The three men walked out with them to the Otter, dragging a sledge loaded with supplies: coffee, canned food, cigarettes, sweets. Then they all shook hands again. Mike said, “When you’re gone we’ll be sure it was all a hallucination.”
“I already think you’re the hallucinations,” Penny answered. “Good luck — see you again in a few weeks, I guess.”
“I’ll be back by suppertime,” Al said. “Unless the weather breaks.”
They all looked up. The horizon was dark again, and the sky was full of stars. There was still no wind.
Al tried to follow his own tracks in taking off, to avoid hitting an unseen hole or sastrugi. As the Otter climbed and circled, three flares went off over the little base; Al blinked his running lights in reply.
“Are we really going to fly our way out of here?” Penny asked, feeling a little giddy.
“I believe we are. I truly believe we are.” Al rubbed his hands together, like a stage villain anticipating the success of his schemes. “We’re gonna freeze in that Herc for a couple of weeks, but it’ll be a lot of fun.”
“Whoopee,” Penny drawled.
“Aw, where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“It’s all very well for you — you’ll be having fun with your grease-monkey friends in a nice cool aeroplane while I’m slaving in that hot kitchen.”
After a while, she said: “The real piss-off is being back with Steve.”
“How so?”
“I don’t like failures. He’s not a failure, and I’m not a failure, but we sure failed together.” She waved at the cigar smoke filling the compartment. “And I kind of expected that, because he’s a lot like my ex-husband. But that lasted four years, and this lasted four months.”
“Being on the ice will do it,” Al said. “Whatever you are when you come here, this place will intensify it. Steve came here as an ambitious guy with a reputation to make. You came here as an outside observer. And I think you were kind of on the run from something.”
“What did you come as?” she asked quickly, feeling the subject was getting dangerous.
“I was on the run, too.” He looked at her, his expression almost unreadable in the dim light. “Guys Steve’s age, if they’re any good, are hungry. And they think about that hunger, and how they can feed it. It makes ’em kind of calculating sometimes, but it also makes ’em — oh, exposed. Like anybody who wants something really bad. I don’t know what made you guys decide to split up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had to do with his being involved in the quake.”
“Hey, Al, you and I were involved, too, remember?”
“Not the way Steve was — intellectually involved, emotionally involved. You and me, we just got knocked down. He’s the Frankenstein who invented the monster. And then it surprised him, and he’s had to try to understand it, get it all — get it all into his head, into words and numbers.”
She suspected Al was right; she had known a lot of men, and a few women, with that urge to reduce the world to a pattern of symbols. She had the urge herself. But to understand Steve was not to forgive him.
Conversation lapsed. For a long time there was only the rumble of the engines, the vibration of the plane and the darkness Al tried several times to raise either Shacktown or Outer Willy, with no luck. At 1500, after they’d been in the air almost an hour, he shook his head in annoyance.
“I’m still not getting TACAN. And we must be almost on top of Shacktown.”
Penny put on her helmet and plugged it in, but only static came through the headphones. Al took them down to five hundred metres, but there were no special landmarks — only the Shelf and a scattering of ice islands.
“I see a light!” Penny said. She pointed a few degrees to the right of their course. “See it?”
Al doused the instrument lights. “Yup. That must be the place.”
They flew towards the light for several minutes, but it seemed to grow no closer. The high cliffs of an ice island rose under them, scarcely visible in the darkness.
Now the light did grow: it pulsed and flared, a yellow-orange flower. They were over it, circling down, and their beacon was Shacktown itself, burning in the ice.
Chapter 12 – Fire
Reg Lewis had gone right to work to find the cause of the floodlights’ failure, but it hadn’t been an easy job. A hundred cables ran down Tunnel D into the hangar; some were exposed while others disappeared into the hangar walls. The floodlight cables were in the walls, and also supplied current to several other outlets. Reg methodically worked his way around the dark hangar from the machine shop, and it wasn’t until almost 1000 hours that he began to smell smoke. He yanked off a glove and held it against a wall panel without quite touching; then another. The fifth panel was noticeably warm. So were the sixth and seventh. The eighth was hot.
“Fire!” he shouted, and began running towards the nearest drum of fire extinguisher. It was a fine red powder that could be sprayed or even shovelled — ordinary fire retardants were liquid and therefore useless in the cold. He wrestled the drum closer to the hot panel, aware of footsteps thudding towards him from the machine shop.
“Where?” It was Gordon Ellerslee, with George Hills right behind him.
“Behind the bloody wall. That bloody old aluminium wiring they put in two years ago.” He ripped the shovel out of the drum and jammed its blade between two panels, then pried one panel loose. Smoke puffed out, black and acrid.
“Better be quick!” Gordon said. Reg heaved on the shovel and the panel screamed away from the studs. The smouldering wood ignited; Reg stumbled back and plunged the shovel into the top of the drum. As he threw the retardant over the fire, sparks scattered over the duckboards and oil-soaked ice beneath their feet.
Suddenly they were standing in a pool of blue and orange flames, a pool that spread erratically along the hangar wall and across the floor. The three men threw handfuls of retardant around themselves.
“Aw, hell,” Reg said. “We better get out of here.”
“No shit,” Gordon snapped.
They stumbled through the flames, coughing. The hangar looked strange in the bluish firelight, and they almost lost their bearings. The forty seconds it took to reach the machine shop seemed much longer.
George Hills, in first, slapped the FIRE button on the wall by the door to Tunnel D. A shrill clanging began at once. Gordon snatched up the phone and punched Hugh’s number. No answer. He tried the lounge.
“Fire in the hangar!” he bellowed as soon as someone picked up the phone. “It’s bad. We need everybody.” Then he dropped the phone and lunged towards the switches controlling the hangar doors.
“Gord — don’t,” George said. “You’ll just feed the fire.”
“We gotta get the fucking vehicles out. The fucking fire will burn right through the roof anyways. Jesus — the fuel bladders.”
Two big fuel bladders, one for Diesel Arctic and the other for JP4, were buried in the ice just beyond the burning wall. The diesel was probably safe — it was farther away from the fire, and not easily ignited — but the JP4 bladder could go off like a bomb.
Men began to pour into the machine shop, and up the ramp directly into the hangar. The big doors banged open, and the fire reached farther back in the hangar, sweeping delicately around the snowmobiles, Sno-Cats and the D4 bulldozer. Oily black smoke retreated, thickening, before the cold air from outside.
Hugh was suddenly in the machine shop, his anorak open and his head bare. “Get on those vehicles and get ’em outside,” he said calmly. “Howie, take the D4. Then come back for the Nodwell. Steve, the snowmobile by the rear wall. Will, the other one. Simon, take Sno-Cat 1. Gordon, Sno-Cat 2.” He stopped the three Russians. “Get the sledges down from the wall on this side, and get as many crates on to them as you can. Take them outside, dump them—”