In Kate’s tent they sat down again, silently.
“Right,” said Kate, “we’d better have this out. Colin, tell us what happened.”
“But . . .” began Quick.
“Shut up, Simon; you’ll get your chance later. Colin, will you please tell us about Antarctica?” Kate’s voice held rock-hard authority.
Ross looked at her. Blue eyes, still warm, met cold green in another level stare. This time Ross looked away. He looked down and nodded. He held up his hands, one blackened, blistered, twisted, part-melted, glistening with metal pins, struts, and strings; the other a great square, blunt fingered, thick knuckled, black haired. He studied it for a moment, remembering.
And then he told them.
EIGHT
Ross studied the flesh of his two hands as he held them up towards the faint warmth of the stove. How white and thin they looked, the black hair on their backs made deeper, thicker, by the whiteness of the skin. They looked almost skeletal, the fingers thin, knuckles bulging unnaturally. He couldn’t keep them still. Half cold, half the pain of his split nails. The nail on each of his index-fingers was split to the quick. The nails on the other fingers were long – there had been no real chance to cut them since the team had started back from the South Pole – but they were strangely clean. Ross knew about city dirt which collected under the nails from grubby handles on street-doors, dirty trains, black newsprint, but here there was no dirt at all. He had been pulling a sledge day after day for longer than he could clearly remember, unable to wash properly, unable to shave, sometimes too tired to even eat, and yet he had perfectly clean fingernails. He studied them in silent, stupid wonder. They were so perfectly clean.
Outside, the storm raged as it had been raging for over a week, pinning them, helpless, to the unforgiving ice, as another storm had pinned Scott and his men more than half a century before, almost in the same place. Scott. It all came back to Scott.
When they had put it to him so long ago, so far away, it had all seemed so easy: do what Scott had done, but come out alive. Walk to the Pole, using ponies, only a few dogs, and men; walk to the Pole, and walk back. December and January had passed as they walked in, February and much of March as they walked out. At least they had lost none of the men: Scott had lost Evans and Oates by the time the storm had pinned him down a few miles from here. Scott, Wilson and Bowers had lasted ten days.
Ross, Jeremiah, Quick, Smith and McCann had been here for ten days. They had food, drink, heat still, but the magic ten days was up. The Antarctic was not going to let them go: they must move or die. Ross knew it, Jeremiah knew it, Captain Robin Quick knew it: Smith and McCann seemed to know nothing. Even after the long rest – if the endless war against cold and wet could be called a rest – they were dull-eyed and uncaring. Left to themselves, they would do nothing. And Camp 13 was twenty miles away on Scott’s route towards Cape Evans: four days’ walk. Ross looked up from his shaking hands, his clean fingernails.
“You’ll never make it, Robin,” he said. “Not four days. Not in this.”
Quick looked over at him. The argument had been the same for over a week, while they had waited for one of two things: the end of the storm, or the arrival of help. The one thing they had over Scott was the fact that a fully motorised rescue team was looking for them. The problem was that the rescue could not follow the route up from Cape Evans: it would be coming over from Edward VII Peninsula, 450 miles to the east. And it was impossible, of course, that help could come on foot over that distance in ten days.
Before they had started out, Ross had made contingency for just such an emergency as this. Job was at Amundsen’s old base, where they had helicopters. And even if the weather closed in, and the helicopters were grounded, Job would still come to get them out. But when they had sent emergency signals on their radio, they had received no acknowledgment . . . Quick had agreed to wait ten days before making an attempt with his team for Camp 13. The ten days were up, and there was still no sign of Job.
“We’ve got to try,” said Robin.
Ross smiled, and winced as his cold-split lip opened again. He sucked the lip – the lower – into his mouth: he must not let the blood freeze on his face. It turned his smile into a grimace, but Robin understood. They had had it all out before, going through the gamut of outrage, anger, acceptance. Ross was the leader, but he was a civilian: Robin, a captain in the Army, and Smith and McCann, a sergeant and a corporal, did not have to obey him. Even the best teams can come to a leadership crisis: Amundsen had had his crisis before he left for the Pole, and had changed his final team: Ross was having his leadership crisis at a less convenient time, and he could only give in. Robin and he had known each other for most of their lives; Ross was married to Charlie, Robin’s sister – and he knew now that there was nothing more he could say, nothing he could do, to stop Robin taking Smith and McCann away towards Camp 13. And of course Robin might be right: the three Army men might be the ones to take the story of their attempt back to the rest of the world.
“Think again, Robin.”
“I’ll sleep on it, Colin.”
Ross shrugged his shoulders. The ice on his heavy anorak grated at the joints. The wind howled with vicious force, making the canvas of the tent flap, starring the slick ice of the sagging walls, sending it tinkling to the ground. Ross felt his body begin to shudder spasmodically. He moved his toes in his boots, exploring the unyielding solidity of the toecaps, relieved that he could feel anything through the pins-and-needles of his cramped legs.
“You will never make it, Captain.” Jeremiah.
“I didn’t know you were taking sides in this, Jeremiah.”
“I do not like to see men going to their death, Captain.”
Ross shook his head wearily. “Leave it, Jeremiah.” His eyes rested on his old friend’s face, on the red-rimmed eyes in their deep black sockets which shifted restlessly, and never met his own; on the high, skull-like cheekbones mottled white with frostbite, the hollow, hopeless face lined and cracked like an old oil painting, the thin split mouth, blood-caked for all the sucking of lips. And Smith and McCann looked even worse: there was a look of utter defeat, almost of death on their ice-pinched features. They had given up already.
Quick knew this, and it was part of his desperation: a natural leader, he had felt keenly the pressures of taking orders, even from his closest friend, and now that things had gone so badly wrong, he had to make a move away from Colin to try to save his two men. Yet he was well aware that in doing so he was giving in to a selfish feeling which bordered on cowardice: he was not man enough, he thought, to trust the ultimate responsibility to his friend, even though he knew that Colin was a better cold-weather man than he could ever hope to be. That was what lay at the root of it, he knew; and this was his last chance to prove himself. He had to grasp it, live or die.
But Jeremiah was speaking again. “Even Scott could not make it, Captain. Even Scott, and he had Wilson and Bowers. Great men all, and fighters to the end.” He shook his head. His eyes moved to the huge Scot, McCann, and the wiry Cockney, Smith.
“Smith!” he rapped out.
After a moment, Smith replied in a dull, dead voice, “Sir?”
“Why are you here, Smith?” Jeremiah asked.