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

I set the searchlight so that its beam illuminated the wrecked control cabin, gauged the distance to the lower sill of the windscreen – it must have been fully nine feet – and jumped. My gloved hands hooked on firmly but slipped almost at once on the ice-rimed surface. I grabbed for a purchase grip on one of the windscreen pillars, felt my fingers striking against solid glass on both sides – the windscreen hadn’t been as completely shattered as I had imagined – and was on the point of losing my hold altogether when Jackstraw moved forward swiftly and took my weight.

With my knees on his shoulders and a fire axe in my hand it took me no more than two minutes to smash away the glass that clung to the pillars and the upper and lower edges. I hadn’t realised that aircraft glass – toughened perspex – could be so tough, nor, when it came to clambering through into the control cabin in my bulky furs, that windscreens could be so narrow.

I landed on top of a dead man. Even in the darkness I knew he was dead. I fumbled under my parka, brought out the torch, switched it on for a couple of seconds, then put it out. It was the co-pilot, the man who had taken the full impact of the crash. He was pinned, crushed between his seat and the twisted, fractured wreckage of what had been control columns, levers and dashboard instruments: not since I had once been called out to the scene of a head-on collision between a racing motor-cyclist and a heavy truck had I seen such dreadful injuries on any man. Whatever any of the survivors, the shocked and injured survivors in the plane, must see, it mustn’t be this. It was ghastly beyond description.

I turned and leaned out the windscreen. Jackstraw was directly below, cupped gloved hands shielding his eyes against the flying ice spicules as he stared upwards.

‘Bring a blanket,’ I shouted. ‘Better, bring a full gunny sack. And the morphia kit. Then come up yourself.’

He was back in twenty seconds. I caught both sack and morphia box, placed them on the twisted cabin floor behind me, then reached out a hand to help Jackstraw, but it wasn’t necessary. Athleticism wasn’t the forte of the short and stocky Greenlanders, but Jackstraw was the fittest and most agile man I had ever met. He sprang, caught the lower sill of the left windscreen in his left hand, the central pillar in the other and swung legs and body through the centre screen as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.

I gave him my torch to hold, rummaged in the gunny sack and dragged out a blanket. I spread it over the dead co-pilot, tucking the corners down among twisted and broken ends of metal, so that it shouldn’t blow free in the icy wind that swirled and gusted through the wrecked control cabin.

‘Waste of a good blanket, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘But – well, it isn’t pretty.’

‘It isn’t pretty,’ Jackstraw agreed. His voice was quite steady, devoid of all inflection. ‘How about this one?’

I looked across at the left-hand side of the cabin. It was almost completely undamaged and the chief pilot, still strapped in his seat and slumped against his sidescreens, seemed quite unmarked. I stripped fur glove, mitten and silk glove off my right hand, reached out and touched the forehead. We had been out of doors now for over fifteen minutes in that ferocious cold, and I would have sworn that my hand was about as cold as the human flesh could get. But I was wrong. I pulled the gloves back on and turned away, without touching him further. I wasn’t carrying out any autopsies that night.

A few feet farther back we found the radio operator in his compartment. He was half-sitting, half-lying against the for’ard bulkhead of his shack where he must have been catapulted by the crash. His right hand was still clutched firmly round the handgrip of the front panel of his radio set – it must have been ripped clear off the transmitter, which didn’t look as if it would ever transmit anything again.

On the bulkhead, behind his head, blood gleamed dully in the torch-light. I bent over the unconscious man – I could see that he was still breathing – removed my gloves once more and gently slid my fingers behind his head. Just as gently I withdrew them. How the hell, I thought, part hopelessly, part savagely, am I to carry out a head operation on a person with a telescoped occiput: the state he was in, I wouldn’t have given a fig for his chance in the finest operating theatre in London. At the very least he would be blind for life, the sight centre must have been completely destroyed. I reached for his pulse: racing, faint, erratic to a degree. The thought came to me, a thought compounded as much of cowardice as of regret, that in all likelihood the possibility of my having to operate on him was remote, very remote. If he were to survive the inevitably rough handling that would be needed to get him out of that aircraft and then the journey back to the cabin through that ice-laden sub-zero gale, it would be a miracle indeed.

It seemed unlikely that he would ever wake again. But he might, he just conceivably might, so I broached the morphia kit. Then we eased his head and neck into a more comfortable position, covered him with a blanket and left him.

Immediately behind the radio compartment was a long narrow room which extended across two-thirds of the width of the plane. A quick glance at the two chairs and collapsible bunk was enough to show that this must be the crew’s rest room, and someone had been resting there at the moment of the crash. That crumpled shirt-sleeved figure on the floor must have been taken completely unawares, before he had the slightest knowledge of what was happening: and he would never know now.

We found the stewardess in the pantry, lying on her left side on the floor, the outspread black hair fallen forward over her face. She was moaning softly to herself, but it wasn’t the moan of one in pain. Her pulse was steady enough, but fast. Jackstraw stooped down beside me.

‘Shall we lift her, Dr Mason?’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘She’s coming to, I think, and she can tell us far quicker than we can find out whether there’s anything broken. Another blanket, and we’ll let her be. Almost certainly someone much more in need of our attention.’

The door leading into the main passenger compartment was locked. At least, it appeared to be, but I was pretty certain it would never be locked under normal circumstances. Perhaps it had been warped by the impact of landing. It was no time for half measures. Together, we took a step back, then flung all the weight of our shoulders against it. It gave suddenly, three or four inches, and at the same time we heard a sharp exclamation of pain from the other side.

‘Careful!’ I warned, but Jackstraw had already eased his weight. I raised my voice. ‘Get back from that door, will you? We want to come in.’

We heard a meaningless mutter from the other side, followed by a low groan and the slipping shuffle of someone trying to haul himself to his feet. Then the door opened and we passed quickly inside.

The blast of hot air struck me in the face like an almost physical blow. I gasped, fought off a passing moment of weakness when my legs threatened to give under me, then recovered sufficiently to bang the door shut behind me. With the motors dead and the arctic chill striking through the thin steel of the fuselage this warmth, no matter how efficient the cabin insulation, wouldn’t last long: but while it did, it might be the saving of all those who still lived. A thought struck me and, ignoring the man who stood swaying before me, one hand clutching a seat grip for support, the other rubbing at a blood-masked forehead, I turned to Jackstraw.

‘Carry the stewardess in here. We’ll take a chance – and it’s not all that much of a chance either. There’s a damned sight more hope for her in here with a broken leg than out there with only a bump on the head. Throw her blanket over the wireless operator – but whatever you do don’t touch him.’

Jackstraw nodded and went out, closing the door quickly behind him. I turned to the man who still stood shakily in the aisle, still dazedly rubbing his hand, a big brown square hand matted on the back with black hair, across a bleeding forehead. He looked at me for a moment, then stared down uncomprehendingly at the blood dripping on to the bright red tie and blue shirt that contrasted so oddly with the light grey gaberdine suit. He closed his eyes tightly, then shook his head to clear it.

‘Sorry to ask the inevitable question.’ The voice was quiet, deep, well under control. ‘But – what happened?’

‘You crashed,’ I said shortly. ‘What do you remember?’

‘Nothing. Well, that is, just a bump, then a loud screeching tearing noise—’

‘Then you hit the door.’ I gestured at the bloodstains behind me. ‘Sit down for a moment. You’ll be all right.’ I’d lost interest in him and was staring down the length of the cabin. I’d expected to see most of the seats wrenched off their bases, but instead they were all there exactly as they should have been, three wide to the left of me, two to the right, the seats in the front half facing aft, those to the rear facing forward. More than that, I had expected to see people, injured, broken and moaning people, flung all over the seats and aisles: but the big passenger compartment seemed almost empty, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

But it wasn’t empty, not quite. Apart from the man by my side there were, I found, nine others altogether. Two men lay in the front part of the aisle. One, a big broad-shouldered man with curly dark hair, was propped up on an elbow, staring around him with a puzzled frown on his face; near him, lying on his side, was a smaller, much older man, but all I could see of him were a few wisps of black hair plastered across a bald head, a Glenurquhart plaid jacket that seemed a couple of sizes too big for him and the loudest check tie it had ever been my misfortune to see. It seemed obvious that they had been sitting together in the left-hand seat adjacent to them and had been flung out when the plane crashed into the ice-mound and slewed violently to one side.

In the seat beyond that, also on the left, a man sat by himself. My first reaction was surprise that he, too, hadn’t been hurled into the aisle, but then I saw that he was awake and fully conscious. He was sitting rigidly in his seat, pressed in hard against the window, legs braced on the floor, holding on with both hands to the table fixed to the seat in front: tautened tendons ridged the backs of his thin white hands, and his knuckles gleamed in the torch-light. I lifted the beam higher, saw that he was wearing a close-fitting clerical collar.

‘Relax, Reverend,’ I said soothingly. ‘Terra firma once more, and this is as far as you are going.’ He said nothing, just stared at me through rimless glasses, so I left him. He seemed unhurt.

Four people sat in the right-hand side of the front part of the plane, each one in a window seat; two women, two men. One of the women was fairly elderly, but so heavily made-up and with her hair so expensively dyed and marcelled that I couldn’t have guessed her age within ten years: her face, somehow, seemed vaguely familiar. She was awake, and looking slowly about her, her eyes empty of understanding. So, too, was the woman in the next seat, an even more expensive-looking creature with a mink coat flung cape-wise over her shoulders to show a simple green jersey dress that I suspected cost a small fortune: she was about twenty-five, I guessed, and with her blonde hair, grey eyes and perfect features would have been one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, if it weren’t for the overfull and rather sulky mouth. Maybe, I thought uncharitably, she remembered to do something about that mouth when she was fully awake. But right then, she wasn’t fully awake: none of them was, they all behaved as if they were being dragged up from the depths of an exhausting sleep.

Still more asleep than awake were the other two men in the front, one a big, burly, high-coloured man of about fifty-five, with the gleaming thick white hair and moustache of the caricature of a Dixie colonel: the other was a thin elderly man, his face heavily lined, unmistakably Jewish.

Not bad going so far, I thought with relief. Eight people, and only one cut forehead among the lot of them – the perfect argument, if ever there was one, for having all seats in a plane face towards the rear. No question but that they all owed, if not their lives, at least their immunity to injury to the fact that their high-backed seats had almost completely cushioned and absorbed the shock of impact.

The two passengers in the rear end of the cabin were the perfect argument for not having the seat face forward. The first I came to – a brown-haired young girl of about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a belted raincoat – was lying on the floor between two seats. She was stirring, and as I put my hands under her arms to help her up, she screamed in sudden pain. I changed my grip and lifted her gently on to the seat.

‘My shoulder.’ Her voice was low and husky. ‘It is very sore.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ I’d eased back the blouse at the neck and closed it again. ‘Your clavicle – the collar-bone – is gone. Just sit there and hold your left arm in your right hand … yes, so. I’ll strap you up later. You won’t feel a thing, I promise you.’

She smiled at me, half-timidly, half-gratefully, and said nothing. I left her, went to the very rear seat in the plane, stooped to examine the man there then straightened in almost the same instant: the weirdly unnatural angle of the head on the shoulders made any examination superfluous.

I turned and walked forward, everybody was awake now, sitting upright or struggling dazedly to their feet, their half-formed questions as dazed as the expressions on their faces. I ignored them for a moment, looked questioningly at Jackstraw as he came through the forward door, closely followed by Joss.

‘She won’t come.’ Jackstraw jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’s awake, but she won’t leave the wireless operator.’

‘She’s all right?’

‘Her back hurts, I think. She wouldn’t say.’

I made no answer and moved across to the main door – the one we’d failed to open from the outside. I supposed it no business of mine if the stewardess chose to devote her attention to a member of the crew instead of to the passengers who were her charges. But it was damned queer all the same – almost as queer as the fact that though the inevitability of the crash must have been known for at least fifteen minutes before the actual event, not one of the ten passengers in the cabin had been wearing a seat-belt – and the stewardess, wireless operator and the crew member in the rest room appeared to have been caught completely unprepared.

The circular door handle refused to budge. I called Jackstraw, but even the extra weight made not the slightest impression on it. Obviously, it was immovably jammed – there must have been a slight telescoping effect along the entire length of the fuselage as the plane had crashed into the ice-mound. If the door I had noticed behind the control cabin was as badly warped as this one – and, being nearer the point of impact, it almost inevitably would be – then they’d all have to leave via the windscreens of the control cabin. I thought of the wireless operator with his dreadful head wound and wondered bleakly whether even trying to move him out could be more than a futile gesture, anyway.

A figure barred my way as I turned from the door. It was the white-haired, white-moustached Dixie colonel. His face was dark red, his eyes light blue, choleric and protuberant. It only required someone to get this man good and mad and he would be no more than a debit entry in the account book of some life assurance company. And he seemed good and mad now.

‘What’s happened? What in the devil is all this?’ He had a voice like a Dixie colonel too, the Mason-Dixon line lay far to the north of wherever he had been born. ‘We’ve landed. Why? What are we doing here? What’s the noise outside? And – and who in the name of heaven are you?’

A big business tycoon, I thought wryly, with money enough and power enough to indulge an obviously over-generous capacity for righteous indignation: if I was going to meet any trouble, it wasn’t hard to guess the direction it was going to come from. But, right then, there was some excuse for his attitude: I wondered how I would have felt if I had gone to sleep in a trans-Atlantic airliner and woken up to find myself landed in the freezing middle of nowhere with three fur-clad people, complete with snow-goggles and snow-masks, waddling about the aisle of the plane.

‘You’ve crash-landed,’ I said briefly. ‘I don’t know why – how the hell should I? The noise outside is an ice-blizzard rattling against the fuselage. As for us, we are scientists managing an International Geophysical Year station half a mile from here. We saw and heard you just before you crashed.’

I made to push past him, but he barred my way.

‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ The voice was more authoritative than ever and there was a surprising amount of muscle in that arm across my chest. ‘I think we have a right to know—’

‘Later.’ I knocked his arm away and Jackstraw completed the job by pushing him down into his seat. ‘Don’t make a damned nuisance of yourself. There’s a critically injured man who has to have attention, and at once. We’ll take him to safety and then come back for you. Keep the door shut.’ I was addressing all of them now, but the white-haired man’s wrathful spluttering attracted my attention again. ‘And if you don’t shut up and cooperate, you can stay here. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead, stiff as a board, in a couple of hours. Maybe you will be yet.’