‘Let’s try that again,’ said Gallen, as the cavern reduced suddenly to a tunnel that a medium-sized dog would have to squeeze through.
Retracing their steps, both of them slipped on the ice as they struggled to make headway up the slight incline, the snow shoes giving no purchase on the shiny surface. Small gutters had been cut in the ice where the melt water flowed.
‘Need my golf shoes,’ said Winter as they crested a small rise and paused.
Panting, Gallen looked around, the air temperature dropping into the minus-twenty range with the coming of night. ‘This way,’ he pointed, and stepped out.
The first slip was comical and as he swung his arms around for balance, Gallen almost laughed. Then he slipped again, his feet going straight upwards, leaving him horizontal in mid-air.
‘Gerry!’ yelled Winter above the din of the helo, and as Gallen hit the ice slopes his snow shoes broke off and he was accelerating like an Olympic luger. Gathering speed across the surface, Gallen plummeted and bounced towards the ice wall at the bottom of the slope, screaming as he did so and praying to a God he hadn’t spoken to since his teens. Gallen’s head bounced off the concrete-like floor, and he looked ahead and saw the ice wall approaching at twenty-five mph.
Readying himself for death — or life in a wheelchair — Gallen shut his eyes and tried to relax his body. The final ground before the collision suddenly gave way and he was falling and accelerating. And then the momentum had ceased and Gallen opened his eyes. He was lying in a pool of water, in a wide guttering at the edge of another ice cave.
Pulling himself out of the incredibly cold water, Gallen gasped for air, the nightmare memory of pleurisy returning. All around him was the noise of the helo and Winter’s shouts.
‘Kenny, Kenny,’ he said into the mic, scared he was going to pass out with the shock of the cold water, ‘I’m okay. I went under the ice wall. Repeat, I’m okay but wet.’
Shaking as he turned, he made his fingers wrap around the flashlight in his parka pocket and fumbled with the power switch. ‘Shit,’ he said to himself, not wanting to ever feel as cold as he had after that plane wreck. He’d promised himself it would never happen again.
Finally getting the flashlight powered up, he swung it around as his jaw seized shut.
‘Gerry,’ came Winter’s voice in the helmet. ‘I’m coming. Stay dry, I’m coming.’
‘Roger th-th-that,’ said Gallen, forcing it out as his nervous system tried to shut down. Turning slowly with the flashlight, he recognised the cavern; it was where he had found the prone form of Donny McCann.
Movement came from the corner of his eye, and in the gloom he could see a fluoro-yellow helmet poking through the ice culvert that he’d just slid through.
‘Here, boss,’ came Winter’s voice over the speakers in Gallen’s helmet, but now the voice sounded like it was echoing up from a well. The cave was starting to take on a dream-like quality as Winter arrived in front of Gallen.
‘Shit, boss. Fuck!’ he said.
Gallen, his brain swirling towards unconsciousness, was unable to talk or smile or even shut his mouth; his face had completely seized up.
Tearing off his own parka and balaclava, Winter ripped at Gallen’s sodden clothes as he stood like a helpless infant. Gallen’s brain was taking him into dream realms, back to the hot baths his mother used to run him after hockey, young Gerry soaking in the warmth while his parents argued about turning a sensitive boy into a hockey thug, Gerry lying there in a halfway world between his mother’s desire for him to be educated and his dad’s need to have at least one son who could spend time in the bin without it ruining his day.
The life was draining out, it felt like the end, as Winter pulled the dry balaclava and parka onto Gallen. And here he was sixteen years after refusing to take the hockey scholarship to the University of North Dakota, because he wanted to join the Marines instead. Turning his back on the one thing that would have made both his mom and dad proud — getting a degree while playing for the Fighting Sioux — to become a soldier.
His mother. Why didn’t he call his mother?
The first slap felt like a dream. The second made his eyes open and focus.
‘Gerry!’ the man shouted, and slapped him again.
‘Th-th-th… there,’ said Gallen, his whole body shaking with the exertion of speaking. He couldn’t make his arm move and so he pointed with his forehead.
Winter aimed his flashlight at the floor in the middle of the cavern. ‘Here, Gerry? This it?’
Closing his eyes, Gallen made himself nod once.
Winter walked away into the cave, the beam from his helmet fixed on the ice floor. He was wearing a layer of thermals and a jumper and nothing else. The flashlight beam crisscrossed in the gloom and then it was pointed in one direction.
Gallen’s head felt disembodied, as if it was floating away. He felt a sadness, as if he was closer to his mom than he had been since he was sixteen, yet still so far from her.
He felt like crying but his face wouldn’t work. And then Winter was in front of him again, slapping him and pointing, and then the Canadian’s arm was around his shoulder and under his armpit and they were moving, Gallen forcing each slow step as his body cried to shut down, brain-first.
Standing against the wall, Winter put on his helmet and Gallen listened as he told the pilot and loadmaster what to do. The noise built and then the entire centre section of the roof was collapsing, the Sikorsky’s landing gear sticking through, the landing lights lighting up the cave like a Broadway stage.
The loadmaster lowered the harnesses and Gallen watched helpless as Winter — now suffering from the cold himself — clipped Gallen onto the line and gave the thumbs-up.
As Gallen was raised into the Sikorsky’s belly, he watched Winter disappear like an apparition.
Hands grabbed at him as his mind floated away, into a dream of hot baths and a mother who had left him, but still cared.
And then the sleep came.
CHAPTER 50
His mouth was glued shut. He became aware of the crunch of the cotton pillow case and the soft sound of a TV on low volume.
Opening his eyes, Gallen let himself acclimatise as he did his test of toes and fingers. He was dressed in a foil suit inside several quilts. Feeling okay, but groggy, he tried to raise his head and was hit by a swoon that made him groan and hit the pillow again.
‘Shit, boss,’ came Winter’s voice, as Gallen squinted to stop his mind spinning. ‘Don’t move till I get the quack, okay?’
The doctor arrived eight minutes later and spent an hour going over Gallen’s vital signs, his eyesight, cognition and blood pressure.
‘So, it’s a Monday, you say?’ she said, getting Gallen propped up on several pillows against the hotel bedstead. ‘Want another guess?’
Squinting against the daylight, he felt a Krakatoa-size headache in its early stages. ‘I give up,’ he croaked.
‘Try Wednesday,’ she said, standing and packing her bag. ‘You’ll be okay, but you’re lucky you have a fast-thinking friend.’
‘And a helo on standby,’ said Winter, winking.
‘He needs a day of rest, okay, Mr Winter?’
‘Gotcha, Doc.’
‘I mean it. A full day. I’m holding you responsible.’
Giving Winter her business card, she said goodbye and left.
Grabbing a cold beer, Winter sat on the end of Gallen’s bed and handed him a water-damaged manila file. ‘I’ve read it — your turn.’
Gallen looked: inside were the red pages of the Newport Associates report, titled Operation Nanook. Behind it was another report which, Gallen realised, contained the original backgrounders on Gallen and his team as prepared for Harry Durville.