Wright opened his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths to clear his aching head and with a weak smile looked over and said that he’d really messed up this time. Unlike Hetherington, Wright was not as badly injured and was able, after a time, to crawl out from his damaged seat. “Are you alright?” Wright asked his friend.
Hetherington weakly smiled back, but did not say a word.
Wright bit his lip, he knew Hetherington was hurt, he just would not admit it. After making sure that his friend as comfortable as possible, Wright took a blanket and covered the broken windshield, hoping to stop the snow from falling down onto his trapped comrade. He looked back through the shattered fuselage and realized that their plane was resting at a steep angle and that he would have to climb up through the wreckage to get out. Wright bit his lip when he saw that their radio set was smashed beyond repair. After a couple of minutes digging through the cabin, he found a couple of cans of food, but no flares, or anything else he could have used to signal for help.
Their inexperience was coming back to haunt them. They’d never bothered to see if the plane was properly provisioned with emergency supplies before leaving their ship.
They quickly discussed their dire predicament. Hetherington insisted that Wright, for both of their sakes, had to try to make for the coast. Perhaps he could somehow flag down their ship as it sailed by. When they didn’t return, both men knew that Captain Williams, master of the ship, the Commodore, would surely come looking for them.
Wright reluctantly agreed, left his friend with half of their meager supply of food, and crawled his way out through a hole torn open in the back of the plane. On the surface of the desolate glacier, Wright stood all alone, shivering from the cold. He looked around. His heart ached when he realized that he couldn’t see far in any direction. The island was shrouded in a thick, gray fog.
The falling snow didn’t help, either.
He felt low. Wright did not fear for his own life, not while his dearest and oldest friend lay trapped inside their wrecked plane. If help wasn’t found soon, he knew that Hetherington would not last long in the cold with a severed spine. He tried to get his bearings in the fog; however, it proved impossible. Wright dug out a coin from his pocket and flipped it in the air. It landed heads up. He turned to his right, slipped his hands in his pockets, and began to walk.
As he trudged over the ice, he prayed that he would reach the shore and that before too long their ship would find him. Instead of heading due west towards the only beach accessible from the sea, Wright began to walk south.
Before too long, the falling snow and cold fog began to make him shiver from his head to his toes.
His teeth soon began to chatter. “Well, old boy, you’ve truly gone and mucked it up this time,” Wright muttered to himself.
The temperature wasn’t below freezing; however, Wright was slowly becoming hypothermic. The smartest thing he could have done was turn around and head back to the plane. Instead, his loyalty to his injured friend drove him on. After walking blindly in the fog for several hours, Wright stopped next to a tall ice ridge and sat down for a moment to rest his tired and aching feet. He pulled his damp jacket tight around his neck, trying to keep the snow from falling down the back of his neck.
Wright felt himself suddenly become very tired. Although he was shivering, his body felt unbelievably warm. He undid his jacket to let his body heat escape. Next, he pulled off his gloves to let his hands feel the cool air.
He sat back and closed his eyes.
Wright decided that he needed to take a short nap before continuing his walk to find help. With his body’s core temperature rapidly dropping, Wright died half an hour later from exposure, frozen to the glacier.
The falling snow soon covered his body.
Back inside the crushed remains of their plane, Hetherington was fading in and out of consciousness. He looked down at his watch and saw that his colleague had been gone for close to six hours. Outside, the world was beginning to darken. With a silent prayer on his lips that Wright would make it, he knew that his end was coming soon. With his one good hand, he dug around in his jacket and pulled out a picture of his fiancée Anne. She was wearing a long dress and a hat with a tall feather protruding from the side. Anne was standing in front of her parents’ home in Lancashire with a warm smile on her slender face. He brought the picture up to his lips and kissed her good-bye. With the photo held tightly in his hand, Hetherington let the creeping fatigue in his body take hold. Sometime during the night, he too also succumbed to the effects of hypothermia.
When their plane failed to return, Captain Williams began a methodical search for the missing men. The ship’s radio operator didn’t leave his post for days while they searched for Wright and Hetherington, hoping to catch a call from the lost plane. Although they sailed within several kilometers of the island, Williams did not feel that they would have tried to land a seaplane on an ice-covered island. After three days steaming around the cold, dark waters of the South Atlantic, Williams called off the search and headed for the nearest port in Argentina to report the loss.
People soon reported seeing the plane floating on the waters off Antarctica or trapped on the pack ice, the men living off seals and fish while they waited for rescue. One person even wrote a letter to Anne claiming that her fiancé was living in Chile under an assumed name. Anne, however, refused to believe any of the stories. She knew in her heart that her fiancé was dead. All she wanted was to bring his remains home so he could be buried.
A year after they had gone missing, Anne outfitted an expedition to search for the missing men’s remains. Unlike Captain Williams, she insisted that they land on the desolate shores of Bouvet Island. With a crew of experienced men, Anne struggled up onto the glacier and spent several days fruitlessly searching for any sign of the plane and its occupants. By a cruel trick of fate, they came within a hundred meters of the crevice concealing the crashed plane. However, with a storm brewing out to sea and visibility fading fast, she was persuaded by the leader of the search party to call off the search. With a heavy heart, she reluctantly sailed for home, never to learn the fate of her fiancé and his close friend.
3
On the desolate, rocky surface of the Moon in the cold vacuum of space sat the Luna 15 probe. Launched eight days earlier from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soviet Union, the probe was the third Soviet probe sent to the Moon on a mission to gather and return samples of dirt and rock to the Earth. The first two missions had both ended in abject failure. The initial attempt never archived escape velocity and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, while the second had flown straight past the Moon and out into the cold depths of space. However, after completing fifty-two orbits of the Moon to ensure it was still operational after its 385,000-kilometer flight, the decision was made to land the probe.