Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

Below me, very slowly, the dark hole widened as I slid soundlessly down towards it. I whispered into the walkie-talkie, 'Entering the neck soon.'

'How far?'

'Four feet.'

'Try communication soon as you're through.'

'Right.'

The lowering continued, and soon I was no longer in an immense space, but in a tight, white bottleneck that inspired sudden, panicky claustrophobia. If an icicle had fallen earlier, it just might have gone by, giving me only a glancing blow as it passed; but here, the whole shape of the structure would guide any falling weight directly on to me.

Slowly the neck widened, the walls of the second chamber beginning to slope down and away from where I hung. 'Through the neck now,' I muttered softly.

'You okay ?'

'Yes. Keep lowering.'

I tried to envisage the two of them up there. This, for them, was the easy part, with the ratchet taking the strain. Coming up would be another matter, with muscles wearying through the long haul and the pressure of time always goading them to further effort.

All round me another crop of immense icicles hung like an inverted and petrified forest, gleaming and winking in the light of my lamp. They were, I thought soberly, even worse than those at the entrance to the upper chamber: longer, thinner, some distorted in shape like twisted fangs. Here the rising vapour from the steam hose would have been denser and warmer, its action stronger on the snow of centuries and adding drop by frozen drop to the tip of each rod of ice. I held my breath as the bosun's chair slipped past, concentrating on stillness. The need to tear my eyes away from their hypnotic menace was almost irresistible, but to look up or down seemed now to be to risk setting off a pendulum swing. If the icicles had been anchored to something solid, as the normal small icicle clings to a gutter, the danger would have been small. But they clung only to compacted snow.

Minutes passed and 1 moved beyond their threatening points, slowly down into the centre of the onion-shaped bulb, and again there came the feeling that I had ceased to move, that the world had stopped and that I would remain for ever strapped to my tiny seat in a bubble in the immensity of the icecap.

'You okay?'

'Yes.'

'How far?'

I glanced carefully downwards. Below me the walls were beginning to close a little towards the black eye of the third chamber. 'Forty feet.'

As I sat helplessly, inching downwards, anger welled up in me: anger at myself for embarking on this crazy descent; anger at the lunatic somewhere above me whose brilliant and implacable malevolence made it necessary; most of all, though, at Smales, who should long ago have closed off this death trap, and hadn't. It was a natural enough anger, born of danger and fear, but its intensity frightened me, constricting my throat, tensing my muscles, tripping a pulse in my temple that thumped in my head like a drum. Shutting my eyes tight, 1 tried to force the anger from me, but it had its effect. On a head full of blood the hard hat felt uncomfortably tight. I raised a hand to ease the pressure, took too deep a breath of icy air, and coughed. The hat tilted, slid quickly over my scalp, and fell. I made a grab for it, missed and began to swing a little as it fell.

I sat rigid, waiting for disaster. The hat bounced and bounced again, skittering round the sloping ice before it fell into the hole, and then a silence followed until, seconds later, it hit the bottom of the third bulb. I'd have expected a splash, but it bounced repeatedly. The water at the bottom of the well must have frozen again ! The clattering could only have lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to go on and on as the steel hat ricocheted from one ice surface to another and the ice-bulb below me magnified the sound and funnelled it upwards through the neck. Sweating, even in the icy cold, I waited for it to end, but when it did, another sound remained .., a high-pitched hum that seemed to have no source, but vibrated like a tuning-fork .., and then an icy breath swirled round me and I knew and cowered as, with a soft whoosh, a huge icicle fell past. A tiny movement of my hand would have let me touch it as the white, shining projectile dropped slowly past, its forty-foot length seeming to fall in slow motion, to go on for ever. Miraculously it didn't touch me, but I watched it continue its fall, down into the neck, and through it like an arrow, not even touching the sides, then disappearing into blackness until it landed with an immense crash in the icy base of the bulb.

Again noise crashed below me, reverberating upwards, and again the singing, tuning-fork sound began. I wrapped my arms around my unprotected head in an instinctive but futile gesture, and waited for death. For the next icicle wouldn't miss, and if the fall of the hat had been enough to unseat one of them, the monstrous impact of the ice-spear crashing down must surely loosen the others. The ringing tone seemed to last so long as to be a permanent part of the atmosphere, then slowly, it began to fade. And nothing had happened ! The forest of ice above had rung to the music of death, and yet had stilled! Slowly, disbelievingly, scarcely daring to move, I lowered my arms. The light of the lamp shone back at me from the great, shining walls; the silence was total. I let out a great, shuddering breath and cringed at the sound of it.

'Harry, Harry!' Kelleher's voice crackled urgently from the walkie-talkie on my chest. I said, 'I'm okay.'

'What happened?'

'Icicle,' I whispered.

'We'll bring you up.'

I heard the words with a vast sense of relief. More than anything in the world I wanted to be lifted out of that ghastly place, to stand once more on something firm, to be free of the interminable menace of that battery of deadly, pointed, hanging spears above me. I knew that, even though they had not fallen, they must have been loosened by the long vibration; that the chance of a fall had immeasurably increased. I sat trembling in the chair, my mind whirling with both fear and a resurgence of fury. Fury.

Fury that directed itself suddenly at the man who had done all this to me. The man who wanted Camp Hundred closed, and was on the edge of succeeding.

Damn him!

I gritted my teeth. 'Continue lowering.'

Chapter 17

'Harry?'

'Continue, damn it!'

A tiny jerk and I was off again, a little bundle of rage and revenge dangling at the end of a long, long cable, helpless in the space and cold, yet feeling suddenly like a hunter. I would reach the bottom, and if the answer lay there, I'd damn well find it.

I was going to get that bastard!

Into the neck, through it, and the light picked out another thick clump of icicles, slung like so many giant stilettos from beside the opening.

'Kelleher?'

'Yeah?' His voice was faint. 'Still okay?'

'I'm into the bottom chamber. Keep lowering.'

The chair slid slowly past the hanging ice fingers. Here, where the rising steam from the hose had been densest, there were more of them; they were larger, and thicker too, reaching more than half-way down the entire height of the chamber. They were almost more than I could bear, and I closed my eyes and counted slowly to two hundred before I opened them again. Then I sighed with relief. I was past, dropping steadily towards the base of the great cavern.

The speaker crackled. 'Repeat?' I turned up the volume to maximum.

'How far?' The words were almost indistinguishable.

'Thirty feet,' I said, and turned the lamp beam downwards to study the base of the ice chamber. As the beam played across the surface of the frozen pool, it glittered back at me from ten thousand facets of shattered ice. The huge icicle, as it fell, had done several things: its initial impact had penetrated the ice layer and starred the smoothness of the whole sheet. New cracks radiated from its crash-point out towards the edges. It had also exploded into thousands of tiny, diamond-bright fragments that littered the entire surface, in an opaque, reflecting layer.