Whiteout!

We didn't get out. Instead, we switched the radio to the Swing frequency and talked briefly to Garrison, saying little more than hello and goodbye.

After that we were alone in the dark again, skating fast over the Trail. Scott, in the seat beside me, kept watch ahead with a curious, almost unblinking stare, as the marker poles came one after the other out of the night, to flicker their little orange flags at us, then vanish behind. Once I asked Scott, 'Are those flags real?'

'They're real.'

'If you catch me circling right, stop me.'

He laughed. 'If I see those French broads again, then I'll stop you.'

Herschel told me about the Swing and its awesome statistics. It had now been running, more or less day and night, for about five years. The crews lived aboard for six months at a time, driving six hours on, six hours off. The huge Caterpillar low-ground-pressure diesel tractors could go ninety hours without refuelling and each of them hauled a weight of up to 160 tons.

I said, 'The crews must go slowly mad.'

'Nope. They like it. You know, they got a project on, those guys. Milt Garrison's behind it, but he ain't gonna get it. What he wants to do is take the whole Swing from Thule over to Nome, Alaska.'

'Over the ocean?

'Sure. In winter when it's frozen.'

I said, 'But it's three thousand miles. At least that.'

'Nearly four,' Herschel said cheerfully. 'They could do it, too. But there's a whole bundle of opinion down at Corps of Engineers headquarters, says the US taxpayer won't like it. And he sure won't. But wouldn't that be something!'

'I said, 'You're one of the ones who like the Arctic'

'That's right. Scott too, eh Scott?'

Scott said, 'Sure thing.'

'What about you, Foster?' I said.

He didn't reply for a moment. Then he said, 'I like the work. I like the projects. But it's all too damned angry.'

We had no crevasse trouble at all. The TK4 gave a beautiful performance demonstration, and about an hour and a half after leaving the safety wanigan, even allowing for reduced speed on the gradient down the side of the icecap to the flat coastal strip, we came easily into Camp Belvoir and I ran the hovercraft into its hangar, and turned smugly to Herschel. 'Okay?'

He said, 'Just one thing missing. No stewardess. No scotch.'

I said, 'Nothing's impossible.'

The TK4 had made that fifty-mile trip over the icecap, in high winds and a murderously low temperature, with no more fuss than if it had been skating along a motorway. We all went off to have some food, and after it Herschel went off to see Cohen and to organize the loading of the neoprene piping and perhaps, if he was anything like Barney Smales, to do a little gentle pilfering, too. Scott was playing pool with one of his friends and Foster and I were nursing another cup of hot coffee and waiting for the off.

The last few hours had made a change in him, and I said so. He said, with a rueful smile, 'Just got on top of me at Hundred, I guess. I keep thinking about when I get back and have to explain what happened to Charlie. To the folks, you know. They're going to want to know why I didn't stop it.'

I said, 'You feel that, too, don't you?'

He shrugged. 'I guess so. Just a little.'

'Well, you were his cousin, not his keeper. That needs to be understood.'

Foster said, 'I was always his keeper. That's part of it.'

'Did he need one?'

'Charlie?' Foster sighed. 'Yeah, I suppose he did. He's .., he was one of those kids who could get in a mess fast. Always.'

'I know the kind.'

'Yeah. Charlie was like that. Funny thing is, though, I thought he'd just got himself straight. Really straight. Permanently.*

'How?'

He looked at me for a moment, hesitating, then told me. He must have thought that talking to a total stranger he was never likely to see again, would do no harm.

'Well,' Foster said, 'when he was maybe sixteen he hit the drug scene. Before that all kinds of trouble. You could've predicted it. You could have said, give Charlie the chance and he'll go on drugs. And he did. Soft stuff. Hash. Then the pills. Didn't even keep it secret. The whole family knew and worried a lot. If he'd been a bad kid - oh, I don't know. But he wasn't. There was this about Charlie, everybody liked him. They liked him, but they couldn't do anything about it. He was going to hell in a bucket. Heroin next stop, because that's the kind of kid he was. And then . . .'

I waited.

'Well, then one of those things happened. We had an old aunt, great-aunt, really. Lived in North Carolina, only one in the whole pack of us with any money. And when she died, we found out what she'd done in her will. What she did, she left Charlie three hundred thousand dollars.'

I whistled. 'Which he frittered away?'

He smiled. 'No, sir. Great Aunt Eleanor had it all worked out. After she died, Charlie had two weeks to join the army. If he didn't, no dough. Well, he joined the army. I was in the Corps of Engineers, so that's what Charlie joined. And she really screwed the lid down. Charlie had to get through a three-year enlistment. And when he came out, his discharge papers had to have the magic word on them: Exemplary.'

'She sounds,' I said, 'like an ingenious old lady.'

'She was all of that. The way she worked it out, if he was going down, he'd go slower in the army. If not, if he could keep his sights on that three-year target and not fall off, it could maybe straighten him out.'

'And it did, that's what you're saying?'

He said, 'Yeah. I guess so. Charlie was a whole lot different. He was even a good soldier. The army suited him. He was doing his third tour up here, and the old Charlie'd never have made it.'

'How long,' 1 asked, 'before he was due to get the money?'

Foster said, 'He'd made it. Five days before . . .' and left the sentence unfinished.

Chapter 8

We were supposed to leave immediately, but the Arctic had done its unpredictable worst. In the area of Siberia that's sometimes called the Weather Kitchen, a pinch of something fizzy had been added to the brew and conditions in Northern Greenland had deteriorated savagely. Even at Belvoir, at the foot of the icecap, winds were somewhere over sixty, gusting up to ninety miles an hour. On the cap a full-blown Arctic hurricane was raging, accompanied by temperatures dropped to sixty below. There was no question of setting off back; it wasn't even sensible to leave the hut, for the accommodation at Belvoir stands out in the open. Grimly we settled down to drink more coffee and talk the night away, but we were all too tired. Finally, we fought our way along hand-lines in a raging blizzard and screaming icy wind across twenty yards of deep snow to a dormitory hut and went to sleep. Twenty yards doesn't sound much, but I got an idea of how Charlie Foster had died.

When we woke next morning the weather was, if anything, worse, but we stumbled back to the mess hall to eat and do our waiting in a little more comfort than we'd have done in the dormitory. And we learned that, remarkably, radio contact with Camp Hundred was good. However, the news wasn't. The diesel generator that had broken down was severely damaged, it seemed, and one of the others was running rough. With the reactor still out of action, Camp Hundred's power resources were dangerously stretched. Accordingly the big decision had been made and a new well was being opened up. Herschel had a long radio talk with Smales about it and learned that a length of the neoprene from the old well was to be used, cleaned out as well as possible. The snag was that to get below the level of snow which had fallen since the first atom bomb went off in 1945, they'd have to cut through seventy feet. Above that, radiation contaminated the snow layers.