She took a look back. Getting too far ahead again. Carlos was behind her, hauling the other banana sled. Then X and Wade. Behind them Ta Shu, still looking around every few steps, still talking to his distant audience, or presumably taping a talk. Then Jorge and Elspeth, obviously wasted; and Jim hanging back with Jack, who was holding his right elbow with his left hand. All eight moving in slow motion, as far as Val was concerned. The wind was getting gusty, hard buffets interspersed with dead air. She found it hard not to feel for Jack, who was certainly a jerk, but whose collarbone must have hurt with every misstep on the ice. He was definitely angry at Val for spurring him on, back on Mohn Basin. And X was angry at her too for that matter, for the Mac Town stuff. Of course. There really was a curse on this trip.
Wade was holding his wrist to his mouth and shouting into it, in yet another fruitless attempt to reach the world; or maybe he had heard a ring and was trying to respond. Then he slipped, and hastily started using that ski pole again. Anyway there would be no help for them from the outside now, no matter if he made contact or not. Val took off again, very chilled, happy to stop facing the wind. The glacier here was nearly flat, only a slight tilt downhill. The blue ice was dimpled as usual, but other than that easy going. A rubble line of black and rust-colored rocks paralleled them to the left. The black cliffs walling the glacier on both sides had clearly been shaved smooth by earlier higher versions of the glacier, which must have run a thousand feet higher by the looks of it, for the cliffs were shaved that high, right to the feet of ramparts which then jumped up, scaling to peaks in the sky far above them. It was not as tight and deep a canyon as the Axel Heiberg’s, but something about the vast breadth of it was even more impressive; as if they were ants. Everything was enormous. Shackleton Field Camp was about seventeen miles ahead of them, down where the McGregor Glacier poured into the Shackleton, in a giant confluence under Mount Wade. But all that was invisible under the massed clouds rolling up the canyon, except for Mount Wade lofting high over all—white snow over white cloud. Storm coming.
This group was not going to be able to hike in a storm of any severity. Despite herself Val recalled Krakauer’s searing account of the notorious Everest debacle, ten people killed in a single day, and mostly because the guides had gotten a bit overconfident; they had been taking complete amateurs to the top of Everest for hefty fees, and had dealt with all kinds of problems shepherding them up and down, including hauling comatose ones from the peak all the way back down the mountain, so that they thought they had all possible situations in hand; but had never been on the summit ridge in a storm. And so when the inevitable happened and a storm struck on summit day most of the clients had died, and the lead guide had stayed high on the peak trying to save one of them and had died too. Near the end his base camp had patched his radio link into their satellite phone so that he had been able to have a final talk with his pregnant wife back in New Zealand. An early example of the total com age’s mixed blessings.
When Val had read Krakauer’s account, early in her guiding career, she had vowed never to make the same sort of mistakes. And she hadn’t, at least so far. She had never guided on the eight-thousand-meter peaks, or on any other radically dangerous climbs or tours. Other guides were still taking amateur clients up Everest, of course, and people were still dying up there on a regular basis; these days the southeast ridge resembled a cemetery cracked down the middle and thrust into the stratosphere, the bodies (a couple hundred now) spilling down both sides of the slope. But she had refused all such work. She had only taken on competent clients, she had never pushed the outside of the envelope when she was with clients, she had paid very respectful attention to the weather. In Antarctica you had to. She had sat out storms many many times, sometimes for up to two weeks straight, resisting all pleas to forge on from the (mostly bored) clients. And so on. She had been a safe guide!
But here she was. There really did seem to be a curse on this trip, a malignant combination of problems. Well, that was what had struck down Hall’s group on Everest too. But here there was the added factor, unprecedented as far as she knew, of human sabotage. From what Carlos and X and Wade had said, it sounded like the saboteurs had tried to destroy the oil camps without causing any loss of life. But if anything went even slightly wrong down here, then the danger from the cold was immediate.
The wind stopped. Val stopped too. It shifted onto her left cheek, like a slap to the head; went dead, though the howl of it was all around them; then hit her again from the right. Then it struck her full in the face, the hardest blow of all. And suddenly they were hiking into the wind instead of away from it.
Val cursed into her ski mask. Already her sunglasses were icing up, and even at their lightest coloration their polarization dimmed the world to various shades of brilliant or dull gray. Still she could see quite clearly that the cloud that had been coming up the glacier was now upon them.
She took a sharp turn to the left, toward the rubble line, looking back and waving to make sure that everyone was following. She had almost left it too late, she saw, in her desire to get down to Shackleton Camp before the storm hit. Carlos had grasped the situation, and was actually running for the rubble. Bad weather changed everything. On a windless sunny day they could have marched down to Shackleton in style. But not today.
Then they were fully in the cloud. The wind shrieked. Visibility dropped to a few score yards—not a classic whiteout by any means, but a blizzard. The ice dust that composed the cloud was driven horizontally into them, it was like having an industrial sand-blaster shot into one’s face. Val’s clothes plastered against her, the wind penetrating right through the fabric. What she could see in the cloud was a kind of rapidly fluctuating bubble which appeared lit from below, as the glacier seemed brighter than the dark cloud rushing by. Her face hurt, and she had to drive each leg forward to take steps. Buffets of wind struck like blows from an invisible heavyweight. The noise of the shriek was incredibly loud, like jet engines on all sides, krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrr.
But she reached the rubble line. She turned and waved to the others. They staggered in one by one. She went back to help Jim help Jack over the remaining fifty yards or so, fighting to keep her balance. Jack was hunched, and couldn’t throw his right arm over her shoulder. She walked on the windward side of him with an arm around his waist, trying to protect him from the blasts. Any injury would be bound to hurt in this frigid wind, and a collarbone was much too close to the center of things. The noise was like a fleet of jet engines, it was too loud to talk.