Alistair MacLean: Night Without End

We were still two hundred yards behind the tractor when, less than fifty yards from the corner, it struck an ice-mound, spun round crazily several times and then smashed, tail first, with horrifying force into the biggest of the nunataks—a fifty-foot pinnacle of rock at the very corner. We were still over a hundred yards away when we saw Small wood, obviously dazed, half-fall out of the still upright driving cabin, hat-box in hand, followed by the girl. Whether she flung herself at him or just stumbled against him it was impossible to say, but both of them slipped and fell together and next moment had disappeared from sight against the face of the nunatak.

Still fifty yards away, already trying all we could to brake ourselves, we heard the staccato roar of cannon shells seemingly directly above us and as I flung myself flat on the ice, not to avoid the fire but to stop myself before I, too, plunged into the crevasse by the nunatak where I knew Margaret and Smallwood must have disappeared, I caught a glimpse of two Scimitars hurtling low across the glacier, red fire streaking from their guns. For a moment, rolling over and over, I saw no more, then I had another glimpse of the lower part of the glacier, of exploding cannon shells raking a lethal barrier of fragmenting steel across the glacier's entire width, and, about sixty or seventy yards lower down, the men from the trawler lying flat on their faces to escape the whistling flying shrapnel. Even in that brief moment I had time to see a third Scimitar screaming down out of the north, exactly following the path of the other two. They were making no attempt to kill the trawler men, obviously they were under the strictest instructions to avoid any but the most necessary bloodshed. And it wasn't necessary, if ever anything was crystal clear it was the fact that we weren't going to have any trouble at all from those trawler men. Both men and trawler could depart now, unmolested: with the missile mechanism beyond their reach, they no longer mattered.

Ten yards ahead of Jackstraw, sick to the heart and almost mad with fear, I reached the crevasse by the nunatak—no more than a three-foot wide gap between ice and rock—peered down over the side, and as I peered I felt faint from the wave of relief that swept over me: the crevasse, narrowing as it went down to not much more than two feet, ended about fifteen feet down in a solid shelf of rock, a ledge sculpted by thousands of years of moving, grinding ice.

Margaret and Smallwood were still on their feet, shaky, I could see, but seemingly unharmed—it had been a short drop and they could have slowed their descent by pressing against both sides of the crevasse as they fell. Smallwood, flattened lips drawn back over his teeth, was staring up at me, his pistol barrel pressed savagely against Margaret's temple.

"A rope, Mason!" he said softly. "Get me a rope. This crevasse is closing—the ice is moving!"

And it was, I knew it was. All glaciers moved, some of them, on this West Greenland coast, with astonishing speed—the great Upernivik glacier, farther north, covered over four feet every hour. As if in confirmation of his words, the ice beneath my feet groaned and shuddered and slid forward a couple of inches.

"Hurry up!" Smallwood's incomparable nerve held to the last, his voice was urgent but completely under control, his face tight-lipped but calm. "Hurry up or I'll kill her!"

I knew he meant it absolutely.

"Very well," I said calmly. My mind felt preternaturally clear, I knew Margaret's life hung on a fraying thread but I had never felt so cool, so self-possessed in my life. I unwound the rope round my shoulders. "Here it comes."

He reached up both hands to catch the falling rope, I took a short step forward and then, stiff-legged and with my hands pressed close to my sides, fell on top of him like a plummeting stone. He saw me coming, but with the tangle of the rope and the narrowness of the crevasse he had no chance to get clear. My feet caught him on the shoulder and outstretched arm, and we crashed on to the ledge together.

He was, as I have said, phenomenally strong for his size, but he had no chance then. True, he was partially numbed by the shock of my fall, but that was more than cancelled out by my weakness, by the loss of blood from my wounded shoulder. But he still had no chance, I locked my hands round that scrawny throat, ignored his kickings, his eye-gougings, the fusillade of blows rained on my unprotected head, and squeezed and knocked his head against the blue-banded striations of the side of the crevasse until I felt him go limp in my hands. And then it was time to go, the ice-wall was now no more than eighteen inches distant from the polished rock of the nunatak.

Smallwood apart, I found myself alone on that narrowing ledge. Jackstraw had already been lowered by Hillcrest and his men, fastened a rope round Margaret and been pulled up himself after her: I could have sworn that I had fought with Smallwood for no more than ten seconds, but was told later that we had struggled like madmen for three or four minutes. It may well have been so, I have no memory of that time, my coolness, my detachment was something altogether outside me.

My first clear recollection was hearing Jackstraw's voice, quick and urgent, as a rope snaked down over my shoulders.

"Quickly, Dr Mason! It'll close any second now."

"I'm coming. But another rope first, please." I pointed to the radio lying at my feet. "We've come too long a way with this, we've suffered too much for this to leave it now."

Twenty seconds later, just as I scrambled over the edge of the crevasse, the grinding ice-wall lurched another inch or two towards the rock of the nunatak, and, at the same moment, Smallwood's voice came to us again. He had propped himself up on his hands and knees and was staring up numbly, almost disbelievingly, at the narrowing walls above him.

"Throw me a rope." He could see death's hand reaching out to touch him, but the urgency in his voice was still under that iron control, his face an expressionless mask. "For God's sake, throw me a rope."

I thought of the trail of death Smallwood had left behind him, of the plane's dead captain, the three dead crew members, Colonel Harrison, Brewster and Mrs Dansby-Gregg, of how close to the brink of death he had brought Marie LeGarde and Mahler, of how often he had threatened death to the girl now trembling violently in the crook of my arm. I thought of these things, then I looked at Jackstraw, who carried a rope over his arm, and I saw reflected in his face the same implacability, the same bleak mercilessness that informed my own mind. And then Jackstraw moved towards the brink of the crevasse, lifted the tightly coiled rope high above his head, hurled it down on top of the man below and stepped back without a word.

We turned, Jackstraw and I, with Margaret Ross supported between us, and walked slowly up the glacier to meet the officer in charge of the landing party, and as we walked we could feel the glacier shiver beneath our feet as a million tons of ice lurched down towards the head of the Kangalak Fjord.

THE END