Out came the sun and dried up all the rain… Although the roof was now nearly vertical, she slithered across the surface in search of provisions. Any loose debris that hadn’t been tossed forward into the water was piled in small drifts against the rear seats. Except for the modest gear they had packed for the possible rescue of Garner, there was little more than the usual assortment of junk that accumulated in any vessel. The haversack they had filled with food, water, and warm clothing was, of course, nowhere to be found. There was a pair of exposure suits, but she doubted she was flexible enough to crawl inside one. They would provide little more warmth than an ineffectual blanket, but they were orange and that, at least, meant being seen amid all this white. A flashlight with a lantern battery, which might penetrate eighteen inches into the fog. A Danielle Steel novel, which would make good kindling if Carol could find some matches. A rifle and enough shells to ward off any curious polar bears. A five-gallon gas can, filled with the fuel mix for which Byrnes had adapted all the Phoenix’s motorized machinery. Some rope just enough to hang herself and two paddles that gave her just enough wood to fashion a splint.
Then, last, a kit containing a flare gun and six emergency flares. She couldn’t imagine a better situation to declare an emergency, but she couldn’t fire off a flare from inside the cabin.
She could hear the wind howling outside and knew she would lose most of her shelter once the hatch was opened. If she crawled outside she might never get back in, or the hovercraft would simply leave her behind as it completed its halting fall to the bottom.
She also knew she didn’t have a choice in the matter.
Then the itsy-bitsy spider went up the spout again.
With three long, desperate steps, she reached the release handle on the outside hatch. Were the hovercraft still upright, she would have lacked the leverage to open it, but in the cabin’s inverted position, the released hatch pulled open under its own weight.
Carol gasped as the cold wind struck her. Although the overcast persisted in the night sky, it had stopped snowing and the fog had lifted. She pulled on her hood and goggles, then tossed her supplies onto the ice one piece at a time. Even with her body weight helping to hold down the rear of the craft, the ground was at least four feet away. She would have to pull herself over the lip of the hatchway headfirst, then grip the top of the opening and lower herself to the ground.
She almost succeeded. As she angled her legs outside, straightened her back, and began reaching for the ground with her one good leg, she lost her grip and fell heavily to the ice, landing on her rump. Her leg raged in protest and for a moment all Carol could do was close her eyes and wait for the blinding pain to pass.
Tears came again; she fought them back. Eventually she struggled to her feet and looked around. A continuous plateau of fast ice extended from the wreckage to the shore. Even if she knew which shore it was, even if the distance were only a hundred yards, she couldn’t imagine making the trek. Until the hovercraft sank from sight, she would have to remain with it.
She took up one of the paddles and wedged it in the hatchway. Balanced on one foot, she grabbed the open hatch and slammed it closed against the shaft of wood, snapping it in half. She placed the two pieces on either side of her broken shin and, as a temporary measure, bound them together with the rope. The effort left her too exhausted to even contemplate whether she should somehow stabilize the fragile wreckage and climb back inside the shelter of the cabin. Instead, she loaded the gun and fired one flare. The bright red projectile streaked into the sky and exploded somewhere in the fog layer above. Still, she hoped someone, somewhere, had seen its muted red glow.
“One down, five to go,” she muttered, then, exhausted, sat down heavily to rest. Relieved of Carol’s awkward and sporadic motion, the hovercraft stopped complaining. It dangled on the edge of the floe, nose in the water, and provided partial shelter against the wind. The cushion provided a large, orange marker that would be easy to spot, once the weather allowed anyone to go aloft.
Carol gathered up the rifle, the remaining paddle, the suits, and the novel, then pulled herself to the downward end of the wreck. Crawling into the crook formed between the hovercraft’s roof and the edge of the floe, she sat down and waited for help to arrive.
The weather cleared as the storm moved off to the east. The visibility improved but it was still several hours until dawn. As he walked, Garner could see a little farther ahead on the ice and land forms along the horizon. For the previous three hours, he had progressed in what he could only hope was a straight line; he could only estimate how far he had walked from the helicopter.
He knew only that he had vastly underestimated how far north the helicopter had been when it went down. Several times the fast ice he was traversing ended abruptly, forcing him to backtrack as much as half a mile to find a continuous path. He also had to be alert for thin spots and soft, breakaway pieces of ice underfoot; thankfully, most had been recently refrozen by the blizzard.
Garner guessed he was somewhere on Melville Peninsula, but still nowhere near the entrance to Fury and Hecla Strait. That meant that, to the west, there was nothing but water between himself and B-82, almost a hundred miles away. To the east was the peninsula, with nothing but the occasional Inuit settlement. North, somewhere, was the Phoenix, and so he followed the coastline, keeping the frozen surface of Committee Bay to his left. If the Phoenix and the other vessels had progressed past that point, into the strait, there was no way he could hope to reach them. Garner ignored such speculation and trudged onward.
Hunger had raged in Garner’s stomach for hours. Now, as he walked, he saw something round and pink pressing against a translucent window in the sea ice.
It was a single Cyanea arctica, a species of jellyfish indigenous to the Arctic that could grow up to six feet in diameter. This one was small, it was probably contaminated, and as a cnidarian it possessed nests of stinging cells for self-defense. But to Garner it was a long-overdue meal. He knelt down, chipped through the ice, and pulled the jellyfish through. Garner cut the top off the jellyfish’s bell, which was apt to have fewer stinging cells, and cooked it over a small fire. The soft, shapeless form could not have looked less appealing and was more than 95 percent water, but the remaining flesh left a warm, satisfying sensation in his belly.
Soon Garner forced himself to resume walking. The crunching of his boots and the sound of his own breathing soon fell into a steady cadence. While he remained acutely aware of his surroundings, the utter lack of reference points lulled his mind into a contemplative state. Foremost among his thoughts was the welfare of those aboard the Phoenix, and what he might find whenever he reached them. If the soliton had been generated but produced little damage, he was confident that Carol, Zubov, and the others could shrug it off and regroup. If, however, the soliton was a large one and hit them directly, he doubted even the formidable bulk of the three icebreakers could have stayed unaffected.
His thoughts, as they always did, progressed to the minute details. He wondered if the Ulva bombers had reached their mark, and whether Macadam had managed to scrounge up enough Plasroc and make the interminable trip north, at least as far as Cape Dorset, where his ground support was waiting. There were still too many pieces left to fit in the logistic jigsaw puzzle, too many intangibles. With or without him, the containment operation would proceed as it had to; if the operation failed, it would not be for lack of gallant effort, but the consequences would be much more horrifying than anything they had witnessed so far. Murphy’s Law or not, Garner couldn’t do a thing to help until he got where he was going.