Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

Then the hut loomed suddenly, only yards away. I had to cut the engine power and fling the steering round frantically to miss it, and that set me another problem. The tractor was not yet in sight but the hut was my starting point and if I went past it there would be trouble and delay in locating it again. I came to a decision quickly, backed off to set the TK4 down on low pressure a dozen yards or so from the hut, climbed out and walked towards it, my feet sinking inches deep into the soft, dry snow of the icecap. Reaching the hut, I turned to look round at the TK4, now little more than a vague shape that hummed quietly, its outline blurred and its engine noise muffled by the sheer weight of the snowfall. At first I thought the line had disappeared, blown away by the hurricane winds of the last days, but then I realized that snow reached a third the way up the side of the hut and that the line, instead of being waist level, would be at ankle height. As I hunted for it, I looked over my shoulder every few seconds, puzzled and menaced by the absence of the tractor, expecting an attack at any second. But nothing moved within my small circle of visibility and I kept telling myself that the harsh beat of its massive diesel would be clearly audible.

Then my foot brushed against the line and I bent to pick it up, slipped it into the dog's lead clip of my parka belt. Another cautious look all round me: no sign of man or tractor. I took the line in both hands and pulled, lifting it clear of the snow, and began to move along it. After ten yards I reached the first of the flag-topped anchor posts, unfastened and refastened the clip, and moved on again, examining the surface carefully at each step. A lot of precipitation had occurred since the last time anybody at Hundred had been able to venture out on to the cap, and what I was looking for would by now be thoroughly buried.

I had reached the third anchor post and was re-clipping my beltwhen I remembered with sudden horror that I was still wearing the same boots in which I'd gone down the well. And that they were damp! Instantaneously, my feet felt cold. Was it psychological or actual? It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes since I'd left the cab of the TK4, but two minutes in damp boots is a long time on the icecap. Thank God the wind had died!

I trudged on, worried and frightened. It was crazy to have tried to give chase alone, yet the pressure of time had allowed me no other choice and I'd been aware of the risk; I'd also been close enough to death in the last hours and days for this pursuit to be only an extension of that peril. Irrationally the prospect of frozen feet was far more deeply horrifying; the thought that if I survived, it might be to hobble for the rest of my days on stumps, dried mymouth and prickled the back of my neck. Longing to turn back, I still marched on. The snow surface wasmarked only by windwhip, not by boots or mechanical tracks. As 1 pulled up each yard of buried line, it cut smoothly through the recent, loose-packed snow, to stretch ahead to the next anchor post.

I was at the tenth now, and hurrying, flexing my toes inside my boots to reassure myself that feeling and movement were still there. But heels cannot be flexed, and it was at the heel that cold was likely to strike first. Eleven. Four more would be about halfway. Re-fixing the clip 1 pulled the line, and this time only a yard or two came up. Ahead of me it ran taut and at an angle, to a point well down beneath the surface. I knelt then, and began to dig rapidly in the snow with my mittened hands, flinging it aside in a spray of dry particles. Why hadn't I brought the spade from the hovercraft? The usual reasons: lack of thinking power, lack of foresight, lack of concentration! If the snow had been even lightly compacted, it would have been impossible to dig like that, but it wasn't compacted and I was swiftly two feet down, then three, scrabbling like a dog with his forepaws until.., my hands touched something hard in the snow, something that became dark in the surrounding white as I swept the powdery flakes from it. I knelt for a moment then, sickened by yet another death. But I was sure now. Sure except that one small yet critical point remained to be confirmed. I grabbed the line again, ran my hand along it until it touched not only the body but the hard, metal shape of a dog clip. The line ran through the clip and away, and when I reached beyond and pulled, it cut upwards through the snow to run tight and straight to the next anchor post. I stood then, knowing it was true. The innocent cause of all Camp Hundred's problems lay here in the snow at my feet . . , feet that were becoming colder inside my dampened felt boots. Quickly I bent and pushed back into the hole the snow I had dug away, then smoothed it as well as I could. Even when I'd finished, it stood out a mile, rough and disturbed among the surrounding smoothness. But as I looked, I realized it was already being covered; ten minutes more and it would begin to blend into the endless snowscape. I thought of trying to uproot the anchor posts to make the killer's search more difficult, but realized it couldn't work. Only by severing the line could the body be hidden, and in severing the line, I'd be destroying the evidence. I turned and began to work my way back the way I had come, along the line, knowing he was out there somewhere -probably waiting to see if he'd been followed - and that somehow I must stop him before he could reach the spot and at last conceal the continuing proof of his guilt.

The hut lay only a little more than a hundred yards ahead, but I was slowed by the need to clip and re-clip my belt. With nine anchor posts behind me the hut was still not in sight, but I thought I could hear faintly the idling note of the TK4*s engine. The temptation to run towards it was almost irresistible; once inside there would be the safety of the metal structure, the warmth of the heater, the speed of the machine itself. Inside I'd be safe. But the knowledge that I was not alone out there dictated caution. He might have

- probably had - the rifle, unless he'd taken the risk of returning it to Barney's office so that its absence would go unremarked. Time was one of his problems, too; he dared not be absent long enough for the absence to be noticed. If he could destroy the evidence and get back quickly, it might be difficult, even impossible to pin on him his long sequence of crimes. And if he could get rid of me, it would almost certainly be impossible. If my body, too, were lost beneath the snow, the diary would be lost with it, and the sheet from Kirton's notebook!

I went down full length in the snow and began to kitten-crawl forward, parallel with the hand line but no longer fastened to it, and pushing before me with my hands a tiny wall of snow no more than six inches high.

I saw the hut at the same second that the idling engine note became a roar and the huge diesel tractor swung into view, lights blazing, from behind the hut. I shut my eyes tight, but not quickly enough, and the powerful white beams assaulted my widened pupils, blinding me completely. Shakily I rose to my feet, sightless and disorientated by dazzle patterns, and tried desperately to gauge direction by sound alone. The roar was from my right, though it seemed now to fill the night air all round me. He must be twenty-five or thirty yards away and his maximum speed six miles an hour or so. I swung left and tried to run, but my foot caught in the slack hand line and I pitched full length. As I struggled to rise, my foot remained hooked in the line, briefly but enough to delay me, and already the massive roar of the big diesel engine seemed to be on top of me. I turned my head, squinting my eyes against the glare, and thought I discerned, among the redness in my eyes, a wide dark shape with the glare of the lights above it, and I knew then that this was not just a tractor but a bulldozer, blade down, that was hammering down on me. I made two or three lumbering strides away from it, but my foot slipped on the loose snow and I spun off balance, and by the time I'd steadied myself again, it was almost on top of me. Terrified, I turned to face it, knowing there was no way now that I could avoid that eighteen-foot blade : it would be on me before I could move aside. The half-seen black rectangle with those blinding white lights mounted high above it roared down on me, only a few feet away, and knowing suddenly there was no other way, I dived towards it, seizing desperate handholds on the top edge and lifting my feet clear of the surface and hanging there as the blade drove onwards.