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

‘No more!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it’s blown itself out. We can’t live through this.’

I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn’t all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster.

‘Good God!’ I cried in Jackstraw’s ear. ‘The Senator – we’ve lost him! I’ll go back and look. I won’t be a minute.’

‘Stay here.’ The grip on my arm was promise enough that Jackstraw meant to detain me by force, if necessary. ‘You’d never come back. Balto! Balto!’ He shouted a few Eskimo words which meant nothing to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw’s pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes.

‘He’s found him?’ I asked Jackstraw.

Jackstraw nodded silently.

‘Let’s bring him in.’

Balto led us there, but we didn’t bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn’t have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I’d seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn’t matter now. But he had been a man.

How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw’s torch. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning.

I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake – I was pretty sure he’d never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakening – and Zagero was stirring. That they – and I – would survive, I didn’t doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene’s seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as her sole anchor in an alien sea … I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde.

‘They don’t look so hot to me.’ Zagero, too, was studying them. ‘What’s their chances, Doc?’

‘I just don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘I don’t know at all.’

‘Don’t take it to heart, Doc. It’s no fault of yours.’ Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. ‘Your dispensary ain’t all that well stocked.’

‘No.’ I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. ‘Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end’s coming pretty close. Ordinarily I’d say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don’t know – he’s got the will to live, sheer guts, his beliefs – the lot … But in twelve hours he’ll be dead.’

‘And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?’

I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice.

‘Good lord, you’ve come to!’ I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. ‘This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?’

‘How do you think I feel?’ she said with a flash of her old spirit. ‘Don’t try to put me off, Peter. How long?’

‘About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi.’ The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. ‘Seriously, the fact that you’ve recovered consciousness is a good sign.’

‘I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can’t think of any dramatic words.’ I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. ‘You’re a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?’

‘Certainly,’ I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. ‘We’ll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoon – this afternoon, rather. It can’t be more than twenty miles from here.’

‘Twenty miles!’ Zagero interjected. ‘In this little lot?’

He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard.

‘It won’t last, Mr Zagero,’ Jackstraw put in. ‘These williwaws always blow themselves out in a short time. This already has gone on longer than most and it’s easing a lot. Tomorrow will be clear and calm and cold.’

‘The cold will be a change,’ Zagero said feelingly. He looked past me. ‘The old lady’s off again, Doc.’

‘Yes.’ I stopped massaging her hands and slid the gloves on. ‘Let’s have a look at these paws of yours, Mr Zagero, will you?’

‘“Johnny” to you, Doc. I’ve been dismissed without a stain on my character, remember?’ He thrust his big hands out for inspection. ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’

They weren’t pretty, they were the worst case of frostbite I had ever seen, and I had seen all too many, in Korea and later. They were white and yellow and dead. The original skin had vanished under a mass of blisters, and from the few warm spots I could detect on either hand I knew that much of the tissue had been permanently destroyed.

‘’Fraid I was a mite careless with my gloves,’ Zagero said apologetically. ‘In fact, I lost the damn’ things about five miles back. Didn’t notice it at the time – hands were too cold, I reckon.’

‘Feel anything in them now?’

‘Here and there.’ He nodded as I touched some spots where the blood still flowed, and went on conversationally: ‘Am I goin’ to lose my hands, Doc? Amputation, I mean?’

‘No.’ I shook my head definitely. I saw no point in mentioning that some of his fingers were beyond hope.

‘Will I ever fight again?’ Still the same casual, careless tone.

‘It’s difficult to say. You never know—’

‘Will I ever fight again?’

‘You’ll never fight again.’

There was a long pause, then he said quietly: ‘You’re sure, Doc? You’re absolutely sure?’

‘I’m absolutely sure, Johnny. No boxing commission doctor in the world would ever let you climb into a ring. It would cost him his listing in the Medical Register.’

‘Okay, so that’s how it is. Consolidated Plastics of Trenton, New Jersey, have just got themselves a new factory hand: this boxin’ racket was too damn’ strenuous anyway.’ There was no regret in his voice, no resignation even, but that meant nothing: like me, he had more important things to worry about. He looked away into the darkness, then twisted round: ‘What’s the matter with that hound of yours, Jackstraw?’

‘I don’t know. I think I’d better find out.’ Twice while we had been talking Balto had left us, vanished into the snow, and returned after a few minutes: he seemed restless, uneasy. ‘I won’t be long.’

He rose, followed Balto into the darkness, returned in a short time: ‘Come and see this, Dr Mason.’

‘This’ was a spot less than a hundred yards away, close into the side of the glacier valley. Jackstraw flashed his torch on to the snow-dusted ice. I stooped, made out a black circular patch on the ground and, a few feet away, a smaller discoloured area where the surface snow had frozen solid.

‘Oil from the gearcase or sump, water from the radiator,’ Jackstraw said briefly. He altered the torch-beam. ‘And you can still see the crimp marks of the caterpillars.’

‘And very recent?’ I suggested. The drifting snow, the scouring effect of the flying ice-particles had scarcely begun to obliterate the traces left by the treads.

‘I think so. And they were stopped here a long time, Dr Mason – look at the size of that oil patch.’

‘Mechanical trouble?’ I hazarded. I didn’t really believe it myself.

‘Riding out the storm – Corazzini must have been blind,’ Jackstraw said definitely. ‘If the engine had stopped on that pair, they’d never have got it started again.’

I knew he was right. Neither Smallwood nor Corazzini had shown any mechanical ability at all, and I was convinced that it had been no act.

‘Perhaps they were still here when we arrived back there? My God, if we’d only carried on another hundred yards!’

‘Spilt milk, as you say, Dr Mason. Yes, I’m sure they were here then.’