Exit Alpha (28 page)

She called out, ‘We’ve got seven sleeping bags — with left and right zips.’

‘Good.’ Two sleeping bags zipped together would accommodate three people. ‘Zip three twos together. That holds nine. And one over.’

Cain worked with Mullins and Bell on the other tents, pitching them in the lee of the plane. It was hard, slogging effort with each step an agony. Their fingers and heads became numb while the rest of them started to sweat. Then their tear ducts became more viscous and stuck their eyelids together.

‘Keep blinking,’ Cain warned, ‘or you’ll end up blind.’

When Hunt and Jakov finished the first tent, they transferred the exhausted pope, the moaning Zia, his leg now roughly splinted between ice axes, and the now-conscious but hypothermic Eve. Hunt stayed with them as guide and mentor. He knew she’d help them thaw, warn them to change into dry socks, show them how to hang their boots and felt-liners up. And she’d get food cooking.

Raul said, ‘I’ve done what I can with Zia’s leg. There’s nothing sticking out but there’s swelling and bruising.’ His eyes streamed with tears in the cold wind. The sullen Nina stood beside him.

Cain said, ‘Does the leg seem shorter? Did you try rotating the foot?’

‘It’s too painful to move and I don’t know how to set it. It seemed best to immobilise it. If you have better ideas . . .’

‘Find the plane’s emergency pack. Give him two tablets of codeine. Elevate the leg. Check for frostbite. Get the girl to help you.’

By the time the other tents were up and fitted out, ground drift was piling up snow. In the darkening wasteland, the Tilley lamps suspended in the tents transformed each into a yellow pyramid.

Cain trudged from tent to tent checking arrangements. His breath had frozen on his face mask until it was metal-stiff, his goggles were almost iced over and his stubble, stuck to the jacket hood, made turning his head painful.

Hunt had left the first tent. But it was still so packed with people that he couldn’t fully crawl inside. Zia, the invalid, had a sleeping bag to himself. Nina and the pope were in the double bag, cold and exhausted, while a sobbing Eve tended the stove.

The smell of cooking macaroni cheese made him instantly famished. They’d need 5000 calories a day in this weather just to survive.

‘Any frostbite here?’ he asked.

Eve’s despairing face looking up. ‘I’m frozen right inside.’

He cleaned his goggles. ‘You’ll be okay tomorrow.’

‘How can you say that? Did you see Jane?’

He nodded.

She pointed to her daughter. ‘Did
she
cause this?’

‘The first real gremlin I’ve ever struck.’

Eve moaned and clenched her fists.

Zia sat in his single bag, his splinted leg protruding from the unzipped side and elevated on a pack. He sipped cocoa as dark as his skin but still managed to look like death.

‘How are you?’ Cain asked him in English.

‘A lot of pain. Can we survive this?’

He said in Urdu, ‘No. Down here, the tiger has wings.’

Zia nodded at the reference.

Cain held his hands by the stove. John seemed to be asleep. God’s postman would bunk with two women tonight — the best way to keep him warm.

Cain said, ‘Put your socks and water bottles in your sleeping bags. You get thirsty in this place and it takes hours to melt snow for water. And stiff socks don’t help.’ He pointed to a torch by the food box. ‘That goes in with you, too. Batteries lose power if they get cold. And hang your boots at the top of the tent or they’ll be like ice tomorrow.’

Raul and Bell, in the second tent, had told Hunt to join them. She hadn’t liked it. He stuck his head through the entrance of their tent. Vapour crystallising on the inside was creating an ice storm. Bell was adding to it bashing ice from his parka. Their food was still frozen and they were trying to boil water.

Over the roar of the gas jet, Cain asked, ‘Okay here?’

Hunt’s return glance would have pitted bronze. But he doubted Raul and his hunter-scavengers intended to slaughter her that night. It might even go the other way. She still saw people as targets and killing as a game to be won — was too young, too recently trained, to know the cruelty and folly of it all.

He crawled into the third tent where he was billeted with Mullins and Jakov. Raul clearly intended to keep him supervised and separate from Hunt. Right now he didn’t care, was at the end of his wick, body shaking with cold, hands and feet shutting down.

Mullins had made the usual discoveries — that matches froze as they came out of the box and saucepan lids froze to the pan. But he had the stove going at least. He still wore his balaclava. Frost had stuck it to his face and he was waiting for it to thaw.

The other hard case, Jakov, crawled in with them. ‘Jeez, toilet in plane is like wind tunnel.’

Cain reached between the double lining of the tent and held up a plastic beaker. ‘That’s your toilet.’

‘Like hell.’

Mullins cackled. ‘We call him the phantom crapper ’cause his dick’s so small he doesn’t want us to see it.’

‘Shut your face, big shitbag.’ Jakov rubbed his hands together. ‘Jeez, my hands sting terrible.’

‘It’s the sensation coming back,’ Cain said. ‘Good sign. It’ll go in a while.’

He told them to change their socks and hang up the wet ones. He hung up his felt-liners and mukluk insoles from the apex of the tent to dry. Tents were warm at the peak but could be 60 degrees centigrade cooler on the floor. He explained how the body reacted to cold — reduced blood to hands, feet, limbs to keep vital organs warm. The other men had bunny boots — not as effective in this climate.

Mullins finally peeled off his headgear, said, ‘My underdaks are wet.’

‘Me too,’ the Slav said. ‘I sweat much.’ They’d worked hard and the sweat that normally froze between the pile suit and the windproofs hadn’t entirely wicked out.

‘How you dry long johns?’ Jakov said.

‘Sleep in them.’ Sleeping in wet polypropylene felt lousy but you did it.

‘Yuk.’

* * *

It took them two hours to get watered, fed.

Cain had seen no guns for some time. Had they buried them outside the tent? At minus 40 degrees centigrade they could freeze up or hang fire. That could be useful later. He checked the vent, killed the lamp, burrowed into the bag.

‘One thing,’ the garlic-smelling Jakov said, ‘we got to cuff you. Is orders from Bell.’

‘Like fun.’

‘Don’ make it tough, fellah.’

He felt the man fiddling with plasticuffs.

‘What do you think I’ll do? Kill you?’

‘Could be. Jus’ ’cause you talk like uni poofter don’ mean you not know how to kill.’

He let them do it, longing to sleep.

‘So what about the girl?’ Mullins said. ‘Could use a bit of that.’

Jakov chuckled. ‘I like to hump that Hunt bitch. If her body good as her face . . .’

‘That’s Raul’s bitch,’ Mullins said. ‘The one who done him in.’

‘So?’

Cain said, ‘You’d look cute with your dicks turning blue. Now can we get some sleep?’

He was woken by someone shaking him. Sunlight made the inner tent bright orange and the fabric was bellying in as if pushed.

A slapping noise.

Jakov had woken him. ‘Chopper. Frien’ or foe?’

‘Foe.’

‘You sure, fellah?’

‘We were on an EXIT flight, damn it. That means no one but EXIT’ll go near it. Get these bloody cuffs off.’

As they set him free he yelled, ‘And get the guns.’

H
e expected them to strafe the tent, was surprised as the rotor slap became more distant. He struggled into his boots and ventiles, dragging at closures and zips.

Mullins had released the drawstring and had his head outside the tent. ‘Big twin.’

‘Shift arse.’ Jakov hauled him back and stuck his own head through the widening hole. ‘Is Sikorsky S–76.’

ANARE, the Australian Antarctic Division, used those, Cain knew. But even give-it-a-go Aussies wouldn’t meddle with an EXIT crash. ‘Colour?’

‘Orange and black stripe.’

‘It’s Alpha,’ Cain said.

‘How they find us?’

‘Could be an EPIRB on the plane — probably still transmitting on the aircraft emergency frequency. But there’d be an EXIT classification on the signal.’

‘Guns.’

Mullins lifted the matting off the air mattress that formed the tent floor. He pulled out the two M–40s and slung one to Jakov who struggled from the tent.

Cain got his head outside into the gold-grey light of morning. The chopper hovered far across the sea of snow against cirrus that radiated from the horizon like a fan. They’d taken a risk, he thought. They were a long way from base and pushing it.

The extreme clearness of Antarctic air made everything deceptive. The view across the compacted snow could have stretched for 60 miles, or 12, to the milky haze where ice joined sky.

Bell, Raul and Hunt were bunkered in a scour that had formed behind a piece of severed wing. Bell had the sniper’s rifle and looked keen to use it. He called to Cain, ‘What’s going down?’

‘I’d say it’s a recce. They’ll be asking Alpha for instructions. The wheels are up. So they’re not going to land.’

‘Can we negotiate with them?’ Raul warmed his gloved hands under his armpits. ‘If they think their plane crew’s alive . . .’

‘They wouldn’t give a toss. Lots of Herc crews around. They want us dead.’

‘So what’ll they tell their base?’ Bell asked.

‘Good news and bad news. We didn’t escape but the Herc’s a wreck. They’ll report armed survivors. Then Alpha’ll freak and order them home.’ He pointed to the S–76, now a distant hovering speck. ‘That’s an all-weather, long-range job worth 2.5 million second-hand. They should fly them in pairs but they’re stretched for planes so they’ve sent it out alone. And there’s no way they’ll let them up the risk by scrapping with us.’ He shrugged. ‘When we’re dead, they’ll come back for our bodies. In a year they’ll mount a traverse — salvage engines, avionics . . .’

‘Which leaves us where?’ Raul rumbled.

‘Still dead.’

The chopper circled away, climbing, and soon was out of sight. The silence of the lifeless ice-scape, unfit for any warm-blooded animal, pressed in on them again. Raul slapped his mittens together. ‘Well I don’t intend to die here. So I suggest we hit the road.’

Hunt’s look of derision. ‘How?’

‘In the tracked vehicle. I prefer being driven in warmth to walking in the cold.’

Bell said, ‘Exactly. Exactly. One side of the front cabin’s wrecked but we could patch that to protect against the wind. The tracks are okay.’

Cain said, ‘And how will you thaw the engine?’

‘Huh?’

‘Thaw me first,’ Raul said. ‘I need hot food. Cain, you’re joining us for a working breakfast. Mullins, Jakov, check our guests and get them fed.’

Cain bundled into the tent with Raul, Bell and Hunt. She already had oats swimming in half-melted snow. They took their parkas off in the comparative warmth, sat awkwardly, desperate to eat.

Bell tried to pick ice off his brows, looked at Cain. ‘If the engine’s an ice block, how do we start the vehicle?’

‘On traverse, you’d plug it into a generator for two hours or use a Herman Nelson in condition one. But we don’t have those items.’

‘What if we soaked something combustible in aviation fuel, made a shielded fire under it and . . . ?’

‘You don’t light a match near a Hagg,’ Hunt said with disgust. ‘Do you know the flashpoint of JP8?’

‘Well, the plane’s engines have generators. Wouldn’t the APU drive them?’

‘If it’s not wrecked,’ Cain said, ‘and you could hot-wire it. If you’re an aircraft electrician, go for it.’

‘I don’t care how you do it,’ Raul snapped. ‘Just get us moving.’

‘To where?’

He looked at Cain nastily. ‘What?’

‘I know where we are.’ Bell reached beside the cooking box and pulled out a map. ‘I found this with the navigator’s stuff.’ He unfolded the map, spread it across their knees, pointed to a pencil mark. ‘We’re here. I’ve double-checked the GPS coordinates.’

Cain examined the mark — some 400 kilometres from the pole of relative inaccessibility. ‘Great. Couldn’t be further from anywhere. So, forgetting Alpha, your nearest chance is . . .’ He ran his finger toward the coast. ‘. . . Asuka, a Jap base over 800 kilometres away.’

Hunt distributed mugs. ‘You couldn’t carry the fuel. Even if you struck no sastrugi . . .’

Bell held out his mug for hot chocolate. ‘What’s that?’

‘Wind-scoured snow ridges. They can get as big as tank traps. So if you didn’t strike those and got a litre per kilometre, you’d need 800 litres. It’d be closer to a kilolitre. That’s 220 gallons.’ She frowned, working it out. ‘Five 44-gallon drums.’

‘And we don’t have the fuel.’ Bell looked glum.