Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

My scalp prickled. Who was F? And who in hell was the Chameleon ? There was nothing else. In the loose-leaf notebook there'd been that tantalizing reference: 'I made a note to investigate,' but there was no sign of it here in the diary. Perhaps it had been only a mental note. I put the diary in a pocket in my parka and took one last look round the base of the chamber, my eyes resting longingly on the hard hat. It would make not the slightest difference if one of the icicles crashed down, but that didn't stop me from trying to work out some desperate way of reaching it. The knowledge that I'd have to leave without it made a little shudder pass across my shoulders.

'Pull me up,' I said into the walkie-talkie. There was no response. Instantly my heart began to hammer in my chest. I tried to control it and tapped three times on the microphone. There was a pause that seemed like hours but could only have lasted a few seconds, and then three faint responding taps sounded from the speaker. A moment later my feet lifted off the ice. The long upward haul had begun. Twenty feet up, I realized I had stopped moving and tapped again. Almost immediately I began to move, but after a few more feet the movement stopped. Sitting rigidly still in the bosun's chair, I began to ask myself panicky questions: Was I too heavy? Would the effort of lifting me through four hundred feet be too great for them ? Then a tiny jerk told me I was on my way again and I thought I understood the pattern. They were resting at frequent intervals and I'd just have to live with it. I only looked up once and the sight of the big icicles, all seemingly pointed directly at me, made me determined not to do so again. I sat there, patiently paying out the thin nylon line attached to Kirton's body and trying not to think about anything except the need to restrict movement. The journey would end, one way or another, within some finite time. Either I'd be killed by an ice fall, or I'd reach the top, and the only thing I could do to influence the outcome was to come as close as possible to doing absolutely nothing. Gradually I became accustomed, or as near it as was attainable in the circumstances, to the repeated sudden realization that I was hanging motionless in the void. Then there'd come the reassuring little movement of the chair as Kelleher and his sergeant took up the strain again. I thought of them sweating with the effort and wished I could change places, because now the cold was working its way into me. Hands and feet were chilled through, damped with the contact with the ice, with Kirton's body and the diary. Any danger of frostbite was remote, but the discomfort was increasing steadily.

Coming up into the neck of the bulb, and with the first icicles now below me, I tried again with the walkie-talkie during one of the breaks, and heard Kelleher's faint voice with relief.

'Find anything?'

'Nothing conclusive. I got the diary.'

'Hold on. We'll get you up.' He was breathing heavily as he spoke and I didn't prolong the conversation. The minutes went by. As I emerged from the neck, once more the chair stopped moving. My feet were almost exactly level with the base of the bulb. I heard a tap then : but just one. A moment later there was another. Neither seemed quite to come from the handset, though they could have come from nowhere else and it must be some trick of acoustics.

All the same, I spoke into the mike: 'Kelleher?'

No answer.

'Kelleher!' I said sharply, a few seconds later, anxiety breaking through. Still no response. I tapped then, and called him, and tapped again, fear mushrooming inside me. The loudspeaker remained silent. For a little while, hanging on to the remnants of control, I tried to reason that it must be some malfunction of the walkie-talkie, that the tapping noise had meant Kelleher had dropped and damaged his handset. Soon they'd start again and I'd be on my way. But they didn't start again, and I stayed where I was. By now I was looking at my watch every few seconds and a cold block seemed to have formed in my chest. By the time ten leaden minutes had dragged by, I knew all too well there would be no more winding. Something had happened up there; something that had stopped them; something that would leave me suspended there, three hundred feet down in the icecap!

Air seemed to flow, for some reason, slowly between the two bulbs and to draw warmth from me as it passed. My whole body was chilled now, as my mind was chilled with the fearful knowledge that I would almost certainly hang here until I died. Another glance at my watch showed that it was fifteen minutes since I'd moved; fifteen minutes of no contact, no hope, no company except icy speculation that this, for me, was the end. The meaning of those two, spaced-out taps still baffled me. One tap had meant 'lower'. Two had meant 'stop'. Could it be that what Kelleher had meant was that they'd have to stop? But if so, why? There was only one answer that made any sense, and that one was pushing me steadily towards the edge of panic: the killer up there had found two men working at the well hoist! But if he'd done that, if he'd attacked them, surely he'd have cut the cable, too, to ensure that whoever was down the well stayed down. But the cable was steel, and in any case there was no need; he disposed of me just as effectively by marooning me.

I began to think half-seriously about suicide. It might be better to unfasten the straps and die quickly than to dangle here as life slipped agonizingly away. There were no other possibilities. No man alive could hope to climb either the ice walls of the bulb or the thin steel cable that rose through several hundred feet to the ice trench above. And now, at last, even the light from my lamp was fading as the battery's power drained away. Soon I would be waiting for death in the freezing dark. It became increasingly difficult even to flex my hands inside my gloves as my blood circulation slowed. How pathetic, I thought once, in a sudden spurt of anger, to go like this, not knowing; how pathetic to die failing*. How pathetic not to know who the Chameleon was, who F, was. 'Young F.' who could I blinked. The seat had moved! I shone the now-dim lamp towards the top of the neck, but the top of the neck wasn't there! It was below, ten feet, even twelve . ., now fifteen. I was moving upwards fast, far faster than Kelleher and the sergeant had been able to wind in the cable. Which must . . , could only mean the winch !

The nylon line jerked in my hands and I hastily paid out more, and kept on doing so as the chair rose steadily upwards. In no time I was passing the icicles, moving into the neck, passing through into the topmost chamber. Again and again I tried the walkie-talkie, but without getting any reply. I'd been right, then - the thing was broken. It had to be broken, because somebody must be up there, in the trench, working the winch.

Somebody working the winch! Somebody who didn't reply! Somebody who -1 heard the click of my nervous swallow - might be waiting for me to appear at the well-head, strapped helplessly in the bosun's chair.

Tilting my head back, I looked upwards to where the dark thread of the cable ran up into the well-head. There was a circle of dim, yellow light from the trench, a complete, uninterrupted circle, with no head leaning over to watch me. Frantically now, I paid out the remainder of the nylon line, letting it hang loose, and tying the end to the seat. Then I pulled the ice-axe free. There was no more than thirty feet to go now, and I fumbled with numb fingers to unfasten the straps that held me in the chair. It began to rock slightly, swinging me within inches of a huge icicle, and 1 froze into stillness as I swung back, breathtakingly close to another. Was I going to touch? The chair moved back again and I was safe, at least from the icicles. The strap parted and I clung grimly with one hand to the chair frame, the other hand gripping the ice-axe, my eyes measuring the distance as the yellow circle moved down towards me. It was then, at the precise moment that the chair entered the narrow tube to the well-head, that my brain gave a little click and spilled an answer into my mind. For days I'd been thinking about it, trying to force out conclusions, and there had been none. Now, when all my awareness was concentrated elsewhere, the mental print-out chattered!