mind almost as much as it did the body. ‘Sleeping-bags, blankets, spare coats, shirts, it doesn’t matter whose they are. Shove them into a couple of gunny sacks.’
‘You think they’re going to land, sir?’ Curiosity, anticipation, horror – each struggled for supremacy in the thin, dark intelligent face. ‘You really think so?’
‘I think they’re going to try. What have you got there?’
‘Fire bombs, a couple of Pyrenes.’ He dumped them by the stove. ‘Hope they’re not solid.’
‘Good boy. And a couple of the tractor extinguishers – the Nu-Swifts, G-1000, I think.’ A great help these little things are going to be, I thought, if several thousand gallons of petrol decide to go up in flames. ‘Fire axes, crowbars, canes, the homing spool – for heaven’s sake don’t forget the homing spool – and the searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well.’
‘Bandages?’
‘No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?’
‘Full. But more ice than water.’
‘Put them on the stove – and don’t forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave.’ Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. ‘Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter.’
I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness.
‘How’s it coming?’ I shouted.
‘Easy.’ I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. ‘I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great help – he’s in a very bad temper at being woken up.’
Balto was Jackstraw’s lead dog – a huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of ‘25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw’s Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master – although not above baring his wolf’s fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time-and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority now – snarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy.
‘I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll get the searchlight.’ I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind.
‘The plane – have you heard the plane, Jackstraw? I can’t hear a thing.’
Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood.
‘My God!’ I looked at him. ‘Maybe they’ve crashed already’
Again the shake of the head.
‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘On a night like this you wouldn’t hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind.’
‘I’d have felt it, Dr Mason.’
I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in ever-widening circles trying to pick up our lights again, but at least there was hope yet.
I hurried across to where the tractor, sheeted in tarpaulin, lay close in to the high snow wall that had been cut down the middle of the drift. It took me a couple of minutes to clear away the accumulated snow at one end and wriggle in under the tarpaulin. There was no question of trying to lift it – its impregnated oils had frozen solid and it would have cracked and torn under any pressure.
The searchlight, fixed to a couple of bolts on the tractor bonnet, was held down by two quick-release butterfly nuts. In these latitudes, quick-release was a misnomer: the nuts invariably froze after even the briefest exposure. The accepted practice was to remove one’s gloves and close mittened hands round the nuts until body heat warmed and expanded them enough to permit unscrewing. But there was no time for that tonight: I tapped the bolts with a spanner from the tool box and the steel pins, made brittle by the intense cold, sheared as if made from the cheapest cast iron.
I crawled out at the foot of the tarpaulin, searchlight clutched under one arm, and as soon as I straightened I heard it again – the roar of aero engines, closing rapidly. They sounded very near, very low, but I wasted no time trying to locate the plane. Head lowered against the wind and the needle-sharp lances of the flying ice, I felt rather than saw my way back to the cabin hatch and was brought up short by Jackstraw’s steadying hand. He and Joss were busy loading equipment aboard the sledge and lashing it down, and as I stooped to help them something above my head fizzled and spluttered into a blinding white glare that threw everything into a harsh black and white relief of frozen snow and impenetrable shadow. Joss, remembering what I had completely forgotten – that dousing our cabin lights would have robbed the pilot of his beacon – had ignited a magnesium flare in the slats of the instrument shelter.
We all turned as the plane came into our vision again, to the south, and it was at once apparent why we had lost all sight and sound of it. The pilot must have made a figure of eight turn out in the darkness, had reversed his approach circle, and was flying from east to west: less than two hundred feet up, undercarriage still retracted, it passed within a couple of hundred yards of us like some monstrous bird. Both headlights were now dipped, the twin beams a glitter of kaleidoscopic light in the ice-filled darkness of the sky, the twin oval pools of light interlocking now and very bright, racing neck and neck across the snow. And then these pools, increasing as rapidly in size as they diminished in strength, slipped away to the left as the plane banked sharply to the right and came curving round clockwise to the north. I knew now what the pilot was intending and my hands clenched helplessly inside mittens and gloves. But there was nothing I could do about this.
‘The antenna!’ I shouted. ‘Follow out the line of the antenna.’ I stooped and gave the sledge its initial shove as Jackstraw shouted at Balto. Joss was by my side, head close to mine.
‘What’s happening? Why are we—’
‘He’s coming down this time. I’m sure of it. To the north.’
‘The north?’ Not even the snow-mask could hide the horror in his voice. ‘He’ll kill himself. He’ll kill all of them. The hummocks—’
‘I know.’ The land to the north-east was broken and uneven, the ice raised up by some quirk of nature into a series of tiny hillocks, ten, twenty feet high, tiny but the only ones within a hundred miles. ‘But he’s going to do it, all the same. A belly landing with the wheels up. That’s why he reversed his circle. He wants to land upwind to give himself the minimum stalling ground speed.’
‘He could land to the south, into the wind.’ Joss sounded almost desperate. ‘It’s a billiard table there.’
‘He could, but he won’t.’ I had to shout the words to make myself heard above the wind. ‘He’s nobody’s fool. He knows if he lands to windward of us, even a hundred yards to windward, the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don’t exist. He’s got to land upwind. He’s just got to.’
There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist level against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again.
‘Maybe he’ll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can—’
‘He’ll never see them,’ I said flatly. ‘Flying into this stuff he can’t possibly see a hundred yards in front of him.’
The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feet – the antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged.
Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on the vanishing plane and was literally blown head over heels by the tremendous slipstream from the four great propellers, slid helplessly across the frozen crust of the snow and fetched up on my back almost twenty feet from where I had been standing. Cursing, bruised and not a little dazed, I got to my feet again, started off in the direction where I could hear the dogs barking and howling in a paroxysm of fear and excitement, then stopped abruptly and stood quite still. The engines had died, all four of them had died in an instant, and that could mean only one thing: the airliner was about to touch down.
Even with the realisation a jarring vibration, of a power and intensity far beyond anything I had expected, reached my feet through the frozen crust of the ice-cap. No ordinary touchdown that, I knew, not even for a belly landing: the pilot must have overestimated his height and set his ship down with force enough to crumple the fuselage, to wreck the plane on the spot.
But he hadn’t. I was prone to the frozen snow again, ear pressed hard against it, and I could half hear, half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn’t be sure – six seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, by far more severe than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silence – a silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all.
Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-mask-it must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parka – it was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enough – and probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn’t like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin.
Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them.
‘You all right, sir?’ Joss asked. He took a step closer. ‘Good lord, you’ve lost your mask!’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’ It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. ‘Did you get a bearing on that plane?’
‘Roughly. Due east, I should say.’
‘Jackstraw?’
‘A little north of east, I think.’ He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind.
‘We’ll go east.’ Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. ‘We’ll go east – Joss, how long is that spool?’
‘Four hundred yards. More or less.’
‘So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we’ll cut across them. Let’s hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here.’
I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathers – weird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leeward – and made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fast – our lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen névé that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor.
We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring.
Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs.
The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-cap – if there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100°F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And even if we did get them all back, how to feed them – for our own supplies were already dangerously low? And where, in heaven’s name, were we going to put them all?
Jackstraw’s shout checked me so suddenly that I stumbled and all but fell. I turned back, and Joss came running up.
‘The end of the line?’ I asked.
He nodded, flashed a torch in my face. ‘Your nose and cheek – both gone. They look bad.’
Gloves off, I kneaded my face vigorously with my mittened hands until I felt the blood pounding painfully back, then took the old jersey which Jackstraw dug out from a gunny sack and wrapped it round my face. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
We struck off to the north, with the wind on our right cheeks – I had no option but to gamble on the hope that the wind had neither backed nor veered – our torches probing the ground in front of us, stopping every fifteen or twenty feet to drive a pointed bamboo marker into the frozen ground. We had covered fifty yards without sighting anything, and I was just beginning to become convinced that we must still be well to the west of the plane’s touchdown point and wondering what in the world we should do next when we almost literally stumbled into an eighteen inch deep, ten foot wide depression in the snow-crust of the ice-cap.
This was it, no question about that. By a one in a hundred chance we had hit on the very spot where the plane had touched down – or crashed down, if the size of the depression in that frozen snow were anything to go by. To the left, the west, the ground was virginal, unmarked – ten feet to that side and we should have missed it altogether. To the east, the deep depression shelved rapidly upwards, its smooth convexity now marred by two large gouge marks, one in the centre and one to the right of the track, as if a pair of gigantic ploughs had furrowed through the ground: part of the under fuselage must have been ripped open by the impact – it would have been a wonder had it not been. Some way farther to the east, and well to the right of the main track, two other grooves, parallel and of a shallow bowl shape, had been torn in the snow. The gouge marks, plainly, of the still-racing propellers: the plane must have tilted over on its right wing just after the moment of landing.
To see all this took no longer than to sweep a torch through a swift semi-circle. I shouted to Joss to take another bundle of canes and prop up the homing spool line that led back to the antenna-if this weren’t done it would drift over and be lost to sight in ten minutes – and then rejoin us: then I turned and ran after Jackstraw who had already urged his team forwards and eastwards along the track of the crashed plane.
The wind was worse than ever, the drift an almost solid wall that reduced our speed to a lurching stumble and forced us to lean far into it to maintain our balance. Two hundred yards, three hundred, and then, almost a quarter of a mile from where it had touched down we found the airliner simply by walking straight into it. It had slewed almost 90 degrees as it had come to a halt, and was lying square across its own path, still resting on even keel.
In the feeble light of my torch the airliner, even although its fuselage rested on the ground, seemed immensely high and to stretch away for a vast distance on either side, but for all its great size there was something peculiarly pathetic and forlorn about it. But this, of course, was purely subjective, the knowledge in my own mind that this crippled giant would never leave here again.
I could hear no movement, see no movement. High above my head a faint blue light seemed to glow behind some of the cabin windows but apart from that there was no sign of life at all.
TWO Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m. (#ulink_da6e20c1-d35f-5083-96e6-a72b22c7103e)
My greatest fear had already proved groundless-there was no sign of fire anywhere, no flickering red to see, no hidden crackling to hear. It was still possible that some small tongue of flame was creeping along inside the fuselage or wings looking for the petrol or oil that would help it blaze into destructive life – and with that wind to fan the flames, destruction would have been complete – but it hardly seemed worth worrying about: and it was unlikely that any pilot cool-headed enough to turn off the ignition would have forgotten to shut down the petrol lines.
Already Jackstraw had plugged our searchlight into the dry battery and handed me the lamp. I pressed the switch, and it worked: a narrow but powerful beam good for six hundred yards in normal conditions. I swung the beam to my right, then brought it slowly forward.
Whatever colours the plane may have had originally, it was impossible to distinguish any of them now. The entire fuselage was already shrouded in a sheet of thin rimed ice, dazzling to the eye, reflecting the light with the intensity, almost, of a chromed mirror. The tail unit was intact. So, too, was the fuselage for half its length, then crumpled and torn underneath, directly opposite the spot where we stood. The left wing was tilted upwards at an angle of about five degrees above the normal – the plane wasn’t on such an even keel as I had first thought. From where I stood this wing blocked off my view of the front, but just above and beyond it I saw something that made me temporarily forget the urgency of my concern for those inside and stand there, stockstill, the beam trained unwaveringly on that spot.
Even under the coating of ice the big bold lettering ‘BOAC was clearly visible. BOAC! What on earth was a BOAC airliner doing in this part of the world? The SAS and KLM, I knew, operated trans-Arctic flights from Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Winnipeg, Los Angeles and Vancouver via Sondre Strömfjord, about an hour and a half’s flying time away to the south-west on the west coast of Greenland, just on the Arctic Circle, and I was pretty sure that Pan American and Trans World operated reciprocal services on the same route. It was just barely possible that freak weather conditions had forced one of these planes far enough off course to account for its presence here, but if I was right about the BOAC, it just wasn’t possible—
‘I’ve found the door, Dr Mason.’ Jackstraw had taken my arm, jerking me out of my reverie, and was pointing to a big oval door with its lowest point just at our eye-level. ‘We will try these, perhaps?’
I heard the metallic clang as he lifted a couple of crowbars off the sledge, and nodded. We could only try. I set the searchlight on the snow, adjusted it on its gimbals so as to illuminate the door, took one of the crowbars and thrust it beneath the foot of the oval, the flattened end sliding easily between door and fuselage. Jackstraw did the same. We heaved together, but nothing happened. Again we heaved, and again, our feet coming clear of the ground, but the door remained immovable. To localise pressure, we concentrated on one bar, and this time we felt something giving: but it was the lever, not the door. With a pistol-shot crack, the cold-weakened crowbar snapped six inches from the end and we both landed on our backs.
Even the urgency of the moment, my almost complete lack of knowledge about planes, was no excuse. I cursed my stupidity in wasting valuable time trying to force open a massive door locked on the inside by heavy clips designed to withstand an internal pressure of many thousands of pounds, grabbed searchlight and battery, ducked round under the towering tail assembly into the full force of the wind and flying drift and moved forward till I came to the right wing.
Its tip was buried deep under the frozen snow, the airscrew blades bent back at right angles to their normal line. I thought perhaps I might try to scramble up the wing towards the fuselage and smash in one of the cabin windows, but after a couple of seconds wild slithering on the ice-sheeted wing in that gusting gale wind I gave up the idea. To maintain a foothold was quite impossible: besides, it was doubtful whether I could have smashed in a window anyway. Like the door, the windows were designed to withstand great pressures.
Stumbling, slipping, we ran round the buried tip of the wing, and clear in sight now was the ice hummock that had brought the big airliner to its sudden halt. About fifteen feet high and twenty wide at the base, it lay in the right angle formed by the front of the fuselage and the leading edge of the wing. But it wasn’t the root of the wing that had absorbed the initial impact, a glance at the nose of the aircraft was enough to show that. The plane must have crashed into the ice-mound just to right of centre of the control cabin: the windscreens were smashed, the fuselage ripped open and crushed back for six or seven feet. What had happened to the pilot sitting on that side at the moment of the telescopic impact just didn’t bear thinking about: but at least we had found our way in.
I set the searchlight so that its beam illuminated the wrecked control cabin, gauged the distance to the lower sill of the windscreen – it must have been fully nine feet – and jumped. My gloved hands hooked on firmly but slipped almost at once on the ice-rimed surface. I grabbed for a purchase grip on one of the windscreen pillars, felt my fingers striking against solid glass on both sides -the windscreen hadn’t been as completely shattered as I had imagined – and was on the point of losing my hold altogether when Jackstraw moved forward swiftly and took my weight.
With my knees on his shoulders and a fire axe in my hand it took me no more than two minutes to smash away the glass that clung to the pillars and the upper and lower edges. I hadn’t realised that aircraft glass – toughened perspex – could be so tough, nor, when it came to clambering through into the control cabin in my bulky furs, that windscreens could be so narrow.
I landed on top of a dead man. Even in the darkness I knew he was dead. I fumbled under my parka, brought out the torch, switched it on for a couple of seconds, then put it out. It was the co-pilot, the man who had taken the full impact of the crash. He was pinned, crushed between his seat and the twisted, fractured wreckage of what had been control columns, levers and dashboard instruments: not since I had once been called out to the scene of a head-on collision between a racing motor-cyclist and a heavy truck had I seen such dreadful injuries on any man. Whatever any of the survivors, the shocked and injured survivors in the plane, must see, it mustn’t be this. It was ghastly beyond description.
I turned and leaned out the windscreen. Jackstraw was directly below, cupped gloved hands shielding his eyes against the flying ice spicules as he stared upwards.
‘Bring a blanket,’ I shouted. ‘Better, bring a full gunny sack. And the morphia kit. Then come up yourself.’
He was back in twenty seconds. I caught both sack and morphia box, placed them on the twisted cabin floor behind me, then reached out a hand to help Jackstraw, but it wasn’t necessary. Athleticism wasn’t the forte of the short and stocky Greenlanders, but Jackstraw was the fittest and most agile man I had ever met. He sprang, caught the lower sill of the left windscreen in his left hand, the central pillar in the other and swung legs and body through the centre screen as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.
I gave him my torch to hold, rummaged in the gunny sack and dragged out a blanket. I spread it over the dead co-pilot, tucking the corners down among twisted and broken ends of metal, so that it shouldn’t blow free in the icy wind that swirled and gusted through the wrecked control cabin.
‘Waste of a good blanket, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘But – well, it isn’t pretty’
‘It isn’t pretty’ Jackstraw agreed. His voice was quite steady, devoid of all inflection. ‘How about this one?’
I looked across at the left-hand side of the cabin. It was almost completely undamaged and the chief pilot, still strapped in his seat and slumped against his sidescreens, seemed quite unmarked. I stripped fur glove, mitten and silk glove off my right hand, reached out and touched the forehead. We had been out of doors now for over fifteen minutes in that ferocious cold, and I would have sworn that my hand was about as cold as the human flesh could get. But I was wrong. I pulled the gloves back on and turned away, without touching him further. I wasn’t carrying out any autopsies that night.
A few feet farther back we found the radio operator in his compartment. He was half-sitting, half-lying against the for’ard bulkhead of his shack where he must have been catapulted by the crash. His right hand was still clutched firmly round the handgrip of the front panel of his radio set – it must have been ripped clear off the transmitter, which didn’t look as if it would ever transmit anything again.
On the bulkhead, behind his head, blood gleamed dully in the torch-light. I bent over the unconscious man – I could see that he was still breathing – removed my gloves once more and gently slid my fingers behind his head. Just as gently I withdrew them. How the hell, I thought, part hopelessly, part savagely, am I to carry out a head operation on a person with a telescoped occiput: the state he was in, I wouldn’t have given a fig for his chance in the finest operating theatre in London. At the very least he would be blind for life, the sight centre must have been completely destroyed. I reached for his pulse: racing, faint, erratic to a degree. The thought came to me, a thought compounded as much of cowardice as of regret, that in all likelihood the possibility of my having to operate on him was remote, very remote. If he were to survive the inevitably rough handling that would be needed to get him out of that aircraft and then the journey back to the cabin through that ice-laden sub-zero gale, it would be a miracle indeed.
It seemed unlikely that he would ever wake again. But he might, he just conceivably might, so I broached the morphia kit. Then we eased his head and neck into a more comfortable position, covered him with a blanket and left him.
Immediately behind the radio compartment was a long narrow room which extended across two-thirds of the width of the plane. A quick glance at the two chairs and collapsible bunk was enough to show that this must be the crew’s rest room, and someone had been resting there at the moment of the crash. That crumpled shirt-sleeved figure on the floor must have been taken completely unawares, before he had the slightest knowledge of what was happening: and he would never know now.
We found the stewardess in the pantry, lying on her left side on the floor, the outspread black hair fallen forward over her face. She was moaning softly to herself, but it wasn’t the moan of one in pain. Her pulse was steady enough, but fast. Jackstraw stooped down beside me.
‘Shall we lift her, Dr Mason?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘She’s coming to, I think, and she can tell us far quicker than we can find out whether there’s anything broken. Another blanket, and we’ll let her be. Almost certainly someone much more in need of our attention.’
The door leading into the main passenger compartment was locked. At least, it appeared to be, but I was pretty certain it would never be locked under normal circumstances. Perhaps it had been warped by the impact of landing. It was no time for half measures. Together, we took a step back, then flung all the weight of our shoulders against it. It gave suddenly, three or four inches, and at the same time we heard a sharp exclamation of pain from the other side.
‘Careful!’ I warned, but Jackstraw had already eased his weight. I raised my voice. ‘Get back from that door, will you? We want to come in.’
We heard a meaningless mutter from the other side, followed by a low groan and the slipping shuffle of someone trying to haul himself to his feet. Then the door opened and we passed quickly inside.
The blast of hot air struck me in the face like an almost physical blow. I gasped, fought off a passing moment of weakness when my legs threatened to give under me, then recovered sufficiently to bang the door shut behind me. With the motors dead and the arctic chill striking through the thin steel of the fuselage this warmth, no matter how efficient the cabin insulation, wouldn’t last long: but while it did, it might be the saving of all those who still lived. A thought struck me and, ignoring the man who stood swaying before me, one hand clutching a seat grip for support, the other rubbing at a blood-masked forehead, I turned to Jackstraw.
‘Carry the stewardess in here. We’ll take a chance – and it’s not all that much of a chance either. There’s a damned sight more hope for her in here with a broken leg than out there with only a bump on the head. Throw her blanket over the wireless operator – but whatever you do don’t touch him.’
Jackstraw nodded and went out, closing the door quickly behind him. I turned to the man who still stood shakily in the aisle, still dazedly rubbing his hand, a big brown square hand matted on the back with black hair, across a bleeding forehead. He looked at me for a moment, then stared down uncomprehendingly at the blood dripping on to the bright red tie and blue shirt that contrasted so oddly with the light grey gaberdine suit. He closed his eyes tightly, then shook his head to clear it.
‘Sorry to ask the inevitable question.’ The voice was quiet, deep, well under control. ‘But – what happened?’
‘You crashed,’ I said shortly. ‘What do you remember?’
‘Nothing. Well, that is, just a bump, then a loud screeching tearing noise—’
‘Then you hit the door.’ I gestured at the bloodstains behind me. ‘Sit down for a moment. You’ll be all right.’ I’d lost interest in him and was staring down the length of the cabin. I’d expected to see most of the seats wrenched off their bases, but instead they were all there exactly as they should have been, three wide to the left of me, two to the right, the seats in the front half facing aft, those to the rear facing forward. More than that, I had expected to see people, injured, broken and moaning people, flung all over the seats and aisles: but the big passenger compartment seemed almost empty, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard.
But it wasn’t empty, not quite. Apart from the man by my side there were, I found, nine others altogether. Two men lay in the front part of the aisle. One, a big broad-shouldered man with curly dark hair, was propped up on an elbow, staring around him with a puzzled frown on his face; near him, lying on his side, was a smaller, much older man, but all I could see of him were a few wisps of black hair plastered across a bald head, a Glenurquhart plaid jacket that seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and the loudest check tie it had ever been my misfortune to see. It seemed obvious that they had been sitting together in the left-hand seat adjacent to them and had been flung out when the plane crashed into the ice-mound and slewed violently to one side.
In the seat beyond that, also on the left, a man sat by himself. My first reaction was surprise that he, too, hadn’t been hurled into the aisle, but then I saw that he was awake and fully conscious. He was sitting rigidly in his seat, pressed in hard against the window, legs braced on the floor, holding on with both hands to the table fixed to the seat in front: tautened tendons ridged the backs of his thin white hands, and his knuckles gleamed in the torch-light. I lifted the beam higher, saw that he was wearing a close-fitting clerical collar.
‘Relax, Reverend,’ I said soothingly. ‘Terra firma once more, and this is as far as you are going.’ He said nothing, just stared at me through rimless glasses, so I left him. He seemed unhurt.
Four people sat in the right-hand side of the front part of the plane, each one in a window seat; two women, two men. One of the women was fairly elderly, but so heavily made-up and with her hair so expensively dyed and marcelled that I couldn’t have guessed her age within ten years: her face, somehow, seemed vaguely familiar. She was awake, and looking slowly about her, her eyes empty of understanding. So, too, was the woman in the next seat, an even more expensive-looking creature with a mink coat flung cape-wise over her shoulders to show a simple green jersey dress that I suspected cost a small fortune: she was about twenty-five, I guessed, and with her blonde hair, grey eyes and perfect features would have been one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, if it weren’t for the overfull and rather sulky mouth. Maybe, I thought uncharitably, she remembered to do something about that mouth when she was fully awake. But right then, she wasn’t fully awake: none of them was, they all behaved as if they were being dragged up from the depths of an exhausting sleep.
Still more asleep than awake were the other two men in the front, one a big, burly, high-coloured man of about fifty-five, with the gleaming thick white hair and moustache of the caricature of a Dixie colonel: the other was a thin elderly man, his face heavily lined, unmistakably Jewish.
Not bad going so far, I thought with relief. Eight people, and only one cut forehead among the lot of them – the perfect argument, if ever there was one, for having all seats in a plane face towards the rear. No question but that they all owed, if not their lives, at least their immunity to injury to the fact that their high-backed seats had almost completely cushioned and absorbed the shock of impact.
The two passengers in the rear end of the cabin were the perfect argument for not having the seat face forward. The first I came to – a brown-haired young girl of about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a belted raincoat – was lying on the floor between two seats. She was stirring, and as I put my hands under her arms to help her up, she screamed in sudden pain. I changed my grip and lifted her gently on to the seat.
‘My shoulder.’ Her voice was low and husky. ‘It is very sore.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ I’d eased back the blouse at the neck and closed it again. ‘Your clavicle – the collar-bone – is gone. Just sit there and hold your left arm in your right hand … yes, so. I’ll strap you up later. You won’t feel a thing, I promise you.’
She smiled at me, half-timidly, half-gratefully, and said nothing. I left her, went to the very rear seat in the plane, stooped to examine the man there then straightened in almost the same instant: the weirdly unnatural angle of the head on the shoulders made any examination superfluous.
I turned and walked forward, everybody was awake now, sitting upright or struggling dazedly to their feet, their half-formed questions as dazed as the expressions on their faces. I ignored them for a moment, looked questioningly at Jackstraw as he came through the forward door, closely followed by Joss.
‘She won’t come.’ Jackstraw jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’s awake, but she won’t leave the wireless operator.’
‘She’s all right?’
‘Her back hurts, I think. She wouldn’t say.’
I made no answer and moved across to the main door – the one we’d failed to open from the outside. I supposed it no business of mine if the stewardess chose to devote her attention to a member of the crew instead of to the passengers who were her charges. But it was damned queer all the same – almost as queer as the fact that though the inevitability of the crash must have been known for at least fifteen minutes before the actual event, not one of the ten passengers in the cabin had been wearing a seat-belt – and the stewardess, wireless operator and the crew member in the rest room appeared to have been caught completely unprepared.
The circular door handle refused to budge. I called Jackstraw, but even the extra weight made not the slightest impression on it. Obviously, it was immovably jammed – there must have been a slight telescoping effect along the entire length of the fuselage as the plane had crashed into the ice-mound. If the door I had noticed behind the control cabin was as badly warped as this one -and, being nearer the point of impact, it almost inevitably would be – then they’d all have to leave via the windscreens of the control cabin. I thought of the wireless operator with his dreadful head wound and wondered bleakly whether even trying to move him out could be more than a futile gesture, anyway.
A figure barred my way as I turned from the door. It was the white-haired, white-moustached Dixie colonel. His face was dark red, his eyes light blue, choleric and protuberant. It only required someone to get this man good and mad and he would be no more than a debit entry in the account book of some life assurance company. And he seemed good and mad now.
‘What’s happened? What in the devil is all this?’ He had a voice like a Dixie colonel too, the Mason-Dixon line lay far to the north of wherever he had been born. ‘We’ve landed. Why? What are we doing here? What’s the noise outside? And -and who in the name of heaven are you?’
A big business tycoon, I thought wryly, with money enough and power enough to indulge an obviously over-generous capacity for righteous indignation: if I was going to meet any trouble, it wasn’t hard to guess the direction it was going to come from. But, right then, there was some excuse for his attitude: I wondered how I would have felt if I had gone to sleep in a trans-Atlantic airliner and woken up to find myself landed in the freezing middle of nowhere with three fur-clad people, complete with snow-goggles and snow-masks, waddling about the aisle of the plane.
‘You’ve crash-landed,’ I said briefly. ‘I don’t know why – how the hell should I? The noise outside is an ice-blizzard rattling against the fuselage. As for us, we are scientists managing an International Geophysical Year station half a mile from here. We saw and heard you just before you crashed.’
I made to push past him, but he barred my way.
‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ The voice was more authoritative than ever and there was a surprising amount of muscle in that arm across my chest. ‘I think we have a right to know—’
‘Later.’ I knocked his arm away and Jackstraw completed the job by pushing him down into his seat. ‘Don’t make a damned nuisance of yourself. There’s a critically injured man who has to have attention, and at once. We’ll take him to safety and then come back for you. Keep the door shut.’ I was addressing all of them now, but the white-haired man’s wrathful spluttering attracted my attention again. ‘And if you don’t shut up and cooperate, you can stay here. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead, stiff as a board, in a couple of hours. Maybe you will be yet.’
I moved up the aisle, followed by Jackstraw. The young man who had been lying on the floor pulled himself on to a seat, and he grinned at me as I passed.
‘How to win friends and influence people.’ He had a slow cultured drawl. ‘I fear you have offended our worthy friend.’
‘I fear I have.’ I smiled, passed by, then turned. These wide shoulders and large capable hands could be more than useful to us. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Recoverin’ rapidly.’
‘You are indeed. You didn’t look so good a minute ago.’
‘Just takin’ a long count,’ he said easily. ‘Can I help?’
‘That’s why I asked,’ I nodded.
‘Glad to oblige.’ He heaved himself to his feet, towering inches above me. The little man in the loud tie and the Glenurquhart jacket gave an anguished sound, like the yelp of an injured puppy.
‘Careful, Johnny, careful!’ The voice, the rich, nasal and rather grating twang, was pure Bowery. ‘We got our responsibilities, boy, big commitments. We might strain a ligament—’
‘Relax, Solly’ The big man patted him soothingly on his bald head. ‘Just takin’ a little walk to clear my head.’
‘Not till you put this parka and pants on first.’ I’d no time to bother about the eccentricities of little men in loud jackets and louder ties. ‘You’ll need them.’
‘Cold doesn’t bother me, friend.’
‘This cold will. Outside that door it’s 110 degrees below the temperature of this cabin.’
I heard a murmur of astonishment from some of the passengers, and the large young man, suddenly thoughtful, took the clothes from Jackstraw. I didn’t wait until he had put them on, but went out with Joss.
The stewardess was bent low over the injured wireless operator. I pulled her gently to her feet. She offered no resistance, just looked wordlessly at me, the deep brown eyes huge in a face dead-white and strained with shock. She was shivering violently. Her hands were like ice.
‘You want to die of cold, Miss?’ This was no time for soft and sympathetic words, and I knew these girls were trained how to behave in emergencies. ‘Haven’t you got a hat, coat, boots, anything like that?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was dull, almost devoid of life. She was standing alone by the door now, and I could hear the violent rat-a-tat of her elbow as it shook uncontrollably and knocked against the door. ‘I’ll go and get them.’
Joss scrambled out through the windscreen to get the collapsible stretcher. While we were waiting I went to the exit door behind the flight deck and tried to open it, swinging at it with the back of my fire axe. But it was locked solid.
We had the stretcher up and were lashing the wireless operator inside as carefully as we could in these cramped conditions, when the stewardess reappeared. She was wearing her uniform heavy coat now, and high boots. I tossed her a pair of caribou trousers.
‘Better, but not enough. Put these on.’ She hesitated, and I added roughly, ‘We won’t look.’
‘I – I must go and see the passengers.’
‘They’re all right. Bit late in thinking about it, aren’t you?’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t leave him.’ She looked down at the young man at her feet. ‘Do you – I mean—’ She broke off, then it came out with a rush. ‘Is he going to die?’
‘Probably,’ I said, and she flinched away as if I had struck her across the face. I hadn’t meant to be brutal, just clinical.
‘We’ll do what we can for him. It’s not much, I’m afraid.’
Finally we had him securely lashed to the stretcher, his head cushioned against the shock as best we could. When I got to my feet, the stewardess was just pulling her coat down over the caribou pants.
‘We’re taking him back to our cabin,’ I said. ‘We have a sledge below. There’s room for another. You could protect his head. Want to come?’
‘The passengers—’ she began uncertainly.
‘They’ll be all right.’
I went back inside the main cabin, closing the door behind me, and handed my torch to the man with the cut brow. The two feeble night or emergency lights that burned inside were poor enough for illumination, worse still for morale.
‘We’re taking the wireless operator and stewardess with us,’ I explained. ‘Back in twenty minutes. And if you want to live, just keep this door tight shut.’
‘What an extraordinarily brusque young man,’ the elderly lady murmured. Her voice was low-pitched, resonant, with an extraordinary carrying power.
Only from necessity, madam,’ I said dryly. ‘Would you really prefer long-winded and flowery speeches the while you were freezing to death?’
‘Well, do you know, I really don’t think I would,’ she answered mock-seriously, and I could hear her chuckling – there was no other word for it – as I closed the door behind me.
Working in the cramped confines of that wrecked control cabin, in almost pitch darkness and with that ice-laden bitter gale whistling through the shattered windscreens, we had the devil’s own time of it trying to get the injured wireless operator down to that waiting sledge below. Without the help of the big young stranger I don’t think we would ever have managed it, but manage it we eventually did: he and I lowered and slid the stretcher down to Jackstraw and Joss, who took and strapped it on the sledge. Then we eased the stewardess down: I thought I heard her cry out as she hung supported only by a hand round either wrist, and remembered that Jack-straw had said something about her back being injured. But there was no time for such things now.
I jumped down and a couple of seconds later the big young man joined me. I hadn’t intended that he should come, but there was no harm in it: he had to go sometime, and there was no question of his having to ride on the sledge.
The wind had eased a little, perhaps, but the cold was crueller than ever. Even the dogs cowered miserably in the lee of the plane: now and again one of them stretched out a neck in protest and gave its long, mournful wolf call, a sound eerie beyond description. But their misery was all to the good: as Jackstraw said, they were mad to run.
And, with the wind and ice-drift behind them, run they did. At first I led the way with the torch, but Balto, the big lead dog, brushed me aside and raced on into the darkness: I had sense enough to let him have his head. He followed the twisting route of the plane’s snow-furrow, the bamboos, homing spool and antenna line as swiftly and unerringly as if it had been broad daylight, and the polished steel runners of the sledge fairly hissed across the snow. The frozen ground was smooth and flat as river ice; no ambulance could have carried the wireless operator as comfortably as our sledge did that night.
It took us no more than five minutes to reach the cabin, and in three more minutes we were on our way again. They were a busy three minutes. Jackstraw lit the oil stove, oil lamp and Colman pressure lamp, while Joss and I put the injured man on a collapsible cot before the stove, worked him into my sleeping-bag, slid in half a dozen heat pads – waterproof pads containing a chemical which gave off heat when water was added -placed a rolled up blanket under his neck to keep the back of his head off the cot, and zipped the sleeping-bag shut. I had surgical instruments enough to do what had to be done, but it had to wait: not so much because we had others still to rescue, urgent enough though that was, but the man lying at our feet, so still, so ashen-faced, was suffering so severely from shock and exposure that to touch him would have been to kill him: I was astonished that he had managed to survive even this long.
I told the stewardess to make some coffee, gave her the necessary instructions, and then we left her and the big young man together: the girl heating a pan over a pile of meta tablets, the young man staring incredulously into a mirror as he kneaded a frost-bitten cheek and chin with one hand, and with another held a cold compress to a frozen ear. We took with us the warm clothes we had lent them, some rolls of bandages, and left.
Ten minutes later we were back inside the plane. Despite its insulation, the temperature inside the main cabin had already dropped at least thirty degrees and almost everyone was shivering with the cold, one or two beating their arms to keep themselves warm. Even the Dixie colonel was looking very subdued. The elderly lady, fur coat tightly wrapped around her, looked at her watch and smiled.
‘Twenty minutes, exactly. You are very prompt, young man.’
‘We try to be of service.’ I dumped the pile of clothes I was carrying on a seat, nodded at them and the contents of a gunny sack Joss and Jackstraw were emptying. ‘Share these out between you and be as quick as you can. I want you to get out at once – my two friends here will take you back. Perhaps one of you will be kind enough to remain behind.’ I looked to where the young girl still sat alone in her back seat, still holding her left forearm in her hand. ‘I’ll need some help to fix this young lady up.’
‘Fix her up?’ It was the expensive young woman in the expensive furs speaking for the first time. Her voice was expensive as the rest of her and made me want to reach for a hairbrush. ‘Why? What on earth is the matter with her?’
‘Her collar-bone is broken,’ I said shortly.
‘Collar-bone broken?’ The elderly lady was on her feet, her face a nice mixture of concern and indignation. ‘And she’s been sitting there alone all this time – why didn’t you tell us, you silly man?’
‘I forgot,’ I replied mildly. ‘Besides, what good would it have done?’ I looked down at the girl in the mink coat. Goodness only knew that I didn’t particularly want her, but the injured girl had struck me as being almost painfully shy, and I was sure she’d prefer to have one of her own sex around. ‘Would you like to give me a hand?’
She stared at me, a cold surprised stare that would have been normal enough had I made some outrageous or improper request, but before she could answer the elderly lady broke in again.
‘I’ll stay behind. I’d love to help.’
‘Well—’ I began doubtfully, but she interrupted immediately.
‘Well yourself. What’s the matter? Think I’m too old, hey?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ I protested.
‘A fluent liar, but a gallant one.’ She grinned. ‘Come on, we’re wasting this valuable time you’re always so concerned about.’
We brought the girl into the first of the rear seats, where there was plenty of space between that and the first of the rearward facing front seats, and had just worked her coat off when Joss called me.
‘We’re off now, sir. Back in twenty minutes.’
As the door closed behind the last of them and I broke open a roll of bandage, the old lady looked quizzically at me.
‘Know what you’re doing, young man?’
‘More or less. I’m a doctor.’
‘Doctor, hey?’ She looked at me with open suspicion, and what with my bulky, oil-streaked and smelly furs, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t shaved for three days, I suppose there was justification enough for it. ‘You sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure,’ I said irritably. ‘What do you expect me to do – whip my medical degree out from under this parka or just wear round my neck a brass plate giving my consulting hours?’
‘We’ll get along, young man,’ she chuckled. She patted my arm, then turned to the young girl. ‘What’s your name, my dear?’
‘Helene.’ We could hardly catch it, the voice was so low: her embarrassment was positively painful.
‘Helene? A lovely name.’ And indeed, the way she said it made it sound so. ‘You’re not British, are you? Or American?’
‘I’m from Germany, madam.’
‘Don’t call me “madam”. You know, you speak English beautifully. Germany, hey? Bavaria, for a guess?’
‘Yes.’ The rather plain face was transfigured in a smile, and I mentally saluted the old lady for the ease with which she was distracting the young girl’s thoughts from the pain. ‘Munich. Perhaps you know it?’
‘Like the back of my hand,’ she said complacently. ‘And not just the Hofbrauhaus either. You’re still very young, aren’t you?’
‘I’m seventeen.’
‘Seventeen.’ A nostalgic sigh. ‘Ah, my dear, I remember when I was seventeen. A different world. There was no trans-Atlantic airliner in those days, I can tell you.’
‘In fact,’ I murmured, ‘the Wright brothers were hardly airborne.’ The face had been more than familiar to me, and I was annoyed that I should have taken so long in placing it: I suppose it was because her normal setting was so utterly different from this bleak and frozen world.
‘Being insulting, young man?’ she queried. But there was no offence in her face.
‘I can’t imagine anyone ever insulting you. The world was at your feet even in the Edwardian days, Miss LeGarde.’
‘You know me, then?’ She seemed genuinely pleased.
‘It would be difficult to find anyone who doesn’t know the name of Marie LeGarde.’ I nodded at the young girl. ‘See, Helene knows it too.’ And it was clear from the awe-struck expression on the young German girl’s face that the name meant as much to her as to me. Twenty years queen of the music-hall, thirty years queen of the musical comedy stage, beloved wherever she was known less for her genius than for the innate kindliness and goodness which she tried to conceal from the world with a waspish tongue, for the half-dozen orphanages she maintained in Britain and Europe, Marie LeGarde was one of the few truly international names in the world of entertainment.
‘Yes, yes, I see you know my name.’ Marie LeGarde smiled at me. ‘But how did you know me?’
‘From your photograph, naturally. I saw it in Life the other week, Miss LeGarde.’
‘“Marie”, to my friends.’
‘I don’t know you,’ I protested.
‘I paid a small fortune to have that photograph retouched and made briefly presentable,’ she answered obliquely. ‘It was a splendid photograph, inasmuch as it bore precious little resemblance to the face that I carry about with me. Anyone who recognises me from that is my friend for life. Besides,’ she smiled, ‘I bear nothing but the most amicable feelings towards people who save my life.’
I said nothing, just concentrated on finishing the job of strapping up Helene’s arm and shoulders as quickly as possible: she was blue with cold, and shivering uncontrollably. But she hadn’t uttered a murmur throughout, and smiled gratefully at me when I was finished. Marie LeGarde regarded my handiwork approvingly.
‘I really do believe you have picked up some smattering of your trade along the way, Doctor -ah—’
‘Mason. Peter Mason, Peter to my friends.’
‘“Peter” it shall be. Come on, Helene, into your clothes as fast as you like.’
Fifteen minutes later we were back in the cabin. Jackstraw went to unharness the dogs and secure them to the tethering cable, while Joss and I helped the two women down the ice-coated steps from the trap-door. But I had no sooner reached the foot of the steps than I had forgotten all about Marie LeGarde and Helene and was staring unbelievingly at the tableau before me. I was just vaguely aware of Joss by my shoulder, and anger and dismay on his face slowly giving way to a kind of reluctant horror. For what we saw, though it concerned us all, concerned him most of all.
The injured wireless operator still lay where we had left him. All the others were there too, grouped in a rough semi-circle round him and round a cleared space to the left of the stove. By their feet in the centre of this space, upside down and with one corner completely stove in on the wooden floor, lay the big metal RCA radio transmitter and receiver, our sole source of contact with, our only means of summoning help from the outer world. I knew next to nothing about radios, but it was chillingly obvious to me – as it was, I could see, to the semi-circle of fascinated onlookers – that the RCA was smashed beyond recovery.
THREE Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m. (#ulink_41f0220e-b129-5249-98e3-8db13fd71590)
Half a minute passed in complete silence, half a minute before I could trust myself to speak, even bring myself to speak. When at last I did, my voice was unnaturally low in the unnatural hush that was broken only by the interminable clacking of the anemometer cups above.
‘Splendid. Really splendid. The perfect end to the perfect day.’ I looked round them slowly, one by one, then gestured at the smashed transmitter. ‘What bloody idiot was responsible for this – this stroke of genius?’
‘How dare you, sir!’ The white-haired man whom I had mentally labelled as the Dixie colonel took a step forward, face flushed with anger. ‘Mind your tongue. We’re not children to be—’
‘Shut up!’ I said, quietly enough, but there must have been something in my voice rather less than reassuring, for he fell silent, though his fists still remained clenched. I looked at them all again. ‘Well?’
‘I’m afraid – I’m afraid I did it,’ the stewardess faltered. Her brown eyes were as unnaturally large, her face as white and strained as when I had first seen her. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘You! The one person here who should know just how vital radio really is. I don’t believe it.’
‘You must, I’m afraid.’ The quiet controlled voice belonged to the man with the cut brow. ‘No one else was anywhere near it at the time.’
‘What happened to you?’ I could see he was nursing a bruised and bleeding hand.
‘I dived for it when I saw it toppling.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I should have saved myself the trouble. That damned thing’s heavy.’
‘It’s all that. Thanks for trying anyway. I’ll fix your hand up later.’ I turned to the stewardess again, and not even that pale and exhausted face, the contrition in the eyes, could quieten my anger – and, to be honest, my fear. ‘I suppose it just came to pieces in your hand?’
‘I’ve told you I’m sorry. I – I was just kneeling beside Jimmy here—’
‘Who?’
‘Jimmy Waterman – the Second Officer. I—’
‘Second Officer?’ I interrupted. ‘That’s the radio operator, I take it?’
‘No, Jimmy is a pilot. We’ve three pilots – we don’t carry a radio operator.’
‘You don’t—’ I broke off my surprised question, asked another instead. ‘Who’s the man in the crew rest room? Navigator?’
‘We don’t carry a navigator either. Harry Williamson is – was – the Flight Engineer.’
No wireless operator, no navigator. There had been changes indeed since I’d flown the Atlantic some years previously in a Stratocruiser. I gave it up, returned to my original question and nodded at the smashed RCA.
‘Well, how did it happen?’
‘I brushed the table as I rose and – well, it just fell.’ Her voice trailed off uncertainly.
‘It just fell,’ I echoed incredulously. ‘One hundred and fifty pounds of transmitter and you flicked it off the table just like that?’
‘I didn’t knock it off. The legs collapsed.’
‘It’s got no legs to collapse,’ I said shortly. ‘Hinges.’
‘Well, hinges, then.’
I looked at Joss, who had been responsible for the erection of the table as well as the radio. ‘Is it possible?’
‘No.’ His voice was flat, definite.
Again the silence in the cabin, the hush, the tension that grew from the merely uncomfortable to the all but unbearable. But I was beginning to see that there was nothing to be gained now by further questioning, much to be lost. The radio was wrecked. Finish.
I turned away without a word, hung up my caribou furs on nails on the walls, took off goggles and gloves and turned to the man with the cut brow.
‘Let’s have a look at your head and your hand – it’s a pretty nasty gash on your forehead. Forget the radio for the moment, Joss – let’s have coffee first, lots of it.’ I turned to Jackstraw, who had just come down the steps from the hatch and was staring at the smashed radio. ‘I know, Jackstraw, I know. I’ll explain later – not that I know anything about it. Bring some empty cases for seats out of the food tunnel, will you. And a bottle of brandy. We all need it.’
I’d just started to wash the cut forehead – a nasty gash, as I had said, but surprisingly little signs of bruising – when the big amiable young man who had helped us lower the second officer from the wrecked plane came to us. I looked across up at him, and saw that I could be wrong about the amiability: his face wasn’t exactly hostile, but his eyes had the cool measuring look of one who knew from experience that he could cope with most of the situations, pleasant and unpleasant, that he was ever likely to come up against.
‘Look,’ he began without preamble, ‘I don’t know who you are or what your name is, but I’m sure we are all most grateful to you for what you have done for us. It’s more than probable that we owe our lives to you. We acknowledge that. Also, we know you’re a field scientist, and we realise that your equipment is of paramount importance to you. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ I dabbed iodine fairly liberally on the injured man’s head – he was tough, all right, he didn’t even wince – and looked at the speaker. Not at all a man to ignore, I thought. Behind the strong intelligent face lay a hardness, a tenacity of purpose that hadn’t been acquired along with the cultured relaxed voice at the Ivy League college I was pretty certain he had attended. ‘You’d something else to say?’
‘Yes. We think – correction, I think – that you were unnecessarily rough on our air hostess. You can see the state the poor kid’s in. OK, so your radio’s bust, so you’re hoppin’ mad about it – but there’s no need for all this song and dance.’ His voice was calm, conversational all the time. ‘Radios aren’t irreplaceable. This one will be replaced, I promise you. You’ll have a new one inside a week, ten days at the most.’
‘Kind,’ I said dryly. I finished tying the head bandage and straightened up. ‘The offer is appreciated, but there’s one thing you haven’t taken into account. You may be dead inside that ten days. You may all be dead in ten days.’
‘We may all—’ He broke off and stared at me, his expression perceptibly hardening. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘What I’m talking about is that without this radio you dismiss so lightly your chances – our chances – of survival aren’t all that good. In fact, they’re not good at all. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the radio, as such.’ I eyed him curiously, and a preposterous thought struck me: at least, it was preposterous for all of a couple of
seconds, before the truth hit me. ‘Have you – have any of you any idea just where you are, right here, at the present moment?’
‘Sure we have.’ The young man lifted his shoulders fractionally. ‘Just can’t say how far to the nearest drugstore or pub—’
‘I told them,’ the stewardess interrupted. ‘They were asking me, just before you came in. I thought Captain Johnson had overshot the landing field at Reykjavik in a snowstorm. This is Langjökull, isn’t it?’ She saw the expression on my face and went on hastily. ‘Or Hofsjökull? I mean, we were flying more or less north-east from Gander, and these are the only two snow-fields or glaciers or whatever you call them in Iceland in that direction from—’
‘Iceland?’ I suppose there is a bit of the ham actor in all of us, and I really couldn’t pass it up. ‘Did you say Iceland?’
She nodded, dumbly. Everybody was looking at her, and when she didn’t answer they all transferred their gazes to me, as at the touch of a switch.
‘Iceland,’ I repeated. ‘My dear girl, at the present moment you’re at an altitude of 8500 feet, right slam bang in the middle of the Greenland ice-cap.’
The effect was all that anybody could ever have wished for. I doubt whether even Marie LeGarde had ever had a better reaction from an audience. ‘Stunned’ is an inadequate word to describe their mental state immediately after this announcement: paralysis was nearer it, especially where the power of speech was concerned. And when the power of thought and speech did return, it expressed itself, as I might have expected, in the most violent disbelief. Everybody seemed to start talking at once, but it was the stewardess who took my attention, by coming forward and catching me by the lapels. I noticed the glitter of a diamond ring on her hand, and remember having some vague idea that this was against airline regulations.
‘What kind of joke is this? It can’t be, it can’t be! Greenland – it just can’t be.’ She saw by the expression on my face that I wasn’t joking, and her grip tightened even more. I had just time to be conscious of two conflicting thoughts – that, wide with fear and dismay though they might be, she had the most extraordinarily beautiful brown eyes and, secondly, that the BOAC were slipping in their selection of stewardesses whose calmness in emergency was supposed to match the trim-ness of their appearance – then she rushed on wildly.
‘How – how can it be? We were on a Gander-Reykjavik flight. Greenland – we don’t go anywhere near it. And there’s the automatic pilot, and radio beams and – and radio base checks every half-hour. Oh, it’s impossible, it’s impossible! Why do you tell us this?’ She was shaking now, whether from nervous strain or cold I had no idea: the big young man with the Ivy League accent put an arm awkwardly round her shoulder, and I saw her wince. Something indeed seemed to be hurting her – but again it could wait.
‘Joss,’ I called. He looked up from the stove, where he was pouring coffee into mugs. ‘Tell our friends where we are.’
‘Latitude 72.40 north, longitude 40.10 east,’ Joss said unemotionally. His voice cut clearly through the hubbub of incredulous conversation. ‘Three hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Near enough 800 miles from Reykjavik, 1000 from Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland, and just a little further distant from the North Pole. And if anyone doesn’t believe us, sir, I suggest they just take a walk – in any direction – and they’ll find out who’s right.’
Joss’s calm, matter-of-fact statement was worth half an hour of argument and explanation. In a moment, conviction was complete – and there were more problems than ever to be answered. I held up my hand in mock protest and protection against the waves of questions that surged against me from every side.
‘All in good time, please – although I don’t really know anything more than yourselves – with the exception, perhaps, of one thing. But first, coffee and brandy all round.’
‘Brandy?’ The expensive young woman had been the first, I’d noticed, to appropriate one of the empty wooden cases that Jackstraw had brought in in lieu of seats, and now she looked up under the curve of exquisitely modelled eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ The tone of her voice left little room for doubt as to her opinion.
‘Of course.’ I forced myself to be civil: bickering could reach intolerable proportions in a rigidly closed, mutually interdependent group such as we were likely to be for some time to come. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Opens the pores, dear man,’ she said sweetly. ‘I thought everyone knew that – how dangerous it is when you’re exposed to cold afterwards. Or had you forgotten? Our cases, our night things in the plane – somebody has to get these.’
‘Don’t talk such utter rubbish.’ My short-lived attempt at civility perished miserably. ‘Nobody’s leaving here tonight. You sleep in your clothes – this isn’t the Dorchester. If the blizzard dies down, we may try to get your things tomorrow morning.’
‘But—’
‘If you’re all that desperate, you’re welcome to get them yourself. Want to try?’ It was boorish of me, but that was the effect she had. I turned away to see the minister or priest hold up his hand against the offered brandy.
‘Go on, take it,’ I said impatiently.
‘I don’t really think I should.’ The voice was high-pitched, but the enunciation clear and precise, and I found it vaguely irritating that it should so perfectly match his appearance, be so exactly what I should have expected. He laughed, a nervous deprecating laugh. ‘My parishioners, you know …’
I was tired, worried and felt like telling him what he could do with his parishioners, but it wasn’t his fault.
‘There’s precedent in plenty in your Bible, Reverend. You know that better than I. It’ll do you good, really.’
‘Oh well, if you think so.’ He took the glass gingerly, as if Beelzebub himself were on the offering end, but I noticed that there was nothing so hesitant about his method and speed of disposal of the contents: his subsequent expression could properly be described as beatific. I caught Marie LeGarde’s eye, and smiled at the twinkle I caught there.
The reverend wasn’t the only one who found the coffee – and brandy – welcome. With the exception of the stewardess, who sipped at her drink in a distraught fashion, the others had also emptied their glasses, and I decided that the broaching of another Martell’s was justified. In the respite from the talk, I bent over the injured man on the floor. His pulse was slower, steadier and his breathing not quite so shallow: I slipped in a few more heat pads and zipped up the sleeping-bag.
‘Is he – is he any better, do you think?’ The stewardess was so close to me that I brushed against her as I straightened. ‘He – he seems a bit better, doesn’t he?’
‘He is a bit, I think. But nothing like over the shock from the wound and the exposure, though.’ I looked at her speculatively and suddenly felt almost sorry for her. Almost, but not quite: I didn’t at all like the direction my thoughts were leading me. ‘You’ve flown together quite a bit, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t offer anything more. ‘His head – do you think—’
‘Later. Let me have a quick look at that back of yours.’
‘Look at what?’
‘Your back,’ I said patiently. ‘Your shoulders. They seem to give you some pain. I’ll rig a screen.’
‘No, no, I’m all right.’ She moved away from me.
‘Don’t be silly, my dear.’ I wondered what trick of voice production made Marie LeGarde’s voice so clear and carrying. ‘He is a doctor, you know.’
‘No!’
I shrugged and reached for my brandy glass. Bearers of bad news were ever unpopular: I supposed her reaction was the modern equivalent of the classical despot’s unsheathing his dagger. Probably only bruises, anyhow, I told myself, and turned to look at the company.
An odd-looking bunch, to say the least, but then any group of people dressed in lounge suits and dresses, trilby hats and nylon stockings would have looked odd against the strange and uncompromising background of that cabin where every suggestion of anything that even remotely suggested gracious living had been crushed and ruthlessly made subservient to the all-exclusive purpose of survival.
Here there were no armchairs – no chairs, even – no carpets, wall-paper, book-shelves, beds, curtains – or even windows for the curtains. It was a bleak utilitarian box of a room, eighteen feet by fourteen. The floor was made of unvarnished yellow pine. The walls were made of spaced sheets of bonded ply, with kapok insulation between: the lower part of the walls was covered with green-painted asbestos, the upper part and entire roof sheeted with glittering aluminium to reflect the maximum possible heat and light. A thin, ever-present film of ice climbed at least halfway up all four walls, reaching almost to the ceiling in the four corners, the parts of the room most remote from the stove and therefore the coldest. On very cold nights, such as this, the ice reached the ceiling and started to creep across it to the layers of opaque ice that permanently framed the undersides of our rimed and opaque skylights.
The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.
One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks – eight in all. The other eighteen-foot wall was given over entirely to our stove, work-bench, radio table and housings for the meteorological instruments. The remaining wall by the tunnel was piled with tins and cases of food, now mostly empties, that had been brought in from the tunnel to begin the lengthy process of defrosting.
Slowly I surveyed all this, then as slowly surveyed the company. The incongruity of the contrast reached the point where one all but disbelieved the evidence of one’s own eyes. But they were there all right, and I was stuck with them. Everyone had stopped talking now and was looking at me, waiting for me to speak: sitting in a tight semi-circle round the stove, they were huddled together and shivering in the freezing cold. The only sounds in the room were the clacking of the anemometer cups, clearly audible down the ventilation pipe, the faint moaning of the wind on the ice-cap and the hissing of our pressure Colman lamp. I sighed to myself, and put down my empty glass.
‘Well, it looks as if you are going to be our guests for some little time, so we’d better introduce ourselves. Us first.’ I nodded to where Joss and Jackstraw were working on the shattered RCA, which they had lifted back on the table. ‘On the left, Joseph London, of the city of London, our radio operator.’
‘Unemployed,’ Joss muttered.
‘On the right, Nils Nielsen. Take a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. At this very moment the guardian angels of your respective insurance companies are probably putting up a prayer for his continued well-being. If you all live to come home again, the chances are that you will owe it to him.’ I was to remember my own words later. ‘He probably knows more than any man living about survival on the Greenland ice-cap.’
‘I thought you called him “Jackstraw”,’ Marie LeGarde murmured.
‘My Eskimo name.’ Jackstraw had turned and smiled at her, his parka hood off for the first time; I could see her polite astonishment as she looked at the fair hair, the blue eyes, and it was as if Jackstraw read her thoughts. ‘Two of my grandparents were Danish – most of us Greenlanders have as much Danish blood as Eskimo in us nowadays.’ I was surprised to hear him talk like this, and it was a tribute to Marie LeGarde’s personality: his pride in his Eskimo background was equalled only by his touchiness on the subject.
‘Well, well, how interesting.’ The expensive young lady was sitting back on her box, hands clasped round an expensively-nyloned knee, her expression reflecting accurately the well-bred condescension of her tone. ‘My very first Eskimo.’
‘Don’t be afraid, lady.’ Jackstraw’s smile was wider than ever, and I felt more than vaguely uneasy; his almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness and good nature concealed an explosive temper which he’d probably inherited from some far distant Viking forebear. ‘It doesn’t rub off.’
The silence that followed could hardly be described as companionable, and I rushed in quickly.
‘My own name is Mason, Peter Mason, and I’m in charge of this IGY station. You all know roughly what we’re doing stuck out here on the plateau – meteorology, glaciology, the study of the earth’s magnetism, the borealis, airglow, ionosphere, cosmic rays, magnetic storms and a dozen other things which I suppose are equally uninteresting to you.’ I waved my arm. ‘We don’t, as you can see, normally live here alone. Five others are away to the north on a field expedition. They’re due back in about three weeks, after which we all pack up and abandon this place before the winter sets in and the ice-pack freezes on the coast.’
‘Before the winter sets in?’ The little man in the Glenurquhart jacket stared at me. ‘You mean to tell me it gets colder than this?’
‘It certainly does. An explorer called Alfred Wegener wintered not fifty miles from here in 1930–1, and the temperature dropped by 85 degrees below zero – 117 degrees of frost. And that may have been a warm winter, for all we know.’
I gave some time to allow this cheering item of information to sink in, then continued.
‘Well, that’s us. Miss LeGarde – Marie LeGarde – needs no introduction from anyone.’ A slight murmur of surprise and turning of heads showed that I wasn’t altogether right. ‘But that’s all I know, I’m afraid.’
‘Corazzini,’ the man with the cut brow offered. The white bandage, just staining with blood, was in striking contrast to the receding dark hair. ‘Nick Corazzini. Bound for Bonnie Scotland, as the travel posters put it.’
‘Holiday?’
‘No luck.’ He grinned. ‘Taking over the new Global Tractor Company outside Glasgow. Know it?’
‘I’ve heard of it. Tractors, eh? Mr Corazzini, you may be worth your weight in gold to us yet. We have a broken-down elderly tractor outside that can usually only be started by repeated oaths and assaults by a four-pound hammer.’
‘Well.’ He seemed taken aback. ‘Of course, I can try—’
I don’t suppose you’ve actually laid a finger on a tractor for many years,’ Marie LeGarde interrupted shrewdly. ‘Isn’t that it, Mr Corazzini?’
‘Afraid it is,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘But in a situation like this I’d gladly lay my hands on another one.’
‘You’ll have your chance,’ I promised him. I looked at the man beside him.
‘Smallwood,’ the minister announced. He rubbed his thin white hands constantly to drive the cold away. ‘The Reverend Joseph Smallwood. I’m the Vermont delegate to the international General Assembly of the Unitarian and Free United Churches in London. You may have heard of it – our biggest conference in many years?’
‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘But don’t let that disturb you. Our paper boy misses out occasionally. And you, sir?’
‘Solly Levin. Of New York City,’ the little man in the check jacket added unnecessarily. He reached up and laid a proprietary arm along the broad shoulders of the young man beside him. ‘And this is my boy, Johnny.’
‘Your boy? Your son?’ I fancied I could see a slight resemblance.
‘Perish the thought,’ the young man drawled. ‘My name is Johnny Zagero. Solly is my manager. Sorry to introduce a discordant note into company such as this’ – his eyes swept over us, dwelt significantly longer on the expensive young lady by his side – ‘but I’m in the way of being a common or garden pugilist. That means “boxer”, Solly.’
‘Would you listen to him?’ Solly Levin implored. He stretched his clenched fists heavenwards. ‘Would you just listen to him? Apologisin’. Johnny Zagero, future heavyweight champion, apologisin’ for being a boxer. The white hope for the world, that’s all. Rated number three challenger to the champ. A household name in all—’
‘Ask Dr Mason if he’s ever heard of me,’ Zagero suggested.
‘That means nothing,’ I smiled. ‘You don’t look like a boxer to me, Mr Zagero. Or sound like one. I didn’t know it was included in the curriculum at Yale. Or was it Harvard?’
‘Princeton,’ he grinned. ‘And what’s so funny about that? Look at Tunney and his Shakespeare. Roland La Starza was a college boy when he fought for the world title. Why not me?’
‘Exactly’ Solly Levin tried to thunder the word, but he hadn’t the voice for it. ‘Why not? And when we’ve carved up this British champ of yours – a doddery old character rated number two challenger by one of the biggest injustices ever perpetrated in the long and glorious history of boxin’ – when we’ve massacred this ancient has-been, I say—’
‘All right, Solly,’ Zagero interrupted. ‘Desist. There’s not a press man within a thousand miles. Save the golden words for later.’
‘Just keepin’ in practice, boy. Words are ten a penny. I’ve got thousands to spare—’
‘T’ousands, Solly, t’ousands. You’re slippin’. Now shut up.’
Solly shut up, and I turned to the girl beside Zagero.
‘Well, miss?’
‘Mrs. Mrs Dansby-Gregg. You may have heard of me?’
‘No.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’ I’d heard of her all right, and I knew now that I’d seen her name and picture a score of times among those of other wealthy unemployed and unemployable built up by the tongue-in-the-cheek gossip columnists of the great national dailies into an ersatz London society whose frenetic, frequently moronic and utterly unimportant activities were a source of endless interest to millions. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I seemed to recall, had been particularly active in the field of charitable activities, although perhaps not so in the production of the balance sheets.
She smiled sweetly at me.
‘Well, perhaps it’s not so surprising after all. You are a bit distant from the centre of things, aren’t you?’ She looked across to where the youngster with the broken collar-bone was sitting. ‘And this is Fleming.’
‘Fleming?’ This time the wrinkling of my brow was genuine. ‘You mean Helene?’
‘Fleming. My personal maid.’
‘Your personal maid,’ I said slowly. I could feel the incredulous anger stirring inside me. ‘Your own maid? And you didn’t even bother to volunteer to stay while I fixed her shoulder up?’
‘Miss LeGarde did it first,’ she said coolly. ‘Why should I?’
‘Quite right, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, why should you?’ Johnny Zagero said approvingly. He looked at her long and consideringly. ‘You might have got your hands dirty.’
For the first time the carefully cultivated façade cracked, the smile stiffened mechanically, and her colour deepened. Mrs Dansby-Gregg made no reply, maybe she had none to make. People like Johnny Zagero never got close enough even to the fringes of her money-sheltered world for her to know how to deal with them.
‘Well, that leaves just the two of you,’ I said hastily. The large Dixie colonel with the florid face and white hair was sitting next to the thin wispy-haired little Jew. They made an incongruous pair.
‘Theodore Mahler,’ the little Jew said quietly. I waited, but he added nothing. A communicative character.
‘Brewster,’ the other announced. He made a significant pause. ‘Senator Hoffman Brewster. Glad to help in any way I can, Dr Mason.’
‘Thank you, Senator. At least I know who you are.’ Indeed, thanks to his magnificent flair for self-publicity, half the Western world knew who this outspoken, bitterly – but fairly – anti-communist, near isolationist senator from the south-west was. ‘On a European tour?’
‘You might say that.’ He had the politician’s gift for investing even the most insignificant words with a statesmanlike consideration. ‘As Chairman of one of our Appropriation committees, I – well, let’s call it a fact-finding tour.’
‘Wife and secretaries gone ahead by humble passenger steamer, I take it,’ Zagero said mildly. He shook his head. ‘That was a fearful stink your Congressional investigation boys raised recently about the expenses of US senators abroad.’
‘That was quite unnecessary, young man,’ Brewster said coldly. ‘And insulting.’
‘I believe it was,’ Zagero apologised. ‘Not really intended as such. Sorry, Senator.’ He meant it.
What a bunch, I thought despairingly, what a crowd to be stuck with in the middle of the Greenland ice-plateau. A business executive, a musical comedy star, a minister of religion, a boxer with an uninhibited if cultured tongue, his zany manager, a London society playgirl and her young German maid, a Senator, a taciturn Jew and a near-hysterical hostess – or one apparently so. And a gravely injured pilot who might live or die. But willy-nilly I was stuck with them, stuck with the responsibility of doing my damnedest to get these people to safety, and the prospect appalled me. How on earth was I even to start to go about it, go about it with people with no arctic clothing to ward off the razor-edged winds and inhuman cold, people lacking in all knowledge and experience of arctic travel, even lacking, with two or three exceptions, the endurance and sheer muscular strength to cope with the savagery of the Greenland icecap? I couldn’t even begin to guess.
But whatever else they were lacking in at that moment, it wasn’t volubility: the life-giving warmth of the brandy had had the unfortunate side effect of loosening their tongues. Unfortunate, that is, from my point of view: they had a hundred and one questions to ask, and they seemed to think that I should have the answer to all of them.
More accurately, they had only half a dozen questions to ask, with a hundred and one variations of these. How was it possible for a pilot to veer so many hundreds of miles off course? Could the compasses have gone wrong? Could the pilot have had a brain-storm? But then surely both co-pilot and second pilot would have known something was wrong? Could the radio have been damaged? It had been a bitterly cold afternoon even when they had left Gander, was it possible that some of the flaps and controls had iced up, forcing them off course? But if this were the case, why hadn’t someone come to warn them of the possibility of the crash?
I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn’t really know anything more about it than they did.
‘But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did.’ It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. ‘What was that, Dr Mason?’
‘What? Ah, yes, I remember now.’ I hadn’t forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I’d had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. ‘I need hardly tell you that it’s nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini – how could I, I wasn’t in the plane – just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It’s based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen months.
‘For over a year now, we have been experiencing a period of intense sun-spot activity – that’s one of the main interests of the IGY year – the most intense of this century. As you may know, sun-spots, or, rather, the emission of solar particles from these sun-spots, are directly responsible for the formation of the aurora borealis and magnetic storms, both of these being related to disturbances in the ionosphere. These disturbances can and, actually, almost invariably do interfere with radio transmission and reception, and when severe enough can completely disrupt all normal radio communications: and they can also produce temporary alterations of the earth’s magnetism which knock magnetic compasses completely out of kilter.’ All of which was true enough as far as it went. ‘It would, of course, require extreme conditions to produce these effects: but we have been experiencing these lately, and I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened with your plane. Where astral navigation – by the stars, that is – is impossible, as it was on a night like this, you are dependent on radio and compasses as your two main navigational aids: if these are knocked out, what have you left?’
A fresh hubbub of talk arose at this, and though it was quite obvious that most of them had only a vague idea what I was talking about, I could see that this idea was finding a fair degree of ready acceptance, satisfying them and fitting the facts as they knew them. I saw Joss gazing at me with an expressionless face, looked him in the eye for a couple of seconds, then turned away. As a radio operator, Joss knew even better than I that, though there was still some sun-spot activity, it had reached its maximum in the previous year: and as an ex-aircraft radio operator, he knew that airliners flew on gyrocompasses, which neither sun-spots nor magnetic storms could ever affect in the slightest.
‘We’ll have something to eat now.’ I cut through the buzz of conversation. ‘Any volunteers to give Jackstraw a hand?’
‘Certainly.’ Marie LeGarde, as I might have guessed, was first on her feet. ‘I’m by way of being what you might call a mean cook. Lead me to it, Mr Nielsen.’
‘Thanks, Joss, you might give me a hand to rig a screen.’ I nodded at the injured pilot. ‘We’ll see what we can do for this boy here.’ The stewardess, unbidden, moved forward to help me also. I was on the point of objecting - I knew that this wasn’t going to be nice – but I didn’t want trouble with her, not yet. I shrugged my shoulders and let her stay.
*
Half an hour later, I had done all I could. It indeed hadn’t been nice, but both the patient and the stewardess had stood it far better than I had expected. I was fixing and binding on a stiff leather helmet to protect the back of his head and Joss was strapping him down, inside the sleeping-bag, to the stretcher, so that he couldn’t toss around and hurt himself, when the stewardess touched my arm.
‘What – what do you think now, Dr Mason?’
‘It’s hard to be sure. I’m not a specialist in brain or head injuries, and even a specialist would hesitate to say. The damage may have penetrated deeper than we think. There may be haemor-rhaging – it’s often delayed in these cases.’
‘But if there’s no haemorrhaging?’ she persisted. ‘If the damage is no worse than what you think, what you see?’
‘Fifty-fifty. I wouldn’t have said so a couple of hours ago, but he seems to have quite astonishing powers of resistance and recuperation. Better than an even chance, I would say – if he had the warmth, the food, the skilled nursing he would have in a first class hospital. As it is – well, let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you.’
I looked at her, looked at the washed-out face, the faint blue circles forming under her eyes, and almost felt touched with pity. Almost. She was exhausted, and shivering with cold.
‘Bed,’ I said. ‘You’re dying for sleep and warmth, Miss – I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask your name.’
‘Ross. Margaret Ross.’
‘Scots?’
‘Irish. Southern Irish.’
‘I won’t hold it against you,’ I smiled. There was no answering smile from her. ‘Tell me, Miss Ross, why was the plane so empty?’
‘We had an “X” flight – an extra or duplicate charter for an overflow of passengers – out from London yesterday. Day before yesterday it is now, I suppose. We just stayed the night in Idlewild and had to return after we’d slept. The office phoned up people who had booked out on the evening plane, giving the chance of an earlier flight: ten of them accepted.’
‘I see. By the way, isn’t it a bit unusual to have only one stewardess aboard? On a trans-Atlantic flight, I mean?’
‘I know. There’s usually two or three – a steward and two stewardesses – or two stewards and a stewardess. But not for ten people.’
Of course. Hardly worth stewarding, you might say. Still,’ I went on smoothly, ‘it at least gives you time for the odd forty winks on these long night-flights.’
‘That wasn’t fair!’ I hadn’t been as clever as I thought, and her white cheeks were stained with red. ‘That’s never happened to me before. Never!’
‘Sorry, Miss Ross – it wasn’t really meant as a dig. It doesn’t matter anyhow.’
‘It does so matter!’ Her extraordinary brown eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘If I hadn’t been asleep I would have known what was going to happen. I could have warned the passengers. I could have moved Colonel Harrison to a front seat facing the rear—’
‘Colonel Harrison?’ I interrupted sharply.
‘Yes. The man in the back seat – the dead man.’
‘But he hadn’t a uniform on when—’
‘I don’t care. That was his name on the passenger list … If I’d known, he wouldn’t be dead now – and Miss Fleming wouldn’t have had her collar-bone broken.’
So that’s what has been worrying her, I thought. That accounts for her strange distraught behaviour. And then a moment later I realised that it didn’t account for it all – she had been behaving like that before ever she had known what had happened to any of the passengers. My slowly forming suspicions came back with renewed force: the lady would bear watching.
‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, Miss Ross. The captain must have been flying blind in the storm – and we’re more than 8000 feet up here. Probably he’d no knowledge of what was going to happen until the actual moment of crashing.’ In my mind’s eye I saw again the doomed airliner, landing lights on, circling our cabin for at least ten minutes, but if Miss Ross had any such thing in her mind’s eye, it was impossible for me to detect it. She had no idea at all – or she was an extraordinarily good actress.
‘Probably,’ she murmured dully, ‘I don’t know.’
We had a hot and satisfying meal of soup, corned meat, potatoes and vegetables – everything out of cans, but passable enough for all that. It was the last satisfying meal that our guests – or ourselves, for that matter – were likely to have for some considerable time to come, but I felt the moment unpropitious for breaking that sort of news. Time enough for that tomorrow – or later in the day, rather, for it was now already after three o’clock in the morning.
I suggested that the four women sleep in the top bunks – not from any delicacy of sentiment but because it was at least twenty-five degrees warmer there than it was at ground level, and the proportional difference would increase as the night wore on after the stove had been put out. There were some half-hearted protests when they learnt that I intended to shut down the fire, but I didn’t even bother arguing with them. Like all people who have lived for any length of time in the Arctic, I had an almost pathological dread of fire.
Margaret Ross, the stewardess, refused the offer of a bunk, and said she would sleep by the injured pilot, lest he should wake and want anything during the night. I had intended doing that myself, but I saw her mind was set on it, and though I felt unaccountably uneasy about the idea, I raised no objection.
That left five empty bunks among six men -Jackstraw, Joss and I could sleep reasonably enough in our furs. Inevitably, there was some magnanimous argument over the allocation of these bunks, but Corazzini settled the argument by producing a coin and beginning to toss for it. He himself lost in the end, but accepted defeat and the prospect of a cold uncomfortable night on the floor with amiable grace.
When they were all settled down, I picked up a torch and our weather log book, glanced at Joss and made for the trap. Zagero turned in his bunk to look at me.
‘What gives, Dr Mason? Especially at this hour of night, what gives?’
‘Weather reports, Mr Zagero. That’s why we’re here, remember? And I’m already three hours late with these.’
‘Even tonight?’
‘Even tonight. Continuity is the most important thing in weather observation.’
‘Sooner you than me.’ He shivered. ‘If it’s only half as cold outside as it is in here.’
He turned his back, and Joss rose to his feet. He’d correctly interpreted my look, and I knew he was consumed with curiosity.
‘I’ll come with you, sir. Better have a last look at the dogs.’
We didn’t bother looking at either the dogs or the weather instruments. We went straight towards the tractor and huddled under the tarpaulin for what miserable shelter it could afford. True, the wind had eased, but it was colder than ever: the long winter night was beginning to close down on the ice-cap.
‘It stinks,’ Joss said flatly. ‘The whole set-up stinks.’
‘To high heaven,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s finding out where the smell comes from that the trouble lies.’
‘This fairy tale of yours about magnetic storms and compasses and radios,’ he went on. ‘What was the idea?’
‘I’d previously said I knew something they didn’t. I did. But when it came to the bit I knew I’d be better to keep it to myself. You know how this damnable cold slows up your mind – I should have realised it sooner.’
‘Realised what?’
‘That I should keep it to myself.’
‘Keep what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Sorry, Joss. Not trying to build up suspense. The reason none of them knew anything about the crash until after it had happened is that they were all doped. As far as I could see, all of them, or nearly all, were under the influence of some sleeping drug or narcotic’
In the darkness I could almost feel him staring at me. After a long time he said softly, ‘You wouldn’t say this unless you were sure of it.’
‘I am sure of it. Their reactions, their dazed fumbling back to reality – and, above all, the pupils of their eyes. Unmistakable. Some kind of sleeping tablet mixtures, of the fast-acting kind. What is known to the trade, I believe, as Mickey Finns.’
‘But—’ Joss broke off. He was still trying to orientate his mind to this new line of thought. ‘But – they would be bound to know of it, to be aware that they had been doped, when they came to.’
‘In normal circumstances, yes. But they came to in what was, to say the least, most abnormal circumstances. I’m not saying that they didn’t experience any symptoms of weakness, dizziness and lassitude – they must have done – and what more natural than that they should ascribe any such unusual physical or mental symptoms to the effects of the crash. And what more natural, too, than that they should conceal these symptoms as best they could – and refrain from mentioning them? They would be ashamed to admit or discuss weaknesses – it’s a very human trait to show to your neighbours the very best face you can put on in times of emergency or danger.’
Joss didn’t reply at once. The implications of all this, as I’d found out for myself, took no little time for digestion, so I let him take his time and waited, listening to the lost and mournful wailing of the wind, the rustling hiss of millions of ice spicules scudding across the frozen snow of the ice-cap, and my own thoughts were in keeping with the bleak misery of the night.
‘It’s not possible,’ Joss muttered at length. I could hear his teeth chattering with the cold. ‘You can’t have some maniac rushing around an aircraft cabin with a hypo needle or dropping fizz-balls into their gin and tonics. You think they were all doped?’
‘Just about.’
‘But how could anyone—’
‘A moment, Joss,’ I interrupted. ‘What happened to the RCA?’
‘What?’ The sudden switch caught him momentarily off-balance. ‘What happened – you mean, how did it go for a burton? I’ve no idea at all, sir. All I know is that these hinges couldn’t have been knocked into the wall accidentally -not with radio and equipment weighing about 180 pounds sitting on top of them. Someone shoved them in. Deliberately.’
‘And the only person anywhere near it at the time was the stewardess, Margaret Ross. Everyone agreed on that.’
‘Yes, but why in the name of heaven should anyone want to do a crazy thing like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘There’s a hundred things I don’t know. But I do know she did it … And who’s in the best position to spike the drinks of aircraft passengers?’
‘Good God!’ I could hear the sharp hissing intake of breath. ‘Of course. Drinks – or maybe the sweets they hand out at take-off.’
‘No.’ I shook my head definitely in the darkness. ‘Barley sugar is too weak a covering-up agent to disguise the taste of a drug. Coffee, more likely’
‘It must have been her,’ Joss said slowly. ‘It must have been. But – but she acted as dazed and abnormal as any of the others. More so, if anything.’
‘Maybe she’d reason to,’ I said grimly. ‘Come on, let’s get back or we’ll freeze to death. Tell Jackstraw when you get him by himself.’
Inside the cabin, I propped the hatch open a couple of inches – with fourteen people inside, extra ventilation was essential. Then I glanced at the thermograph: it showed 48° below zero – eighty degrees of frost.
I lay down on the floor, pulled my parka hood tight to keep my ears from freezing, and was asleep in a minute.
FOUR Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m. (#ulink_1fc2ab2b-fb0d-5101-a4b8-4bf043149eef)
For the first time in four months I had forgotten to set the alarm-clock before I went to sleep, and it was late when I awoke, cold and stiff and sore all over from the uneven hardness of the wooden floor. It was still dark as midnight – two or three weeks had passed since the rim of the sun had shown above the horizon for the last time that year, and all the light we had each day was two or three hours dim twilight round noon – but a glance at the luminous face of my watch showed me that it was nine-thirty.
I pulled the torch out from my parka, located the oil-lamp and lit it. The light was dim, scarcely reaching the far corners of the cabin, but sufficient to show the mummy-like figures lying huddled on the bunks and sprawled grotesquely across the floor, their frozen breath clouding before their faces and above their heads, then condensing on the cabin walls. The walls themselves were sheeted with ice which had extended far out across the roof, in places reaching the skylights, a condition largely brought about by the cold heavy air that had flooded down the opened hatchway during the night: the outside temperature registered on the drum at 54° below zero.
Not everyone was asleep: most of them, I suspected, had slept but little, the numbing cold had seen to that: but they were as warm in their bunks as they would be anywhere else and nobody showed any inclination to move. Things would be better when the cabin heated up a little.
I had trouble starting the stove – even though it was gravity fed from a tank above and to one side of it, the fuel oil had thickened up in the cold – but when it did catch it went with a roar. I turned both burners up to maximum, put on the water bucket that had lain on the floor all night and was now nearly a solid mass of ice, pulled on snow-mask and goggles and clambered up the hatchway to have a look at the weather.
The wind had died away almost completely -I’d known that from the slow and dispirited clacking of the anemometer cups – and the ice-drift, which at times could reach up several hundred feet into the sky, was no more than gentle puffs of dust stirring lazily and spectrally, through the feeble beam of my torch, across the glittering surface of the ice-cap. The wind, such as it was, still held out to the east. The cold, too, was still intense, but more bearable than it had been on the previous night. In terms of the effect of cold on human beings in the Arctic, absolute temperature is far from being the deciding factor: wind is just as important – every extra mile per hour is equivalent to a one degree drop in temperature -and humidity far more so. Where the relative humidity is high, even a few degrees below zero can become intolerable. But today the wind was light and the air dry. Perhaps it was a good omen … After that morning, I never believed in omens again.
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Alistair MacLean
From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all time classic.An airliner crashes in the polar ice-cap. In temperatures 40 degrees below zero, six men and four women survive.But for the members of a remote scientific research station who rescue them, there are some sinister questions to answer – the first one being, who shot the pilot before the crash?
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Night Without End
HARPER
To Bunty
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5f0731a3-1844-5a29-acf2-8b157c90188c)
Title Page (#u5c1dd9d3-e648-534e-ae2b-a27bf396ea92)
ONE: Monday midnight (#ucd45c75f-08d0-5f3f-80b0-ca5b7a9eb329)
TWO: Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m. (#uff4e41fd-9b42-5f75-aff1-511c4f15c276)
THREE: Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m. (#u2886549a-c548-54e5-81a2-4bd53acf1b10)
FOUR: Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m. (#u5b589d47-6a45-5baf-bba9-b909d1b8592d)
FIVE: Monday 6 p.m.–7 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX: Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVEN: Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT: Wednesday 4 a.m–8 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE: Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN: Thursday 4 p.m.–Friday 6 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
ELEVEN: Friday 6 p.m.–Saturday 12.15 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
TWELVE: Saturday 12.15 p.m.–12.30 p.m. (#litres_trial_promo)
HMS Ulysses: Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)
Where Eagles Dare: Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)
What’s next? (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE Monday midnight (#ulink_087370e3-d1d3-52bd-ba9f-bfb17c41db56)
It was Jackstraw who heard it first – it was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stove – curio collectors paid fancy prices for what they imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusks – rose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough.
‘Aeroplane,’ he announced casually.
‘Aeroplane!’ I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. ‘Jackstraw, you’ve been hitting the methylated spirits again.’
‘Indeed, no, Dr Mason.’ The blue eyes, so incongruously at variance with the swarthy face and the broad Eskimo cheekbones, crinkled into a smile: coffee was Jackstraw’s strongest tipple and we both knew it. ‘I can hear it plainly now. You must come and listen.’
‘No, thanks.’ It had taken me fifteen minutes to thaw out the frozen condensation in my sleeping-bag, and I was just beginning to feel warm for the first time. Heaven only knew that the presence of a plane in the heart of that desolate ice plateau was singular enough – in the four months since our IGY station had been set up this was the first time we had had any contact, however indirectly, with the world and the civilisation that lay so unimaginably beyond our horizons – but it wasn’t going to help either the plane or myself if I got my feet frozen again. I lay back and stared up through our two plate glass skylights: but as always they were completely opaque, covered with a thick coating of rime and dusting of snow. I looked away from the skylights across to where Joss, our young Cockney radioman, was stirring uneasily in his sleep, then back to Jackstraw.
‘Still hear it?’
‘Getting louder all the time, Dr Mason. Louder and closer.’
I wondered vaguely – vaguely and a trifle irritably, for this was our world, a tightly-knit, compact little world, and visitors weren’t welcome – what plane it could be. A met. plane from Thüle, possibly. Possibly, but unlikely: Thule was all of six hundred miles away, and our own weather reports went there three times a day. Or perhaps a Strategic Air Command bomber testing out the DEW-line – the Americans’ distant early warning radar system – or even some civilian proving flight on a new trans-polar route. Or maybe some base plane from down by Godthaab—
‘Dr Mason!’ Jackstraw’s voice was quick, urgent. ‘It’s in trouble, I think. It’s circling us-lower and closer all the time. A big plane, I’m sure: many motors.’
‘Damn!’ I said feelingly. I reached out for the silk gloves that always hung at night above my head, pulled them on, unzipped my sleeping-bag, swore under my breath as the freezing air struck at my shivering skin, and grabbed for my clothes. Half an hour only since I had put them off, but already they were stiff, awkward to handle and abominably cold – it was a rare day indeed when the temperature inside the cabin rose above freezing point. But I had them on – long underwear, woollen shirt, breeches, silk-lined woollen parka, two pairs of socks and my felt cabin shoes – in thirty seconds flat. In latitude 72.40 north, 8000 feet up on the Greenland ice-cap, self-preservation makes for a remarkable turn of speed. I crossed the cabin to where no more than a nose showed through a tiny gap in a sleeping-bag.
‘Wake up, Joss.’ I shook him until he reached out a hand and pushed the hood off his dark tousled head. ‘Wake up, boy. It looks as if we might need you.’
‘What – what’s the trouble?’ He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared up at the chronometer above his head. ‘Midnight! I’ve been asleep only half an hour.’
‘I know. Sorry. But get a move on.’ I recrossed the cabin, passed by the big RCA transmitter and stove, and halted in front of the instrument table. The register showed the wind ENE, velocity 15 knots – near enough 17 miles per hour, on a night like this, with the ice-crystals and drift lifting off the ice-cap, clogging and slowing up the anemometer cups, the true speed was probably half as much again. And the pen of the alcohol thermograph was running evenly along the red circle of 40 degrees below zero – 72 degrees of frost. I thought of the evil combination of these two factors of wind and cold and felt my skin crawl.
Already Jackstraw was silently climbing into his furs. I did the same – caribou trousers and parka with reindeer fur trimmed hood, all beautifully tailored by Jackstraw’s wife – sealskin boots, woollen mittens and reindeer gloves. I could hear the plane quite clearly now, and so too, I could see, did Joss. The deep even throb of its motors was plain even above the frantic rattling of the anemometer cups.
‘It’s – it’s an aeroplane!’ You could see that he was still trying to convince himself.
‘What did you think it was – one of your precious London double-deckers?’ I slipped snow-mask and goggles round my neck and picked up a torch from the shelf beside the stove: it was kept there to keep the dry batteries from freezing. ‘Been circling for the past two or three minutes. Jackstraw thinks it’s in trouble, and I agree.’
Joss listened.
‘Engines sound OK to me.’
‘And to me. But engine failure is only one of a dozen possible reasons.’
‘But why circle here?’
‘How the devil should I know? Probably because he can see our lights – the only lights, at a guess, in 50,000 square miles. And if he has to put down, which God forbid, he stands his only chance of survival if he puts down near some human habitation.’
‘Heaven help them,’ Joss said soberly. He added something else, but I didn’t wait to hear. I wanted to get up top as quickly as possible.
To leave our cabin, we had to use a trap-door, not an ordinary door. Our cabin, a prefabricated, sectioned structure that had been hauled up from the coast on tractor sleds during the month of July was deep-sunk in a great oblong hole that had been gouged out from the surface of the icecap, so that only the top few inches of its flat roof projected above ground level. The trap-door, hinged at both ends so that it could open either upwards or downwards, was reached by a short steep flight of steps.
I climbed the first two of these, took down the wooden mallet that hung there permanently by the wall and pounded round the already bruised and splintered edges of the trap to loosen the ice that held it locked fast. This was an almost invariable routine: whenever the trap had previously been opened for any length of time at all, the layer of warm air that always lay under the roof seeped slowly out, melting the surrounding snow – which promptly turned to ice when the trap was closed again.
Tonight the ice cracked easily. I got my shoulder under the trap, levered upwards against the accumulated drift of snow above, and scrambled out.
I was prepared for what awaited me up top-the gasping, panic-stricken feeling of suffocation as the warm air was sucked from my lungs by that deadly, numbing cold – but even so I wasn’t sufficiently prepared. The wind speed was far higher than I had feared. Bent double and coughing violently, breathing shallowly to avoid frosting my lungs, I turned my back to the wind, breathed into my reindeer gloves, slipped on my snow-mask and goggles and straightened. Jackstraw was already standing by my side.
The wind on the ice-cap never howled or shrieked. It moaned, instead, a low-pitched, unutterably eerie ululation: a requiem for the damned, if ever there was one, the agony of some soul lost in torment. That same moan had driven men mad before now: less than two months previously I had had to send our tractor mechanic, a completely broken youngster who had lost all contact with the last shadow of reality, back to our Uplavnik base. The wind had done that to him.
Tonight its desolate threnody boomed and faded, boomed and faded in the lower registers of sound with an intensity which I had seldom heard, while its fingers plucked at the tightly strung guy ropes of the radio antenna and instrument shelters to provide its own whistling obbligato of unearthly music. But I was in no mood then to listen to its music, and, indeed, that sepulchral wailing was not the dominant sound on the ice-cap that night.
The throbbing roar of big aero engines, surging and receding, as the wind gusted and fell away, like surf on some distant shore, was very close now. The sound lay to windward of us at that moment, and we turned to face it, but we were blind. Although the sky was overcast, there was no snow that night – at any time, heavy snowfalls, strangely enough, are all but unknown on the Greenland ice-cap – but the air was full of millions of driving, needle-pointed ice spicules that swept towards us out of the impenetrable darkness to the east, clogging up our goggles in a matter of seconds and stinging the narrow exposed area of my face between mask and goggles like a thousand infuriated hornets. A sharp, exquisite pain, a pain that vanished almost in the moment of arrival as the countless sub-zero spicules dug deep with their anæsthetising needles and drove out all sensation from the skin. But I knew this ominous absence of feeling all too well. Once again I turned my back to the wind, kneaded the deadened flesh with mittened hands till the blood came throbbing back, then pulled my snow-mask higher still.
The plane was flying in an anti-clockwise direction, following, it seemed, the path of an irregular oval, for the sound of its motors faded slightly as it curved round to north and west. But within thirty seconds it was approaching again, in a swelling thunder of sound, to the south-west – to the leeward of us, that was – and I could tell from Jackstraw’s explosive ejaculation of sound, muffled behind his mask, that he had seen it at the same moment as myself.
It was less than half a mile distant, no more than five hundred feet above the ice-cap, and during the five seconds it remained inside my line of vision I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thud heavily in my chest. No SAC bomber this, nor a Thule met. plane, both with crews highly trained in the grim craft of Arctic survival. That long row of brightly illuminated cabin windows could belong to only one thing – a trans-Atlantic or trans-polar airliner.
‘You saw it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw’s snow-mask was close to my ear.
‘I saw it.’ It was all I could think to say. But what I was seeing then was not the plane, now again vanished into the flying ice and drift, but the inside of the plane, with the passengers – God, how many passengers, fifty, seventy? – sitting in the cosy security of their pressurised cabin with an air-conditioned temperature of 70°F, then the crash, the tearing, jagged screeching that set the teeth on edge as the thin metal shell ripped along its length and the tidal wave of that dreadful cold, 110 degrees below cabin temperature, swept in and engulfed the survivors, the dazed, the injured, the unconscious and the dying as they sat or lay crumpled in the wreckage of the seats, clad only in thin suits and dresses …
The plane had completed a full circuit and was coming round again. If anything, it was even closer this time, at least a hundred feet lower, and it seemed to have lost some speed. It might have been doing 120, perhaps 130 miles an hour, I was no expert in these things, but for that size of plane, so close to the ground, it seemed a dangerously low speed. I wondered just how effective the pilot’s windscreen wipers would be against these flying ice spicules.
And then I forgot all about that, forgot all about everything except the desperate, urgent need for speed. Just before the plane had turned round to the east again and so out of the line of our blinded vision, it had seemed to dip and at the same instant two powerful lights stabbed out into the darkness, the one lancing straight ahead, a narrow powerful beam glittering and gleaming with millions of sparkling diamond points of flame as the ice-crystals in the air flashed across its path, the other, a broader fan of light, pointing downwards and only slightly ahead, its oval outline flitting across the frozen snow like some flickering will o’ the wisp. I grabbed Jackstraw’s arm and put my head close to his.
‘He’s going to land! He’s looking for a place to put down. Get the dogs, harness them up.’ We had a tractor, but heaven only knew how long it would have taken to start it on a night like this. ‘I’ll give you a hand as soon as I can.’
He nodded, turned and was lost to sight in a moment. I turned too, cursed as my face collided with the slatted sides of the instrument shelter, then jumped for the hatch, sliding down to the floor of the cabin on back and arms without bothering to use the steps. Joss, already completely clad in his furs but with the hood of his parka hanging over his shoulders, was just emerging from the food and fuel tunnel which led off from the other end of the cabin, his arms loaded with equipment.
‘Grab all the warm clothing you can find, Joss,’ I told him quickly. I was trying to think as quickly and coherently as I was talking, to figure out everything that we might require, but it wasn’t easy, that intense cold numbed the mind almost as much as it did the body. ‘Sleeping-bags, blankets, spare coats, shirts, it doesn’t matter whose they are. Shove them into a couple of gunny sacks.’
‘You think they’re going to land, sir?’ Curiosity, anticipation, horror – each struggled for supremacy in the thin, dark intelligent face. ‘You really think so?’
‘I think they’re going to try. What have you got there?’
‘Fire bombs, a couple of Pyrenes.’ He dumped them by the stove. ‘Hope they’re not solid.’
‘Good boy. And a couple of the tractor extinguishers – the Nu-Swifts, G-1000, I think.’ A great help these little things are going to be, I thought, if several thousand gallons of petrol decide to go up in flames. ‘Fire axes, crowbars, canes, the homing spool – for heaven’s sake don’t forget the homing spool – and the searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well.’
‘Bandages?’
‘No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?’
‘Full. But more ice than water.’
‘Put them on the stove – and don’t forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave.’ Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. ‘Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter.’
I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness.
‘How’s it coming?’ I shouted.
‘Easy.’ I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. ‘I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great help – he’s in a very bad temper at being woken up.’
Balto was Jackstraw’s lead dog – a huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of ‘25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw’s Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master – although not above baring his wolf’s fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time-and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority now – snarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy.
‘I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll get the searchlight.’ I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind.
‘The plane – have you heard the plane, Jackstraw? I can’t hear a thing.’
Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood.
‘My God!’ I looked at him. ‘Maybe they’ve crashed already’
Again the shake of the head.
‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘On a night like this you wouldn’t hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind.’
‘I’d have felt it, Dr Mason.’
I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in ever-widening circles trying to pick up our lights again, but at least there was hope yet.
I hurried across to where the tractor, sheeted in tarpaulin, lay close in to the high snow wall that had been cut down the middle of the drift. It took me a couple of minutes to clear away the accumulated snow at one end and wriggle in under the tarpaulin. There was no question of trying to lift it – its impregnated oils had frozen solid and it would have cracked and torn under any pressure.
The searchlight, fixed to a couple of bolts on the tractor bonnet, was held down by two quick-release butterfly nuts. In these latitudes, quick-release was a misnomer: the nuts invariably froze after even the briefest exposure. The accepted practice was to remove one’s gloves and close mittened hands round the nuts until body heat warmed and expanded them enough to permit unscrewing. But there was no time for that tonight: I tapped the bolts with a spanner from the tool box and the steel pins, made brittle by the intense cold, sheared as if made from the cheapest cast iron.
I crawled out at the foot of the tarpaulin, searchlight clutched under one arm, and as soon as I straightened I heard it again – the roar of aero engines, closing rapidly. They sounded very near, very low, but I wasted no time trying to locate the plane. Head lowered against the wind and the needle-sharp lances of the flying ice, I felt rather than saw my way back to the cabin hatch and was brought up short by Jackstraw’s steadying hand. He and Joss were busy loading equipment aboard the sledge and lashing it down, and as I stooped to help them something above my head fizzled and spluttered into a blinding white glare that threw everything into a harsh black and white relief of frozen snow and impenetrable shadow. Joss, remembering what I had completely forgotten – that dousing our cabin lights would have robbed the pilot of his beacon – had ignited a magnesium flare in the slats of the instrument shelter.
We all turned as the plane came into our vision again, to the south, and it was at once apparent why we had lost all sight and sound of it. The pilot must have made a figure of eight turn out in the darkness, had reversed his approach circle, and was flying from east to west: less than two hundred feet up, undercarriage still retracted, it passed within a couple of hundred yards of us like some monstrous bird. Both headlights were now dipped, the twin beams a glitter of kaleidoscopic light in the ice-filled darkness of the sky, the twin oval pools of light interlocking now and very bright, racing neck and neck across the snow. And then these pools, increasing as rapidly in size as they diminished in strength, slipped away to the left as the plane banked sharply to the right and came curving round clockwise to the north. I knew now what the pilot was intending and my hands clenched helplessly inside mittens and gloves. But there was nothing I could do about this.
‘The antenna!’ I shouted. ‘Follow out the line of the antenna.’ I stooped and gave the sledge its initial shove as Jackstraw shouted at Balto. Joss was by my side, head close to mine.
‘What’s happening? Why are we—’
‘He’s coming down this time. I’m sure of it. To the north.’
‘The north?’ Not even the snow-mask could hide the horror in his voice. ‘He’ll kill himself. He’ll kill all of them. The hummocks—’
‘I know.’ The land to the north-east was broken and uneven, the ice raised up by some quirk of nature into a series of tiny hillocks, ten, twenty feet high, tiny but the only ones within a hundred miles. ‘But he’s going to do it, all the same. A belly landing with the wheels up. That’s why he reversed his circle. He wants to land upwind to give himself the minimum stalling ground speed.’
‘He could land to the south, into the wind.’ Joss sounded almost desperate. ‘It’s a billiard table there.’
‘He could, but he won’t.’ I had to shout the words to make myself heard above the wind. ‘He’s nobody’s fool. He knows if he lands to windward of us, even a hundred yards to windward, the chances of finding our lights, our cabin, in this weather just don’t exist. He’s got to land upwind. He’s just got to.’
There was a long silence as we staggered forward, head and shoulders bent almost to waist level against the wind and ice-filled drift, then Joss moved close again.
‘Maybe he’ll see the hummocks in time. Maybe he can—’
‘He’ll never see them,’ I said flatly. ‘Flying into this stuff he can’t possibly see a hundred yards in front of him.’
The radio antenna, rime-coated now to almost fifty times its normal size, sagging deeply and swaying pendulum-like in the wind between each pair of fourteen-foot poles that supported it, stretched away almost 250 feet to the north. We were following the line of this, groping our way blindly from pole to pole and almost at the end of the line, when the roar of the aircraft engines, for the last few seconds no more than a subdued murmur in the night as the wind carried the sound from us, suddenly swelled and increased to a deafening crescendo as I shouted a warning to the others and flung myself flat on the ground: the huge dark shape of the airliner swept directly over us even as I fell. I would have sworn, at the time, that I could have reached out and touched it with my hand, but it must have cleared us by at least ten feet – the antenna poles, we later discovered, were undamaged.
Like a fool, I immediately leapt to my feet to try to get a bearing on the vanishing plane and was literally blown head over heels by the tremendous slipstream from the four great propellers, slid helplessly across the frozen crust of the snow and fetched up on my back almost twenty feet from where I had been standing. Cursing, bruised and not a little dazed, I got to my feet again, started off in the direction where I could hear the dogs barking and howling in a paroxysm of fear and excitement, then stopped abruptly and stood quite still. The engines had died, all four of them had died in an instant, and that could mean only one thing: the airliner was about to touch down.
Even with the realisation a jarring vibration, of a power and intensity far beyond anything I had expected, reached my feet through the frozen crust of the ice-cap. No ordinary touchdown that, I knew, not even for a belly landing: the pilot must have overestimated his height and set his ship down with force enough to crumple the fuselage, to wreck the plane on the spot.
But he hadn’t. I was prone to the frozen snow again, ear pressed hard against it, and I could half hear, half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn’t be sure – six seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, by far more severe than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silence – a silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all.
Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-mask-it must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parka – it was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enough – and probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn’t like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin.
Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them.
‘You all right, sir?’ Joss asked. He took a step closer. ‘Good lord, you’ve lost your mask!’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’ It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. ‘Did you get a bearing on that plane?’
‘Roughly. Due east, I should say.’
‘Jackstraw?’
‘A little north of east, I think.’ He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind.
‘We’ll go east.’ Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. ‘We’ll go east – Joss, how long is that spool?’
‘Four hundred yards. More or less.’
‘So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we’ll cut across them. Let’s hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here.’
I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathers – weird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leeward – and made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fast – our lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen névé that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor.
We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring.
Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs.
The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-cap – if there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100°F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And even if we did get them all back, how to feed them – for our own supplies were already dangerously low? And where, in heaven’s name, were we going to put them all?
Jackstraw’s shout checked me so suddenly that I stumbled and all but fell. I turned back, and Joss came running up.
‘The end of the line?’ I asked.
He nodded, flashed a torch in my face. ‘Your nose and cheek – both gone. They look bad.’
Gloves off, I kneaded my face vigorously with my mittened hands until I felt the blood pounding painfully back, then took the old jersey which Jackstraw dug out from a gunny sack and wrapped it round my face. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
We struck off to the north, with the wind on our right cheeks – I had no option but to gamble on the hope that the wind had neither backed nor veered – our torches probing the ground in front of us, stopping every fifteen or twenty feet to drive a pointed bamboo marker into the frozen ground. We had covered fifty yards without sighting anything, and I was just beginning to become convinced that we must still be well to the west of the plane’s touchdown point and wondering what in the world we should do next when we almost literally stumbled into an eighteen inch deep, ten foot wide depression in the snow-crust of the ice-cap.
This was it, no question about that. By a one in a hundred chance we had hit on the very spot where the plane had touched down – or crashed down, if the size of the depression in that frozen snow were anything to go by. To the left, the west, the ground was virginal, unmarked – ten feet to that side and we should have missed it altogether. To the east, the deep depression shelved rapidly upwards, its smooth convexity now marred by two large gouge marks, one in the centre and one to the right of the track, as if a pair of gigantic ploughs had furrowed through the ground: part of the under fuselage must have been ripped open by the impact – it would have been a wonder had it not been. Some way farther to the east, and well to the right of the main track, two other grooves, parallel and of a shallow bowl shape, had been torn in the snow. The gouge marks, plainly, of the still-racing propellers: the plane must have tilted over on its right wing just after the moment of landing.
To see all this took no longer than to sweep a torch through a swift semi-circle. I shouted to Joss to take another bundle of canes and prop up the homing spool line that led back to the antenna-if this weren’t done it would drift over and be lost to sight in ten minutes – and then rejoin us: then I turned and ran after Jackstraw who had already urged his team forwards and eastwards along the track of the crashed plane.
The wind was worse than ever, the drift an almost solid wall that reduced our speed to a lurching stumble and forced us to lean far into it to maintain our balance. Two hundred yards, three hundred, and then, almost a quarter of a mile from where it had touched down we found the airliner simply by walking straight into it. It had slewed almost 90 degrees as it had come to a halt, and was lying square across its own path, still resting on even keel.
In the feeble light of my torch the airliner, even although its fuselage rested on the ground, seemed immensely high and to stretch away for a vast distance on either side, but for all its great size there was something peculiarly pathetic and forlorn about it. But this, of course, was purely subjective, the knowledge in my own mind that this crippled giant would never leave here again.
I could hear no movement, see no movement. High above my head a faint blue light seemed to glow behind some of the cabin windows but apart from that there was no sign of life at all.
TWO Monday 1 a.m.–2 a.m. (#ulink_da6e20c1-d35f-5083-96e6-a72b22c7103e)
My greatest fear had already proved groundless-there was no sign of fire anywhere, no flickering red to see, no hidden crackling to hear. It was still possible that some small tongue of flame was creeping along inside the fuselage or wings looking for the petrol or oil that would help it blaze into destructive life – and with that wind to fan the flames, destruction would have been complete – but it hardly seemed worth worrying about: and it was unlikely that any pilot cool-headed enough to turn off the ignition would have forgotten to shut down the petrol lines.
Already Jackstraw had plugged our searchlight into the dry battery and handed me the lamp. I pressed the switch, and it worked: a narrow but powerful beam good for six hundred yards in normal conditions. I swung the beam to my right, then brought it slowly forward.
Whatever colours the plane may have had originally, it was impossible to distinguish any of them now. The entire fuselage was already shrouded in a sheet of thin rimed ice, dazzling to the eye, reflecting the light with the intensity, almost, of a chromed mirror. The tail unit was intact. So, too, was the fuselage for half its length, then crumpled and torn underneath, directly opposite the spot where we stood. The left wing was tilted upwards at an angle of about five degrees above the normal – the plane wasn’t on such an even keel as I had first thought. From where I stood this wing blocked off my view of the front, but just above and beyond it I saw something that made me temporarily forget the urgency of my concern for those inside and stand there, stockstill, the beam trained unwaveringly on that spot.
Even under the coating of ice the big bold lettering ‘BOAC was clearly visible. BOAC! What on earth was a BOAC airliner doing in this part of the world? The SAS and KLM, I knew, operated trans-Arctic flights from Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Winnipeg, Los Angeles and Vancouver via Sondre Strömfjord, about an hour and a half’s flying time away to the south-west on the west coast of Greenland, just on the Arctic Circle, and I was pretty sure that Pan American and Trans World operated reciprocal services on the same route. It was just barely possible that freak weather conditions had forced one of these planes far enough off course to account for its presence here, but if I was right about the BOAC, it just wasn’t possible—
‘I’ve found the door, Dr Mason.’ Jackstraw had taken my arm, jerking me out of my reverie, and was pointing to a big oval door with its lowest point just at our eye-level. ‘We will try these, perhaps?’
I heard the metallic clang as he lifted a couple of crowbars off the sledge, and nodded. We could only try. I set the searchlight on the snow, adjusted it on its gimbals so as to illuminate the door, took one of the crowbars and thrust it beneath the foot of the oval, the flattened end sliding easily between door and fuselage. Jackstraw did the same. We heaved together, but nothing happened. Again we heaved, and again, our feet coming clear of the ground, but the door remained immovable. To localise pressure, we concentrated on one bar, and this time we felt something giving: but it was the lever, not the door. With a pistol-shot crack, the cold-weakened crowbar snapped six inches from the end and we both landed on our backs.
Even the urgency of the moment, my almost complete lack of knowledge about planes, was no excuse. I cursed my stupidity in wasting valuable time trying to force open a massive door locked on the inside by heavy clips designed to withstand an internal pressure of many thousands of pounds, grabbed searchlight and battery, ducked round under the towering tail assembly into the full force of the wind and flying drift and moved forward till I came to the right wing.
Its tip was buried deep under the frozen snow, the airscrew blades bent back at right angles to their normal line. I thought perhaps I might try to scramble up the wing towards the fuselage and smash in one of the cabin windows, but after a couple of seconds wild slithering on the ice-sheeted wing in that gusting gale wind I gave up the idea. To maintain a foothold was quite impossible: besides, it was doubtful whether I could have smashed in a window anyway. Like the door, the windows were designed to withstand great pressures.
Stumbling, slipping, we ran round the buried tip of the wing, and clear in sight now was the ice hummock that had brought the big airliner to its sudden halt. About fifteen feet high and twenty wide at the base, it lay in the right angle formed by the front of the fuselage and the leading edge of the wing. But it wasn’t the root of the wing that had absorbed the initial impact, a glance at the nose of the aircraft was enough to show that. The plane must have crashed into the ice-mound just to right of centre of the control cabin: the windscreens were smashed, the fuselage ripped open and crushed back for six or seven feet. What had happened to the pilot sitting on that side at the moment of the telescopic impact just didn’t bear thinking about: but at least we had found our way in.
I set the searchlight so that its beam illuminated the wrecked control cabin, gauged the distance to the lower sill of the windscreen – it must have been fully nine feet – and jumped. My gloved hands hooked on firmly but slipped almost at once on the ice-rimed surface. I grabbed for a purchase grip on one of the windscreen pillars, felt my fingers striking against solid glass on both sides -the windscreen hadn’t been as completely shattered as I had imagined – and was on the point of losing my hold altogether when Jackstraw moved forward swiftly and took my weight.
With my knees on his shoulders and a fire axe in my hand it took me no more than two minutes to smash away the glass that clung to the pillars and the upper and lower edges. I hadn’t realised that aircraft glass – toughened perspex – could be so tough, nor, when it came to clambering through into the control cabin in my bulky furs, that windscreens could be so narrow.
I landed on top of a dead man. Even in the darkness I knew he was dead. I fumbled under my parka, brought out the torch, switched it on for a couple of seconds, then put it out. It was the co-pilot, the man who had taken the full impact of the crash. He was pinned, crushed between his seat and the twisted, fractured wreckage of what had been control columns, levers and dashboard instruments: not since I had once been called out to the scene of a head-on collision between a racing motor-cyclist and a heavy truck had I seen such dreadful injuries on any man. Whatever any of the survivors, the shocked and injured survivors in the plane, must see, it mustn’t be this. It was ghastly beyond description.
I turned and leaned out the windscreen. Jackstraw was directly below, cupped gloved hands shielding his eyes against the flying ice spicules as he stared upwards.
‘Bring a blanket,’ I shouted. ‘Better, bring a full gunny sack. And the morphia kit. Then come up yourself.’
He was back in twenty seconds. I caught both sack and morphia box, placed them on the twisted cabin floor behind me, then reached out a hand to help Jackstraw, but it wasn’t necessary. Athleticism wasn’t the forte of the short and stocky Greenlanders, but Jackstraw was the fittest and most agile man I had ever met. He sprang, caught the lower sill of the left windscreen in his left hand, the central pillar in the other and swung legs and body through the centre screen as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.
I gave him my torch to hold, rummaged in the gunny sack and dragged out a blanket. I spread it over the dead co-pilot, tucking the corners down among twisted and broken ends of metal, so that it shouldn’t blow free in the icy wind that swirled and gusted through the wrecked control cabin.
‘Waste of a good blanket, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘But – well, it isn’t pretty’
‘It isn’t pretty’ Jackstraw agreed. His voice was quite steady, devoid of all inflection. ‘How about this one?’
I looked across at the left-hand side of the cabin. It was almost completely undamaged and the chief pilot, still strapped in his seat and slumped against his sidescreens, seemed quite unmarked. I stripped fur glove, mitten and silk glove off my right hand, reached out and touched the forehead. We had been out of doors now for over fifteen minutes in that ferocious cold, and I would have sworn that my hand was about as cold as the human flesh could get. But I was wrong. I pulled the gloves back on and turned away, without touching him further. I wasn’t carrying out any autopsies that night.
A few feet farther back we found the radio operator in his compartment. He was half-sitting, half-lying against the for’ard bulkhead of his shack where he must have been catapulted by the crash. His right hand was still clutched firmly round the handgrip of the front panel of his radio set – it must have been ripped clear off the transmitter, which didn’t look as if it would ever transmit anything again.
On the bulkhead, behind his head, blood gleamed dully in the torch-light. I bent over the unconscious man – I could see that he was still breathing – removed my gloves once more and gently slid my fingers behind his head. Just as gently I withdrew them. How the hell, I thought, part hopelessly, part savagely, am I to carry out a head operation on a person with a telescoped occiput: the state he was in, I wouldn’t have given a fig for his chance in the finest operating theatre in London. At the very least he would be blind for life, the sight centre must have been completely destroyed. I reached for his pulse: racing, faint, erratic to a degree. The thought came to me, a thought compounded as much of cowardice as of regret, that in all likelihood the possibility of my having to operate on him was remote, very remote. If he were to survive the inevitably rough handling that would be needed to get him out of that aircraft and then the journey back to the cabin through that ice-laden sub-zero gale, it would be a miracle indeed.
It seemed unlikely that he would ever wake again. But he might, he just conceivably might, so I broached the morphia kit. Then we eased his head and neck into a more comfortable position, covered him with a blanket and left him.
Immediately behind the radio compartment was a long narrow room which extended across two-thirds of the width of the plane. A quick glance at the two chairs and collapsible bunk was enough to show that this must be the crew’s rest room, and someone had been resting there at the moment of the crash. That crumpled shirt-sleeved figure on the floor must have been taken completely unawares, before he had the slightest knowledge of what was happening: and he would never know now.
We found the stewardess in the pantry, lying on her left side on the floor, the outspread black hair fallen forward over her face. She was moaning softly to herself, but it wasn’t the moan of one in pain. Her pulse was steady enough, but fast. Jackstraw stooped down beside me.
‘Shall we lift her, Dr Mason?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘She’s coming to, I think, and she can tell us far quicker than we can find out whether there’s anything broken. Another blanket, and we’ll let her be. Almost certainly someone much more in need of our attention.’
The door leading into the main passenger compartment was locked. At least, it appeared to be, but I was pretty certain it would never be locked under normal circumstances. Perhaps it had been warped by the impact of landing. It was no time for half measures. Together, we took a step back, then flung all the weight of our shoulders against it. It gave suddenly, three or four inches, and at the same time we heard a sharp exclamation of pain from the other side.
‘Careful!’ I warned, but Jackstraw had already eased his weight. I raised my voice. ‘Get back from that door, will you? We want to come in.’
We heard a meaningless mutter from the other side, followed by a low groan and the slipping shuffle of someone trying to haul himself to his feet. Then the door opened and we passed quickly inside.
The blast of hot air struck me in the face like an almost physical blow. I gasped, fought off a passing moment of weakness when my legs threatened to give under me, then recovered sufficiently to bang the door shut behind me. With the motors dead and the arctic chill striking through the thin steel of the fuselage this warmth, no matter how efficient the cabin insulation, wouldn’t last long: but while it did, it might be the saving of all those who still lived. A thought struck me and, ignoring the man who stood swaying before me, one hand clutching a seat grip for support, the other rubbing at a blood-masked forehead, I turned to Jackstraw.
‘Carry the stewardess in here. We’ll take a chance – and it’s not all that much of a chance either. There’s a damned sight more hope for her in here with a broken leg than out there with only a bump on the head. Throw her blanket over the wireless operator – but whatever you do don’t touch him.’
Jackstraw nodded and went out, closing the door quickly behind him. I turned to the man who still stood shakily in the aisle, still dazedly rubbing his hand, a big brown square hand matted on the back with black hair, across a bleeding forehead. He looked at me for a moment, then stared down uncomprehendingly at the blood dripping on to the bright red tie and blue shirt that contrasted so oddly with the light grey gaberdine suit. He closed his eyes tightly, then shook his head to clear it.
‘Sorry to ask the inevitable question.’ The voice was quiet, deep, well under control. ‘But – what happened?’
‘You crashed,’ I said shortly. ‘What do you remember?’
‘Nothing. Well, that is, just a bump, then a loud screeching tearing noise—’
‘Then you hit the door.’ I gestured at the bloodstains behind me. ‘Sit down for a moment. You’ll be all right.’ I’d lost interest in him and was staring down the length of the cabin. I’d expected to see most of the seats wrenched off their bases, but instead they were all there exactly as they should have been, three wide to the left of me, two to the right, the seats in the front half facing aft, those to the rear facing forward. More than that, I had expected to see people, injured, broken and moaning people, flung all over the seats and aisles: but the big passenger compartment seemed almost empty, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard.
But it wasn’t empty, not quite. Apart from the man by my side there were, I found, nine others altogether. Two men lay in the front part of the aisle. One, a big broad-shouldered man with curly dark hair, was propped up on an elbow, staring around him with a puzzled frown on his face; near him, lying on his side, was a smaller, much older man, but all I could see of him were a few wisps of black hair plastered across a bald head, a Glenurquhart plaid jacket that seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and the loudest check tie it had ever been my misfortune to see. It seemed obvious that they had been sitting together in the left-hand seat adjacent to them and had been flung out when the plane crashed into the ice-mound and slewed violently to one side.
In the seat beyond that, also on the left, a man sat by himself. My first reaction was surprise that he, too, hadn’t been hurled into the aisle, but then I saw that he was awake and fully conscious. He was sitting rigidly in his seat, pressed in hard against the window, legs braced on the floor, holding on with both hands to the table fixed to the seat in front: tautened tendons ridged the backs of his thin white hands, and his knuckles gleamed in the torch-light. I lifted the beam higher, saw that he was wearing a close-fitting clerical collar.
‘Relax, Reverend,’ I said soothingly. ‘Terra firma once more, and this is as far as you are going.’ He said nothing, just stared at me through rimless glasses, so I left him. He seemed unhurt.
Four people sat in the right-hand side of the front part of the plane, each one in a window seat; two women, two men. One of the women was fairly elderly, but so heavily made-up and with her hair so expensively dyed and marcelled that I couldn’t have guessed her age within ten years: her face, somehow, seemed vaguely familiar. She was awake, and looking slowly about her, her eyes empty of understanding. So, too, was the woman in the next seat, an even more expensive-looking creature with a mink coat flung cape-wise over her shoulders to show a simple green jersey dress that I suspected cost a small fortune: she was about twenty-five, I guessed, and with her blonde hair, grey eyes and perfect features would have been one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, if it weren’t for the overfull and rather sulky mouth. Maybe, I thought uncharitably, she remembered to do something about that mouth when she was fully awake. But right then, she wasn’t fully awake: none of them was, they all behaved as if they were being dragged up from the depths of an exhausting sleep.
Still more asleep than awake were the other two men in the front, one a big, burly, high-coloured man of about fifty-five, with the gleaming thick white hair and moustache of the caricature of a Dixie colonel: the other was a thin elderly man, his face heavily lined, unmistakably Jewish.
Not bad going so far, I thought with relief. Eight people, and only one cut forehead among the lot of them – the perfect argument, if ever there was one, for having all seats in a plane face towards the rear. No question but that they all owed, if not their lives, at least their immunity to injury to the fact that their high-backed seats had almost completely cushioned and absorbed the shock of impact.
The two passengers in the rear end of the cabin were the perfect argument for not having the seat face forward. The first I came to – a brown-haired young girl of about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a belted raincoat – was lying on the floor between two seats. She was stirring, and as I put my hands under her arms to help her up, she screamed in sudden pain. I changed my grip and lifted her gently on to the seat.
‘My shoulder.’ Her voice was low and husky. ‘It is very sore.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ I’d eased back the blouse at the neck and closed it again. ‘Your clavicle – the collar-bone – is gone. Just sit there and hold your left arm in your right hand … yes, so. I’ll strap you up later. You won’t feel a thing, I promise you.’
She smiled at me, half-timidly, half-gratefully, and said nothing. I left her, went to the very rear seat in the plane, stooped to examine the man there then straightened in almost the same instant: the weirdly unnatural angle of the head on the shoulders made any examination superfluous.
I turned and walked forward, everybody was awake now, sitting upright or struggling dazedly to their feet, their half-formed questions as dazed as the expressions on their faces. I ignored them for a moment, looked questioningly at Jackstraw as he came through the forward door, closely followed by Joss.
‘She won’t come.’ Jackstraw jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’s awake, but she won’t leave the wireless operator.’
‘She’s all right?’
‘Her back hurts, I think. She wouldn’t say.’
I made no answer and moved across to the main door – the one we’d failed to open from the outside. I supposed it no business of mine if the stewardess chose to devote her attention to a member of the crew instead of to the passengers who were her charges. But it was damned queer all the same – almost as queer as the fact that though the inevitability of the crash must have been known for at least fifteen minutes before the actual event, not one of the ten passengers in the cabin had been wearing a seat-belt – and the stewardess, wireless operator and the crew member in the rest room appeared to have been caught completely unprepared.
The circular door handle refused to budge. I called Jackstraw, but even the extra weight made not the slightest impression on it. Obviously, it was immovably jammed – there must have been a slight telescoping effect along the entire length of the fuselage as the plane had crashed into the ice-mound. If the door I had noticed behind the control cabin was as badly warped as this one -and, being nearer the point of impact, it almost inevitably would be – then they’d all have to leave via the windscreens of the control cabin. I thought of the wireless operator with his dreadful head wound and wondered bleakly whether even trying to move him out could be more than a futile gesture, anyway.
A figure barred my way as I turned from the door. It was the white-haired, white-moustached Dixie colonel. His face was dark red, his eyes light blue, choleric and protuberant. It only required someone to get this man good and mad and he would be no more than a debit entry in the account book of some life assurance company. And he seemed good and mad now.
‘What’s happened? What in the devil is all this?’ He had a voice like a Dixie colonel too, the Mason-Dixon line lay far to the north of wherever he had been born. ‘We’ve landed. Why? What are we doing here? What’s the noise outside? And -and who in the name of heaven are you?’
A big business tycoon, I thought wryly, with money enough and power enough to indulge an obviously over-generous capacity for righteous indignation: if I was going to meet any trouble, it wasn’t hard to guess the direction it was going to come from. But, right then, there was some excuse for his attitude: I wondered how I would have felt if I had gone to sleep in a trans-Atlantic airliner and woken up to find myself landed in the freezing middle of nowhere with three fur-clad people, complete with snow-goggles and snow-masks, waddling about the aisle of the plane.
‘You’ve crash-landed,’ I said briefly. ‘I don’t know why – how the hell should I? The noise outside is an ice-blizzard rattling against the fuselage. As for us, we are scientists managing an International Geophysical Year station half a mile from here. We saw and heard you just before you crashed.’
I made to push past him, but he barred my way.
‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ The voice was more authoritative than ever and there was a surprising amount of muscle in that arm across my chest. ‘I think we have a right to know—’
‘Later.’ I knocked his arm away and Jackstraw completed the job by pushing him down into his seat. ‘Don’t make a damned nuisance of yourself. There’s a critically injured man who has to have attention, and at once. We’ll take him to safety and then come back for you. Keep the door shut.’ I was addressing all of them now, but the white-haired man’s wrathful spluttering attracted my attention again. ‘And if you don’t shut up and cooperate, you can stay here. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead, stiff as a board, in a couple of hours. Maybe you will be yet.’
I moved up the aisle, followed by Jackstraw. The young man who had been lying on the floor pulled himself on to a seat, and he grinned at me as I passed.
‘How to win friends and influence people.’ He had a slow cultured drawl. ‘I fear you have offended our worthy friend.’
‘I fear I have.’ I smiled, passed by, then turned. These wide shoulders and large capable hands could be more than useful to us. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Recoverin’ rapidly.’
‘You are indeed. You didn’t look so good a minute ago.’
‘Just takin’ a long count,’ he said easily. ‘Can I help?’
‘That’s why I asked,’ I nodded.
‘Glad to oblige.’ He heaved himself to his feet, towering inches above me. The little man in the loud tie and the Glenurquhart jacket gave an anguished sound, like the yelp of an injured puppy.
‘Careful, Johnny, careful!’ The voice, the rich, nasal and rather grating twang, was pure Bowery. ‘We got our responsibilities, boy, big commitments. We might strain a ligament—’
‘Relax, Solly’ The big man patted him soothingly on his bald head. ‘Just takin’ a little walk to clear my head.’
‘Not till you put this parka and pants on first.’ I’d no time to bother about the eccentricities of little men in loud jackets and louder ties. ‘You’ll need them.’
‘Cold doesn’t bother me, friend.’
‘This cold will. Outside that door it’s 110 degrees below the temperature of this cabin.’
I heard a murmur of astonishment from some of the passengers, and the large young man, suddenly thoughtful, took the clothes from Jackstraw. I didn’t wait until he had put them on, but went out with Joss.
The stewardess was bent low over the injured wireless operator. I pulled her gently to her feet. She offered no resistance, just looked wordlessly at me, the deep brown eyes huge in a face dead-white and strained with shock. She was shivering violently. Her hands were like ice.
‘You want to die of cold, Miss?’ This was no time for soft and sympathetic words, and I knew these girls were trained how to behave in emergencies. ‘Haven’t you got a hat, coat, boots, anything like that?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was dull, almost devoid of life. She was standing alone by the door now, and I could hear the violent rat-a-tat of her elbow as it shook uncontrollably and knocked against the door. ‘I’ll go and get them.’
Joss scrambled out through the windscreen to get the collapsible stretcher. While we were waiting I went to the exit door behind the flight deck and tried to open it, swinging at it with the back of my fire axe. But it was locked solid.
We had the stretcher up and were lashing the wireless operator inside as carefully as we could in these cramped conditions, when the stewardess reappeared. She was wearing her uniform heavy coat now, and high boots. I tossed her a pair of caribou trousers.
‘Better, but not enough. Put these on.’ She hesitated, and I added roughly, ‘We won’t look.’
‘I – I must go and see the passengers.’
‘They’re all right. Bit late in thinking about it, aren’t you?’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t leave him.’ She looked down at the young man at her feet. ‘Do you – I mean—’ She broke off, then it came out with a rush. ‘Is he going to die?’
‘Probably,’ I said, and she flinched away as if I had struck her across the face. I hadn’t meant to be brutal, just clinical.
‘We’ll do what we can for him. It’s not much, I’m afraid.’
Finally we had him securely lashed to the stretcher, his head cushioned against the shock as best we could. When I got to my feet, the stewardess was just pulling her coat down over the caribou pants.
‘We’re taking him back to our cabin,’ I said. ‘We have a sledge below. There’s room for another. You could protect his head. Want to come?’
‘The passengers—’ she began uncertainly.
‘They’ll be all right.’
I went back inside the main cabin, closing the door behind me, and handed my torch to the man with the cut brow. The two feeble night or emergency lights that burned inside were poor enough for illumination, worse still for morale.
‘We’re taking the wireless operator and stewardess with us,’ I explained. ‘Back in twenty minutes. And if you want to live, just keep this door tight shut.’
‘What an extraordinarily brusque young man,’ the elderly lady murmured. Her voice was low-pitched, resonant, with an extraordinary carrying power.
Only from necessity, madam,’ I said dryly. ‘Would you really prefer long-winded and flowery speeches the while you were freezing to death?’
‘Well, do you know, I really don’t think I would,’ she answered mock-seriously, and I could hear her chuckling – there was no other word for it – as I closed the door behind me.
Working in the cramped confines of that wrecked control cabin, in almost pitch darkness and with that ice-laden bitter gale whistling through the shattered windscreens, we had the devil’s own time of it trying to get the injured wireless operator down to that waiting sledge below. Without the help of the big young stranger I don’t think we would ever have managed it, but manage it we eventually did: he and I lowered and slid the stretcher down to Jackstraw and Joss, who took and strapped it on the sledge. Then we eased the stewardess down: I thought I heard her cry out as she hung supported only by a hand round either wrist, and remembered that Jack-straw had said something about her back being injured. But there was no time for such things now.
I jumped down and a couple of seconds later the big young man joined me. I hadn’t intended that he should come, but there was no harm in it: he had to go sometime, and there was no question of his having to ride on the sledge.
The wind had eased a little, perhaps, but the cold was crueller than ever. Even the dogs cowered miserably in the lee of the plane: now and again one of them stretched out a neck in protest and gave its long, mournful wolf call, a sound eerie beyond description. But their misery was all to the good: as Jackstraw said, they were mad to run.
And, with the wind and ice-drift behind them, run they did. At first I led the way with the torch, but Balto, the big lead dog, brushed me aside and raced on into the darkness: I had sense enough to let him have his head. He followed the twisting route of the plane’s snow-furrow, the bamboos, homing spool and antenna line as swiftly and unerringly as if it had been broad daylight, and the polished steel runners of the sledge fairly hissed across the snow. The frozen ground was smooth and flat as river ice; no ambulance could have carried the wireless operator as comfortably as our sledge did that night.
It took us no more than five minutes to reach the cabin, and in three more minutes we were on our way again. They were a busy three minutes. Jackstraw lit the oil stove, oil lamp and Colman pressure lamp, while Joss and I put the injured man on a collapsible cot before the stove, worked him into my sleeping-bag, slid in half a dozen heat pads – waterproof pads containing a chemical which gave off heat when water was added -placed a rolled up blanket under his neck to keep the back of his head off the cot, and zipped the sleeping-bag shut. I had surgical instruments enough to do what had to be done, but it had to wait: not so much because we had others still to rescue, urgent enough though that was, but the man lying at our feet, so still, so ashen-faced, was suffering so severely from shock and exposure that to touch him would have been to kill him: I was astonished that he had managed to survive even this long.
I told the stewardess to make some coffee, gave her the necessary instructions, and then we left her and the big young man together: the girl heating a pan over a pile of meta tablets, the young man staring incredulously into a mirror as he kneaded a frost-bitten cheek and chin with one hand, and with another held a cold compress to a frozen ear. We took with us the warm clothes we had lent them, some rolls of bandages, and left.
Ten minutes later we were back inside the plane. Despite its insulation, the temperature inside the main cabin had already dropped at least thirty degrees and almost everyone was shivering with the cold, one or two beating their arms to keep themselves warm. Even the Dixie colonel was looking very subdued. The elderly lady, fur coat tightly wrapped around her, looked at her watch and smiled.
‘Twenty minutes, exactly. You are very prompt, young man.’
‘We try to be of service.’ I dumped the pile of clothes I was carrying on a seat, nodded at them and the contents of a gunny sack Joss and Jackstraw were emptying. ‘Share these out between you and be as quick as you can. I want you to get out at once – my two friends here will take you back. Perhaps one of you will be kind enough to remain behind.’ I looked to where the young girl still sat alone in her back seat, still holding her left forearm in her hand. ‘I’ll need some help to fix this young lady up.’
‘Fix her up?’ It was the expensive young woman in the expensive furs speaking for the first time. Her voice was expensive as the rest of her and made me want to reach for a hairbrush. ‘Why? What on earth is the matter with her?’
‘Her collar-bone is broken,’ I said shortly.
‘Collar-bone broken?’ The elderly lady was on her feet, her face a nice mixture of concern and indignation. ‘And she’s been sitting there alone all this time – why didn’t you tell us, you silly man?’
‘I forgot,’ I replied mildly. ‘Besides, what good would it have done?’ I looked down at the girl in the mink coat. Goodness only knew that I didn’t particularly want her, but the injured girl had struck me as being almost painfully shy, and I was sure she’d prefer to have one of her own sex around. ‘Would you like to give me a hand?’
She stared at me, a cold surprised stare that would have been normal enough had I made some outrageous or improper request, but before she could answer the elderly lady broke in again.
‘I’ll stay behind. I’d love to help.’
‘Well—’ I began doubtfully, but she interrupted immediately.
‘Well yourself. What’s the matter? Think I’m too old, hey?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ I protested.
‘A fluent liar, but a gallant one.’ She grinned. ‘Come on, we’re wasting this valuable time you’re always so concerned about.’
We brought the girl into the first of the rear seats, where there was plenty of space between that and the first of the rearward facing front seats, and had just worked her coat off when Joss called me.
‘We’re off now, sir. Back in twenty minutes.’
As the door closed behind the last of them and I broke open a roll of bandage, the old lady looked quizzically at me.
‘Know what you’re doing, young man?’
‘More or less. I’m a doctor.’
‘Doctor, hey?’ She looked at me with open suspicion, and what with my bulky, oil-streaked and smelly furs, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t shaved for three days, I suppose there was justification enough for it. ‘You sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure,’ I said irritably. ‘What do you expect me to do – whip my medical degree out from under this parka or just wear round my neck a brass plate giving my consulting hours?’
‘We’ll get along, young man,’ she chuckled. She patted my arm, then turned to the young girl. ‘What’s your name, my dear?’
‘Helene.’ We could hardly catch it, the voice was so low: her embarrassment was positively painful.
‘Helene? A lovely name.’ And indeed, the way she said it made it sound so. ‘You’re not British, are you? Or American?’
‘I’m from Germany, madam.’
‘Don’t call me “madam”. You know, you speak English beautifully. Germany, hey? Bavaria, for a guess?’
‘Yes.’ The rather plain face was transfigured in a smile, and I mentally saluted the old lady for the ease with which she was distracting the young girl’s thoughts from the pain. ‘Munich. Perhaps you know it?’
‘Like the back of my hand,’ she said complacently. ‘And not just the Hofbrauhaus either. You’re still very young, aren’t you?’
‘I’m seventeen.’
‘Seventeen.’ A nostalgic sigh. ‘Ah, my dear, I remember when I was seventeen. A different world. There was no trans-Atlantic airliner in those days, I can tell you.’
‘In fact,’ I murmured, ‘the Wright brothers were hardly airborne.’ The face had been more than familiar to me, and I was annoyed that I should have taken so long in placing it: I suppose it was because her normal setting was so utterly different from this bleak and frozen world.
‘Being insulting, young man?’ she queried. But there was no offence in her face.
‘I can’t imagine anyone ever insulting you. The world was at your feet even in the Edwardian days, Miss LeGarde.’
‘You know me, then?’ She seemed genuinely pleased.
‘It would be difficult to find anyone who doesn’t know the name of Marie LeGarde.’ I nodded at the young girl. ‘See, Helene knows it too.’ And it was clear from the awe-struck expression on the young German girl’s face that the name meant as much to her as to me. Twenty years queen of the music-hall, thirty years queen of the musical comedy stage, beloved wherever she was known less for her genius than for the innate kindliness and goodness which she tried to conceal from the world with a waspish tongue, for the half-dozen orphanages she maintained in Britain and Europe, Marie LeGarde was one of the few truly international names in the world of entertainment.
‘Yes, yes, I see you know my name.’ Marie LeGarde smiled at me. ‘But how did you know me?’
‘From your photograph, naturally. I saw it in Life the other week, Miss LeGarde.’
‘“Marie”, to my friends.’
‘I don’t know you,’ I protested.
‘I paid a small fortune to have that photograph retouched and made briefly presentable,’ she answered obliquely. ‘It was a splendid photograph, inasmuch as it bore precious little resemblance to the face that I carry about with me. Anyone who recognises me from that is my friend for life. Besides,’ she smiled, ‘I bear nothing but the most amicable feelings towards people who save my life.’
I said nothing, just concentrated on finishing the job of strapping up Helene’s arm and shoulders as quickly as possible: she was blue with cold, and shivering uncontrollably. But she hadn’t uttered a murmur throughout, and smiled gratefully at me when I was finished. Marie LeGarde regarded my handiwork approvingly.
‘I really do believe you have picked up some smattering of your trade along the way, Doctor -ah—’
‘Mason. Peter Mason, Peter to my friends.’
‘“Peter” it shall be. Come on, Helene, into your clothes as fast as you like.’
Fifteen minutes later we were back in the cabin. Jackstraw went to unharness the dogs and secure them to the tethering cable, while Joss and I helped the two women down the ice-coated steps from the trap-door. But I had no sooner reached the foot of the steps than I had forgotten all about Marie LeGarde and Helene and was staring unbelievingly at the tableau before me. I was just vaguely aware of Joss by my shoulder, and anger and dismay on his face slowly giving way to a kind of reluctant horror. For what we saw, though it concerned us all, concerned him most of all.
The injured wireless operator still lay where we had left him. All the others were there too, grouped in a rough semi-circle round him and round a cleared space to the left of the stove. By their feet in the centre of this space, upside down and with one corner completely stove in on the wooden floor, lay the big metal RCA radio transmitter and receiver, our sole source of contact with, our only means of summoning help from the outer world. I knew next to nothing about radios, but it was chillingly obvious to me – as it was, I could see, to the semi-circle of fascinated onlookers – that the RCA was smashed beyond recovery.
THREE Monday 2 a.m.–3 a.m. (#ulink_41f0220e-b129-5249-98e3-8db13fd71590)
Half a minute passed in complete silence, half a minute before I could trust myself to speak, even bring myself to speak. When at last I did, my voice was unnaturally low in the unnatural hush that was broken only by the interminable clacking of the anemometer cups above.
‘Splendid. Really splendid. The perfect end to the perfect day.’ I looked round them slowly, one by one, then gestured at the smashed transmitter. ‘What bloody idiot was responsible for this – this stroke of genius?’
‘How dare you, sir!’ The white-haired man whom I had mentally labelled as the Dixie colonel took a step forward, face flushed with anger. ‘Mind your tongue. We’re not children to be—’
‘Shut up!’ I said, quietly enough, but there must have been something in my voice rather less than reassuring, for he fell silent, though his fists still remained clenched. I looked at them all again. ‘Well?’
‘I’m afraid – I’m afraid I did it,’ the stewardess faltered. Her brown eyes were as unnaturally large, her face as white and strained as when I had first seen her. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘You! The one person here who should know just how vital radio really is. I don’t believe it.’
‘You must, I’m afraid.’ The quiet controlled voice belonged to the man with the cut brow. ‘No one else was anywhere near it at the time.’
‘What happened to you?’ I could see he was nursing a bruised and bleeding hand.
‘I dived for it when I saw it toppling.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I should have saved myself the trouble. That damned thing’s heavy.’
‘It’s all that. Thanks for trying anyway. I’ll fix your hand up later.’ I turned to the stewardess again, and not even that pale and exhausted face, the contrition in the eyes, could quieten my anger – and, to be honest, my fear. ‘I suppose it just came to pieces in your hand?’
‘I’ve told you I’m sorry. I – I was just kneeling beside Jimmy here—’
‘Who?’
‘Jimmy Waterman – the Second Officer. I—’
‘Second Officer?’ I interrupted. ‘That’s the radio operator, I take it?’
‘No, Jimmy is a pilot. We’ve three pilots – we don’t carry a radio operator.’
‘You don’t—’ I broke off my surprised question, asked another instead. ‘Who’s the man in the crew rest room? Navigator?’
‘We don’t carry a navigator either. Harry Williamson is – was – the Flight Engineer.’
No wireless operator, no navigator. There had been changes indeed since I’d flown the Atlantic some years previously in a Stratocruiser. I gave it up, returned to my original question and nodded at the smashed RCA.
‘Well, how did it happen?’
‘I brushed the table as I rose and – well, it just fell.’ Her voice trailed off uncertainly.
‘It just fell,’ I echoed incredulously. ‘One hundred and fifty pounds of transmitter and you flicked it off the table just like that?’
‘I didn’t knock it off. The legs collapsed.’
‘It’s got no legs to collapse,’ I said shortly. ‘Hinges.’
‘Well, hinges, then.’
I looked at Joss, who had been responsible for the erection of the table as well as the radio. ‘Is it possible?’
‘No.’ His voice was flat, definite.
Again the silence in the cabin, the hush, the tension that grew from the merely uncomfortable to the all but unbearable. But I was beginning to see that there was nothing to be gained now by further questioning, much to be lost. The radio was wrecked. Finish.
I turned away without a word, hung up my caribou furs on nails on the walls, took off goggles and gloves and turned to the man with the cut brow.
‘Let’s have a look at your head and your hand – it’s a pretty nasty gash on your forehead. Forget the radio for the moment, Joss – let’s have coffee first, lots of it.’ I turned to Jackstraw, who had just come down the steps from the hatch and was staring at the smashed radio. ‘I know, Jackstraw, I know. I’ll explain later – not that I know anything about it. Bring some empty cases for seats out of the food tunnel, will you. And a bottle of brandy. We all need it.’
I’d just started to wash the cut forehead – a nasty gash, as I had said, but surprisingly little signs of bruising – when the big amiable young man who had helped us lower the second officer from the wrecked plane came to us. I looked across up at him, and saw that I could be wrong about the amiability: his face wasn’t exactly hostile, but his eyes had the cool measuring look of one who knew from experience that he could cope with most of the situations, pleasant and unpleasant, that he was ever likely to come up against.
‘Look,’ he began without preamble, ‘I don’t know who you are or what your name is, but I’m sure we are all most grateful to you for what you have done for us. It’s more than probable that we owe our lives to you. We acknowledge that. Also, we know you’re a field scientist, and we realise that your equipment is of paramount importance to you. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ I dabbed iodine fairly liberally on the injured man’s head – he was tough, all right, he didn’t even wince – and looked at the speaker. Not at all a man to ignore, I thought. Behind the strong intelligent face lay a hardness, a tenacity of purpose that hadn’t been acquired along with the cultured relaxed voice at the Ivy League college I was pretty certain he had attended. ‘You’d something else to say?’
‘Yes. We think – correction, I think – that you were unnecessarily rough on our air hostess. You can see the state the poor kid’s in. OK, so your radio’s bust, so you’re hoppin’ mad about it – but there’s no need for all this song and dance.’ His voice was calm, conversational all the time. ‘Radios aren’t irreplaceable. This one will be replaced, I promise you. You’ll have a new one inside a week, ten days at the most.’
‘Kind,’ I said dryly. I finished tying the head bandage and straightened up. ‘The offer is appreciated, but there’s one thing you haven’t taken into account. You may be dead inside that ten days. You may all be dead in ten days.’
‘We may all—’ He broke off and stared at me, his expression perceptibly hardening. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘What I’m talking about is that without this radio you dismiss so lightly your chances – our chances – of survival aren’t all that good. In fact, they’re not good at all. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the radio, as such.’ I eyed him curiously, and a preposterous thought struck me: at least, it was preposterous for all of a couple of
seconds, before the truth hit me. ‘Have you – have any of you any idea just where you are, right here, at the present moment?’
‘Sure we have.’ The young man lifted his shoulders fractionally. ‘Just can’t say how far to the nearest drugstore or pub—’
‘I told them,’ the stewardess interrupted. ‘They were asking me, just before you came in. I thought Captain Johnson had overshot the landing field at Reykjavik in a snowstorm. This is Langjökull, isn’t it?’ She saw the expression on my face and went on hastily. ‘Or Hofsjökull? I mean, we were flying more or less north-east from Gander, and these are the only two snow-fields or glaciers or whatever you call them in Iceland in that direction from—’
‘Iceland?’ I suppose there is a bit of the ham actor in all of us, and I really couldn’t pass it up. ‘Did you say Iceland?’
She nodded, dumbly. Everybody was looking at her, and when she didn’t answer they all transferred their gazes to me, as at the touch of a switch.
‘Iceland,’ I repeated. ‘My dear girl, at the present moment you’re at an altitude of 8500 feet, right slam bang in the middle of the Greenland ice-cap.’
The effect was all that anybody could ever have wished for. I doubt whether even Marie LeGarde had ever had a better reaction from an audience. ‘Stunned’ is an inadequate word to describe their mental state immediately after this announcement: paralysis was nearer it, especially where the power of speech was concerned. And when the power of thought and speech did return, it expressed itself, as I might have expected, in the most violent disbelief. Everybody seemed to start talking at once, but it was the stewardess who took my attention, by coming forward and catching me by the lapels. I noticed the glitter of a diamond ring on her hand, and remember having some vague idea that this was against airline regulations.
‘What kind of joke is this? It can’t be, it can’t be! Greenland – it just can’t be.’ She saw by the expression on my face that I wasn’t joking, and her grip tightened even more. I had just time to be conscious of two conflicting thoughts – that, wide with fear and dismay though they might be, she had the most extraordinarily beautiful brown eyes and, secondly, that the BOAC were slipping in their selection of stewardesses whose calmness in emergency was supposed to match the trim-ness of their appearance – then she rushed on wildly.
‘How – how can it be? We were on a Gander-Reykjavik flight. Greenland – we don’t go anywhere near it. And there’s the automatic pilot, and radio beams and – and radio base checks every half-hour. Oh, it’s impossible, it’s impossible! Why do you tell us this?’ She was shaking now, whether from nervous strain or cold I had no idea: the big young man with the Ivy League accent put an arm awkwardly round her shoulder, and I saw her wince. Something indeed seemed to be hurting her – but again it could wait.
‘Joss,’ I called. He looked up from the stove, where he was pouring coffee into mugs. ‘Tell our friends where we are.’
‘Latitude 72.40 north, longitude 40.10 east,’ Joss said unemotionally. His voice cut clearly through the hubbub of incredulous conversation. ‘Three hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Near enough 800 miles from Reykjavik, 1000 from Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland, and just a little further distant from the North Pole. And if anyone doesn’t believe us, sir, I suggest they just take a walk – in any direction – and they’ll find out who’s right.’
Joss’s calm, matter-of-fact statement was worth half an hour of argument and explanation. In a moment, conviction was complete – and there were more problems than ever to be answered. I held up my hand in mock protest and protection against the waves of questions that surged against me from every side.
‘All in good time, please – although I don’t really know anything more than yourselves – with the exception, perhaps, of one thing. But first, coffee and brandy all round.’
‘Brandy?’ The expensive young woman had been the first, I’d noticed, to appropriate one of the empty wooden cases that Jackstraw had brought in in lieu of seats, and now she looked up under the curve of exquisitely modelled eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ The tone of her voice left little room for doubt as to her opinion.
‘Of course.’ I forced myself to be civil: bickering could reach intolerable proportions in a rigidly closed, mutually interdependent group such as we were likely to be for some time to come. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Opens the pores, dear man,’ she said sweetly. ‘I thought everyone knew that – how dangerous it is when you’re exposed to cold afterwards. Or had you forgotten? Our cases, our night things in the plane – somebody has to get these.’
‘Don’t talk such utter rubbish.’ My short-lived attempt at civility perished miserably. ‘Nobody’s leaving here tonight. You sleep in your clothes – this isn’t the Dorchester. If the blizzard dies down, we may try to get your things tomorrow morning.’
‘But—’
‘If you’re all that desperate, you’re welcome to get them yourself. Want to try?’ It was boorish of me, but that was the effect she had. I turned away to see the minister or priest hold up his hand against the offered brandy.
‘Go on, take it,’ I said impatiently.
‘I don’t really think I should.’ The voice was high-pitched, but the enunciation clear and precise, and I found it vaguely irritating that it should so perfectly match his appearance, be so exactly what I should have expected. He laughed, a nervous deprecating laugh. ‘My parishioners, you know …’
I was tired, worried and felt like telling him what he could do with his parishioners, but it wasn’t his fault.
‘There’s precedent in plenty in your Bible, Reverend. You know that better than I. It’ll do you good, really.’
‘Oh well, if you think so.’ He took the glass gingerly, as if Beelzebub himself were on the offering end, but I noticed that there was nothing so hesitant about his method and speed of disposal of the contents: his subsequent expression could properly be described as beatific. I caught Marie LeGarde’s eye, and smiled at the twinkle I caught there.
The reverend wasn’t the only one who found the coffee – and brandy – welcome. With the exception of the stewardess, who sipped at her drink in a distraught fashion, the others had also emptied their glasses, and I decided that the broaching of another Martell’s was justified. In the respite from the talk, I bent over the injured man on the floor. His pulse was slower, steadier and his breathing not quite so shallow: I slipped in a few more heat pads and zipped up the sleeping-bag.
‘Is he – is he any better, do you think?’ The stewardess was so close to me that I brushed against her as I straightened. ‘He – he seems a bit better, doesn’t he?’
‘He is a bit, I think. But nothing like over the shock from the wound and the exposure, though.’ I looked at her speculatively and suddenly felt almost sorry for her. Almost, but not quite: I didn’t at all like the direction my thoughts were leading me. ‘You’ve flown together quite a bit, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t offer anything more. ‘His head – do you think—’
‘Later. Let me have a quick look at that back of yours.’
‘Look at what?’
‘Your back,’ I said patiently. ‘Your shoulders. They seem to give you some pain. I’ll rig a screen.’
‘No, no, I’m all right.’ She moved away from me.
‘Don’t be silly, my dear.’ I wondered what trick of voice production made Marie LeGarde’s voice so clear and carrying. ‘He is a doctor, you know.’
‘No!’
I shrugged and reached for my brandy glass. Bearers of bad news were ever unpopular: I supposed her reaction was the modern equivalent of the classical despot’s unsheathing his dagger. Probably only bruises, anyhow, I told myself, and turned to look at the company.
An odd-looking bunch, to say the least, but then any group of people dressed in lounge suits and dresses, trilby hats and nylon stockings would have looked odd against the strange and uncompromising background of that cabin where every suggestion of anything that even remotely suggested gracious living had been crushed and ruthlessly made subservient to the all-exclusive purpose of survival.
Here there were no armchairs – no chairs, even – no carpets, wall-paper, book-shelves, beds, curtains – or even windows for the curtains. It was a bleak utilitarian box of a room, eighteen feet by fourteen. The floor was made of unvarnished yellow pine. The walls were made of spaced sheets of bonded ply, with kapok insulation between: the lower part of the walls was covered with green-painted asbestos, the upper part and entire roof sheeted with glittering aluminium to reflect the maximum possible heat and light. A thin, ever-present film of ice climbed at least halfway up all four walls, reaching almost to the ceiling in the four corners, the parts of the room most remote from the stove and therefore the coldest. On very cold nights, such as this, the ice reached the ceiling and started to creep across it to the layers of opaque ice that permanently framed the undersides of our rimed and opaque skylights.
The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.
One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks – eight in all. The other eighteen-foot wall was given over entirely to our stove, work-bench, radio table and housings for the meteorological instruments. The remaining wall by the tunnel was piled with tins and cases of food, now mostly empties, that had been brought in from the tunnel to begin the lengthy process of defrosting.
Slowly I surveyed all this, then as slowly surveyed the company. The incongruity of the contrast reached the point where one all but disbelieved the evidence of one’s own eyes. But they were there all right, and I was stuck with them. Everyone had stopped talking now and was looking at me, waiting for me to speak: sitting in a tight semi-circle round the stove, they were huddled together and shivering in the freezing cold. The only sounds in the room were the clacking of the anemometer cups, clearly audible down the ventilation pipe, the faint moaning of the wind on the ice-cap and the hissing of our pressure Colman lamp. I sighed to myself, and put down my empty glass.
‘Well, it looks as if you are going to be our guests for some little time, so we’d better introduce ourselves. Us first.’ I nodded to where Joss and Jackstraw were working on the shattered RCA, which they had lifted back on the table. ‘On the left, Joseph London, of the city of London, our radio operator.’
‘Unemployed,’ Joss muttered.
‘On the right, Nils Nielsen. Take a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. At this very moment the guardian angels of your respective insurance companies are probably putting up a prayer for his continued well-being. If you all live to come home again, the chances are that you will owe it to him.’ I was to remember my own words later. ‘He probably knows more than any man living about survival on the Greenland ice-cap.’
‘I thought you called him “Jackstraw”,’ Marie LeGarde murmured.
‘My Eskimo name.’ Jackstraw had turned and smiled at her, his parka hood off for the first time; I could see her polite astonishment as she looked at the fair hair, the blue eyes, and it was as if Jackstraw read her thoughts. ‘Two of my grandparents were Danish – most of us Greenlanders have as much Danish blood as Eskimo in us nowadays.’ I was surprised to hear him talk like this, and it was a tribute to Marie LeGarde’s personality: his pride in his Eskimo background was equalled only by his touchiness on the subject.
‘Well, well, how interesting.’ The expensive young lady was sitting back on her box, hands clasped round an expensively-nyloned knee, her expression reflecting accurately the well-bred condescension of her tone. ‘My very first Eskimo.’
‘Don’t be afraid, lady.’ Jackstraw’s smile was wider than ever, and I felt more than vaguely uneasy; his almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness and good nature concealed an explosive temper which he’d probably inherited from some far distant Viking forebear. ‘It doesn’t rub off.’
The silence that followed could hardly be described as companionable, and I rushed in quickly.
‘My own name is Mason, Peter Mason, and I’m in charge of this IGY station. You all know roughly what we’re doing stuck out here on the plateau – meteorology, glaciology, the study of the earth’s magnetism, the borealis, airglow, ionosphere, cosmic rays, magnetic storms and a dozen other things which I suppose are equally uninteresting to you.’ I waved my arm. ‘We don’t, as you can see, normally live here alone. Five others are away to the north on a field expedition. They’re due back in about three weeks, after which we all pack up and abandon this place before the winter sets in and the ice-pack freezes on the coast.’
‘Before the winter sets in?’ The little man in the Glenurquhart jacket stared at me. ‘You mean to tell me it gets colder than this?’
‘It certainly does. An explorer called Alfred Wegener wintered not fifty miles from here in 1930–1, and the temperature dropped by 85 degrees below zero – 117 degrees of frost. And that may have been a warm winter, for all we know.’
I gave some time to allow this cheering item of information to sink in, then continued.
‘Well, that’s us. Miss LeGarde – Marie LeGarde – needs no introduction from anyone.’ A slight murmur of surprise and turning of heads showed that I wasn’t altogether right. ‘But that’s all I know, I’m afraid.’
‘Corazzini,’ the man with the cut brow offered. The white bandage, just staining with blood, was in striking contrast to the receding dark hair. ‘Nick Corazzini. Bound for Bonnie Scotland, as the travel posters put it.’
‘Holiday?’
‘No luck.’ He grinned. ‘Taking over the new Global Tractor Company outside Glasgow. Know it?’
‘I’ve heard of it. Tractors, eh? Mr Corazzini, you may be worth your weight in gold to us yet. We have a broken-down elderly tractor outside that can usually only be started by repeated oaths and assaults by a four-pound hammer.’
‘Well.’ He seemed taken aback. ‘Of course, I can try—’
I don’t suppose you’ve actually laid a finger on a tractor for many years,’ Marie LeGarde interrupted shrewdly. ‘Isn’t that it, Mr Corazzini?’
‘Afraid it is,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘But in a situation like this I’d gladly lay my hands on another one.’
‘You’ll have your chance,’ I promised him. I looked at the man beside him.
‘Smallwood,’ the minister announced. He rubbed his thin white hands constantly to drive the cold away. ‘The Reverend Joseph Smallwood. I’m the Vermont delegate to the international General Assembly of the Unitarian and Free United Churches in London. You may have heard of it – our biggest conference in many years?’
‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘But don’t let that disturb you. Our paper boy misses out occasionally. And you, sir?’
‘Solly Levin. Of New York City,’ the little man in the check jacket added unnecessarily. He reached up and laid a proprietary arm along the broad shoulders of the young man beside him. ‘And this is my boy, Johnny.’
‘Your boy? Your son?’ I fancied I could see a slight resemblance.
‘Perish the thought,’ the young man drawled. ‘My name is Johnny Zagero. Solly is my manager. Sorry to introduce a discordant note into company such as this’ – his eyes swept over us, dwelt significantly longer on the expensive young lady by his side – ‘but I’m in the way of being a common or garden pugilist. That means “boxer”, Solly.’
‘Would you listen to him?’ Solly Levin implored. He stretched his clenched fists heavenwards. ‘Would you just listen to him? Apologisin’. Johnny Zagero, future heavyweight champion, apologisin’ for being a boxer. The white hope for the world, that’s all. Rated number three challenger to the champ. A household name in all—’
‘Ask Dr Mason if he’s ever heard of me,’ Zagero suggested.
‘That means nothing,’ I smiled. ‘You don’t look like a boxer to me, Mr Zagero. Or sound like one. I didn’t know it was included in the curriculum at Yale. Or was it Harvard?’
‘Princeton,’ he grinned. ‘And what’s so funny about that? Look at Tunney and his Shakespeare. Roland La Starza was a college boy when he fought for the world title. Why not me?’
‘Exactly’ Solly Levin tried to thunder the word, but he hadn’t the voice for it. ‘Why not? And when we’ve carved up this British champ of yours – a doddery old character rated number two challenger by one of the biggest injustices ever perpetrated in the long and glorious history of boxin’ – when we’ve massacred this ancient has-been, I say—’
‘All right, Solly,’ Zagero interrupted. ‘Desist. There’s not a press man within a thousand miles. Save the golden words for later.’
‘Just keepin’ in practice, boy. Words are ten a penny. I’ve got thousands to spare—’
‘T’ousands, Solly, t’ousands. You’re slippin’. Now shut up.’
Solly shut up, and I turned to the girl beside Zagero.
‘Well, miss?’
‘Mrs. Mrs Dansby-Gregg. You may have heard of me?’
‘No.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’ I’d heard of her all right, and I knew now that I’d seen her name and picture a score of times among those of other wealthy unemployed and unemployable built up by the tongue-in-the-cheek gossip columnists of the great national dailies into an ersatz London society whose frenetic, frequently moronic and utterly unimportant activities were a source of endless interest to millions. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I seemed to recall, had been particularly active in the field of charitable activities, although perhaps not so in the production of the balance sheets.
She smiled sweetly at me.
‘Well, perhaps it’s not so surprising after all. You are a bit distant from the centre of things, aren’t you?’ She looked across to where the youngster with the broken collar-bone was sitting. ‘And this is Fleming.’
‘Fleming?’ This time the wrinkling of my brow was genuine. ‘You mean Helene?’
‘Fleming. My personal maid.’
‘Your personal maid,’ I said slowly. I could feel the incredulous anger stirring inside me. ‘Your own maid? And you didn’t even bother to volunteer to stay while I fixed her shoulder up?’
‘Miss LeGarde did it first,’ she said coolly. ‘Why should I?’
‘Quite right, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, why should you?’ Johnny Zagero said approvingly. He looked at her long and consideringly. ‘You might have got your hands dirty.’
For the first time the carefully cultivated façade cracked, the smile stiffened mechanically, and her colour deepened. Mrs Dansby-Gregg made no reply, maybe she had none to make. People like Johnny Zagero never got close enough even to the fringes of her money-sheltered world for her to know how to deal with them.
‘Well, that leaves just the two of you,’ I said hastily. The large Dixie colonel with the florid face and white hair was sitting next to the thin wispy-haired little Jew. They made an incongruous pair.
‘Theodore Mahler,’ the little Jew said quietly. I waited, but he added nothing. A communicative character.
‘Brewster,’ the other announced. He made a significant pause. ‘Senator Hoffman Brewster. Glad to help in any way I can, Dr Mason.’
‘Thank you, Senator. At least I know who you are.’ Indeed, thanks to his magnificent flair for self-publicity, half the Western world knew who this outspoken, bitterly – but fairly – anti-communist, near isolationist senator from the south-west was. ‘On a European tour?’
‘You might say that.’ He had the politician’s gift for investing even the most insignificant words with a statesmanlike consideration. ‘As Chairman of one of our Appropriation committees, I – well, let’s call it a fact-finding tour.’
‘Wife and secretaries gone ahead by humble passenger steamer, I take it,’ Zagero said mildly. He shook his head. ‘That was a fearful stink your Congressional investigation boys raised recently about the expenses of US senators abroad.’
‘That was quite unnecessary, young man,’ Brewster said coldly. ‘And insulting.’
‘I believe it was,’ Zagero apologised. ‘Not really intended as such. Sorry, Senator.’ He meant it.
What a bunch, I thought despairingly, what a crowd to be stuck with in the middle of the Greenland ice-plateau. A business executive, a musical comedy star, a minister of religion, a boxer with an uninhibited if cultured tongue, his zany manager, a London society playgirl and her young German maid, a Senator, a taciturn Jew and a near-hysterical hostess – or one apparently so. And a gravely injured pilot who might live or die. But willy-nilly I was stuck with them, stuck with the responsibility of doing my damnedest to get these people to safety, and the prospect appalled me. How on earth was I even to start to go about it, go about it with people with no arctic clothing to ward off the razor-edged winds and inhuman cold, people lacking in all knowledge and experience of arctic travel, even lacking, with two or three exceptions, the endurance and sheer muscular strength to cope with the savagery of the Greenland icecap? I couldn’t even begin to guess.
But whatever else they were lacking in at that moment, it wasn’t volubility: the life-giving warmth of the brandy had had the unfortunate side effect of loosening their tongues. Unfortunate, that is, from my point of view: they had a hundred and one questions to ask, and they seemed to think that I should have the answer to all of them.
More accurately, they had only half a dozen questions to ask, with a hundred and one variations of these. How was it possible for a pilot to veer so many hundreds of miles off course? Could the compasses have gone wrong? Could the pilot have had a brain-storm? But then surely both co-pilot and second pilot would have known something was wrong? Could the radio have been damaged? It had been a bitterly cold afternoon even when they had left Gander, was it possible that some of the flaps and controls had iced up, forcing them off course? But if this were the case, why hadn’t someone come to warn them of the possibility of the crash?
I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn’t really know anything more about it than they did.
‘But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did.’ It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. ‘What was that, Dr Mason?’
‘What? Ah, yes, I remember now.’ I hadn’t forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I’d had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. ‘I need hardly tell you that it’s nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini – how could I, I wasn’t in the plane – just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It’s based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen months.
‘For over a year now, we have been experiencing a period of intense sun-spot activity – that’s one of the main interests of the IGY year – the most intense of this century. As you may know, sun-spots, or, rather, the emission of solar particles from these sun-spots, are directly responsible for the formation of the aurora borealis and magnetic storms, both of these being related to disturbances in the ionosphere. These disturbances can and, actually, almost invariably do interfere with radio transmission and reception, and when severe enough can completely disrupt all normal radio communications: and they can also produce temporary alterations of the earth’s magnetism which knock magnetic compasses completely out of kilter.’ All of which was true enough as far as it went. ‘It would, of course, require extreme conditions to produce these effects: but we have been experiencing these lately, and I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened with your plane. Where astral navigation – by the stars, that is – is impossible, as it was on a night like this, you are dependent on radio and compasses as your two main navigational aids: if these are knocked out, what have you left?’
A fresh hubbub of talk arose at this, and though it was quite obvious that most of them had only a vague idea what I was talking about, I could see that this idea was finding a fair degree of ready acceptance, satisfying them and fitting the facts as they knew them. I saw Joss gazing at me with an expressionless face, looked him in the eye for a couple of seconds, then turned away. As a radio operator, Joss knew even better than I that, though there was still some sun-spot activity, it had reached its maximum in the previous year: and as an ex-aircraft radio operator, he knew that airliners flew on gyrocompasses, which neither sun-spots nor magnetic storms could ever affect in the slightest.
‘We’ll have something to eat now.’ I cut through the buzz of conversation. ‘Any volunteers to give Jackstraw a hand?’
‘Certainly.’ Marie LeGarde, as I might have guessed, was first on her feet. ‘I’m by way of being what you might call a mean cook. Lead me to it, Mr Nielsen.’
‘Thanks, Joss, you might give me a hand to rig a screen.’ I nodded at the injured pilot. ‘We’ll see what we can do for this boy here.’ The stewardess, unbidden, moved forward to help me also. I was on the point of objecting - I knew that this wasn’t going to be nice – but I didn’t want trouble with her, not yet. I shrugged my shoulders and let her stay.
*
Half an hour later, I had done all I could. It indeed hadn’t been nice, but both the patient and the stewardess had stood it far better than I had expected. I was fixing and binding on a stiff leather helmet to protect the back of his head and Joss was strapping him down, inside the sleeping-bag, to the stretcher, so that he couldn’t toss around and hurt himself, when the stewardess touched my arm.
‘What – what do you think now, Dr Mason?’
‘It’s hard to be sure. I’m not a specialist in brain or head injuries, and even a specialist would hesitate to say. The damage may have penetrated deeper than we think. There may be haemor-rhaging – it’s often delayed in these cases.’
‘But if there’s no haemorrhaging?’ she persisted. ‘If the damage is no worse than what you think, what you see?’
‘Fifty-fifty. I wouldn’t have said so a couple of hours ago, but he seems to have quite astonishing powers of resistance and recuperation. Better than an even chance, I would say – if he had the warmth, the food, the skilled nursing he would have in a first class hospital. As it is – well, let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you.’
I looked at her, looked at the washed-out face, the faint blue circles forming under her eyes, and almost felt touched with pity. Almost. She was exhausted, and shivering with cold.
‘Bed,’ I said. ‘You’re dying for sleep and warmth, Miss – I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask your name.’
‘Ross. Margaret Ross.’
‘Scots?’
‘Irish. Southern Irish.’
‘I won’t hold it against you,’ I smiled. There was no answering smile from her. ‘Tell me, Miss Ross, why was the plane so empty?’
‘We had an “X” flight – an extra or duplicate charter for an overflow of passengers – out from London yesterday. Day before yesterday it is now, I suppose. We just stayed the night in Idlewild and had to return after we’d slept. The office phoned up people who had booked out on the evening plane, giving the chance of an earlier flight: ten of them accepted.’
‘I see. By the way, isn’t it a bit unusual to have only one stewardess aboard? On a trans-Atlantic flight, I mean?’
‘I know. There’s usually two or three – a steward and two stewardesses – or two stewards and a stewardess. But not for ten people.’
Of course. Hardly worth stewarding, you might say. Still,’ I went on smoothly, ‘it at least gives you time for the odd forty winks on these long night-flights.’
‘That wasn’t fair!’ I hadn’t been as clever as I thought, and her white cheeks were stained with red. ‘That’s never happened to me before. Never!’
‘Sorry, Miss Ross – it wasn’t really meant as a dig. It doesn’t matter anyhow.’
‘It does so matter!’ Her extraordinary brown eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘If I hadn’t been asleep I would have known what was going to happen. I could have warned the passengers. I could have moved Colonel Harrison to a front seat facing the rear—’
‘Colonel Harrison?’ I interrupted sharply.
‘Yes. The man in the back seat – the dead man.’
‘But he hadn’t a uniform on when—’
‘I don’t care. That was his name on the passenger list … If I’d known, he wouldn’t be dead now – and Miss Fleming wouldn’t have had her collar-bone broken.’
So that’s what has been worrying her, I thought. That accounts for her strange distraught behaviour. And then a moment later I realised that it didn’t account for it all – she had been behaving like that before ever she had known what had happened to any of the passengers. My slowly forming suspicions came back with renewed force: the lady would bear watching.
‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, Miss Ross. The captain must have been flying blind in the storm – and we’re more than 8000 feet up here. Probably he’d no knowledge of what was going to happen until the actual moment of crashing.’ In my mind’s eye I saw again the doomed airliner, landing lights on, circling our cabin for at least ten minutes, but if Miss Ross had any such thing in her mind’s eye, it was impossible for me to detect it. She had no idea at all – or she was an extraordinarily good actress.
‘Probably,’ she murmured dully, ‘I don’t know.’
We had a hot and satisfying meal of soup, corned meat, potatoes and vegetables – everything out of cans, but passable enough for all that. It was the last satisfying meal that our guests – or ourselves, for that matter – were likely to have for some considerable time to come, but I felt the moment unpropitious for breaking that sort of news. Time enough for that tomorrow – or later in the day, rather, for it was now already after three o’clock in the morning.
I suggested that the four women sleep in the top bunks – not from any delicacy of sentiment but because it was at least twenty-five degrees warmer there than it was at ground level, and the proportional difference would increase as the night wore on after the stove had been put out. There were some half-hearted protests when they learnt that I intended to shut down the fire, but I didn’t even bother arguing with them. Like all people who have lived for any length of time in the Arctic, I had an almost pathological dread of fire.
Margaret Ross, the stewardess, refused the offer of a bunk, and said she would sleep by the injured pilot, lest he should wake and want anything during the night. I had intended doing that myself, but I saw her mind was set on it, and though I felt unaccountably uneasy about the idea, I raised no objection.
That left five empty bunks among six men -Jackstraw, Joss and I could sleep reasonably enough in our furs. Inevitably, there was some magnanimous argument over the allocation of these bunks, but Corazzini settled the argument by producing a coin and beginning to toss for it. He himself lost in the end, but accepted defeat and the prospect of a cold uncomfortable night on the floor with amiable grace.
When they were all settled down, I picked up a torch and our weather log book, glanced at Joss and made for the trap. Zagero turned in his bunk to look at me.
‘What gives, Dr Mason? Especially at this hour of night, what gives?’
‘Weather reports, Mr Zagero. That’s why we’re here, remember? And I’m already three hours late with these.’
‘Even tonight?’
‘Even tonight. Continuity is the most important thing in weather observation.’
‘Sooner you than me.’ He shivered. ‘If it’s only half as cold outside as it is in here.’
He turned his back, and Joss rose to his feet. He’d correctly interpreted my look, and I knew he was consumed with curiosity.
‘I’ll come with you, sir. Better have a last look at the dogs.’
We didn’t bother looking at either the dogs or the weather instruments. We went straight towards the tractor and huddled under the tarpaulin for what miserable shelter it could afford. True, the wind had eased, but it was colder than ever: the long winter night was beginning to close down on the ice-cap.
‘It stinks,’ Joss said flatly. ‘The whole set-up stinks.’
‘To high heaven,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s finding out where the smell comes from that the trouble lies.’
‘This fairy tale of yours about magnetic storms and compasses and radios,’ he went on. ‘What was the idea?’
‘I’d previously said I knew something they didn’t. I did. But when it came to the bit I knew I’d be better to keep it to myself. You know how this damnable cold slows up your mind – I should have realised it sooner.’
‘Realised what?’
‘That I should keep it to myself.’
‘Keep what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Sorry, Joss. Not trying to build up suspense. The reason none of them knew anything about the crash until after it had happened is that they were all doped. As far as I could see, all of them, or nearly all, were under the influence of some sleeping drug or narcotic’
In the darkness I could almost feel him staring at me. After a long time he said softly, ‘You wouldn’t say this unless you were sure of it.’
‘I am sure of it. Their reactions, their dazed fumbling back to reality – and, above all, the pupils of their eyes. Unmistakable. Some kind of sleeping tablet mixtures, of the fast-acting kind. What is known to the trade, I believe, as Mickey Finns.’
‘But—’ Joss broke off. He was still trying to orientate his mind to this new line of thought. ‘But – they would be bound to know of it, to be aware that they had been doped, when they came to.’
‘In normal circumstances, yes. But they came to in what was, to say the least, most abnormal circumstances. I’m not saying that they didn’t experience any symptoms of weakness, dizziness and lassitude – they must have done – and what more natural than that they should ascribe any such unusual physical or mental symptoms to the effects of the crash. And what more natural, too, than that they should conceal these symptoms as best they could – and refrain from mentioning them? They would be ashamed to admit or discuss weaknesses – it’s a very human trait to show to your neighbours the very best face you can put on in times of emergency or danger.’
Joss didn’t reply at once. The implications of all this, as I’d found out for myself, took no little time for digestion, so I let him take his time and waited, listening to the lost and mournful wailing of the wind, the rustling hiss of millions of ice spicules scudding across the frozen snow of the ice-cap, and my own thoughts were in keeping with the bleak misery of the night.
‘It’s not possible,’ Joss muttered at length. I could hear his teeth chattering with the cold. ‘You can’t have some maniac rushing around an aircraft cabin with a hypo needle or dropping fizz-balls into their gin and tonics. You think they were all doped?’
‘Just about.’
‘But how could anyone—’
‘A moment, Joss,’ I interrupted. ‘What happened to the RCA?’
‘What?’ The sudden switch caught him momentarily off-balance. ‘What happened – you mean, how did it go for a burton? I’ve no idea at all, sir. All I know is that these hinges couldn’t have been knocked into the wall accidentally -not with radio and equipment weighing about 180 pounds sitting on top of them. Someone shoved them in. Deliberately.’
‘And the only person anywhere near it at the time was the stewardess, Margaret Ross. Everyone agreed on that.’
‘Yes, but why in the name of heaven should anyone want to do a crazy thing like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘There’s a hundred things I don’t know. But I do know she did it … And who’s in the best position to spike the drinks of aircraft passengers?’
‘Good God!’ I could hear the sharp hissing intake of breath. ‘Of course. Drinks – or maybe the sweets they hand out at take-off.’
‘No.’ I shook my head definitely in the darkness. ‘Barley sugar is too weak a covering-up agent to disguise the taste of a drug. Coffee, more likely’
‘It must have been her,’ Joss said slowly. ‘It must have been. But – but she acted as dazed and abnormal as any of the others. More so, if anything.’
‘Maybe she’d reason to,’ I said grimly. ‘Come on, let’s get back or we’ll freeze to death. Tell Jackstraw when you get him by himself.’
Inside the cabin, I propped the hatch open a couple of inches – with fourteen people inside, extra ventilation was essential. Then I glanced at the thermograph: it showed 48° below zero – eighty degrees of frost.
I lay down on the floor, pulled my parka hood tight to keep my ears from freezing, and was asleep in a minute.
FOUR Monday 6 a.m.–6 p.m. (#ulink_1fc2ab2b-fb0d-5101-a4b8-4bf043149eef)
For the first time in four months I had forgotten to set the alarm-clock before I went to sleep, and it was late when I awoke, cold and stiff and sore all over from the uneven hardness of the wooden floor. It was still dark as midnight – two or three weeks had passed since the rim of the sun had shown above the horizon for the last time that year, and all the light we had each day was two or three hours dim twilight round noon – but a glance at the luminous face of my watch showed me that it was nine-thirty.
I pulled the torch out from my parka, located the oil-lamp and lit it. The light was dim, scarcely reaching the far corners of the cabin, but sufficient to show the mummy-like figures lying huddled on the bunks and sprawled grotesquely across the floor, their frozen breath clouding before their faces and above their heads, then condensing on the cabin walls. The walls themselves were sheeted with ice which had extended far out across the roof, in places reaching the skylights, a condition largely brought about by the cold heavy air that had flooded down the opened hatchway during the night: the outside temperature registered on the drum at 54° below zero.
Not everyone was asleep: most of them, I suspected, had slept but little, the numbing cold had seen to that: but they were as warm in their bunks as they would be anywhere else and nobody showed any inclination to move. Things would be better when the cabin heated up a little.
I had trouble starting the stove – even though it was gravity fed from a tank above and to one side of it, the fuel oil had thickened up in the cold – but when it did catch it went with a roar. I turned both burners up to maximum, put on the water bucket that had lain on the floor all night and was now nearly a solid mass of ice, pulled on snow-mask and goggles and clambered up the hatchway to have a look at the weather.
The wind had died away almost completely -I’d known that from the slow and dispirited clacking of the anemometer cups – and the ice-drift, which at times could reach up several hundred feet into the sky, was no more than gentle puffs of dust stirring lazily and spectrally, through the feeble beam of my torch, across the glittering surface of the ice-cap. The wind, such as it was, still held out to the east. The cold, too, was still intense, but more bearable than it had been on the previous night. In terms of the effect of cold on human beings in the Arctic, absolute temperature is far from being the deciding factor: wind is just as important – every extra mile per hour is equivalent to a one degree drop in temperature -and humidity far more so. Where the relative humidity is high, even a few degrees below zero can become intolerable. But today the wind was light and the air dry. Perhaps it was a good omen … After that morning, I never believed in omens again.
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Alistair MacLean
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all time classic.An airliner crashes in the polar ice-cap. In temperatures 40 degrees below zero, six men and four women survive.But for the members of a remote scientific research station who rescue them, there are some sinister questions to answer – the first one being, who shot the pilot before the crash?