was less than half a mile distant, no more than five hundred feet above the ice-cap, and during the five seconds it remained inside my line of vision I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thud heavily in my chest. No SAC bomber this, nor a Thule met. plane, both with crews highly trained in the grim craft of Arctic survival. That long row of brightly illuminated cabin windows could belong to only one thing – a trans-Atlantic or trans-polar airliner.
‘You saw it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw’s snow-mask was close to my ear.
‘I saw it.’ It was all I could think to say. But what I was seeing then was not the plane, now again vanished into the flying ice and drift, but the inside of the plane, with the passengers – God, how many passengers, fifty, seventy? – sitting in the cosy security of their pressurised cabin with an air-conditioned temperature of 70°F, then the crash, the tearing, jagged screeching that set the teeth on edge as the thin metal shell ripped along its length and the tidal wave of that dreadful cold, 110 degrees below cabin temperature, swept in and engulfed the survivors, the dazed, the injured, the unconscious and the dying as they sat or lay crumpled in the wreckage of the seats, clad only in thin suits and dresses …
The plane had completed a full circuit and was coming round again. If anything, it was even closer this time, at least a hundred feet lower, and it seemed to have lost some speed. It might have been doing 120, perhaps 130 miles an hour, I was no expert in these things, but for that size of plane, so close to the ground, it seemed a dangerously low speed. I wondered just how effective the pilot’s windscreen wipers would be against these flying ice spicules.
And then I forgot all about that, forgot all about everything except the desperate, urgent need for speed. Just before the plane had turned round to the east again and so out of the line of our blinded vision, it had seemed to dip and at the same instant two powerful lights stabbed out into the darkness, the one lancing straight ahead, a narrow powerful beam glittering and gleaming with millions of sparkling diamond points of flame as the ice-crystals in the air flashed across its path, the other, a broader fan of light, pointing downwards and only slightly ahead, its oval outline flitting across the frozen snow like some flickering will o’ the wisp. I grabbed Jackstraw’s arm and put my head close to his.
‘He’s going to land! He’s looking for a place to put down. Get the dogs, harness them up.’ We had a tractor, but heaven only knew how long it would have taken to start it on a night like this. ‘I’ll give you a hand as soon as I can.’
He nodded, turned and was lost to sight in a moment. I turned too, cursed as my face collided with the slatted sides of the instrument shelter, then jumped for the hatch, sliding down to the floor of the cabin on back and arms without bothering to use the steps. Joss, already completely clad in his furs but with the hood of his parka hanging over his shoulders, was just emerging from the food and fuel tunnel which led off from the other end of the cabin, his arms loaded with equipment.
‘Grab all the warm clothing you can find, Joss,’ I told him quickly. I was trying to think as quickly and coherently as I was talking, to figure out everything that we might require, but it wasn’t easy, that intense cold numbed the mind almost as much as it did the body. ‘Sleeping-bags, blankets, spare coats, shirts, it doesn’t matter whose they are. Shove them into a couple of gunny sacks.’
‘You think they’re going to land, sir?’ Curiosity, anticipation, horror – each struggled for supremacy in the thin, dark intelligent face. ‘You really think so?’
‘I think they’re going to try. What have you got there?’
‘Fire bombs, a couple of Pyrenes.’ He dumped them by the stove. ‘Hope they’re not solid.’
‘Good boy. And a couple of the tractor extinguishers – the Nu-Swifts, G-1000, I think.’ A great help these little things are going to be, I thought, if several thousand gallons of petrol decide to go up in flames. ‘Fire axes, crowbars, canes, the homing spool – for heaven’s sake don’t forget the homing spool – and the searchlight battery. Be sure and wrap that up well.’
‘Bandages?’
‘No need. Seventy degrees of frost will freeze blood and seal a wound quicker than any bandage. But bring the morphia kit. Any water in these two buckets?’
‘Full. But more ice than water.’
‘Put them on the stove – and don’t forget to turn out the stove and both the lights before you leave.’ Incongruously enough, we who could survive in the Arctic only by virtue of fire, feared it above all else. ‘Pile the rest of the stuff up by the instrument shelter.’
I found Jackstraw, working only by the feeble light of his torch, outside the lean-to drift-walled shelter that we had built for the dogs from empty packing cases and an old tractor tarpaulin. He appeared to be fighting a losing battle in the centre of a milling pack of snarling yelping dogs, but the appearance was illusion only: already he had four of the dogs off the tethering cable and the sledge tracelines snapped into their harness.
‘How’s it coming?’ I shouted.
‘Easy.’ I could almost see the crinkling grin behind the snow-mask. ‘I caught most of them asleep, and Balto is a great help – he’s in a very bad temper at being woken up.’
Balto was Jackstraw’s lead dog – a huge, 90-pound, half-wolf, half-Siberian, direct descendant of, and named for the famous dog that had trekked with Amundsen, and who later, in the terrible winter of ‘25, his sledge-driver blind behind him, had led his team through driving blizzards and far sub-zero cold to bring the life-giving anti-toxin into the diphtheria-stricken town of Nome, Alaska. Jackstraw’s Balto was another such: powerful, intelligent, fiercely loyal to his master – although not above baring his wolf’s fangs as he made a token pass at him from time to time-and, above all, like all good lead dogs, a ruthless disciplinarian with his team-mates. He was exercising that disciplinary authority now – snarling, pushing and none-too-gently nipping the recalcitrant and the slow-coaches, quelling insubordination in its earliest infancy.
‘I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll get the searchlight.’ I made off towards the mound of snow that loomed high to the westward of the cabin, broke step and listened. There was no sound to be heard, nothing but the low-pitched moan of the wind on the ice-cap, the eternal rattling of the anemometer cups. I turned back to Jackstraw, my face bent against the knifing wind.
‘The plane – have you heard the plane, Jackstraw? I can’t hear a thing.’
Jackstraw straightened, pulled off his parka hood and stood still, hands cupped to his ears. Then he shook his head briefly and replaced the hood.
‘My God!’ I looked at him. ‘Maybe they’ve crashed already’
Again the shake of the head.
‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘On a night like this you wouldn’t hear a thing if they crashed half a mile downwind.’
‘I’d have felt it, Dr Mason.’
I nodded slowly, said nothing. He was right, of course. The frozen surface of this frozen land transmitted vibration like a tuning-fork. Last July, seventy miles inland, we had distinctly felt the vibration of the ice-cap as an iceberg had broken off from a glacier in a hanging valley and toppled into the fjord below. Maybe the pilot had lost his bearings, maybe he was flying in ever-widening circles trying to pick up our lights again, but at least there was hope yet.
I hurried across to where the tractor, sheeted in tarpaulin, lay close in to the
