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

‘Only a gesture, I’m afraid,’ I interrupted. ‘He’s at least 258 miles away. His tractor’s not a great deal faster than ours.’ It was, in fact, almost three times as fast. ‘Five or six days, at the least.’

Brewster nodded heavily and said no more. He looked disappointed, but he looked as if he believed me. I wondered which of them didn’t believe me, which of them knew I was lying because they knew that they had so thoroughly destroyed all the spare condensers and valves that it would have been quite impossible for Joss to repair the RCA.

The long bitter day, a day filled by nothing except that dreadful cold, an endless suffering and the nerve-destroying thunderous roar and vibration of that big engine, crawled by like a dying man. About two-thirty in the afternoon, as the last glow of the noon-light faded and the stars began to stand clear in the cold and brittle sky, the temperature reached its nadir – a frightening 73 degrees below zero. Then it was, that strange things happened: flashlights brought from under a parka died out inside a minute: rubber became hard as wood and cracked and fractured like wood: breath was an opaque white cloud that shrouded the heads of every person who ventured outside the tractor body: the ice-cap froze to such an unprecedented degree of hardness that the tractor treads spun and slipped on flat surfaces, the crimp marks no more than half-seen hairlines on the ground: the dogs, who could with impunity stand up to howling blizzards that would kill any man, whined and wailed in their utter misery in that appalling cold: and, now and again, like some far-off intimation of doom and the end of the world, a dull rumbling sound would come echoing across the ice-cap and the ground shake beneath the treads of the tractor as some great areas of snow and ice contracted still farther under the iron hand of that glacial cold.

It was then, inevitably, that the tractor started to give trouble: it was only a matter for wonder that it hadn’t broken down long before that. What I feared above all was the shearing of some moving metal part, made brittle by that intense cold, that would have been the end of us: a valve-stem, a cam-rod, any one part of the delicate timing mechanism, even so small a thing as a crankshaft pin: it needed just one of these to go, and we would be gone also.

We were spared these lethal mishaps, but what we had was almost as bad. Carburettor ice was a constant problem. The steering box froze up and had to be thawed out by blow-torches. Generator brushes stuck and broke, but fortunately we carried spares enough of these. But the biggest trouble was the radiator. Despite the fact that we had it heavily lagged, the cold penetrated the lagging as if it were tissue paper and the subsequent metal contraction produced distortion. Soon it began to leak, and by three o’clock in the afternoon we were losing water at dismaying speed. I doled out some of our precious reserves of heat pads for Mahler’s feet, with the instructions that the water from the snow-buckets on the stove was to be kept solely for the radiator. But even with blow-torches assisting the heat of a stove, the melting of super-chilled snow is a discouragingly slow process: soon we were reduced to pouring half-melted slush down the radiator cap, and finally to cramming snow itself down in order to keep going at all. All this was bad enough: but the frightening thing was that for every pint of radiator liquid lost and every pint of snow-water used to replace it, the anti-freeze became that much more diluted, and though we carried a small reserve drum of ethylene glycol its weight diminished perceptibly with every halt we made.

We had, hours before that, dispensed with a lookout, and the burden of all this work fell on Jackstraw, Zagero, Corazzini and myself. Of the four of us, Jackstraw was the only one who escaped what I knew would be permanent injury or disfigurement in the shape of scars and destroyed tissue. Zagero might never before have borne any of the scars of his trade, but he was going to have what looked peculiarly like one now: we had been too late in getting a cold-water compress to his right ear, and these destroyed tissues would need plastic surgery: two of Corazzini’s toes had also been left too long without treatment, and I knew that he, too, would finish up in a surgical ward: and, because I was the one most in contact with the engine, my fingertips were a painful bleeding mess, the nails already blackening and beginning to rot away.

Nor were things a great deal better with those inside the tractor cabin. The first physiological effects of the cold were beginning to assert themselves, and assert themselves strongly – the almost overpowering desire for sleep, the uncaring indifference to all that went on around them. Later would come the sleeplessness, the anæmia, the digestive troubles, the nervousness that could lead to insanity – if the cold continued long enough these conditions would inevitably succeed the picture of huddled, lifeless misery that presented itself to me whenever I sought the shelter of the cabin and the agony of returning circulation after my spell at the wheel. Many times I saw the picture that afternoon, and always the picture was the same.

The Senator sat slumped in a corner, a dead man but for the fits of violent shuddering that overtook him at regularly recurring intervals. Mahler appeared to sleep. Mrs Dansby-Gregg and Helene lay huddled in one another’s arms – an incredible sight, I thought, but then, next only to death itself, the Arctic was the great leveller, an unparalleled agent in stripping away the pretensions and shoddy veneers of everyday living. I was no great believer in the sudden conversions of human nature, and was pretty certain that, with Mrs Dansby-Gregg, the return to civilisation would coincide with the return to her normal self, and that this moment of common humanity shared by herself and her maid would be no more than a fading and unwelcome memory: but for all my dislike of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I was beginning to develop more than a sneaking admiration for her. The carefully cherished snobbery, the maddeningly easy and condescending assumption of an inevitable social superiority were irritating enough, heaven knew, but behind that unlovable façade seemed to lie a deep-buried streak of that selflessness which is the hallmark of the genuine aristocrat: although she complained constantly about the tiny irritations, she was silent on matters that caused her genuine suffering: she was developing a certain brusque helpfulness, as if she was half-ashamed of it, and showed a care for her maid which, though probably no more than that feudal kindness that reaches its best in adversity, nevertheless verged almost on tenderness: and I had seen her take a mirror from her handbag, inspect the ravages frostbite had wreaked on her lovely face, then return the mirror to her bag with a gesture of indifference. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, in short, was becoming for me an object lesson against the dangers of an over-ready classification of people into types.

Marie LeGarde, the lovable, indomitable Marie LeGarde, was a sick old woman, weakening by the hour. Her attempts at cheerfulness in her fully wakeful moments – she was asleep most of the time – were strained and almost desperate. The effort was too much. There was nothing I could do for her. Like an old watch, her time was running out, the mainspring of her life running down. A day or two of this would surely kill her.

Solly Levin had taken over the blow-torches which played constantly against the sides of the snow-buckets. Wrapped and huddled in clothes until only one eye was visible, he nevertheless achieved the near impossible of looking a picture of abject misery: but the way my thoughts had been running all day, I had no sympathy to waste on Mr Levin. Margaret Ross dozed by the side of the stove but I turned my eyes away quickly, even to look at that thin white face was a physical hurt.

The marvel of them all was Mr Smallwood, yet another instance, I thought wryly, of how wrong I could get. Instead of being one of the first to go under, he showed every sign of being the last. Three hours ago, when I had been in the cabin, he had brought up his bag from the tractor sled, and as he’d opened it I’d caught a glimpse of a black gown and the red and purple divinity hood. He’d brought out a Bible, donned a pair of rimless steel spectacles and, for several hours now, had been reading as best he could in the dim overhead light. He seemed composed, relaxed yet alert, fit to carry on for a long time to come. As doctor and scientist I didn’t go in much for theological speculation, but I could only suppose that Mr Smallwood was in some way sustained by something that was denied the rest of us. I could only envy him.

During the course of the evening two blows fell. The first of these was not in any way figurative. I still have the scar on my forehead to prove it.

We stopped just before eight o’clock that evening, partly in order to keep our radio schedule with Hillcrest, partly – because I wanted to make a long halt, to give Hillcrest all the more opportunity to overtake us – on the pretext that the Citroën’s engine was overheating badly in the temperature that had been rising steadily since the early afternoon. But despite the fact that it was now almost twenty-five degrees warmer than in mid-afternoon, it was still bitterly cold – our hunger and physical exhaustion saw to it that we still suffered almost as much as ever – dark and very still. Far away to the south-west we could see the jagged saw-tooth line of the Vindeby Nunataks – that hundred-mile long ridge of hills that we would have to cross the next day – the forbidding peaks a gleaming crystalline white in the light of the moon that had not yet topped our eastern horizon.

I was driving when we stopped. I switched off the motor, walked round to the back of the tractor and told those inside that we were making a halt. I asked Margaret Ross to heat some food on the stove – soup, dried fruit, one of our four remaining tins of corned beef – asked Jackstraw to rig up the antenna for the radio, then went back to the tractor, stooped and turned the radiator drainage cap, catching the liquid in a can. The anti-freeze in the water had been thinned down so much in the course of the day that I was pretty certain that, in those temperatures, it wouldn’t take half an hour for the radiator water to freeze up and split open the cylinder jacket.

I suppose it was because of the gurgling of the water into the can that I didn’t hear the sound behind me until the last moment, and even so I had no particular reason just then to be suspicious of anything. I half-straightened and turned round to see who was there, but I was too late. The consciousness of a vague blur in the darkness and the blinding white flash of light and pain as something solid smashed into my forehead, just above the goggles on my right eye, came in one and the same instant. I was out, completely unconscious, long before I crumpled down on to the frozen surface of the ice-cap.

Death could easily have supervened then. It would have been easy, ever so easy, for me to drift from unconsciousness into that numbed sleep from which, almost eighty degrees of frost in the ground, I would never have awakened. But awake I did, slowly, painfully, reluctantly, at the insistence of urgently shaking hands.

‘Dr Mason! Dr Mason!’ Dimly I realised that it was Jackstraw speaking, that he had my head and shoulders supported in the crook of his arm. His voice was low, but with a peculiarly carrying quality. ‘Wake up, Dr Mason. Ah, good, good. Easy does it now, Dr Mason.’

Groggily, Jackstraw’s strong arm helping, I levered myself up into an upright sitting position. A brilliant flame of pain lanced like a scalpel through my head, I felt everything blurring once more, consciously, almost violently, shook off the shadows that were creeping in on me again, then looked dazedly up at Jackstraw. I couldn’t see very well, I thought for one frightening moment that the vision centre had been damaged when the back of my head had struck against the iron-hard ice-cap – the ache there was almost as severe as the one in my forehead – but I soon discovered that it was only the blood seeping from the cut on my forehead that had frozen and gummed together the lids of my right eye.

‘No idea who did it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw wasn’t the man to ask stupid questions like ‘What happened?’

‘No idea at all.’ I struggled to my feet. ‘Have you?’

‘Hopeless.’ I could sense rather than see the shrug in the darkness. ‘As soon as you stopped, three or four of them came out. I don’t know where they went – I was out to the south rigging up the antenna.’

‘The radio, Jackstraw!’ I was beginning to think again. ‘Where’s the radio?’

‘No worry, Dr Mason, I have it with me,’ Jackstraw said grimly. ‘It’s here … Any idea why?’

‘None … Yes, I have.’ I thrust my hand into the inside pocket of my parka, then looked at Jackstraw in disbelief. ‘My gun – it’s still there!’

‘Nothing else missing?’

‘No. Spare ammo clip there – wait a moment,’ I said slowly. I hunted around in my parka pocket, but with no success. ‘A paper – I took a newspaper cutting from Colonel Harrison’s pocket – it’s gone.’

‘A cutting? What was in it, Dr Mason?’

‘You’re talking to one of the world’s prize idiots, Jackstraw.’ I shook my head in self-reproach, winced as the pain struck again. ‘I’ve never even read the damn’ thing.’

‘If you had,’ Jackstraw murmured philosophically, ‘you’d probably know why it was taken from you.’

‘But – but what was the point in it?’ I asked blankly. ‘For all they know I might have read it a dozen times.’

‘I think they know you haven’t even read it once,’ Jackstraw said slowly. ‘If you had, they’d have known it by the fact that you would have said or done something they would have expected you to say or do. But because you haven’t – well, they know they’re still safe. They must have been desperate to take a chance like this. It is a great pity. I do not think, Dr Mason, that you will ever see that paper again.’

Five minutes later I had washed and bandaged the cut on my forehead – I’d savagely told an inquiring Zagero that I’d walked into a lamp-post and refused to answer all other questions – and set off with Jackstraw in the strengthening light of the newly-risen moon. We were late for our rendezvous, but when I switched the receiver into the antenna I heard Joss’s call-up sign come through straightaway.

I acknowledged, then asked without preamble: ‘What news from Uplavnik?’

‘Two things, Dr Mason.’ Hillcrest had taken the microphone over from Joss, and, even through the distortion of the speaker, his voice sounded strange, with the flat controlled unemotionalism of one speaking through a suppressed anger. ‘Uplavnik has been in touch with HMS Triton – the carrier coming up the Davis Strait. Triton is in constant communication with the British Admiralty and the Government. Or so I gather.

‘The answers to your questions are these. Firstly, the passenger list from BOAC in America is not yet through, but it is known from newspaper reports that the following three people were aboard: Marie LeGarde, the musical comedy star, Senator Hoffman Brewster of the United States and a Mrs Phyllis Dansby-Gregg, who appears to be a very prominent London socialite.’

I wasn’t greatly excited over this item of news. Marie LeGarde had never been a suspect. Mrs Dansby-Gregg – and, by implication, Helene Fleming – had never had more than a faint question mark against their names, and I had already come to the conclusion that it was long odds against the man who was, or purported to be, Senator Brewster being one of the killers.

‘The second thing is this. The Admiralty cannot or will not say why the plane has been forced down, but I gather there must have been a most vital reason. Uplavnik suggests, on what basis I cannot say, perhaps it is officially inspired, that some person aboard the plane must have been in possession of something of the utmost importance, so important that complete secrecy was vital. Don’t ask me what it was. A microfilm, a formula, something, perhaps, only committed to memory – it sounds fanciful, but that’s all we can guess at. It does seem likely that Colonel Harrison was in possession of it.’

I looked at Jackstraw, and he at me. The man who had so recently knocked me out had been desperate all right. I knew then what I had subconsciously known all along, that I was dealing blindfolded against a man – or men – far cleverer than myself. They knew that Joss couldn’t possibly have hoped to repair the RCA. They knew, therefore, that I must have been talking direct to Hillcrest. They knew, because I had told them, that the eight-watt radio we had with us had a range of not more than 150 miles under normal conditions, so that the chances were high that Hillcrest was actually speaking from the IGY cabin – or a point even nearer. I had also told them that Hillcrest and his four companions wouldn’t be returning from their field trip for another two or three weeks, so that this premature return could only be accounted for by some unforeseen and extraordinary event. It wasn’t hard to guess what that event must have been. That I should ask Hillcrest to find out the reason for the crash followed inevitably, but what was not inevitable, what pointed most clearly of all to the shrewdness of the killers, was their guess that whoever knew the reason for the crash would be most reluctant to go into specific detail: and they had robbed me of the only clue that might have helped me discover what that detail was and so also, I felt sure, the identity of the killers. But the time was far past now for crying over spilt milk.

I pressed the switch to ‘Transmit’.

‘Thank you. But please radio Uplavnik again, emphasise desperate urgency of finding out crash reasons … How far behind do you estimate you are now? We have made only twenty miles since noon. Cold extreme, bad radiator trouble. Over.’

‘We have made only eight miles since noon. It seems—’

I threw the switch over.

‘Eight miles?’ I demanded harshly. ‘Did I hear you say eight miles?’

‘You heard.’ Hillcrest’s voice was savage. ‘Remember the missing sugar? Well, it’s turned up. Your fine friends dumped the whole bloody lot into the petrol. We’re completely immobilised.’

9 (#ulink_65b20662-d834-55b2-b344-624e469b8f32)

Wednesday 8 p.m.–Thursday 4 p.m. (#ulink_65b20662-d834-55b2-b344-624e469b8f32)

We were on our way again just after nine o’clock that night. It had been my original intention, by dreaming up a variety of excuses and even, if necessary, by sabotaging the engine, to stay there for several hours or at least what I reckoned to be the longest possible time before the killers became restive, suspected that I was deliberately stalling, and took over. Or tried to take over. For it had been my further intention that, after an hour or two, Jackstraw should produce his rifle – it was strapped to his shoulders night and day – and I my automatic, and hold them all at the point of the gun until Hillcrest came up. If all had gone well, he should have been with us by midnight. Our troubles would have been over.

But it had not gone well, our troubles were as bad as ever, the Sno-Cat was bogged down and with Mahler now seriously ill and Marie LeGarde frighteningly weak and exhausted, I couldn’t remain any longer. Had I been made of tougher stuff, or even had I not been a doctor, I might have brought myself to recognise that both Marie LeGarde and Theodore Mahler were expendable pawns in a game where the stakes, I was now certain, were far greater than just the lives of one or two people. I might have held everybody – or the major suspects, at least – at gunpoint until such time, twenty-four hours if need be, as Hillcrest did come up. But I could not bring myself to regard our sick passengers as expendable pawns. A weakness, no doubt, but one that I was almost proud to share with Jackstraw, who felt exactly as I did.

That Hillcrest would come up eventually I felt pretty sure. The dumping of the sugar in the petrol – I bit my lips in chagrin whenever I remembered that it had been I who had told them all that Hillcrest was running short of fuel – had been a brilliant move, but nothing more, now, than I had come to expect of men who thought of everything, made every possible provision against future eventualities. Still, even though furiously angry at the delay, Hillcrest had thought he could cope with the situation. The big cabin of the Sno-Cat was equipped with a regular workshop with tools fit to deal with just about every mechanical breakdown, and already his driver-mechanic – I didn’t envy him his murderous task even though he was reportedly working behind heated canvas aprons – had stripped down the engine and was cleaning pistons, cylinder walls and valves of the unburnt carbon deposits that had finally ground the big tractor to a halt. A couple of others had rigged up a makeshift distillation unit – a petrol drum, almost full, with a thin metal tube packed in ice leading from its top to an empty drum. Petrol, Hillcrest had explained, had a lower boiling point than sugar, and when the drum was heated the evaporating gas, which would cool in the ice-packed tube, should emerge as pure petrol.

Such, at least, was the theory, although Hillcrest didn’t seem absolutely sure of himself. He had asked if we had any suggestion, whether we could help him in any way at all, but I had said we couldn’t. I was tragically, unforgivably wrong. I could have helped, for I knew something that no one else did, but, at the moment, I completely forgot it. And because I forgot, nothing could now avert the tragedy that was to come, or save the lives of those who were about to die.