Still, let come what would come. She would worry about imponderables later. For now she had a hurt man to check on. She hung beside Paul’s body for a moment, working out the best way to start tending him. It would be even harder than she had feared. The first move would have to be to get over him somehow. By stretching her legs apart until the insides of her thighs smarted, she could just straddle him and this is what she did, placing her feet on either side of his knees and leaning in against the pendulum pull of the rope to check his head and thorax. If he had broken legs or a broken spine at pelvis level, there was little she could do, but she would check these later. Her prime concern was to discover whether he had a broken skull, neck, or shattered ribs which would do him fatal damage when he was moved.
It was hard to be sure, especially through the bulky cold weather gear, but careful exploration revealed the pulse was steady and strong. As soon as she was sure he was alive, she injected the strongest dose of painkiller she dared, straight into the pulse in his throat — the only bare skin she could get at other than that on his face. At once he seemed to relax into an even deeper sleep. Only then did she continue her manual exploration which within the next few moments revealed a dislocated shoulder and a nasty gash on his scalp. There were swellings and bruises aplenty, but these seemed to be the only serious damage. Relief welled up in her. She leaned back and yelled up, ‘He’s OK from the waist up. I’m just going to check his legs!’
Here the luck seemed to have run out. As soon as she began to run her hands down his right thigh, she knew they were in trouble. Even through the bright survival suit he was wearing she could feel the thigh bone moving. She froze at once, all too aware of the possibility of sharp splinters of bone cutting into the huge arteries or veins of the thigh. Hell! she thought. They shouldn’t even try to move him without some kind of splint to keep this mess steady. She checked the left leg. That seemed fine. Could she bandage his legs together and use the good thigh as a temporary makeshift support? Yes, if push came to shove, but she would be far happier if she could put something else on die other side as well.
She looked up towards the hard line made by the cliff edge and the sky. Because of the slope, neither of the men holding the rope was visible. She could call up and send one of them to get her a splint of some kind, she thought. Colin would be quicker.
As she hesitated, Paul began to come round. His first sign of returning consciousness was a deep groan of agony.
Kate looked around with gathering concern. They had better be quick about this. She didn’t want an agonised patient thrashing about like a drowning man, doing himself heaven knew what damage. She opened her mouth to call up to Colin.
And just as she did so, something strange caught her eye.
In the ice beside Paul’s lolling head, some debris was buried. The ice all around was deep, green, crystal clear, with nothing but silvery air bubbles like fish suspended within it. But just beyond Paul’s head there was something else. It looked like a plank of wood. It wasn’t very big, scarcely a metre long and maybe fifteen centimetres wide, but it was planed and square. It was battered and burned, but looked as though it had been painted. It was man-made.
It was exactly what she needed. With no further thought, she pulled the ice axe into her hand and started to chop the plank free.
Five minutes later she was able to worry the wood out of the ice, her eyes busy to see whether there was any more debris deeper in the cliff. Five minutes after she had decided there was nothing else and this miraculous piece of wood must have been dropped by a passing gull — a very big gull — she had it strapped in place. Paul was definitely coming to now, in spite of the drug she had injected, and it was imperative they get him up.
She swung back and pulled in her breath to call out, only to have her cry drowned out by Sam’s astonished yell of, ‘There’s somebody down there! Look! In the water! There’s somebody down there alive!’
Dave Brodski hated taking orders. Even when someone told him to do something self-evidently sensible, like putting on a survival suit before climbing down an ice cliff three hundred metres above the freezing ocean, he still gave them a hard time. This time the order had saved his life. So far.
He had not been as quick-witted as Paul. He hadn’t heard any sound and he hadn’t looked up to see the ice coming down on his head. It had come as an absolute surprise to him to find that he was suddenly falling. It had come as a stunning revelation to discover that about a million tons of ice were falling with him and that his safety line was securely anchored to the biggest lump among the whole collapsing mess. He actually saw it sailing past him, the rope still secure, then it simply jerked him firmly after it, deeper into the heart of the falling ice. He got a clear if momentary idea of what it must have felt like to be the captain of the Titanic. Then he hit the water and the last of the ice came down on top of him. His hard hat remained in place for long enough to save his skull from being shattered and he was swept down into a stunning maelstrom of foam, ice and water. The cold knocked the breath from his body and a blessedly small ice boulder knocked him senseless.
His life preserver inflated automatically and in an instant the fat, air-filled Mae West was pulling him to the surface where he floated for a while, still unconscious, hidden among the varyingly massive blocks of ice. How many minutes passed before he came to his senses he would never know. Perhaps fifteen, but no more than that, for the survival suit could only have kept him alive for twenty or so under these conditions. It was the pain which woke him: not the pain from battered limbs and bruised bones, but the growing agony of having the vital warmth leeched out of his limbs and organs. This was no restful numbness tempting the weary survivor into a deadly slumber. He felt as though every joint in his body was expanding from within, as though he was on some terrible, invisible rack and ready to explode. He screamed and the sound he made echoed so strangely that his eyes sprang open — though he had not really been aware that they were closed.
He looked around in wonder, as close to being awed as his sardonic soul could come. ‘Now I know what it feels like to be the olive in a Martini,’ he thought. All around him were lumps of ice, from cubes to boulders, bobbing in the grey water. The waves rolled under him, lifting and turning him, sucking him in towards the foot of the ice cliff he had just fallen down. Such was the scale of the thing that he gasped. Water went into his lungs. He choked, puked, started coughing and fighting for his life. The first thing he did was panic. He thrashed around and screamed but it soon dawned on him that no one could hear or see him down here among the ice. So he calmed down and started to think.
His paroxysm of futile splashing and arm-waving had one benefit, however. It wrapped the bright orange safety harness round his numb hand. He looked at the bobbing strand for an instant and then he thought, ‘Perhaps this thing is still anchored.’ The vision of an ice boulder seemingly half as big as a house with his rope safely anchored to it crossed his mind. If he could pull himself across to it, he thought, he might just be able to pull himself up on it too.