Alistair MacLean Arctic Chillers 4-Book Collection: Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island, Athabasca

‘Back to the cabin.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘I know. What am I to say? I’m completely at a loss. A hundred questions, and never an answer to one of them.’

‘And I don’t even know all the questions, yet,’ she murmured. ‘It’s only five minutes since I even knew that it wasn’t an accident.’ She shook her head incredulously. ‘Who ever heard of a civilian airliner being forced down at pistol point?’

‘I did. On the radio, just over a month ago. In Cuba – some of Fidel Castro’s rebels forced a Viscount to crash land. Only they picked an even worse spot than this – I think there were only one or two survivors. Maybe that’s where our friends back in the cabin got the idea from. I shouldn’t be surprised.’

She wasn’t even listening, her mind was already off on another track.

‘Why – why did they kill Colonel Harrison?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe he had a high resistance to Mickey Finns. Maybe he saw too much, or knew too much. Or both.’

‘But – but now they know you’ve seen too much and know too much.’ I wished she wouldn’t look at me when she was talking, these eyes would have made even the Rev Smallwood forget himself in the middle of his most thundering denunciations – not that I could imagine Mr Smallwood going in for thundering denunciations very much.

‘A disquieting thought,’ I admitted, ‘and one that has occurred to me several times during the past half-hour. About five hundred times, I would say.’

‘Oh, stop it! You’re probably as scared as I am.’ She shivered. ‘Let’s get out of here, please. It’s – it’s ghastly, it’s horrible. What – what was that?’ Her voice finished on a sharp high note.

‘What was what?’ I tried to speak calmly, but that didn’t stop me from glancing around nervously. Maybe she was right, maybe I was as scared as she was.

‘A noise outside.’ Her voice was a whisper and her fingers were digging deep into the fur of my parka. ‘Like someone tapping the wing or the fuselage.’

‘Nonsense.’ My voice was rough, but I was on razor-edge. ‘You’re beginning to—’

I stopped in mid-sentence. This time I could have sworn I had heard something, and it was plain that Margaret Ross had too. She twisted her head over her shoulder, looking in the direction of the noise, then slowly turned back to me, her face tense, her eyes wide and staring.

I pushed her hands away, reached for gun and torch, jumped up and started running. In the control cabin I checked abruptly – God, what a fool I’d been to leave that searchlight burning and lined up on the windscreens, blinding me with its glare, making me a perfect target for anyone crouching outside with a gun in hand – but the hesitation was momentary only. It was then or never – I could be trapped in there all night, or until the searchlight battery died. I dived head first through the windscreen, caught a pillar at the very last moment and was lying flat on the ground below in less time than I would have believed possible.

I waited five seconds, just listening, but all I could hear was the moan of the wind, the hiss of the ice spicules rustling along over the frozen snow – I’d never before heard that hissing so plainly, but then I’d never before lain with my uncovered ear on the ice-cap itself – and the thudding of my heart. And then I was on my feet, the probing torch cutting a bright swathe in the darkness before me as I ran round the plane, slipping and stumbling in my haste. Twice I made the circuit, the second time in the opposite direction, but there was no one there at all.

I stopped before the control cabin and called softly to Margaret Ross. She appeared at the window, and I said: ‘It’s all right, there’s no one here. We’ve both been imagining things. Come on down.’ I reached up my hands, caught her and lowered her to the ground.

‘Why did you leave me up there, why did you leave me up there?’ The words came rushing out, tumbling frantically one over the other, the anger drowned in the terror. ‘It was – it was horrible! The dead man … Why did you leave me?’

‘I’m sorry.’ There was a time and a place for comment on feminine injustice, unreasonableness and downright illogicality, but this wasn’t it. In the way of grief and heartbreak, shock and ill-treatment, she had already had far more than she could stand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. I just didn’t stop to think.’

She was trembling violently, so I put my arms round her and held her tightly until she had calmed down, took the searchlight and battery in one hand and her hand in my other and we walked back to the cabin together.

6 (#ulink_38f3822d-10a1-5588-93d5-f271ab4e5cc1)

Monday 7 p.m.–Tuesday 7 a.m. (#ulink_38f3822d-10a1-5588-93d5-f271ab4e5cc1)

Jackstraw and the others had just completed the assembly of the tractor body when we arrived back at the cabin, and some of the men were already going below. I didn’t bother to check the tractor: when Jackstraw made anything, he made a perfect job of it.

I knew he must have missed me in the past hour, but I knew, too, that he wasn’t the man to question me while the others were around. I waited till the last of these had gone below, then took him by the arm and walked out into the darkness, far enough to talk in complete privacy, but not so far as to lose sight of the yellow glow from our skylights – twice lost in the one night was twice too many.

He heard me out in silence, and at the end he said: ‘What are we going to do, Dr Mason?’

‘Depends. Spoken to Joss recently?’

‘Fifteen minutes ago. In the tunnel.’

‘How about the radio?’

‘I’m afraid not, Dr Mason. He’s missing some condensers and spare valves. He’s looked for them, everywhere – says they’ve been stolen.’

‘Maybe they’ll turn up?’ I didn’t believe it myself.

‘Two of the valves already have. Crushed little bits of glass lying in the bottom of the snow tunnel.’

‘Our little friends think of everything.’ I swore softly. ‘That settles it, Jackstraw. We can’t wait any longer, we’ll leave as soon as possible. But first a night’s sleep – that we must have.’

‘Uplavnik?’ That was our expedition base, near the mouth of the Strömsund glacier. ‘Do you think we will ever get there?’

He wasn’t thinking, just as I wasn’t, about the rigours and dangers of arctic winter travel, daunting enough though these were when they had to be faced with a superannuated tractor like the Citroën, but of the company we would be keeping en route. If any fact was ever so glaringly obvious that it didn’t need mention, it was that the killers, whoever they were, could only escape justice, or, at least, the mass arrest and interrogation of all the passengers, by ensuring that they were the only ones to emerge alive from the icecap.

‘I wouldn’t like to bet on it,’ I said dryly. ‘But I’d bet even less on our chances if we stay here. Death by starvation is kind of final.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ He paused for a moment, then switched to a fresh line of thought. ‘You say they tried to kill you tonight. Is that not surprising? I would have thought that you and I would have been very safe, for a few days at least.’

I knew what he meant. Apart from Jackstraw and myself, there probably wasn’t a handful of people in all Greenland who could start that damned Citroën, far less drive it, only Jackstraw could handle the dogs, and it was long odds indeed against any of the passengers knowing anything at all about astral or magnetic compass navigation – the latter very tricky indeed in these high latitudes. These special skills should have been guarantee enough of our immediate survival.

‘True enough,’ I agreed. ‘But I suspect they haven’t given any thought to these things simply because they haven’t realised the importance of them. We’ll make it our business to point out that importance very plainly. Then we’re both insured. Meantime, we’ll have one last effort to clear this business up before we get started. It’s not going to make us very popular, but we can’t help that.’ I explained what I had in mind, and he nodded thoughtful agreement.

After he had gone below, I waited a couple of minutes and then followed him. All nine of the passengers were sitting in the cabin now – eight, rather, watching Marie LeGarde presiding over a soup pan – and I took a long, long look at all of them. It was the first time I had ever examined a group of my fellow-men with the object of trying to decide which among them were murderers, and found it a strange and unsettling experience.

In the first place, every one of them looked to me like a potential or actual murderer – or murderess – but even with that thought came the realisation that this was purely because I associated murder with abnormality, and in these wildly unlikely surroundings, clad in the layered bulkiness of these wildly unlikely clothes, every one of them seemed far removed from normality. But on a second and closer look, when one ignored the irrelevancies of surroundings and clothes, there remained only a group of shivering, feet-stamping, miserable and very ordinary people indeed.

Or were they so ordinary? Zagero, for instance, was he ordinary? He had the build, the strength and, no doubt, also the speed and temperament for a top-ranking heavyweight, but he was the most unlikely looking boxer I had ever seen. It wasn’t just that he was obviously a well-educated and cultured man – there had been such boxers before: it was chiefly because his face was absolutely unmarked, without even that almost invariable thickening of skin above the eyes. Moreover, I had never heard of him, although that, admittedly, didn’t go for much: as a doctor, I took a poor view of homo sapiens wreaking gratuitous physical and mental injury on homo sapiens, and took little interest in the sport.

Or take his manager, Solly Levin, or, for that matter, the Rev Joseph Smallwood. Solly wasn’t a New York boxing manager, he was a caricature of all I had ever heard or read about these Runyonesque characters, and he was just too good to be true: so, also, was the Rev Smallwood, who was so exactly the meek, mild, slightly nervous, slightly anæmic man of God that preachers are so frequently represented to be – and almost invariably never are – that his movements, reactions, comments and opinions were predictable to the nth degree. But, against that, I had to set the fact that the killers were clever calculating men who would have carefully avoided assuming the guise of any character so patently cut from cardboard: on the other hand, they might have been astute enough to do just that.

There was a question mark, too, about Corazzini. America specialised in producing shrewd, intelligent, tough business leaders and executives, and Corazzini was undoubtedly one such. But the toughness of the average business man was purely mental: Corazzini had physical toughness as well, a ruthlessness I felt he wouldn’t hesitate to apply to matters lying far outside the immediate sphere of business. And then I realised, wryly, that I was prepared to suspect Corazzini for reasons diametrically opposed to those for which I was prepared to suspect Levin and the Rev Smallwood: Corazzini didn’t fit into any pattern, any prefabricated mental image of the American business man.

Of the two remaining men, Theodore Mahler, the little Jew, and Senator Brewster, I would have taken the former any time as the more likely suspect. But when I asked myself why, I could adduce no more damaging reasons than that he was thin, dark, rather embittered looking and had told us absolutely nothing about himself: and if that weren’t prejudice on my part, I couldn’t guess what was. As for Senator Brewster, he was surely above suspicion: and then the startling thought struck me that if one wished to be above suspicion surely there were no better means of achieving that than by assuming the identity of someone who was above suspicion. How did I know he was Senator Brewster? A couple of forged papers, a white moustache and white hair on top of a naturally florid complexion and anyone could have been Senator Brewster. True, it would be an impersonation impossible to sustain indefinitely: but the whole point was that any such impersonation didn’t have to be sustained indefinitely.

I was getting nowhere and I knew it: I was more confused, more uncertain, and infinitely more suspicious than ever. I was even suspicious of the women. The young German girl, Helene – Munich was her home town, near enough Central Europe and the skulduggery that went on in the neighbourhood of the iron curtain for anything to be possible: but on the other hand the idea of a seventeen-year-old master criminal – we certainly weren’t dealing with apprentices – was ridiculously far-fetched, and the fact that she had fractured her collar-bone, almost sure proof that the crash had been unexpected, was a strong point in her favour. Mrs Dansby-Gregg? She belonged to a world I knew little about, except for what slight information I had gleaned from my psychiatric brethren, who found rich fishing in the troubled waters of what passed for the younger London society: but instability and neuroses – not to mention the more than occasional financial embarrassment – were not criminal in themselves, and, in particular, that world lacked what people like Zagero and Corazzini had in full measure – the physical and mental toughness required for a job like this. But particularising from the general could be every bit as dangerous and misleading as generalising from the particular: of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, as a person, I knew nothing.

That left only Marie LeGarde. She was the touchstone, the one rock I could cling to in this sea of uncertainty, and if I were wrong about her so too had been a million others. There are some things that cannot be because they are unthinkable, and this was one of them. It was as simple as that. Marie LeGarde was above suspicion.

I became gradually aware of the muted clack of the anemometer cups turning sluggishly in the dying wind above and that the hiss of the Colman lamp had become abnormally loud: a total silence had fallen over the cabin and everyone was staring at me with mingled puzzlement and curiosity. So much for my impassive features, my casual negligent ease: so clearly had I betrayed the fact that something was far wrong that not one of the nine had missed it. But to be the centre of attraction at the moment suited me well enough: Jackstraw had just made his entry unobserved, a Winchester repeater cradled under his arm, his finger ready through the trigger guard.

‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘Rude to stare, I know. However, now it’s your turn.’ I nodded in Jackstraw’s direction. ‘Every expedition carries a gun or two – for coast use against prowling bears and wolves and to get seal meat for the dogs. I never thought that it would come in so handy right in the middle of the ice-cap – and against far more dangerous game than we ever find on the coast. Mr Nielsen is a remarkably accurate shot. Don’t try anything – just clasp your hands above your heads. All of you.’

As if controlled by a master switch, all the eyes had now swivelled back to me. I’d had time to spare to pull out the automatic – a 9 mm butt-loading Beretta – that I’d taken off Colonel Harrison: and this time I didn’t forget to slide off the safety-catch. The click was abnormally loud in the frozen silence of the room. But the silence didn’t last long.