Doggedly, with the will power only ever granted to those at death’s door, he began to pull the rope in, hand over hand. The action was dangerously repetitious, however, and not even the agony in his joints could keep his mind active so that after a moment or two he began to slow down without meaning to and by the time he reached his goal he was too far gone to do anything other than hang there and wonder what it was he had planned to do next.
In the final analysis it was Alan who saved him.
Alan had been the unluckiest one of all. The first big ice block had hit him on the side of the head and killed him at once. His rope had held firm for just long enough to let the succeeding boulders smash into his head and face, splitting skin and bone like a Halloween pumpkin, before it had parted, dropping him into the thickest section of the ice fall. By the time he had reached the black depths of the ocean, there was hardly a bone in his body left unbroken. His survival suit was torn and bloodied, hanging in rags around him. His Mae West was punctured in several places but the gas bottle and the automatic release still worked.
Dave, hanging comatose against the edge of the ice block, was suddenly confronted by the ruined corpse of his friend which burst out of the water beside him as though still fighting to survive. For a moment they remained there, frozen, face to face. Alan’s broken visage with its burst eyes bulging and its shattered jaw flapping seemed to be screaming, and indeed the sound of gas escaping from the ruptured Mae West would have drowned out a banshee. Dave was transfixed by the gruesome power of it. His dying body was flooded with the greatest dose of adrenaline it had ever experienced. He gave a shriek of naked terror and fought his way frantically up onto the rocking ice floe. Behind him, Alan, as though satisfied with a job well done, toppled forward to lie face down, hiding the horror his head had become. The last of the gas whispered out of his wrecked Mae West and he sank into blessed oblivion.
They pulled up Kate and Paul with all the despatch safety would allow. As he relieved Sam at the top of Paul Chan’s line, Richard rapped to the pilot, ‘Fire up the Huey. We’ll have to go down after the other one in that.’
Sam nodded numbly and ran. What sort of people were these? he wondered. Did they ever get lost and confused? Did they ever hesitate or stop in the face of a crisis, uncertain what to do?
He hit the side door of the helicopter and swarmed aboard.
The man had said to fire her up and Sam wasn’t hesitating either.
As soon as Kate came over the edge she was running over towards Richard who was pulling her patient up. As she reached him, Paul’s body came in over the edge and she was there on her knees, her hands as busy as her eyes, making as sure as possible that the groaning man was brought onto the ice with no further damage. Only when she was satisfied, in that moment of leisure before Colin came panting up with a stretcher from the emergency hut, did she look down towards the sea where the miracle of another figure lay spread out on the largest ice floe like a bright orange star fish.
‘We’ll both have to go in the helicopter,’ Colin was saying as they put Paul onto the stretcher and began to hurry him towards the biggest hut.
Richard had already gone, pulling the nylon rope from round his body, preparing to use it as a lifeline to the second survivor. Kate’s green eyes followed him as he ran across the ice.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But be careful. Remember your hand.’
He booted the door open and then caught it on his shoulder as it rebounded. ‘I will,’ he promised.
He swung the head end of the stretcher onto the nearest bed and paused only until she had placed the foot end safely in place. ‘Got to run,’ he said.
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Good.’
He was gone.
Kate took a deep breath, counted to ten, kicked the door shut with more force than was absolutely necessary, turned the heating up full and began to take Paul’s clothes off. As she finished undoing the first zip on the survival suit, she heard the helicopter clatter up into the air.
‘I’ll go down onto the ice,’ Richard was yelling. ‘You lower me.’
‘I can do that but I don’t think I can pull you back up.’ Colin held up his left arm. He stripped off mitten and glove to reveal a hand that was all too obviously plastic. ‘It will hold while I lower but I wouldn’t trust it to pull you up. Kate was about the limit.’
‘OK. You get me down and then secure the rope in here. Sam, can you lift us up and carry us up to the top of the berg?’
‘You’ll have to be careful to tie the right knots.’
‘I haven’t had to pass elementary seamanship in a long while but I’ll manage.’
‘Look,’ persisted Colin, ‘I can go down. You’re strong enough to pull me up, I’m sure.’
‘Too risky, Colin. That outfit wouldn’t be much help if you went into the water. At least I’m in one of Antelope’s survival suits.’
The big glaciologist nodded in reluctant agreement.
‘Nearly there,’ called Sam.
As the helicopter danced down the last few metres to hover above the marooned man, Richard knotted one end of the rope round his waist. Colin belayed the other end to a seat foot and pulled at it until the whole fuselage shook. ‘Right!’ he yelled.
Richard opened the sliding door in the Huey’s side and looked out into the battering waterfall of air beneath die rotors. The floe was a couple of metres below him with the body spread across about half of it. It lay quite still, giving no indication at all whether or not the survivor had heard the helicopter or was in any condition to react even if he had done so. Richard’s ice-blue eyes narrowed for a moment as he took stock. Whichever one of the men it was, he was hanging on to the anchorage point Paul had driven into the ice before it fell from the cliff top. How on earth could it have remained secure through all this?
If it was Alan, then he was simply holding on to the rope as a safe handhold. If it was Dave, then he could well still be tied to it. Richard turned to yell at Colin but even as he did so, his big companion shoved a wicked looking knife out towards him. Richard grinned wolfishly, put the icy blade between his teeth and jumped.
He hit the slippery surface of the ice jarringly hard and felt his knees twist in agonised protest. He pitched forward, as he had calculated — and hoped — he would, to sprawl across the body of the man he had come to rescue and share his handhold. He saw at once that it was Dave Brodski. Dave seemed to be unconscious. That was hardly surprising. He had been in the water for the better part of twenty-five minutes. He would be lucky to pull through.
Richard knelt up on his protesting knees and sawed at the rope by the anchorage point. The knife was sharp. Half a dozen desperate pulls and the orange fibres parted. Richard pulled as much slack towards himself as possible and hitched Dave’s line to his own. Then he turned into the savage, numbing blast of the helicopter’s down draught and gestured to Colin.
At once the Huey began to lift and he just had time to pull himself to his feet before he was lifted gently into the air. Less than a metre below him, his lolling head level with Richard’s aching knees, Dave Brodski followed suit.
Dangling there, one hand on the rope reaching up above his head and the other on the rope down below, fighting to breathe against the constriction of the rope round him, Richard had an even better view of the Davis Strait than he had enjoyed from the front of the iceberg. And he had some leisure to enjoy it, though it was an incongruous position for sightseeing. The great bow-formed cliffs seemed to be driving southwards now and the calming waves held enough of the last squall to look like a bow wave foaming at its counter. Beyond the dazzling, deadly beauty of the ice, the end of a bright afternoon was drawing out into die long evening of early autumn in high latitudes.