“No!” My voice was hoarse, savage. “By God, you’re not going to tie me up, Smallwood!”
“Sit down, Mason!” His voice was hard, whip-like, and the light from the tractor cabin was enough for me to see the rock-like pistol barrel centred between my eyes. I ignored it completely.
“Jackstraw!” I shouted. “Zagero, Levin, Brewster! On your feet if you want to live. He’s only got one gun. If he starts firing at any of us, the rest go for him and get him – he can’t possibly get us all. Margaret, Helene, Mrs Dansby-Gregg-first shot that’s fired, run off into the darkness – and stay there!”
“Have you gone crackers, Doc?” The words came from an astonished Zagero, but for all that something namelessly urgent and compelling in my voice had got him to his feet, and he was bent forward, crouched like a great cat, ready to launch himself at Smallwood. “Want to get us all killed?”
“That’s just what I don’t want.” I could feel my spine, the back of my neck cold with a cold that was not of the Arctic, and my legs were trembling. “Going to tie us up and leave us here? Is he hell! Why do you think he told us of the trawler, its position, the submarine and all the rest of it? I’ll tell you why – because he knew it was safe, because he’d made up his mind that none of us would ever live to tell of these things.” I was rattling the words out with machine-gun rapidity, desperate with the need to convince the others of what I was saying before it was too late: and my eyes never left the gun in Smallwood’s hand.
“But-”
“No ‘buts’,” I interrupted harshly. “Smallwood knows that Hillcrest will be coming through here this afternoon. If we’re still here – and alive – first thing we’d tell him would be Smallwood’s course, speed, approximate position and destination. Within an hour the Kangalak glacier would be sealed, within an hour bombers from the Triton would have blasted him off the face of the glacier. Tie us up? Sure – and then he and Corazzini would shoot us at their leisure while we flopped around like birds with broken wings.”
Conviction was immediate and complete. I couldn’t see the faces of the others, but the fractional lowering of Smallwood’s gun was enough to tell me.
“I underestimated you, Dr Mason,” he admitted softly. His voice was devoid of all trace of anger. “But you almost died there.”
“What’s five minutes more or less?” I asked, and Smallwood nodded absently. He was already working out an alternative solution.
“You – you inhuman monster!” Senator Brewster’s voice was shaking with fear or anger or both. “You were going to tie us up and butcher us like – like-” Words failed him for a moment, then he whispered: “You must be mad, Smallwood, stark raving mad.”
“He’s not in the slightest,” Zagero said quietly. “Not mad. Just bad. But it’s kind of hard to tell the difference at times. Figured out our next jolly little scheme, Smallwood?”
“Yes. As Dr Mason says, we can’t possibly dispose of all of you inside a couple of seconds, which is all the time it would take for one – probably more – of you to reach the cover of the snow and darkness.” He nodded towards the tractor sled, lifted his high collar against the snow and biting wind. “I think you had better ride a little way with us.”
And ride with them we did for the thirty longest miles I have ever driven, for nine hours that had no end. A relatively short distance, but this eternity of time to cover it: partly because of the sastrugi, partly because of the increasingly long stretches of soft snow, but mainly because of the weather, which was deteriorating rapidly. The wind had now risen to something better than thirty miles an hour, it carried with it a blinding wall of flying ice-filled drift, and, even though it was directly behind us, it made things troublesome for the driver. For all the others except Smallwood it made the conditions intolerable: had the temperature been what it was only twenty-four hours previously, none of us, I am sure, would have survived that trip.
I would have thought that with either Smallwood or Corazzini driving and the other navigating from the dog-sled we would have had a chance, slender though it might be, to overpower them or at least make good our escape. But Smallwood never offered even a shadow of a chance of either. Corazzini drove all the time, with the radio direction finder headphones clamped to his ears, so that compass navigation became an inaccurate superfluity. Smallwood sat alone in the back of the tractor cabin, his gun unwaveringly trained on the rest of us who were crammed aboard the big tractor sled, ten feet to the rear of him: when the snow eventually became too heavy he stopped the tractor, detached the portable searchlight and mounted it, facing aft, in the rear of the tractor cabin; this had the double advantage of illuminating us so that he could clearly see us even through the drift and making certain that none of us tried to drop off the sled, and of blinding us so that we were quite unable to see what he was doing, even to see whether he was watching us at all. It was frustrating, maddening. And, for good measure and to prevent any desperate attempt at escape in the occasionally blinding flurries of snow, he brought Margaret and Helene up into the cabin and bound their hands: they were the surety for our good conduct.
That left eight of us on the tractor sled, Theodore Mahler and Marie LeGarde stretched out in the middle, three of us sitting on each side. Almost immediately after we had moved off and pulled a pair of tarpaulins over ourselves for what meagre shelter they could afford, Jackstraw leaned across and tapped me on the shoulder with something held in his hand. I reached up and took it from him.
“Corazzini’s wallet,1 he said softly. For all the chance of his being overheard by either Smallwood or Corazzini above the roar of the engine and the voice of the gale, he could have shouted out the words. “Fell from his pocket when Zagero knocked him down. He didn’t see it go, but I did – sat on top of it while Smallwood told us to squat in the snow.”
I stripped off my gloves, opened the wallet and examined its contents in the light of the torch Jackstraw had also passed across – a torch with the beam carefully hooded and screened to prevent the slightest chink of light escaping from under the tarpaulin: at this time, Smallwood had not yet switched on the searchlight.
The wallet provided us with that last proof of the thoroughness, the meticulous care with which these two men had provided themselves with false but utterly convincing identities: I knew that whatever Corazzini’s name was it wasn’t the one he had given himself, but, had I not known, the ‘N.C.” stamped on the hand-tooled morocco, the visiting cards with the inscribed ‘Nicholas Corazzini’ above the name and address of the Indiana head office of the Global Tractor Company, and the leather-backed fold of American Express cheques, each one already signed ‘N. R. Corazzini’ in its top left-hand corner, would have carried complete conviction.
And, too late, the wallet also presented us, obliquely but beyond all doubt, with the reason for many things, ranging from the purpose of the crash-landing of the plane to the explanation of why I had been knocked on the head the night before last: inside the bill-fold compartment was the newspaper cutting which I had first found on the dead body of Colonel Harrison. I read it aloud, slowly, with infinite chagrin.
The account was brief. That it concerned that dreadful disaster in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where a commuters’ train had plunged through an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay, drowning dozens of the passengers aboard, I already knew from the quick glance I had had at the cutting in the plane. But, as I had also gathered in the plane, this was a follow-up story and the reporter wasted little time on the appalling details: his interest lay in another direction entirely. It was ‘reliably reported’, he said, that the train had been carrying an army courier: that he was one of the forty who had died: and that he had been carrying a ‘super-secret guided missile mechanism’.
That was all the cutting said, but it was enough, and more than enough. It didn’t say whether the mechanism had been lost or not, it most certainly never even suggested that there was any connection between the presence of the mechanism aboard the train and the reasons for the crash. It didn’t have to, the cheek-by-jowl contiguity of the two items made the reader’s own horrifying conclusions inevitable. From the silence that stretched out after I had read out the last words, I knew that the others were lost in the same staggering speculations as myself. It was Jackstraw who finally broke this silence, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact.