Carter came aft, checking to make sure everyone was aboard and strapped in. “It’ll be a rough take-off,” he said quietly to Will. “And this beast climbs like a rocket. Keep an eye on her.”
“I will.”
A few seconds later the engines started. The noise reminded Penny of the beginning of the surge, and she realised that it had been exactly six months since the icequake. She found herself gripping Steve’s hand more tightly than necessary; he smiled at her and squeezed back. The plane began to vibrate, and the pitch of the engines rose, but nothing happened.
The engines stopped. People began to mutter and laugh, their breaths frosty in the chill air. Al appeared in the doorway to the flight deck.
“We’re still frozen in,” he announced. “I need some people to get outside and see what the problem is. Ben, where’s your flamethrower?”
“I left it outside.”
Ben was on his feet. Steve and Howie unstrapped themselves and followed him forward.
There was a long, tense wait. Penny could faintly hear scrapes and bangs under the fuselage. Across the aisle Katerina took out a cigarette and then put it back in her pocket. Ivan touched her hand. Jeanne gasped and began breathing in a controlled rhythm, her face to the wall.
The scraping and banging ended. Penny got up and went to the latrine at the rear of the cargo compartment. When she came out a minute later, there was a confused babble of shouts from the front, and a crowd was milling around the door to the flight deck. Steve’s face, blackened and savage, appeared in the doorway:
“Katerina!”
She unstrapped herself, grabbed her medical bag from between her feet, and ran to the door. The crowd pulled away, but not quickly enough for Steve. He shoved Gordon and Simon roughly out of Katerina’s way.
“Somebody get a stretcher!” he shouted.
There was one stowed under Jeanne’s; Ivan pulled it out and hobbled forward with it.
Hugh got everyone seated. “We’ve had an accident,” he said. “A bad one. Ben… Ben Whitcumb is dead.” He took a deep breath. “The damned fuel tank on his flamethrower exploded. He — he was very badly burned — went into shock — and died.”
“God rest his soul,” George Hills said, crossing himself.
A few minutes later Steve and Howie carried the stretcher into the cargo compartment. Ben’s body had been wrapped in an orange nylon tent. They lashed it to the icy metal floor. The stink of gasoline and burned flesh filled the compartment.
“All right,” said Hugh. “Everyone strap in.”
The engines started again. Steve slumped back into his seat, and the scorched smell was thick on his clothes. He leaned towards Penny, his voice faint over the growing roar of the engines.
“He was just unstrapping the tank. I don’t know why it happened; maybe he didn’t shut the valve completely. But it just — blew up in his face. His clothes caught fire—”
She gagged, and shook her head; she didn’t want to hear any more.
“—we rolled him in the snow”, but his clothes were soaked with gas. He kept — and then he just convulsed, and died.”
The Hercules bumped, and heaved, and began to move. Steve leaned back and closed his eyes. His beard was singed half-off and his eyebrows were gone. The front of his green anorak was full of black-edged holes. Penny took his hand very gently, and held it as the plane gained speed and lifted abruptly from the ice. — It isn’t fair, it just isn’t goddam fair! She felt tears run coldly down her face.
There were not many portholes in the cargo compartment; the nearest one was across the aisle and several metres forward. Through it. Penny could see a tilted surface of pink and black. Then, as they climbed still higher, the porthole blazed with the blinding yellow light of the risen sun.
Chapter 15 – North
For the first three hundred kilometres, the weather held clear. Seven kilometres below, the Shelf stretched endlessly in all directions, its irregular surface red and black under the low rays of the sun. They were well to the north — true north — of Cape Adare, and out over the Southern Ocean, but the Shelf seemed as solid as it had been on the traverse.
Al paid little attention to the view. It was good to be flying a Herc again, but without a co-pilot or navigator he was working very hard. Kyril, as flight engineer, monitored the plane’s systems, but if anything went wrong Al would have to fix it — if it could be fixed.
Hugh sat in the co-pilot’s chair, silent and grim. When Al finally put the Herc on autopilot and paused to light a cigar, Hugh said:
“I really thought we were going to get home without a single death. I really did.”
Al nodded. He wore glasses against the glare of the sun, and his face was unreadable. After a while he said, “I felt pretty bad when I couldn’t get those guys off Observatory Hill. But—” He spread his hands. “You don’t quit, but you don’t expect to win.”
“I did. I still do.”
Al leaned over and tapped one of the dials on the co-pilot’s instrument panel. “That’s the pressure in the booster hydraulic system. If that needle drops, you can expect to go on winning for maybe three minutes. That’s how long it’ll take us to hit the water. Or ice, as the case may be.” Then he grimaced. “Sorry, Hugh. That sounded pretty cynical.”
Hugh nodded.
Clouds thickened beneath them and reared up ahead. Unable to trust his compass systems, Al shot the sun and then lifted the plane another two thousand metres. They would pass safely over the storm, but at the cost of increased fuel consumption. He plotted the howgozit and talked briefly with Kyril over the intercom system. Kyril said everything was “Okay-khorosho.” Al buzzed Gerry Roche in the cargo compartment, who told him Jeanne was definitely in labour, but doing all right.
“How soon is she gonna have the baby?”
“I dunno, Al. Just a minute, eh?… Katerina says she’s dilated about eight centimetres, whatever the hell that means. And, uh, I don’t think she likes people asking questions.”
The plane thumped into a region of turbulence, and the flight grew increasingly rough. Al forgot about Jeanne; his attention was focussed on maintaining the plane’s stability, and on the hydraulic-system gauges.
Gerry’s voice buzzed in Al’s headphone: “Hey, Al, any idea how soon we get off this bumpy road? Jeanne, she’s kind of upset.”
“That makes two of us, but don’t tell her I said so. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe less. How’s everybody else?”
“Okay. Say, what’s our ETA at Chee-Chee?”
“Sometime around 1600 hours.”
The turbulence worsened. Clouds boiled up towards them in slow geysers of black and white; the sun, low on the horizon, burned redly through the far edges of the storm. Al lifted the Hercules two hundred metres, knowing that the increased altitude would increase fuel consumption to the danger point. They might have to change course for Dunedin after all, but he didn’t want to: the airfield there was likely to be closed down by the storm. He got up and shot the sun through the sextant mounted in the roof of the flight deck, and wished he could pick up Christchurch.
Jeanne was past transition and pushing hard. Will knelt beside her, counting slowly to time each push while she breathed in quick, infrequent gaps. Her face was congested and mottled with the fine red lines of broken blood vessels.
“Very good, very good,” Katerina said. “The baby is crowning. Very good, again, push, push…”
Suddenly the baby’s head emerged. Katerina’s hands gently turned it, and Will saw its face. Dark red beneath a cap of wet, dark hair, the face was impassive and serene, its eyes closed. Katerina drew mucus out of its nose and mouth.