Crawford Kilian - Icequake - A Prophetic Survival Thriller

“You have taken a foolish risk,” she told him a few minutes later. “It seems to have been a very mild heart attack, but you could have made it much worse. Even so, you will have to rest for several weeks.”

“Good. I’ll go to Fiji for a month.” His voice was hoarse.

“You are sarcastic. But you must rest.”

“There’s too much to do.”

She made him lie down in his bunk and took off his mukluks. “Plenty of people can do whatever must be done.” She grinned wryly at him. “We old people must learn to slow down.”

The blizzard and whiteout lasted almost eighteen hours, sustained by katabatic winds that gusted up to 130 k.p.h. and rarely fell below 70. All night long the station shook. No one got much sleep.

Howie O’Rourke spent most of the night preparing one of the Sno-Cats so that he could search for the helicopter party as soon as the weather cleared.

Terry Dolan and Bruce Robinson yelled and swore until Katerina gave them tranquillisers and a stern lecture.

Suzy Dolan lay in her bunk, waiting silently for the next shock to hit.

Sean McNally had to dig his way out of the snow mine. Everyone had forgotten about him. He was too tired to be angry, but he was sorry to lose his Pachelbel tape.

Hugh dozed in and out of frightening dreams and still more frightening wakefulness.

Katerina walked down the tunnel to look in on him every few minutes. The men clearing the tunnel asked how he was. “Sleeping well,” she said.

Herm Northrop, after a long day checking the CANDU and getting its output back to normal, got through Tunnel E before it was cleared and went to the mess hall. He made himself a meal of three big sandwiches, a bowl of Terry’s soup and a pint of ice cream. Then he made himself three more sandwiches, filled a thermos with coffee and went back to the control room.

Ben Whitcumb worked over fourteen hours straight in the tunnels. He went to bed at 0200 and fell asleep in his clothes, sitting up on the edge of his bunk. Geologist Max Wilhelm, his roommate, came in an hour later and gently stretched Ben out before climbing into the top bunk.

Colin Smith spent most of the night in the dome, alternately making weather observations and trying to raise the helicopter on the old ANGRC-6 transceiver. Over the endless wind he often heard distant booms, rumbles and metallic clangs. Sometimes he almost persuaded himself that the noises were those of an approaching helicopter. They weren’t.

The helicopter smelled of petrol. Al sat very still in his seat, catching his breath. He had been thrown pretty hard against his safety harness, and his ribs ached. Nothing was visible through the cracked windscreen but a boiling greyness of snow moving at 100 k.p.h. He unsnapped his harness and made sure the Search and Rescue and Homing distress signal was on. Not that it was likely to be picked up. Thank God for that brief contact with Shacktown — at least they’d have a rough idea of the helicopter’s location.

“You all right, Al?” Will’s voice was almost lost in the wind. He looked dazed.

“Sure. Been through worse.” He forced his body to relax. “How about you?”

“A bit shaky. But I’m not hurt.”

They got out of their seats and stumbled into the cabin. The smell of petrol was much stronger here. Al moved quickly from one person to the next, checking them over and getting them on their feet. No one was hurt, but they were all shaken up and slow to react.

“Get your survival packs,” Al ordered. “Get your survival packs. Then get out.”

“It’s cold,” Penny complained. “It’s cold out there. I want to stay here.”

“Come on, Pen.” He gripped her shoulders, his hands clumsy in bear-paw mitts, and pulled her out of her seat. “We might have a fire. And if we don’t, we’ll freeze in here.” He thumped the wall. “Helicopter’s a heat sink.”

The wind was almost as deafening as the surge had been. They groped their way out of the helicopter, each dragging a rucksack full of survival gear; Steve stubbornly brought his seismograph tapes and Penny’s camera as well. The surface here was a topographic nightmare of drifts and sastrugi, with nothing high enough to give shelter against the wind. There was some protection in the lee of the helicopter; they huddled there while Al slowly circled the crash site, up to his knees in drift. He glimpsed the pressure ridge as a ghostly line in the whiteout.

“There,” he shouted, and started plodding along the helicopter’s skid track towards the ridge. It meant walking straight into the wind, but the others followed without a word, bent almost double to stay on their feet.

It took them almost fifteen minutes to reach the ridge, though it was only a hundred metres away. In the lee of an almost-vertical mass of ice, Al, Tim and Steve zipped their three survival tents together while Will and the women crouched in a hollow nearby. Steve crawled into the tent; a few long minutes later it glowed orange from the light of a primus stove. The others went inside at once.

The tent was scarcely high enough for them to move around in, even on all fours, and was just wide enough for them to lie side by side. Al assigned each of them a spot and told them to unroll their sleeping bags. “Then get your anoraks off and get into your bags. Two at a time; it’s too crowded for everyone to do it at once. Penny and Jeanne first.”

Penny felt dreamily clumsy, but she managed. The sleeping bag seemed even colder than the outside, and for a long time she shivered convulsively. Almost like a high, she thought. Your brain goes off duty and your spine takes over.

By the time everyone was settled, a pot of stew was steaming over the primus. The steam made frost crystals form on almost everything but the top of the tent, which was flapping violently in the wind.

“Hoosh smells ready,” Steve said. Without getting out of his bag, he dextrously poured stew into plastic mugs and handed them round. “Get it down quick, while it’s hot.”

It was unbelievably delicious, though Penny had trouble holding the mug still enough to drink from it. The heat from the stew thawed the frozen tears on her nose and upper lip. She gave back her mug for a refill, and when that was gone accepted a greasy bar of pemmican and some hard, sweetish biscuits. It hurt to eat — every breath made her fillings ache — but gradually she felt warmer. Her hands and feet began to hurt.

Jeanne, lying between Penny and Will, said: “Will? Are we going to die?”

“Certainly not.”

“What?”

“I said certainly not! Damn that flapping tent.”

“Papa Al, is Will right?” Jeanne sounded very scared.

“He’s right, House-mouse.” Al reached across Penny and patted Jeanne’s sleeping bag. “We’ll be fine. Shacktown knows where we are, and the SARAH is still transmitting from the helicopter. Soon as the wind drops, they’ll send out a Sno-Cat and we’ll go home in style.” In the light of the primus he looked very tired and old. “Finish your lunch and take a nap.”

To save fuel Steve turned the primus down to a faint glow; the tent darkened. The wind’s noise lessened a little as snow drifted over them. No one said much. Jeanne went to sleep, cuddled against Will.

Shivering in her bag, Penny tried to decide on an angle for the story. Do it ironically, she told herself. The brilliant seismologist surprised by the earthquake he’d predicted. The escape from one treacherous shelter to another, each in turn destroyed, until a flimsy nylon tent was all they had. And they would have to escape again, to the doubtful safety of Shacktown. Then where? It would make a grimly amusing story.

She was suddenly aware that Al, lying beside her, was crying. She turned to him and touched his shoulder, trying to comfort him as he had comforted Jeanne. He was facing the wall of the tent; his weeping stopped at her touch, and he rolled over to face her. His eyelids were caked with ice.