“Because they’re going to make good and sure you’re never going to get off this glacier alive, Smallwood,” I went on. “At least, not out of the fjord alive. Neither you nor any of your friends coming to meet you – nor any of the men waiting aboard that trawler down there.”
God, how slowly they were coming! Why didn’t one of their marksmen with a rifle shoot Smallwood there and then – at that moment, the thought that a rifle bullet would have gone clear though Smallwood and killed the girl held so tightly in front of him never occurred to me. But if I could hold his attention another thirty seconds, if none of the others standing by my side betrayed by the slightest flicker of expression-
“They’re going to destroy that trawler, Smallwood,” I rushed on quickly. The men advancing up from the foot of the glacier were waving their arms furiously now, shouting wildly in warning, and even at over three-quarters of a mile their voices were carrying clearly. I had to try to drown their voices, to make sure that Smallwood kept his eyes fixed only on me. “They’re going to blow it out of the water, it and you and that damned missile mechanism. What’s the use of-”
But it was too late. Smallwood had heard the shouts even as I had begun to speak, twisted his head to look down the valley, saw the direction of the pointing arms, glanced briefly over his shoulder, then turned to face me again, his face twisted in a bestial snarl, that monolithic calm shattered at last:
“Who are they?” he demanded viciously. “What are they doing? Quick – or the girl gets it!”
“It’s a landing party from the destroyer in the next bay,” I said steadily. “This is the end, Smallwood. Maybe you’ll stand trial yet.”
Til kill the girl!” he whispered savagely.
“They’ll kill you. They’ve been ordered to recover that mechanism at all costs. Nobody’s playing any more, Smallwood. Give up your gun.”
He swore, vilely, blasphemously, the first time I had ever heard such words from him, and leapt for the driving cabin of the tractor, pushing the girl in front of him while his pistol swung in a wide arc covering all of us. I understood what he was going to do, what this last desperate suicidal gamble was going to be, and hurled myself at the door of the driving cabin.
“You madman!” My voice was a scream. “You’ll kill yourself, you’ll kill the girl-”
The gun coughed softly, I felt the white-hot burning pain in my upper arm and crashed backward on to the ice just as Smallwood released the brakes of the Citroen. At once the big tractor started to move, those murderous treads passing inches from me as Jackstraw leapt forward and dragged me to safety a second before they would have run over my face. The next moment I was on my feet, running after the tractor, Jackstraw at my heels: I suppose that wound just below my shoulder must have been hurting like hell, but the truth is that I felt nothing at all.
The tractor, with next to no adhesion left on the steepening slope of ice, accelerated with dismaying speed, soon outdistancing us. At first it seemed as if Smallwood was making some attempt to steer it, but it was obvious almost immediately that any such attempts were utterly useless: five tons of steel ran amok, it was completely out of control, skidding violently first to one side then the other, finally making a complete half-circle and sliding backward down the glacier at terrifying speed, following the slope of the ice which led from the right-hand side where we had been standing to the big nunataks thrusting up through the ice on the far left-hand corner of the dog-leg half-way down.
How it missed all the crevasses – it went straight across some narrow ones, thanks to its treads – and all the ice-mounds on the way down and across the glacier I shall never know, but miss them it did, increasing speed with every second that passed, its treads screeching out a shrilly metallic cacophony of sound as they scored their serrated way across and through the uneven ice of the glacier. But then, I shall never know either how Jackstraw and I survived all the crazy chances we took on our mad headlong run down that glacier, unable to stop, leaping across crevasses we would never have dared attempt in our normal minds, pounding our sliding way alongside others where the slip of either foot would have been our death.
We were still two hundred yards behind the tractor when, less than fifty yards from the corner, it struck an ice-mound, spun round crazily several times and then smashed, tail first, with horrifying force into the biggest of the nunataks – a fifty-foot pinnacle of rock at the very corner. We were still over a hundred yards away when we saw Small wood, obviously dazed, half-fall out of the still upright driving cabin, hat-box in hand, followed by the girl. Whether she flung herself at him or just stumbled against him it was impossible to say, but both of them slipped and fell together and next moment had disappeared from sight against the face of the nunatak.
Still fifty yards away, already trying all we could to brake ourselves, we heard the staccato roar of cannon shells seemingly directly above us and as I flung myself flat on the ice, not to avoid the fire but to stop myself before I, too, plunged into the crevasse by the nunatak where I knew Margaret and Smallwood must have disappeared, I caught a glimpse of two Scimitars hurtling low across the glacier, red fire streaking from their guns. For a moment, rolling over and over, I saw no more, then I had another glimpse of the lower part of the glacier, of exploding cannon shells raking a lethal barrier of fragmenting steel across the glacier’s entire width, and, about sixty or seventy yards lower down, the men from the trawler lying flat on their faces to escape the whistling flying shrapnel. Even in that brief moment I had time to see a third Scimitar screaming down out of the north, exactly following the path of the other two. They were making no attempt to kill the trawler men, obviously they were under the strictest instructions to avoid any but the most necessary bloodshed. And it wasn’t necessary, if ever anything was crystal clear it was the fact that we weren’t going to have any trouble at all from those trawler men. Both men and trawler could depart now, unmolested: with the missile mechanism beyond their reach, they no longer mattered.
Ten yards ahead of Jackstraw, sick to the heart and almost mad with fear, I reached the crevasse by the nunatak – no more than a three-foot wide gap between ice and rock – peered down over the side, and as I peered I felt faint from the wave of relief that swept over me: the crevasse, narrowing as it went down to not much more than two feet, ended about fifteen feet down in a solid shelf of rock, a ledge sculpted by thousands of years of moving, grinding ice.
Margaret and Smallwood were still on their feet, shaky, I could see, but seemingly unharmed – it had been a short drop and they could have slowed their descent by pressing against both sides of the crevasse as they fell. Smallwood, flattened lips drawn back over his teeth, was staring up at me, his pistol barrel pressed savagely against Margaret’s temple.
“A rope, Mason!” he said softly. “Get me a rope. This crevasse is closing – the ice is moving!”
And it was, I knew it was. All glaciers moved, some of them, on this West Greenland coast, with astonishing speed – the great Upernivik glacier, farther north, covered over four feet every hour. As if in confirmation of his words, the ice beneath my feet groaned and shuddered and slid forward a couple of inches.
“Hurry up!” Smallwood’s incomparable nerve held to the last, his voice was urgent but completely under control, his face tight-lipped but calm. “Hurry up or I’ll kill her!”
I knew he meant it absolutely.
“Very well,” I said calmly. My mind felt preternaturally clear, I knew Margaret’s life hung on a fraying thread but I had never felt so cool, so self-possessed in my life. I unwound the rope round my shoulders. “Here it comes.”
He reached up both hands to catch the falling rope, I took a short step forward and then, stiff-legged and with my hands pressed close to my sides, fell on top of him like a plummeting stone. He saw me coming, but with the tangle of the rope and the narrowness of the crevasse he had no chance to get clear. My feet caught him on the shoulder and outstretched arm, and we crashed on to the ledge together.