Black Ice (11 page)

‘That's a hundred miles since we left the base,' he called over as she slowed. ‘This would be a good place, on that tall sastrugi.'

Lauren considered the terrain. ‘You're right. Not much in the way of landmarks around here, so we might as well make it as high as possible.'

They silenced the engines and untied the first of the emergency barrels from the back of Lauren's sledge. They rolled it to the top of the sastrugi and set it upright. Sean screwed two ice anchors into the walls of the mound, and they lashed the handles of the barrel down so it wouldn't blow away.

Lauren fetched the marker pole, and that too was tied to the barrel, the red pennant at its top fluttering in the wind at the end of the two-metre aluminium pole.

They viewed their handiwork from the snowmobiles. The finished result was about as good as they could hope for, as visible as they could make it under the circumstances.

Lauren brought out her mobile GPS unit, a Magellan device not much bigger than a cigarette packet. She switched it on and waited for the transmitter to lock onto the satellites which would give the precise latitude and longitude.

‘Three satellites,' she read out from the LCD display, ‘good fix.'

Lauren wrote down the figures on her pad and replaced the precious unit back inside her jacket.

‘Sure hope we don't need to rely on finding this depot
without
the GPS,' Sean said. ‘All it needs is a real good blow and that pole could snap like a twig. Then we could end up like Scott, wandering around in circles trying to find the damn thing while we starve to death.'

‘Don't talk like that,' Lauren told him. ‘There's no reason we should ever need this depot. And no reason why we should end up in a situation where we haven't got the GPS.'

She pressed the starter on the snowmobile and drove off across the plateau, trying to clear Sean's words from her head. A few miles later she stopped, just out of interest, to see if she could still see the marker flag.

Even though she knew exactly which bearing it was on, she could only just make out the tiny barrel and its marker pole. A few miles later she stopped again. This time it was completely impossible to see, obscured by the ice mounds in front of it.

After a heavy snowfall that thing would be pretty well invisible amid the many hundreds of sastrugi which dotted the plateau. Without the GPS it would be worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. For the first time, Lauren wondered why she had only brought the one positioning device with her when there were three others lying redundant back at the base.

Anyway, she reasoned, it would be a pretty catastrophic set of circumstances which would see them stranded without their snowmobiles
and
without the GPS.

Very unlikely to happen.

She pushed her shoulders back to stretch the muscles of her back; sitting on the snowmobile for so many hours had built up a persistent ache in there which didn't feel like it was going to go away any time soon.

Lauren straddled her leg over the seat and looked to the horizon, where the Heilman range was waiting for them, the peaks jutting through the swirling storm. That would be the first real test for the snowcats.

The sooner they were through it, the happier she would be.

24

‘We'll keep to the middle of the glaciers,' Lauren had explained to Sean. ‘That's where the ice is at its smoothest.'

Sean had to smile at her use of the word ‘smooth' as they rubbed their noses into the first of the huge ramps of ice. Nothing he had seen so far could qualify for that word; the snowcats were continually beating across small weathered rocks and stones which had been eroded from the surrounding peaks by frost shattering. Worse were the large collections of moraine at the glacier snouts, the runners of the sledges grating horribly as they tracked across gravel and shingle. Then they were back onto ice, accelerating hard as they bit into the climb, the engines straining as the sledges bucked and jumped behind them.

The wind was still blowing intermittent storm force, rocking them on their seats as they leaned into it, but at least the visibility had improved. They had forty to fifty metres of clearway before them, and sometimes more as sporadic gaps in the cloud gave them tantalising glimpses of the mountainous landscape through which they were travelling.

Crossing the range was largely a matter of following the natural weaknesses in the terrain, the rising valleys and cwms which glaciers had eaten into the mountains over millennia of passage.

With every thousand feet of height gained, they lost another degree or two of temperature. Soon, Sean was shivering inside his many layers of protective clothing, his fingers beginning to freeze even though the gauge in front of him indicated the heated grips were still working. On the insides of his thighs Sean could feel sores starting to spread, the chafing from the snowcat seat eroding his flesh in the same way that a horse saddle will do after a long day's ride.

He put the discomfort to the back of his mind, knowing that only by the highest level of concentration would they beat a trail through these mountains without an accident. In front of him, Lauren was driving with considerable skill, rising from the seat to throw her centre of gravity forward on the steepest parts of the ascent and never failing to take the best line through the many dangerous icefalls which littered the route.

They continued to climb, five miles' progress taking them almost to the heart of the range, but eight miles into the traverse they found themselves out of safe options, creeping tentatively round the flank of one of the highest peaks and wondering if they could take the risk to continue.

‘If we can crack this one, there's nothing between us and the saddle.' Lauren pointed out the straightforward trail which lay enticingly on the other side of the lethal slope. ‘Think we can do it?'

‘I don't see any other way,' Sean confirmed. ‘Either we try this or we go back.'

There was one truly heart-stopping section: a polished face as smooth as glass, on which they were forced to traverse. The incline was working against them, tipping the snowcats—and the sledges—out to the point where it seemed likely they would roll. Beneath the slope, revealed from time to time when the clouds allowed, was a three- or four-hundred-metre fall to a plateau littered with sharp rocks.

They inched across, their hearts in their mouths, ready to leap off the seats in an attempt to save themselves if the worst happened. Both were painfully aware that if one of the sledges lost its grip and began to slide sideways there would be little they could do to recover the situation.

The runners held. They reached the better gradient of the far side and stopped to celebrate with a shared bar of chocolate.

Lauren showed Sean the altimeter. ‘We're very nearly at the high point.'

They kicked into gear and powered onward, choosing a direct line up the final obstacle, a forty-degree ice wall which they took at speed before gunning the engines for the last steep burst up onto the saddle, which was the only realistic crossing point of the range.

This place was more exposed than the lee slope they had been climbing, the wind howling across the col so strongly that they had to crouch in the shadow of their snowcats as they considered the view. It was a dramatic vision, banks of rushing cloud scudding across the horizon as the black heart of the storm front continued on its path. Here and there they could see individual snow clouds bursting out from the mass, while beneath the cloud they could see small patches of the glacier which they were now to cross.

‘The Blackmore. Biggest glacier on earth,' Lauren told him. ‘You could fit France and Germany into the space this thing occupies.'

‘How far do you reckon we can see?' Sean tried to fix his eyes on the horizon.

Lauren shrugged. ‘Five hundred miles at least.'

‘Awesome. And no sign of man.'

‘Not that you can see.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘The air.' Lauren gestured into space. ‘It's polluted even here.'

Sean gave her a sceptical look. ‘No way. This air is the cleanest I ever tasted.'

‘Sorry, you're wrong. Just a few parts per million, but we're breathing sulphur, carbon monoxide and a whole batch of other pollutants right here at the end of the earth.'

‘I find that hard to believe, this place looks so pristine.'

‘You don't believe it? You can even see it in an ice core. You drill a core into any part of the glacier and you can see the taint of man-made pollution as clear as day. Hundreds of metres of crystal-clear ice, going back through time, then you get these dark rings appearing in the last six inches of the sample … that's the Industrial Revolution.'

The few moments of rest had left them bitterly cold; this was not a place to linger.

‘Which way do you think we should take for the descent?' Lauren asked.

Sean considered the options. There were three different possibilities, all quite steep, all seeming to pass through areas where crevasses were likely to lurk.

‘I think we should keep to the left.'

‘What about that smooth gully down the middle?'

Sean shook his head. ‘That's an avalanche chute. See where the ice fall at the top feeds into it? Not a good place to be caught if something decides to come down.'

They committed to the descent, using the inherent braking potential of the snowcat engines to keep the pace down to walking speed. Many times they were forced to retreat, spinning the machines at the edge of uncrossable crevasses and powering back up the slope to try their luck on another trajectory.

But by eight they were down, stiff and bruised after thirteen hours of almost continuous driving.

‘Camp?' Lauren asked him. That was the only word she needed to utter; Sean was as ready to rest as she was.

They had the tent erected in less than twenty minutes, a meal cooked and eaten in just an hour. Then they put up the aerial for the nightly radio call back to Capricorn, the calm voice of Frank a reassuring—if faint—presence as they gave him an update of progress.

‘How about tomorrow?' Sean asked as he helped Lauren to pack the radio away.

‘Tomorrow,' Lauren replied, ‘will make today look like a picnic. We're heading for one of the most evil crevasse fields in Antarctica.'

‘That's nice to know.' Sean could barely mumble the words before he fell asleep.

25

It was the uncertainty which was so wearing, the never-quite-sure of whether a snow bridge was going to hold or not … the will-it-or-won't-it of the process which shredded even the steeliest of nerves in the end.

Lauren had crossed crevasse fields before in other parts of Antarctica. She had skied through them on the way to research sites, even once or twice run through them with skidoos like now.

Then she had been a passenger. Others had been making the decisions on which zig-zag line to follow through the maze, more experienced eyes than hers had been weighing up the odds between one route and another.

This time was different: now she was the leader, and Sean was
her
responsibility.

‘The technique is pretty simple,' she had told Sean when they reached the first of the big ones. ‘You take a good look at the snow bridge, pick what you think is the strongest part and drive as fast as you can across it before it collapses.'

‘And the penalty for getting it wrong?'

‘There's a word for it … let me see now, I think it's called “death”.'

Sean held up his hands. ‘OK. Stupid question.'

‘Look how solid this snow bridge is; you can see it clearly if you come over and take a look from the side.'

Sean did as she suggested, moving down the crevasse to look side-on at the place where snow had congealed across the gap.

‘How do they form?'

‘By the wind. Imagine it blowing hard from the south, snow gets impacted against that far wall there and it begins to stick together. Over the years it congeals and hardens, growing outwards to the other wall until eventually it forms a seal—like an arch—over the top. Some crevasses get covered completely.'

‘This one looks strong.'

‘We hope.'

Lauren revved up her snowmobile and blasted across the fragile span of snow, trying not to look down into the inky drops which beckoned on either side.

Sean followed on a few moments later, holding his breath as he felt the weight of the snowmobile press down on the central—most vulnerable—part of the arch.

‘It felt like it sagged as I got to the middle,' he told her as they rejoined on the far side.

‘Sagging we can cope with. It's the breaking we don't want.'

‘So how many more of these are we going to have to deal with?' Sean's face was flushed with the excitement of the prospect.

Lauren squinted into the distance, trying to assess the scale of the crevasse field they were about to weave through.

‘Hundreds certainly,' she told him. ‘Maybe even thousands.'

By the halfway stage, Sean had taken over the lead, quickly assessing each crevasse crossing as it came along and invariably choosing the same route that Lauren would have done. Gradually, she relaxed, secretly pleased that he was taking the reponsibility off her for a while.

They came to a smooth section, crisp, even snow offering maximum purchase for the snowmobile tracks. Sean pushed the speed up to fifteen, twenty miles an hour.

Then Lauren saw it.

‘Stop!' Her scream was loud enough to cut through the rip of the engines. Sean did as she said, and she pulled up by his side.

‘You see that?' she said.

Ahead of them was the merest hint of shadow, a long line which they were about to cross, something so subtle that Sean could not be sure it was there at all. It could have been a sagging in the surface … but then again, it might just have been a trick of the light.