Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted: “George! You hear me? George!”
Lin didn’t move or respond.
“You think he’s alive?” Brian asked.
“Must be. Didn’t fall far. Clothes are quilted, insulated–absorbed some impact.”
Brian cupped both hands around his mouth and shouted at Lin.
The only answer came from the steadily increasing wind, and it was easy to believe that its shriek was full of gleeful malevolence, that this wind was somehow alive and daring them to remain at the brink just a moment longer.
“Have to go down and get him,” Roger said.
Brian studied the slick, vertical wall of ice that dropped twenty feet to the ledge. “How?”
“We’ve got rope, tools.”
“Not climbing gear.”
“Improvise.”
“Improvise?” Brian said with astonishment. “You ever done any climbing?”
“No.”
“This is nuts.”
“No choice.”
“Got to be another way.”
“Like what?”
Brian was silent.
“Let’s look at the tools,” Roger said.
“We could die trying to rescue him.”
“Can’t just walk away.”
Brian stared down at the crumpled figure on the ledge. In a Spanish bullring, on the African veldt, on the Colorado River, skin-diving in a shark run off Bimini… In far-flung places and in so many imaginative ways, he had tempted death without much fear. He wondered why he was hesitating now. Virtually every risk he’d ever taken had been pointless, a childish game. This time he had a good reason for risking everything: A human life was at stake. Was that the problem? Was it that he didn’t want to be a hero? Too damned many heroes in the Dougherty family, power-thirsty politicians who had become heroes for the history books.
“Let’s get working,” Brian said at last. “George’ll freeze if he lies there much longer.”
1:05
Harry Carpenter leaned into the handlebars and squinted through the curve of Plexiglas at the white landscape. Hard sprays of snow and spicules of sleet slanted through the headlights. The windshield wiper thumbed monotonously, crusted with ice but still doing its job reasonably well. Visibility had decreased to ten or twelve yards.
Although the machine was responsive and could be stopped in a short distance, Harry kept it throttled back. He worried that unwittingly he might drive off a cliff, because he had no way of knowing where the iceberg ended.
The only vehicles in use by the Edgeway expedition were custom-stretched snowmobiles with rotary-combustion engines and specially engineered twenty-one-wheel, three-track bogie suspensions. Each machine could carry two adults in bulky thermal clothing on a thirty-six-inch padded bench. The driver and passenger rode in tandem, one behind the other.
Of course the machines had been adapted further for operations in the rugged polar winter, in which conditions were dramatically more severe than those encountered by snowmobile enthusiasts back in the States. Aside from the dual starter system and the pair of special heavy-duty arctic batteries, the major modification on each vehicle was the addition of a cabin that extended from the hood to the end of the stretched passenger bench. That enclosure was fabricated of riveted aluminum sheets and thick Plexiglas. An efficient little heater had been mounted over the engine, and two small fans conducted the warm air to the driver and passenger.
Perhaps the heater was a luxury, but the enclosed cabin was an absolute necessity. Without it, the continuous pounding of the wind would have chilled any driver to the bone and might have killed him on a trip longer than four or five miles.
A few of the sleds had been further modified in unique ways. Harry’s was one of those, for he was transporting the power drill. Most tools were carried in the shallow storage compartment that was hidden under the hinged top of the passenger bench, or in a small open-bed trailer towed behind. But the drill was too large for the storage compartment and too important to the expedition to be exposed to the shocks that rattled the bed of a cargo trailer; therefore, the last half of the bench was fitted with locking braces, and the drill was now dogged down tightly behind Harry, occupying the space where a passenger ordinarily would have been.
With those few modifications, the sled was well suited for work on the Greenland ice. At thirty miles per hour, it could be stopped within eighty feet. The twenty-inch-wide track provided excellent stability on moderately rough terrain. And although it weighed six hundred pounds in its adapted form, it had a top speed of forty-five miles per hour.