Whiteout! Read online

  The chain saw touched the ice first. I'd forgotten about it for the moment and it would in any case be useless. There was too great a risk of the sound of a petrol engine bringing down hanging ice.

  As my toes were about to touch, I rapped sharply twice, and the chair stopped. Cautiously, I pressed down. The ice seemed to hold, but it was damaged more than my earlier survey had indicated. Chunks of it had in fact been broken and turned like floating boulders. Little bright lines of water shone in the interstices, making it impossible for me to rest my weight on the ice chunks, big though they were. Unless I swung. Was it possible? I looked upward, shining the lamp along the taut length of cable to where the massed icicles pointed wickedly down at me, and nowhere was the cable more than four feet from them.

  One tap. Two taps. I moved down another foot, and slid the ice-axe from my belt. My legs were bent now, feet resting flat on a large piece of ice. Leaning forward a little, careful to keep the balance as it was, I shone the light downwards.

  The irregular surfaces were white, blue, yet yellowed from the lamp's light, deeply shaded in places, almost bright in others. I searched among them for a glimpse of green or brown, for something to indicate that Kirton's body was here. With the haft of the ice-axe, I began to push at the lumps of ice, turning them, examining each with care as it moved. But there was nothing. I'd have to go up again. I wanted nothing more than to leave this dreadful place, but the thought of doing so with the mystery still as puzzling as ever after the ordeal of the descent, of facing the worse one of the ascent with nothing to show, that prospect repelled me. I sat prodding with a kind of hopeless determination, turned the blocks, searching the cracks. And suddenly, as a chunk tilted, I saw red; not the red of anger, but perhaps the red of blood. Not much: just a small discoloured patch on a flat piece of ice that must have been part of the surface before the impact.

  I prodded again and again, but without success, widening the circle in my anxiety, taking risks I shouldn't take. Then suddenly it happened: a block turned and an arm appeared, the hand dead white, the dark green of the sleeve blackened by the water.

  Quickly I reversed the ice-axe and extended the metal head towards it. At the first try, it slid limply away. The second time, the curved end caught briefly and a shoulder and head rose slowly to the surface between two ice blocks. Dark hair swam lank in the water, but the body remained face down. But at last I anchored the steel head in the neck of the parka and lifted, and Kirton's face, swollen and white, but unmistakeable, rolled slowly upwards.

  What followed took a long time. In the water, the body could be moved, if clumsily. The moment I tried to lift it clear, sheer weight defeated me. I struggled, tiring now and chilled, without any success at all, until I sat still and thought about it as an engineering problem.

  Finally I managed to pass a loop of line round his shoulders and knot it to the hook beneath the seat of the bosun's chair. It meant jettisoning the saw, but the saw was useless. Also, I remember thinking wryly as I let it go, it wasn't mine. Then, with the ice-axe head, I fished for his legs and hauled them to the surface. At last, leaning precariously over, I reached for the zip of the parka, slid it down and began to search the pockets of his tunic. Why didn't I just give the three taps, have Kelleher haul the two of us up, and search him at leisure on the surface ? Two reasons, both equally strong: first, I wasn't bloody well going to move now until I knew; secondly, I was reasonably certain two men would not be strong enough to haul a combined weight of twenty-five stones and more through four hundred feet.

  I found a small squarish leather object in a breast pocket, but it was a wallet, not a diary. Stuffing it into my own parka, I fumbled on, my ungloved hand bitterly cold. The diary was in an inside pocket and I knew what it was as soon as I touched it, numbed fingers or no numbed fingers.

  The diary was sodden, its papers held together by water. I took off my gloves, letting them dangle from the sleeve strap, then opened the diary carefully and began to peel pages apart, at random. The paper, thin but strong, stood up to it. Kelleher was right about one thing: Kirton had been a committed diarist; every page seemed to have its entry, variable as to length, but written-up religiously. I turned towards the back of the little leather-bound book, where the paper was blank, and began to work backwards towards the final entries. The last one said, 'Polar Bear entered Hundred overnight. Entry point clear, but no exit tracks? Maybe shambled out via tractor shed? Life puzzling and dismal. Shouldn't have played Mozart C Maj, last night. Prescribed A Maj, for mental balance, but not wholly successful.'

  My hands were getting clumsier as they grew colder. I peeled that page away, then the next, scanning the entries quickly, with the lamp held awkwardly under my arm. Kirton was no Pepys. He simply mentioned each day's events, the music he'd played on his hi-fi, the books he'd read. He'd told me he found Camp Hundred dull, and the tedium showed.

  As page followed page, with the entries varying little apart from the titles of the music and books, disappointment crept over me. It began to seem as though I'd made this hellish drop into the well for nothing. But then: 'Bold glance from the Chameleon. Tell Smales? But what? - A glance and a feeling that young F, was frightened. But events justified fear.'

  My scalp prickled. Who was F? And who in hell was the Chameleon ?

  There was nothing else. In the loose-leaf notebook there'd been that tantalizing reference: 'I made a note to investigate,' but there was no sign of it here in the diary. Perhaps it had been only a mental note. I put the diary in a pocket in my parka and took one last look round the base of the chamber, my eyes resting longingly on the hard hat. It would make not the slightest difference if one of the icicles crashed down, but that didn't stop me from trying to work out some desperate way of reaching it. The knowledge that I'd have to leave without it made a little shudder pass across my shoulders.

  'Pull me up,' I said into the walkie-talkie. There was no response. Instantly my heart began to hammer in my chest. I tried to control it and tapped three times on the microphone. There was a pause that seemed like hours but could only have lasted a few seconds, and then three faint responding taps sounded from the speaker. A moment later my feet lifted off the ice. The long upward haul had begun. Twenty feet up, I realized I had stopped moving and tapped again. Almost immediately I began to move, but after a few more feet the movement stopped. Sitting rigidly still in the bosun's chair, I began to ask myself panicky questions: Was I too heavy? Would the effort of lifting me through four hundred feet be too great for them ? Then a tiny jerk told me I was on my way again and I thought I understood the pattern. They were resting at frequent intervals and I'd just have to live with it. I only looked up once and the sight of the big icicles, all seemingly pointed directly at me, made me determined not to do so again. I sat there, patiently paying out the thin nylon line attached to Kirton's body and trying not to think about anything except the need to restrict movement. The journey would end, one way or another, within some finite time. Either I'd be killed by an ice fall, or I'd reach the top, and the only thing I could do to influence the outcome was to come as close as possible to doing absolutely nothing. Gradually I became accustomed, or as near it as was attainable in the circumstances, to the repeated sudden realization that I was hanging motionless in the void. Then there'd come the reassuring little movement of the chair as Kelleher and his sergeant took up the strain again. I thought of them sweating with the effort and wished I could change places, because now the cold was working its way into me. Hands and feet were chilled through, damped with the contact with the ice, with Kirton's body and the diary. Any danger of frostbite was remote, but the discomfort was increasing steadily.

  Coming up into the neck of the bulb, and with the first icicles now below me, I tried again with the walkie-talkie during one of the breaks, and heard Kelleher's faint voice with relief.

  'Find anything?'

  'Nothing conclusive. I got the diary.'

  'Hold on. We'll get you up.' He was breathing heavil
y as he spoke and I didn't prolong the conversation.

  The minutes went by. As I emerged from the neck, once more the chair stopped moving. My feet were almost exactly level with the base of the bulb. I heard a tap then : but just one. A moment later there was another. Neither seemed quite to come from the handset, though they could have come from nowhere else and it must be some trick of acoustics.

  All the same, I spoke into the mike: 'Kelleher?'

  No answer.

  'Kelleher!' I said sharply, a few seconds later, anxiety breaking through.

  Still no response. I tapped then, and called him, and tapped again, fear mushrooming inside me. The loudspeaker remained silent. For a little while, hanging on to the remnants of control, I tried to reason that it must be some malfunction of the walkie-talkie, that the tapping noise had meant Kelleher had dropped and damaged his handset. Soon they'd start again and I'd be on my way.

  But they didn't start again, and I stayed where I was. By now I was looking at my watch every few seconds and a cold block seemed to have formed in my chest. By the time ten leaden minutes had dragged by, I knew all too well there would be no more winding. Something had happened up there; something that had stopped them; something that would leave me suspended there, three hundred feet down in the icecap!

  Air seemed to flow, for some reason, slowly between the two bulbs and to draw warmth from me as it passed. My whole body was chilled now, as my mind was chilled with the fearful knowledge that I would almost certainly hang here until I died. Another glance at my watch showed that it was fifteen minutes since I'd moved; fifteen minutes of no contact, no hope, no company except icy speculation that this, for me, was the end. The meaning of those two, spaced-out taps still baffled me. One tap had meant 'lower'. Two had meant 'stop'. Could it be that what Kelleher had meant was that they'd have to stop? But if so, why? There was only one answer that made any sense, and that one was pushing me steadily towards the edge of panic: the killer up there had found two men working at the well hoist! But if he'd done that, if he'd attacked them, surely he'd have cut the cable, too, to ensure that whoever was down the well stayed down. But the cable was steel, and in any case there was no need; he disposed of me just as effectively by marooning me.

  I began to think half-seriously about suicide. It might be better to unfasten the straps and die quickly than to dangle here as life slipped agonizingly away. There were no other possibilities. No man alive could hope to climb either the ice walls of the bulb or the thin steel cable that rose through several hundred feet to the ice trench above. And now, at last, even the light from my lamp was fading as the battery's power drained away. Soon I would be waiting for death in the freezing dark.

  It became increasingly difficult even to flex my hands inside my gloves as my blood circulation slowed. How pathetic, I thought once, in a sudden spurt of anger, to go like this, not knowing; how pathetic to die failing*. How pathetic not to know who the Chameleon was, who F, was. 'Young F.' who could -

  I blinked. The seat had moved! I shone the now-dim lamp towards the top of the neck, but the top of the neck wasn't there! It was below, ten feet, even twelve . ., now fifteen. I was moving upwards fast, far faster than Kelleher and the sergeant had been able to wind in the cable. Which must . . , could only mean the winch !

  The nylon line jerked in my hands and I hastily paid out more, and kept on doing so as the chair rose steadily upwards. In no time I was passing the icicles, moving into the neck, passing through into the topmost chamber. Again and again I tried the walkie-talkie, but without getting any reply. I'd been right, then - the thing was broken. It had to be broken, because somebody must be up there, in the trench, working the winch.

  Somebody working the winch! Somebody who didn't reply! Somebody who -1 heard the click of my nervous swallow - might be waiting for me to appear at the well-head, strapped helplessly in the bosun's chair.

  Tilting my head back, I looked upwards to where the dark thread of the cable ran up into the well-head. There was a circle of dim, yellow light from the trench, a complete, uninterrupted circle, with no head leaning over to watch me. Frantically now, I paid out the remainder of the nylon line, letting it hang loose, and tying the end to the seat. Then I pulled the ice-axe free. There was no more than thirty feet to go now, and I fumbled with numb fingers to unfasten the straps that held me in the chair. It began to rock slightly, swinging me within inches of a huge icicle, and 1 froze into stillness as I swung back, breathtakingly close to another. Was I going to touch? The chair moved back again and I was safe, at least from the icicles. The strap parted and I clung grimly with one hand to the chair frame, the other hand gripping the ice-axe, my eyes measuring the distance as the yellow circle moved down towards me.

  It was then, at the precise moment that the chair entered the narrow tube to the well-head, that my brain gave a little click and spilled an answer into my mind. For days I'd been thinking about it, trying to force out conclusions, and there had been none. Now, when all my awareness was concentrated elsewhere, the mental print-out chattered!

  But there was no time to think about it, no time for even the smallest flicker of satisfaction. The cable ran smoothly over the pulley and I could hear the steady whirr of the electric motor, the soft clicking of the ratchet. Raising the axe in my hand, I waited for the switch-off, the watching face. There'd be a fraction of a second for identification, then I must strike, instantly and accurately.

  Ten feet. I called Kelleher's name once, twice, a third time, and my words vanished into unresponding silence.

  Tensely I waited for the upward movement to stop. The top of the frame loomed nearer; my eyes came level with the bottom of the corrugated steel ring and therefore the floor of the trench .., and then I realized suddenly that it wasn't going to stop, that the chair was to be dragged right up to the frame, where the power of the motor would drag me and the seat against the pulley. I dropped the ice-axe, grabbed desperately for the corrugated iron and hurled myself sideways, out of the bosun's chair, but the swaying seat robbed me of any accuracy of movement and only my left hand reached the metal. My right hand clawed at empty air as I hung there over the well and the bosun's chair crunched into the ironwork above and was destroyed!

  Chapter 18

  Two frantic lunges with my right arm missed the rim of the ironwork and I could feel my left hand beginning to slip. Numbed, cold fingers lacked the strength to hold me and 1 knew with total clarity that I had only a second or two left before the tenuous grip broke and I plunged into the depths of the well. Once more . . , and my last chance. If this final grab failed, it was over for me. I swung my right arm back, and touched something with the back of my glove. The nylon line ! I grabbed it despairingly and took a turn round my wrist as the fingers of my left hand began to slip inexorably over the metal. Would the nylon hold? It cut viciously into my wrist as my weight swung on to it, and I waited for the long fall . . , then the agony on my wrist told me it was holding and I lunged again, desperately with my left hand, and got a grip, a better one this time, and made myself swing twice on the line until I could make a grab with my right. And this time I got it. A minute later, heart beating wildly, I was clambering over the iron surround on to the floor of the trench, relief and fearful anticipation whirling together in my head. If he was there, why hadn't he simply knocked my hand away from the well-head?

  I stared wildly round me. The trench seemed empty. But no - it wasn't! Kelleher lay on the trench floor beside the well-head, and the sergeant lay against the wall, beneath the winch control box. The electric motor whirred on. Quickly I bent to look at Kelleher. As I turned him on to his back, his arms moved limply, lifelessly And then I saw the little hole in his parka, over his heart. Kelleher was dead!

  The sergeant was dead, too, lying in a puddle, already congealing, of his own blood. As I looked at him, I saw the red smudge of blood that ran across from the well-head to where he lay, and the little channel his body had made in the crystalline floor as he'd dragged himse
lf towards the motor. There was more blood on the wall, where he'd somehow forced himself upright. It was so plain what had happened : the two of them at the handle, the trench door opening and closing, the two shots: Kelleher killed instantly and the sergeant, mortally wounded, using the last moments of his own life to reach the switch in a last desperate attempt to save mine. He'd known that when electric power was restored, the winch would come on automatically, hoisting me out of the depths of the icecap.

  Now I knew the two single taps had been gunshots, probably from a distance since the sound had not been loud. They must have been fired from close to the door. A glance at my watch showed that about eighteen minutes had passed since the shooting. How had those minutes been used ? And who had used them ?

  And then, quite suddenly, I knew! In seconds the mystery of days had been resolved. I knew now who 'young F.' was, and who the killer must be, and where he must have gone now.

  Bending over Kelleher's body, I rapidly searched his pockets for the keys, then raced along the trench to the door, turned the lock and stepped out into Main Street. I pulled my parka hood tight and kept my head down as I hurried in the direction of the tractor shed. As I opened the doors and stepped inside, cold air rushed over me. The big outer doors now gaped inwards! A light burned in the office and I tore over to it. Inside, the duty mechanic was slumped over the desk, an open paperback beneath his head. I shook his shoulder, but he wasn't sleeping; he was unconscious. Leaving the office, I went to the main doors. Heavy snow was falling. I looked at the tracks imprinted in the fresh snow and already being filled, their sharp outlines blurring. And the snow was falling vertically because the wind had dropped. It all fitted now. The weather-change had precipitated things, providing one last chance for the killer to maintain the mystery, a chance he'd had to take.