Cain stared down from the hatch, watching the cable swinging astern, watching the surgeon Grade Three freeze.
Cain and Disable.
Now Disable was disabled. If he had another magazine he couldn’t use it because the bag was going slack beneath him, and he needed both hands to hang on.
Zuiden had two choices — become an iceman or drop and get it over.
This was for Ron, he thought. For Hunt. For the dentists they’d shafted — an event he had to witness for them all.
Zuiden stared up, his encrusting face and clothing turning solid.
Cain remembered when they were young. When Zuiden had left him down a crevasse. Left him to die. Cost him three toes. Remembered Zuiden in the tent — sneering and raising his finger.
Cain raised a finger, slowly.
The freezing man grimaced back, then deliberately let go of the cable.
Cain watched him fall, was forced to smile and shake his head with admiration. Zuiden had assumed the skydiver’s arch position — chest forward, arms back, aerodynamically stable and face down. The big-dick bastard was still proving he was top banana — putting the last touch to his legend. The supreme sensory-overload buzz.
Cain waited the brief seconds until the star-shape smacked high-speed ice.
‘Bet you shat yourself, Jan,’ he said.
He winched the slack bag up.
56
LANDFALL
With only two of the original crew left, the flight became forced labour. Furious side winds and turbulence obliged them to change height to minimise drift, which meant trading off lift against weight. Once, they descended low enough to trail a hose in the sea and pumped up water for extra ballast.
When they could, Flynn and Duckworth alternated in the gondola to work the rest of the ship. Cain became apprentice rigger and chief bottle-washer to the experts.
He spent hours outside the cabin in the half-light of the pitching, rolling envelope, freezing on the narrow catwalk above the spine of the carbon-tubed hull. He climbed high on spidery structures that surrounded the hose-entangled gas cells, wiggled past bracing cables to pass on patches and tools or de-ice valves.
He was shown how to operate pumps, how to free blocks in toggled hoppers, how to check inboard fuel and oil reservoirs and the exhaust water recovery system. He had to monitor the servo-turned worm gears that operated the huge control surfaces at the stern and check for ice on the outrigger gears that swivelled the propulsion ducts.
During rewarming time, he acted as steward and tended the bandaged Snodgrass. The bullet had gone through but the concern was infection. He used all the antibiotic powder but the keel officer steadily got worse.
At night he checked the systems in the hull’s dark and lofty tomb, red-eyed, exhausted, unsteadied by the sluggish yaw and pitch, trying not to fall through the flimsy fabric to the wild sea far below.
They docked at the edge of the Punta Arenas airport in the still air of a pewter-coloured dawn. The tower was a converted mobile crane. There was no winching down. They lowered the rudimentary wheels and a ground crew manned the ropes and outside rails.
Flynn had offered to take him on the next leg but he knew it would be no way to thank him, would jeopardise the expedition, that he had to get off. Filthy, unshaven, exhausted, the pope’s manuscript safe in his kit, he stepped onto snow-covered grass. His sea legs made the earth rock.
Snodgrass and the shrouded pope’s body were carried with great fuss to the ambulance while the groggy but elated Flynn and Duckworth were enveloped by media crews. All attention was on the others as he limped toward the huddled spectators.
He reached the knot of people, too tired to be alert, hoping that EXIT wasn’t there — no fight left in him.
Two men in padded windjackets fell in either side of him. He recognised the soft face and sharp eyes of Harry Frost, the CIA physiologist he’d met on the mountain-top in New Zealand. The other man had a thin head with large ears and sucked an unlit pipe. Half a dozen blank-faced men now moved with them, distrustful eyes on the crowd.
‘Good morning,’ Frost smiled.
‘Hi.’ He just wanted to sleep.
‘Meet Julian Wilson. One of our senior people.’
The man with the pipe nodded. He looked like Special Group.
Cain said, ‘Better you than them.’
Wilson’s thoughtful expression didn’t alter.
‘We need a word,’ Frost said. ‘Got you booked into our hotel. Chance to rest, clean up.’
‘Get me there.’
The trip into town was circuitous. Again they weren’t taking chances. The four-car convoy detoured through slushy dirt roads past tin shanties with colourful roofs and stove-pipe chimneys, rusting cars and mangy dogs. The inner city’s elegant square was surrounded by impressive stone buildings. Machine-gun-toting carabineros stood conspicuously on street corners. Frost pointed out features. ‘Was an important place before the canal.’ He could have done without the city tour.
They reached a hotel with an air of refined decay and escorted him to a room. It had a spa-bath, hot rail and could have been on 56th in New York.
They gave him an hour to fix himself up. He emerged a clean shaved shadow of his former self and the heavies outside his door escorted him to another suite.
‘So,’ Frost handed him coffee, ‘we have the pope. Now we’re interested in Stern, the sisters, Nina.’
He took the cup, hand shaking, eyes gritty with tiredness. ‘So you knew about Stern and John?’
‘We do now.’ Wilson tamped his bowl-blackened pipe. ‘You two-timers.’
‘I just worked there.’
‘So who’s still alive at Alpha?’
Frost said, ‘We need to know what’s happened, Ray. Then you can sleep.’
Sleep deprivation was one of the most insidious tortures known. He had no reason to put himself through that, no reason to deceive. So he told them what he knew, which became an outline of the destruction of EXIT, and the two attentive faces became grim. He expected they were recording him but it hardly mattered now.
It took two hours. At the end of it, the part of him still awake was tripping on caffeine.
Frost cleaned his half-frames. ‘A great pity about Nina.’
‘But Stern’s the money-shot for us,’ Wilson said. ‘Think carefully. Is there a chance he could be alive?’
‘Pretty slim.’ His eyes kept shutting. ‘Look, I’m a threatened species, I’m whacked and I’ve told you all I know. Now can you guys give me a head start? Or some kind of steer on all this?’
‘We’re not authorised to assist EXIT personnel. I need hardly tell you that.’ Wilson’s pipe had gone out a fourth time. He probed it with a match. ‘But, if it’s any joy, we’re flying back via Santiago. I can stretch a point and drop you off. Let you catch a commercial flight from there.’
‘Appreciate that.’
‘As for advice,’ Wilson sucked his teeth, ‘you’re now Vanqua’s favourite target. But if you’re still alive in a month, you can kiss his arse goodbye.’
‘How come?’
The man deliberated how to put it. The lines of his frown seemed to draw the sides of his skull together while his ears appeared ready to take wing. ‘Let’s just say he’s had his run — but he doesn’t know it yet.’
57
EXPECTED GUESTS
Cain didn’t understand it. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. His credit cards and fake passports were still accepted everywhere. Santiago airport appeared free of surgeons. He was back in the world of posturing businessmen, agitated mothers, sullen shoppers, mortality-conscious suburbanites and the triumph of TV over tradition.
He flew Easter Island, Tahiti, Auckland, then switched airlines for the Sydney leg. He went first class, craving comfort and faked consideration — much as the hopeless or rejected would gamble, overeat or drink. He sat beside a concert pianist and, on the last leg, the Malaysian foreign minister. He didn’t fraternise and comforted himself by studying John’s book.