“You mentioned that over the radio,” Bob said at last. “I’m not sure we’d need to go if we weren’t gonna go any farther. Hallett is right in the path of every storm coming in off the ocean. And it’s not a big place — it wouldn’t have much of a fuel dump, or a whole lot of supplies. It probably got evacuated, but if it didn’t the guys there wouldn’t need five extra mouths to feed.”
“I know,” Al nodded. “It’s a very long shot. We’ve got to try it, but I wouldn’t blame you for staying put.”
“There’s another possibility,” Bob went on. “The Hercules.”
Al looked at him cautiously, like someone who finds himself dealing with a self-possessed lunatic. “Oh?”
“You might go out and look it over if you have the time. I only know about choppers, but I couldn’t find much wrong with it. The batteries are just about dead now, but I checked out the instruments back in March. Just for something to do, really. There was something wrong with the hydraulic system, or else the wiring. But everything else looked good. She was all gassed up and ready to fly; if they hadn’t been in such a hurry to get out, they probably could’ve fixed her up in a day or two.” He shrugged, an amateur unsure of his judgement against that of a professional.
“Well. Well, well.” Al looked at his watch. “Can we get inside it fairly quickly?”
“No sweat. We dug a tunnel. Want to see her?”
In a few minutes they were back outside, walking across snow that glowed pink-violet under a crimson sky. It was just bright enough for them to see where they were going, but all of them stumbled at least once. Penny, walking between Al and Mike, shivered with something more than cold: a frightened excitement, an anxious exhilaration. — Oh God, if it can only fly, if it can only fly —
Drifts had piled up on the port side of the Hercules, but relatively little snow lay banked on the starboard side. Compared to the Otter, it seemed monstrously large, too large to fly. The starboard wing alone was as long as the Otter’s full span, and the turboprop engines looked grotesquely big. Bob led them under the wing and along the starboard side towards the tail.
“The passenger doors are drifted over,” he explained, “but the rear cargo door is open.”
“The inside must be full of snow,” Al said.
“Pretty near.”
The rear of the fuselage tapered up and away from the snow towards the tail assembly. Drift had spilled around the plane here, and rose well above their heads. Bob shone his flashlight on a bamboo pole, then dug into the snow beside it. He pulled out a sheet of plywood, revealing a narrow black opening in the drift.
“I’ll go first,” he said, and went in on his hands and knees.
Penny went third, after Al, and was surprised to find the tunnel relatively warm. She crawled for some uncertain distance, watching Al’s backside in the light of her flash. Then the tunnel sloped steeply upward, and its floor turned from packed snow to thickly frosted metal. The cold suddenly bit through her mitts and trousers, and she remembered how Al had made them abandon the helicopter after the crash.
The tunnel ended, and she stood up in freezing darkness. Bob and Al were shining their flashlights around a space that seemed as vast as Shacktown’s hangar, even though the interior of the Hercules was half-filled with snow. Earl and Mike came through, and their lights made the space a little less cavernous; but she remembered that each of Shacktown’s huts had been carried intact in the cargo compartment of a plane like this one.
Where the drift hadn’t reached, the cargo compartment looked like a cave: every surface was crusted with glittering frost. Simple seats — red plastic webbing over steel frames — had been bolted to the walls, facing each other across a wide aisle that could hold personal baggage and other cargo.
“It’d be some job digging this out,” Al grunted. “Let’s take a look at the flight deck.”
They had to struggle through knee-deep snow until they reached a door and forced it open enough to squeeze through. Penny gasped in shock at the dim red light that came from the far side.
The flight-deck windows, though frosted, were translucent enough to let in the noon twilight. Al looked around for a moment before settling into the pilot’s chair; he swept the flashlight beam over the instrument panels. Penny felt a pang of disappointment: so many gauges, so many switches and knobs and dials — anything as big and complex as this couldn’t be repaired by a few people on an ice island, with the nearest proper facilities thousands of kilometres away.
Al pressed a switch and a faint yellow glow appeared in the gauges.
“Yeah, not much life in the batteries anymore,” he said almost to himself. “Gee, this is an old Herc!” He turned the flash on a small metal plate and scraped the frost away, revealing the numbers 56740. “I’ll be darned — I’ve flown this one before. Used to belong to VXE-6 before we sold her to the Kiwis.” He tried some more switches, rubbed frost from the instruments, and muttered to himself as he watched the feeble responses they made.
Penny began to feel the cold; so did the others, but Al seemed oblivious. After a very long time he got up and poked around the flight deck, pulling panels away to inspect the wiring behind them. Finally he turned to Bob and asked: “What about the skis? Any damage?”
“No — I don’t think so, anyway. They were drifted over with ash when we got here, and they’re probably frozen into the snow by now, but I don’t think we’ve got a real problem.”
“Well. Let’s get out of here.”
The Jamesway was like a Turkish bath; they pawed themselves out of the top layers of their clothing while fingers and toes came painfully back to life. Al found a cigar butt and carefully lit it. He took a few puffs.
“I think we can do it,” he said. “There’s a leak in the hydraulics, all right. The booster system — the rudder and the starboard-wing spoilers are out of action. But the wiring’s okay — if that was the problem, we’d be out of luck. And if the skis are damaged, we’re really out of luck. But I’ll bet they’re okay.”
“What’ll it take to fix the booster system?” Bob asked.
“You know anything about Hercs?”
“No.”
“Well, I know a fair amount, and there must be some manuals around. We got one or two guys at Shacktown who could help — Simon’s worked on the Hercules a few times, and there’s a Russian aircraft mechanic who knows his stuff.” Al blew a smoke ring. “Might take a couple of weeks. Maybe less.”
“What about spare parts, tools, all that stuff?” asked Earl.
“Shouldn’t be a problem — they always kept most of the essential equipment here, to save time commuting to Inner Willy. We can make do.”
“This is goddamn unbelievable,” Mike said. “So what’s your programme?”
“Penny and I go right back to Shacktown. I bring Simon and Kyril here, and maybe a few others, and we go to work. By the middle of the month we should know if the Herc will really fly. If it will, we take it to Shacktown and then fly out to New Zealand. If it won’t, we stay put until spring.”
“Sounds okay,” Bob said. “We can give you some help, too, but bring as many people as you need — there’s plenty of room in the other Jamesways, and enough food for everyone. Well, for ten or twelve if they end up staying all winter,” he added.
“Christ,” Penny groaned. “I’ll be back home washing dishes tonight.” The men laughed; Al patted her arm. “You’re sure Cape Hallett is out?” she asked.
“Gee, you really don’t want to wash dishes, do you?” Al smiled. “Yeah, Hallett is out. If you’ve got to gamble, you might as well play the odds.”