The heavy smell of fuel was everywhere, coating the wreckage and soaking into the ice, but there was no indication of burning or fire.
Garner surveyed his surroundings. Between the darkness and the fog, the visibility was still less than a hundred feet. There wasn’t a known landmark in sight except for the tail section of the fuselage, which lay upside-down in the water about twenty yards away and no way of telling which direction they had come from or which way Tibbits was going at the time of the crash.
Garner’s watch read 9:30 P.M. the same day, he assumed. As nearly as he could recollect, the helicopter had been closer to the Phoenix than B-82 when it went down. The Phoenix, along with the other two icebreakers, should have been ninety miles almost due east of the oil rig, but in the subsequent search, Tibbits had gone farther south, over the coastline of Melville Peninsula. Location and distance could only be guessed at until the storm and the darkness broke, and without proper shelter. Garner knew he couldn’t simply sit down and await rescue. There was no way of knowing whether the Phoenix even knew about the Sikorsky, or whether they had survived the soliton but the Rushmore was undoubtedly aware of the missing helicopter and, assuming the situation at B-82 was under control, Krail would be sending out a search party.
Whatever else was going on, the Phoenix likely needed him more. Zubov’s words came flooding back to him: We need you here, man.
Garner stepped around the site, scavenging any useful provisions he could find.
In his parka were a pocketknife, a disposable lighter, and some fishing line — pieces of Medusa’s repair kit. From the wreckage, he gathered two warm blankets, the charts, several tufts of insulation, and a small first-aid kit. He scrubbed the blood from around his eyes with melted snow, then daubed alcohol on his wound and wrapped his head with gauze as best he could. He completed the dressing with goggles and a knit cap, but this did little to ease the throbbing ache. For whatever reason, the manufacturer of the kit found it more essential to include a grease pencil for its first-aid potential than a packet of aspirin.
Using the pencil. Garner scrawled the message Gone to Phoenix on the side of the cockpit in thick black letters. He couldn’t help but laugh at such a message in the middle of so much icy desolation.
Finally, he piled his meager assortment of survival tools onto the blankets and tied them together around a shaft of aluminum. The makeshift hobo’s sack could be dragged along, relieving him of any load to carry. Peering across the ice at what he believed to be the shore of Melville Peninsula, he chose the direction that felt the most sensible and began walking.
Carol didn’t know how long she remained unconscious. From the sound of trickling water and the orientation of the hovercraft, she guessed it was only a few seconds.
Like her, Byrnes was still strapped into his seat in an upside-down position.
Just out of Carol’s reach, his face was turned away from her, slumped down to the port side. He didn’t respond to her shouts and she didn’t want to contemplate the possibility he was dead.
The cockpit of the craft was pointed down at a cockeyed angle and she could only hope that the ice holding up the stern was strong enough to hold them a little longer. If the cushion had torn away from the underside, the fractured body of the hovercraft would sink like a stone; if it hadn’t, the cushion would hold the cockpit underwater like a kayak that refused to be righted. With the very real possibility that the water was highly radioactive in addition to being lethally frigid, the prospect of floating seemed to be a worse fate. Assuming it was still attached and not blown halfway to Newfoundland by now, the cushion’s bright orange color would provide a good marker for the rescue craft to find. When daylight came. And if anyone was searching for them yet. Between the apparent calamity at B-82 and the industrial-sized untangling going on around the Phoenix, it could be hours longer before anyone even noticed they were gone.
As Carol tried to release herself from her seat, a bolt of pain shot upward from her left leg, causing her to scream. From the inflamed but strangely dead sensation, she concluded that a bone the tibia or the fibula, but probably not both had been broken when the impact sent her into the dashboard. There was blood on her boot below the cuff of her snowsuit, which might even mean the break was severe enough to puncture the skin. First she needed a splint of some kind, and a tourniquet.
And no one was going to hand them to her.
Any movement of her legs sent another wave of pain washing over her and she fought to stay alert. She focused instead on her arms, extricating one, then the other from her seat harness. Around her, the shell of the cockpit groaned from her gingerly movements. The craft had come to rest tilted at about thirty degrees, and as this pitch increased the vehicle threatened to nose over and release its grip on the ice. A single error in judgment and she would fall headfirst into the water only a few feet below her.
A simple solution, then: don’t slip. She released her seat belt and took up her own weight by holding on to the safety handle beside her seat. To pull her legs out from under the dash, she climbed at an angle toward the stern, stretching her body between the twin seats.
She was now only inches away from Byrnes. She rolled over against his right shoulder and gently shook him.
“Patrick?” she whispered. Then, louder, “Pat?” She touched his cheek. His flesh was cold, though it was impossible to tell if the condition was from internal or external circumstances. Byrnes’s arm came up without resistance as she peeled away his glove and checked for a pulse, finding none there or in his neck.
Finally, she turned his head to face her. His pale blue eyes stared blankly back at her.
Carol closed Byrnes’s eyes, then her own.
She wept.
Then, with a sudden jolt, the hovercraft dropped lower in the water, breaking her reverie. The water was now less than two feet below her boots, rising steadily higher with each passing moment. The nose of the craft was filling up and the additional weight would soon pull the rest of the wreckage after it. She pulled back her right foot and struggled to sit up, ready to fight once again.
Carol continued crawling into the rear compartment of the hovercraft, a low, open space used for transporting passengers or small payloads.
Finding single footholds along the hovercraft’s roof, she tried to fashion a staircase to move herself farther astern, toward the engine and the main hatch. Each time her left foot even grazed an obstruction, pain shot through her hips and spine. Each time her right foot pushed her up, the hovercraft seemed to step down into the water a little more, negating her progress.
She clenched her teeth and continued upward. She blinked the anguished tears from her eyes and began to sing a song from her childhood: The itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout. The words seeped from her lips in a light, innocent pitch, barely louder than a whisper. Down came the hovercraft and washed the spider out… The hovercraft responded accordingly, angling over farther still and dropping another two feet. The seat where Carol had dangled only moments before was now half underwater. The remainder of the instrument panel slid under the water with a wet gurgle. The lack of any burning or protest to the flooding by the electronics told Carol the vessel was entirely without power, even if she could reach the radio.