Whiteout! Read online

  My TK4 stood, silent and shiny, to one side of the huge shed. 1 began to cross to it, then stopped. I'd need a weapon. A drum of petrol, probably used for engine cleaning, stood on a wooden packing case. I found a bottle, filled it and stuffed cotton waste in the neck.

  The TK4, icy cold as she was after being immobile for days in low temperatures, didn't start first bang. Bad advertisement, I thought with professional sourness, relieved no one had been present to see it. But she started at the second time of asking and gave a few pleased puffs as the rubber skirt ballooned and lifted her and the engines roared cheerfully. I eased her forward, nosing out through the doors into the blackness, then stopping briefly to give my eyes some chance to adjust. I didn't want to use the lights.

  The snow was very thick, cutting visibility back, and clouds blanketed the moon, but I dared wait no longer. The heavy tractor was slow, but the distance was small. He'd be there already, and searching. I turned the hovercraft eastwards and moved slowly over the snowfield, trying to remember all the details of the layout of Camp Hundred.

  I knew that the camp perimeter was marked at a range of four hundred yards by triangular flags on high, flexible, steel poles mounted on barrels and sunk into the snow at five-yard intervals. He'd have followed them, and so must I. Visibility through the heavy snowfall was less than twenty yards and, tense with frustration, I kept the speed down.

  I swore suddenly. The tracks! All I had to do was follow his tracks! Fifty-per-cent thinking again! I eased the TK.4 back towards the dim yellow square of light from the tractor shed, opened the side window and leaned out, searching the smooth white surface for the wide track-trail of the big diesel tractor.

  There! As I moved her forward, creating a wind, bitter cold flooded in through the open window, chilling my face. I pulled the drawstring of my hood tighter and ghosted across the snow-field, through the thick curtain of silently-falling snow, in the wake of the big diesel tractor. Within a few yards I was suffering one of the hazards of a hovercraft running slowly over powder snow : the downward pressure of air blown out from beneath the skirt blasted dry crystals upwards into a fine fog all around me. They whirled higher than the cab, like an impenetrable fog, and enough blew in through the narrowed aperture of my parka hood to start chilling nose, cheekbones and chin. At speed the problem diminishes; the blow-up snow spray is left behind before it can cause a problem. But I couldn't go at speed. The need to follow the tracks without light dictated my rate of progress. I was also uncomfortably aware that the small snowstorm the TK4 was creating would serve to blank out the tracks behind me.

  There was also the possible hazard of running into the tractor. With visibility so short, it was likely that by the time I saw it, it would be too late to slow. I had to catch up with the tractor and its murderous occupant, but preferably not that way!

  Then the hut loomed suddenly, only yards away. I had to cut the engine power and fling the steering round frantically to miss it, and that set me another problem. The tractor was not yet in sight but the hut was my starting point and if I went past it there would be trouble and delay in locating it again. I came to a decision quickly, backed off to set the TK4 down on low pressure a dozen yards or so from the hut, climbed out and walked towards it, my feet sinking inches deep into the soft, dry snow of the icecap.

  Reaching the hut, I turned to look round at the TK4, now little more than a vague shape that hummed quietly, its outline blurred and its engine noise muffled by the sheer weight of the snowfall.

  At first I thought the line had disappeared, blown away by the hurricane winds of the last days, but then I realized that snow reached a third the way up the side of the hut and that the line, instead of being waist level, would be at ankle height. As I hunted for it, I looked over my shoulder every few seconds, puzzled and menaced by the absence of the tractor, expecting an attack at any second. But nothing moved within my small circle of visibility and I kept telling myself that the harsh beat of its massive diesel would be clearly audible.

  Then my foot brushed against the line and I bent to pick it up, slipped it into the dog's lead clip of my parka belt. Another cautious look all round me: no sign of man or tractor. I took the line in both hands and pulled, lifting it clear of the snow, and began to move along it. After ten yards I reached the first of the flag-topped anchor posts, unfastened and refastened the clip, and moved on again, examining the surface carefully at each step. A lot of precipitation had occurred since the last time anybody at Hundred had been able to venture out on to the cap, and what I was looking for would by now be thoroughly buried.

  I had reached the third anchor post and was re-clipping my belt when I remembered with sudden horror that I was still wearing the same boots in which I'd gone down the well. And that they were damp! Instantaneously, my feet felt cold. Was it psychological or actual? It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes since I'd left the cab of the TK4, but two minutes in damp boots is a long time on the icecap. Thank God the wind had died!

  I trudged on, worried and frightened. It was crazy to have tried to give chase alone, yet the pressure of time had allowed me no other choice and I'd been aware of the risk; I'd also been close enough to death in the last hours and days for this pursuit to be only an extension of that peril. Irrationally the prospect of frozen feet was far more deeply horrifying; the thought that if I survived, it might be to hobble for the rest of my days on stumps, dried my mouth and prickled the back of my neck.

  Longing to turn back, I still marched on. The snow surface was marked only by windwhip, not by boots or mechanical tracks. As 1 pulled up each yard of buried line, it cut smoothly through the recent, loose-packed snow, to stretch ahead to the next anchor post.

  I was at the tenth now, and hurrying, flexing my toes inside my boots to reassure myself that feeling and movement were still there. But heels cannot be flexed, and it was at the heel that cold was likely to strike first. Eleven. Four more would be about halfway. Re-fixing the clip 1 pulled the line, and this time only a yard or two came up. Ahead of me it ran taut and at an angle, to a point well down beneath the surface. I knelt then, and began to dig rapidly in the snow with my mittened hands, flinging it aside in a spray of dry particles. Why hadn't I brought the spade from the hovercraft? The usual reasons: lack of thinking power, lack of foresight, lack of concentration! If the snow had been even lightly compacted, it would have been impossible to dig like that, but it wasn't compacted and I was swiftly two feet down, then three, scrabbling like a dog with his forepaws until.., my hands touched something hard in the snow, something that became dark in the surrounding white as I swept the powdery flakes from it. I knelt for a moment then, sickened by yet another death. But I was sure now. Sure except that one small yet critical point remained to be confirmed. I grabbed the line again, ran my hand along it until it touched not only the body but the hard, metal shape of a dog clip. The line ran through the clip and away, and when I reached beyond and pulled, it cut upwards through the snow to run tight and straight to the next anchor post.

  I stood then, knowing it was true. The innocent cause of all Camp Hundred's problems lay here in the snow at my feet . . , feet that were becoming colder inside my dampened felt boots.

  Quickly I bent and pushed back into the hole the snow I had dug away, then smoothed it as well as I could. Even when I'd finished, it stood out a mile, rough and disturbed among the surrounding smoothness. But as I looked, I realized it was already being covered; ten minutes more and it would begin to blend into the endless snowscape. I thought of trying to uproot the anchor posts to make the killer's search more difficult, but realized it couldn't work. Only by severing the line could the body be hidden, and in severing the line, I'd be destroying the evidence. I turned and began to work my way back the way I had come, along the line, knowing he was out there somewhere -probably waiting to see if he'd been followed - and that somehow I must stop him before he could reach the spot and at last conceal the continuing proof of his guilt.

 
The hut lay only a little more than a hundred yards ahead, but I was slowed by the need to clip and re-clip my belt. With nine anchor posts behind me the hut was still not in sight, but I thought I could hear faintly the idling note of the TK4*s engine. The temptation to run towards it was almost irresistible; once inside there would be the safety of the metal structure, the warmth of the heater, the speed of the machine itself. Inside I'd be safe. But the knowledge that I was not alone out there dictated caution. He might have - probably had - the rifle, unless he'd taken the risk of returning it to Barney's office so that its absence would go unremarked. Time was one of his problems, too; he dared not be absent long enough for the absence to be noticed. If he could destroy the evidence and get back quickly, it might be difficult, even impossible to pin on him his long sequence of crimes. And if he could get rid of me, it would almost certainly be impossible. If my body, too, were lost beneath the snow, the diary would be lost with it, and the sheet from Kirton's notebook!

  I went down full length in the snow and began to kitten-crawl forward, parallel with the hand line but no longer fastened to it, and pushing before me with my hands a tiny wall of snow no more than six inches high.

  I saw the hut at the same second that the idling engine note became a roar and the huge diesel tractor swung into view, lights blazing, from behind the hut. I shut my eyes tight, but not quickly enough, and the powerful white beams assaulted my widened pupils, blinding me completely. Shakily I rose to my feet, sightless and disorientated by dazzle patterns, and tried desperately to gauge direction by sound alone. The roar was from my right, though it seemed now to fill the night air all round me. He must be twenty-five or thirty yards away and his maximum speed six miles an hour or so. I swung left and tried to run, but my foot caught in the slack hand line and I pitched full length. As I struggled to rise, my foot remained hooked in the line, briefly but enough to delay me, and already the massive roar of the big diesel engine seemed to be on top of me. I turned my head, squinting my eyes against the glare, and thought I discerned, among the redness in my eyes, a wide dark shape with the glare of the lights above it, and I knew then that this was not just a tractor but a bulldozer, blade down, that was hammering down on me. I made two or three lumbering strides away from it, but my foot slipped on the loose snow and I spun off balance, and by the time I'd steadied myself again, it was almost on top of me. Terrified, I turned to face it, knowing there was no way now that I could avoid that eighteen-foot blade : it would be on me before I could move aside. The half-seen black rectangle with those blinding white lights mounted high above it roared down on me, only a few feet away, and knowing suddenly there was no other way, I dived towards it, seizing desperate handholds on the top edge and lifting my feet clear of the surface and hanging there as the blade drove onwards.

  He must have seen me clearly, because a second later the blade began to rise in the air as he brought in the hydraulics. 1 clung on grimly as it lifted, guessing what would happen next, but shaken by the suddenness as the hydraulics were cut and the blade crashed down, seeking to dislodge me. An appalling drag on my arms and shoulders signalled that it was lifting again and I knew I'd never survive another drop. Already my hands were beginning to lose their hold and the blade had only swung half up. I'll never know what made me let go then deliberately, rather than be shaken off a second or two later. I slid down the blade's curve, on to the snow, and rolled frantically beneath its leading edge, praying I'd make it before the blade crashed down again.

  Swivelling round, I lay flat, and along the whole length of my body felt the whump as the blade was released. I was trapped now in the ten-foot gap between the two huge tracks, still almost sight­less, but crawling fast towards the rear. If he pivoted now, it was all over. Free now of these murderous lights, blinking rapidly, I discerned dimly the rectangle of snow behind the moving bull­dozer and drove myself, almost swimming in the loose snow, towards it. The huge steel body of the machine was only inches above my head, the tracks hideously close to my moving hands. And then above me, the roar of sound changed subtly as the power was adjusted on the tracks and he began to turn the machine.

  I crawled with it in an overwhelming panic, swinging my body round with the machine, and somehow making forward ground in that moving, lethal tunnel of machinery. One of the tracks actually buffeted my boot as I crawled clear. But I was clear, and now I could take up a position behind the tractor, where he couldn't see me. And I stayed behind it, holding on to the rear of it and stepping carefully sideways as it swung, pivoting through a full circle, the headlights sweeping the ice while he searched for me.

  If only I'd had that home-made petrol bomb! But I hadn't; it was in the cab of the hovercraft and I didn't even know where the hovercraft was ! I tried to put myself in his place, at the controls of the bulldozer. He'd be wondering, surely, whether he'd got me. With luck he'd be half-convinced, more than half-convinced, that he had. He'd be hoping that nobody could vanish beneath blade and tractor and survive. But he'd need to be sure, to go on looking, to prove to himself that nobody but himself was now moving on that bleak snow surface.

  Now, at last, my sight was recovering from that dreadful glare and suddenly, past the slowly turning bulldozer, I saw the hovercraft caught clearly by its knifing lights through the heavy curtain of snow. And I thought I saw something else. Not with certainty; it could have been an optical illusion; but watching carefully, I became increasingly sure. A wind was starting to blow. I turned my face into it briefly and felt its cold breath, and suddenly the snow was no longer falling vertically: caught by the air movement its downward path tilted. And now I was sure: the hovercraft itself, with only the touch of its skirts to provide friction on the loose surface, was beginning to drift on the wind. It was like a boat in so many ways, and this was one!

  Still keeping to the rear of the tractor, I backed rapidly away. Now the tracks had stopped swivelling as the driver wrestled with the levers to reverse them and to bring round the lights to bear on the TK4. The drift was carrying it at an angle across the front of the tractor and he'd have to turn back a good deal further to bring it into focus. Knowing he'd be concentrating on the controls, I turned and ran towards the TK4, which was now sliding slowly away from the swinging lights and almost, yet not quite, towards me. Our paths converged, but with an awkward obliqueness, and I'd be caught in the beams before I reached it.

  With every ounce of energy I could summon, I plunged on, the icy air driving into my lungs, and the dry snow crystalline beneath my feet. A swift glance to my right showed the beams turning as the big bulldozer swung round on its tracks, and the sideways glow of the light gave me a clear sight now of the slowly gliding hovercraft. Seconds later the first of the beams had caught me, but I was less than five yards from the TK4 now, cutting across in front to let its bulk shield me. It seemed to be picking up speed, too, with every passing second. Then abruptly I was there, grasping the handrail, my foot scrabbling for the mounting step, and missing, and my heart high in my throat as I was dragged along. I tried to jump, to thrust myself up, away from the clogging snow, and got my toe just on to the step. Arching my back, straining, I forced myself up, got a better grip .., in seconds now I was inside the cab, giving her throttle and wrenching at the controls to let air flow down and give me lift.

  Then came a curious little flick-smack sound and one panel of the glass screen crazed. So now I knew : he had the rifle !

  But I had the speed, if there was time to use it. As the propellers chewed the air, I slipped off into the darkness and concealment of the snowblow. It was impossible to be sure, but I thought then that I half-heard, half-felt the impact of another bullet, somewhere behind me. I was trying to decide how many rounds he had left. He'd used two in the well trench, perhaps two more now. And Smales had talked, hadn't he, of an old rifle, with the mag locked in his desk. One left, then, two at the outside. Perhaps they'd all gone? But I squashed that optimistic thought. He'd keep one.

  Behind me the already dimming
lights from the big tractor vanished suddenly. Yes, I thought grimly, he's kept one. And now the hide-and-seek game was reversed. I had to go and get him I slowed, tripping the heater switch and adjusting the airflow to direct warmth at my feet. They were bitterly cold, but I drew what comfort I could from the fact that I could still feel them, though my toes, as I tried to move them, seemed strangely lethargic.

  Now I had to find him! Somewhere there in the cold dark of the icecap, he was waiting for me, waiting with a rifle, himself protected by tons of heavy steel. Keeping an eye on the compass, treacherous though a compass was in these latitudes, I swung the TK.4 through a hundred and eighty degrees and began to creep forward. There was no means of measuring distance; no means, that is, beyond my own judgment of eye and speed; and there was the wind to allow for, too.

  A touch of the rudder moved my heading a little to the left. I'd calculated three hundred yards to the hut and I wanted to approach it from wider out, to use, if 1 could, its scant shelter to hide my approach. Outside the open side window the snowfield flowed by, its smoothness almost impossible to measure, and I tried to calculate distance additionally on the basis of my own forward speed. The doubt began to grow until it was a certainty that I'd missed the hut ; it had passed, unseen, somewhere to my right. But where? Not far, surely.

  Then, looking down, I thought I saw a depression in the snow surface; yes - filling rapidly, already beginning to lose definition beneath the new layer, but it was a tractor track, with the faint oblongs and ridges still vaguely to be seen.

  Again I turned the TK4, taking care not to lose sight of those precious marks. I thought grimly that he had two tasks now: to fend me off, and to do the job he'd come out here to do - to destroy the evidence that must convict him. And time was pressing. Dare he wait for me, perhaps in the lee of the hut, with the rifle, or would he be moving the tractor along that hand line? I let the TK4 creep forward. A single flick of the headlights might tell me whether my direction was right, but their glow would also pinpoint my location and I daren't try it. I sank low in my seat, to give myself the maximum protection of the hull plating, knowing that a rifle bullet fired at close range would go through both it, and me, without being even briefly delayed.