Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

As I turned to him and lifted the mask away, he lifted his arm weakly, and said, 'Gee, my head.'

'Can you hear me?'

'My head. God, my head!'

Moving behind him, I drew my fingers gently through his hair. His breath hissed and he winced suddenly as I touched a lump like a small mountain at the back where his hair was thinning. He hadn't got that collapsing in the snow!

I said, 'Who did it?'

Allen's head moved weakly from side to side.

'Who?'

He blinked up at me; real consciousness was returning now.

'Somebody did hit you?'

'Sure he did.' Allen's eyes closed tightly.

'Who?'

'Didn't see who. Had his .., his parka hood tight. That's all I saw. Then - Bam!'

'You've no idea? No clue at all?'

'No.'

'Where did it happen? Before or after you got the keys?'

Allen looked puzzled for a moment, then said slowly : 'Oh yeah, the keys. Never got that far.'

All the same, the keys had gone from the rack.

'Coffee?' His eyes had closed. He didn't open them as he nodded. Walking out of the theatre to the coffee machine in Kirton's office, I felt chillingly alone. Allen was in no condition to help; there was no sign of Kelleher; and inside me lurked an uncomfortable certainty that I was next on the list of targets.

I still had no idea why.

My hand shook a little as I filled the coffee-cup. My brain pounded with that question: Why? Why the long chapter of destruction, the skilled sabotage, the readiness to kill men, singly like Kirton or indiscriminately with the blunt sweep of poisoned food? Why, why, why? But I had only questions. No answers. And even if the answers had been there to reason out, my brain now seemed incapable of hard thought; Hundred had deadened it and there was just dull reaction to events, followed by weary frustration at a deadly riddle which grew hourly less answerable. I took the coffee in to Allen and watched morosely as he sipped. The acute discomfort in his guts and the brutal bang on the head combined to make him almost helplessly weak. He needed to be warm in bed, not lying awkwardly on this damned operating table. If only there were a bed . . . Then I groaned at my own stupidity. Of course there was a bed; there was the one Kelleher had occupied. I went through to check and stared in astonishment. Kelleher was in it, his eyes glaring up at me!

'What the - !' But the sight told its own story. Kelleher was back in the straitjacket, the straitjacket was fastened to the bed, and there was a wide strip of surgical tape across his mouth!

Chapter 15

I bent to strip the plaster from Kelleher's mouth, thought better of it, and instead unfastened the strappings of the jacket. Once his hands were free, he took off the plaster himself with a mixture of impatience and extreme care. He massaged stiff, sore skin carefully as he told me what had happened.

'Door opened and I heard Coveney's voice, just minutes after you'd gone. I climbed back in here just to avoid trouble, and turned away, pretending to be sleeping, damn it, so I didn't get the chance to see who did it.'

'Did what?'

'Listen. I'll tell you. Coveney looked at me; I know it - I could sense his septic aura - then he went out. When he'd gone, I started to sit up and somebody tried to bust my head. When I woke up, I was strapped in.'

'Somebody from the ward?'

Kelleher shrugged. 'Who knows? There were some guys with Coveney; it could have been one of them. Stayed behind a moment and - splat !' He shook his head and muttered at the pain.

'Can you stand?'

'Sure I can stand.'

'Good. We need the bed." I told him about Allen, and together we carried the master sergeant in, stripped him down to his underwear and tucked him up. As I up-ended his trousers to fold them and preserve the still immaculate creases, a bunch of keys fell out of one of the pockets, and as I bent to pick them up, a thought struck me. The camp had been searched for Carson, but had all of it been searched ? I said to Allen: 'Is there anywhere in this place that's out of bounds?'

'Sure,' he said. 'There's - ' I let him finish, but had the answer already. Why the hell hadn't I thought of it, or anybody else for that matter: Coveney, Smales, Allen himself, anybody?

'There's that trench where the bodies are,' Allen said.

'Who can get in?'

'Two keys to the door. One on that ring. Major Smales has the other.'

'Did you look inside?'

He shook his head.

Kelleher said, 'But Barney would, surely.'

'Why should he? It's been locked for days. There are only two keys and - '

'Locked it myself,' Allen said, 'right after we put Doc Kirton's body in there.'

I held up the key-ring. 'Which one?'

Allen pointed with a weary hand. 'Okay.' I turned to Kelleher. 'Let's go have a look.'

'We're gonna be spotted,' Kelleher said. 'Leastways I am.'

'We've got to risk it. Do what I did. Pinch a parka with somebody else's name on it. And carry something. Nobody looks twice at a beast of burden . . , take some sheets, you'll look like part of Coveney's clean-up.'

We grabbed another of the parkas the sick men wouldn't be needing and gathered some soiled sheets from the laundry baskets and left the medical block cautiously, ready to duck back if we encountered anybody. But Main Street was deserted. We hurried to the trench. A notice on the locked door read:

'No admittance under any circumstances' and we glanced at one another grimly. I turned the key, the lock slid smoothly back, and in a moment we were inside and locking the door. I had brought a handlamp from the hospital, but we didn't need it. The light switch clicked and the overhead strip lights flickered on.

There was no sign of Carson, but we went the length of the trench to make sure, sidestepping bodies as we walked. At the bottom of the escape hatch stair, Kelleher looked at me and gave a little shudder.

'C'mon, let's get out of here.'

I shared his keenness to leave, and we turned and walked back briskly towards the door. But something only half-remembered began to prickle in my mind and I stopped, looking down at the bodies.

'Just a minute.' Each of the bodies, blanket-shrouded, lay fastened to a steel-framed stretcher sled.

'You spotted something?'

'Hang on. Let me think.' I tried to remember the time I'd been in here before, in the darkness, when I'd blundered in a panic among these hard frozen remnants that had once been men. And there had been something odd about one of them. I'd assumed it had been Kirton, but. . . I said, 'How many men should be here?'

'Seven, I guess. Six from the helo crash, plus Doc Kirton. Why? And what in hell are you doing?'

I was on my knees, swallowing my revulsion and making myself run my hands over the shrouded forms. The fourth was the one that had lingered in my mind. I glanced at the identifying label tied to the sled, and said, 'Not much left of Private First Class Marvin K. Harrer.'

'He was in a helo crash!' Kelleher said impatiently. 'What do you expect? Leave the poor guy alone!'

Ignoring him, I began to unfasten the ties that held the shrouding blanket: as I pulled the material back from where the head should have been, I found myself looking down at a chunk of kapok wearing an Arctic-issue hat. 'I think,' I said, 'that we'd better see the rest of him.'

Kelleher said, 'Be your age. There's got to be something to bury. The army sometimes has to return the body to the family with the lid screwed tight.' But the conviction was going out of his voice, and by the time I'd peeled the blanket right back to reveal lengths of wood positioned where the arms and legs would have been, he had no protests left. 'Six bodies,' he said. 'And there should be seven. So where's the other one?'