Alistair MacLean: Night Without End

I went with him to watch and the whole thing went off without a hitch. Dead on time, just seconds after the third rocket had been fired to curve upwards and explode into incandescent light in the star-dusted darkness above, we heard the high-pitched whine approaching out of the south-west, and in an incredibly short space of time a vague dark blur, carrying no navigation lights, screamed by five hundred feet overhead, banked in the distance, came at us again at much reduced speed, banked a second time and then, with a crescendoing banshee shriek of the jet engine, had vanished again into the vaguely lightening darkness to the south-east before we had realised that the pilot had made his drop. It was a measure of his complete self-confidence that he didn't even trouble to check the accuracy of his drop: but for a man skilled in landing on the handkerchief-sized flight deck of a carrier in the middle of the night this must have been a childishly simple exercise.

There were two packages, not one, attached not to parachutes but to insignificant little drogues that seemed to let them fall much too fast for safety: they landed almost together not forty yards from the magnesium flares and with such force that I was sure that their contents must be smashed. But I had underestimated the Fleet Air Arm's skill and experience in these matters, the contents were so beautifully packed and cushioned that everything was completely intact. The packages were duplicated: two ampoules of insulin and three hypodermic syringes in each package: whoever had packed these had been taking no chances. But gratitude was the last thought in my mind at that moment: I just tucked the boxes under my arm and made for the tractor at a dead run.

For close on two hours Hillcrest's driver pushed the big Sno-Cat along at its maximum speed, and despite the inherent stability afforded by its four wide caterpillars, the tractor swayed and lurched in terrifying fashion. This was bad country, this was crevasse country, and we had been forced to make a wide detour that had carried us more than three miles away from the Kangalak glacier. And once again Jackstraw's big Siberian wolf proved how invaluable he was: running tirelessly ahead, he repeatedly guided the Sno-Cat away from dangerous territory, but even so our route was a necessarily devious and twisted one, though the picking out of a path became considerably easier after the pale grey light of the arctic noon spread across the ice-cap.

For all of us it was a time of tension, of an ever-mounting anxiety that reached intolerable proportions. For the first half-hour or so I was busy enough in broaching the tractor's first-aid kit and doing what doctoring I could to Mahler—a Mahler whose dyspnoea was already dramatically easing—Marie LeGarde, Helene, Jackstraw and, above all, to Zagero's shattered hands. Then I myself submitted to Hillcrest's rough and ready ministrations, but after that there was nothing for me to do, nothing for any of us to do except try to avoid the bitterness of thinking what must happen if the Citroen reached the tongue of the glacier before us.

Suddenly, exactly on noon, the tractor stopped abruptly. We jumped out to see what the matter was, and it became apparent soon enough the driver was awaiting instructions. We had abruptly rounded the humpback of the last ice ridge that had lain between us and the glacier itself.

Even in the half-light of the arctic day the panorama suddenly unfolded before us was a breathtaking one. To the north, the ice-sheet extended all the way down to the coast, forming vertical and in some places overhanging cliffs, the well-known phenomenon of the Chinese Wall fronts: nobody, nothing, could hope to land there.

To the south and separated from the fjord by the mile-long ridgeback of the seaward-projecting southern wall of the fjord, was a wide bay, fringed by a low, ice-bare rocky coast, quilted here and there with drifts of snow blown off the ice-cap. There, if anywhere, was where we would have to leave.

In the centre, between the low walls of the fjord, the Kangalak glacier itself, here, at its tongue, about 300 yards wide, ran down to the waters of the fjord in a great dog-leg curving sharply thirty degrees right about half-way down its length, ending abruptly with its upper surface a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the pack-ice-strewn water beneath. For the first half of its length the tongue of the glacier sloped fairly sharply from right to left down to the nunataks, crescent-fringed by the debris of moraines, that thrust up through the ice at the far corner of the dog-leg: the surface of the glacier was a nightmare of transverse and longitudinal fissures, some of them anything up to two hundred feet deep, great gaping chasms fanged with seracs—the irregular, often needle-pointed ice pinnacles that reached up between the walls of the larger crevasses. Surely Smallwood could never be so desperate, so insane as to drive the Citroen out on that: apart from the fissures, the very steepness of the slope downwards and to the left would be enough to send him into an uncontrollable slide.

And beyond everything lay the sea, the island-studded, ice-filled waters of Baffin Bay. Off-shore there was a mile-wide belt of loose pressure ice—the season was not yet far enough advanced for the fantastic shapes it would assume in the early spring -streaked with open, ever-changing leads and dotted at rare intervals with small icebergs—probably ones that had broken off from the east coast, drifted south round Cape Farewell and then moved north again, the whole half-lost, unearthly, and impossibly, weirdly, continuously altered in configuration by the white drifting fog that hung miasma-like over the sea.

But two things there were that were not lost: two ships. The one to the south-west, wraith-like and blurred though its lines were through the swirling mist, was quite unmistakable, that raked and slender silhouette would have been unmistakable anywhere: it was a destroyer, it could only be the Wykenham, moving slowly, cautiously shorewards through the ice-filled waters of the bay to our left. A heart-warming, immensely reassuring spectacle—or it should have been: but after the first cursory identifying glance I lost interest, my attention was taken and completely held by the second ship.

I couldn't see all of it, most of its hull was hidden by the precipitous end of the glacier, but its small squat bridge, two masts and broad, bluff seaward-pointing bows were clearly etched against the mirror-calm waters of the head of the fjord and the sloping ice-bare rock that brushed its portside fenders. I could see no flag. It was a trawler, unmistakably so, and I thought grimly that it must have been a very special trawler indeed to have battered that still-visible path through the ice-choked mouth of the fjord.

My gaze moved back to the trawler again and a second later I was grabbing Hillcrest's binoculars without so much as by your leave. One glance was enough, even in that shadowed gloom of the depth of the fjord I could see all I wanted to see by the grey noon-light. I could see a great deal more than I wanted to. For a few seconds I stood stock-still listening desperately for the sound of the Citroen's engines: moments later I was in the tractor cabin, by the radio table.

"Still in contact with the Triton, Joss?" He nodded, and I rushed on: "Tell them there's a group of men coming ashore from a trawler in the Kangalak Fjord. Ten, twelve, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure whether they're armed. I'll be damned surprised if they aren't. Tell them I'm certain they're going to move up on the glacier."

"Now?"

"Of course!" I snapped. "Send a message immediately. And—"

"No. I meant are they moving up the glacier now?"

"Take them ten, fifteen minutes—the fjord walls are pretty steep and it's tricky to climb.. . . After that ask the Wykenham if they will send a landing party ashore. An armed party. And for God's sake tell them it's urgent."