“Bacon,” Graeter said. “Best operator here. Cranky, but she can do surgery with that thing.”
The bulldozer drew abreast of them, about a hundred yards to their right. Hallie saw the operator, visible in the red light from the instrument panel. She started to wave before realizing that Bacon could see only what the headlights illuminated. She kept looking. It was hard to know for sure, but there seemed to be something odd about Bacon’s posture, her torso inclined forward against the seat belt, head down, almost as though she had dozed off.
“Mr. Graeter, I think there’s something wrong with—”
“I see it.” He pulled out his radio, then shoved it back into a pocket. The D9 veered right, heading straight for a line of red danger flags twenty feet away. Bacon’s Cat crushed the wands and kept on going. Graeter sat frozen for an instant, as if he could not believe what he was seeing.
“Hold on!” he shouted to Hallie.
Opening the throttle too quickly, he flooded the motor. He jumped off and yanked the starter, again and again, but it took half a dozen pulls to clear the flooded carburetor and get the engine to fire. By the time they stopped at the line of red wands, Bacon’s Cat was one hundred feet beyond and still moving.
“What’s in there?” Hallie shouted.
“It’s the area over Old Pole. Completely unstable. Do not move!” Graeter yelled. He jumped off and ran into the restricted area. He had gone only ten feet when the D9’s front end broke through the surface. The fracturing ice sounded like rifle shots.
“Jump!” Hallie screamed, but Bacon, still bathed in red light, sat motionless, pitched forward, held in place by her seat belt. Hallie watched in horror as the machine, haloed by its lights, sank deeper into the hole, tilting forward like a ship going down at the bow. Then came a huge, crumpling sound, and the D9 disappeared completely. The ice shook under Hallie’s feet. She heard a rumbling, then more ice fracturing at the bulldozer dropped deeper into the huge crevasse. Big enough to swallow locomotives, Graeter had said.
His headlamp beam danced crazily as he stumbled, turned around, fell to his hands and knees. A fracture line opened between Graeter and Hallie. The ice on which he lay began to tilt, and suddenly he was sliding toward the crevasse that had swallowed Bacon and her machine. Just before he dropped in, another, smaller crack appeared. The glow of his headlamp showed him grabbing its edge with both mittened hands. The whole section of ice swung down beneath him, like a giant trapdoor on hinges, finally stopping just short of dead vertical. All Hallie could see of Graeter was the bright glow of his headlamp showing above the edge of the fracture.
She ran toward him and, fifteen feet from where he held on, dropped to her belly like a baseball player sliding headfirst. Spread-eagled to distribute her weight as widely as possible, she pulled with her hands and pushed with her toes. Her own headlamp showed Graeter’s black mittens — all she could see of him from her prone position.
“Graeter,” she yelled. “Are you secure?”
“Barely.” He sounded breathless but uninjured. “I kicked little holes, but my boot toes could slip out at any time.”
“Do you know how deep it is?”
“No. And I don’t want to look.”
Could be a hundred feet, she thought. Or a thousand.
“I’m going to ease forward until I can grab your wrists.”
“Are you insane? I could pull us both down. You back off and wait until some people get here with ropes.”
“Can’t wait. You’ll lose your grip or the ice will break. They probably don’t even know anything happened. And you have the radio.”
She knew that a proper crevasse rescue involved belays and ropes and pulley haul systems, but there was no time for those niceties here. And what was the option? Let the man hang there until he dropped? She inched forward some more, reached out with her right hand, and gently closed her fingers around his left wrist. Two layers of gloves and mittens did not help, but the base of his thumb and the heel of his hand flared out like small handles, helping her hang on. She repeated the move, clutching his right wrist with her left hand. “Okay. Go ahead and kick new toeholds and try to step up.”
She felt the pull increase on her left hand as he picked up his right boot and began kicking a new cavity. “Good as it’ll get.” He kicked another. “Here goes.”
She felt him stand, slowly and gently, on that precariously poised right boot toe, felt him repeat the motion with his left, and then he had gained a foot. She could visualize the placements: a half-inch of boot sole pressed into the shallow concavities he had kicked. The only thing saving him was the extreme temperature. When it was that cold, friction could not generate enough heat to liquefy the ice’s microsurface. Instead of the slick ice that would have been there at warmer temperatures, this was more like sandpaper.
“Go again,” she said.
She waited, feeling her hands starting to numb. He kicked, again and again, then the agonizingly slow process of putting weight on each toehold and standing. But it was working. She could see his headlamp and most of his face. A crack opened up behind Hallie’s feet, and the ice surface on which she lay lurched, tilting down toward the crevasse. The angle was gentle yet, and she didn’t slide forward, but she knew that their combined motions and weight shifts could trigger a collapse and send them both plunging into the void. There was no time for him to finish coming up as he had been.
“Do you know how to do a mantle?” she asked.
“No.”
“It’s a climbing move. Put the palms of both hands on the edge of the crack right in front of your chest and push yourself up as far as your waist. Then you can flop forward and you’ll be out of there.”
“What the hell” was all he could manage.
She held on to his wrists as he leaned forward far enough to place his forearms and elbows on the sharp edge of the crack, with his palms on the ice right in front of his sternum.
He took a deep breath. “Here goes.”
She felt his forearms clench as he pushed down. Slowly his body rose until his waist was even with the edge of the crevasse and he could go no higher. Gently he folded over, gasping, laying his chest and belly flat on the ice, so that only his legs were still hanging over the side.
Elbow-crawling, he dragged himself forward, an inch at a time. When he moved, Hallie moved with him, wriggling back. Slowly they put distance between themselves and the crevasse edge. Five feet, ten, thirty, a hundred. Both breathless, they stopped and lay on their bellies. Hallie knew that Graeter’s brain was digesting the fact of its continued existence. It was like watching someone wake up from a trance.
Directing his headlamp to one side, to avoid blinding her, he said, “Son of a bitch. Nineteen years in the Navy and I never got that close.” He took a deep breath, exhaled. “Think it’s safe to stand now?”
“Yes.”
They got up and walked back to Graeter’s snowmo, brushing themselves off. Hallie was considering how lucky both of them were. Her own reaction had been instinctive, and she did not regret it. But inside all the layers, she felt her hands shaking, and it was not because of the cold. Before either she or Graeter could speak, two big men wearing black Dragger parkas and tool belts roared up on snowmos.
“What the hell happened?” one asked Graeter.
“Bacon’s machine broke through,” Graeter said. “Is anyone else coming?”
“I don’t know. We were headed to the machine shop when that dozer’s lights just disappeared. We figured it went down.”
“Is that you, Grenier?” Graeter asked.