Last Gasp Read online

  Chase gave a thumbs-up in the cone of light, indicating they were done. Nick kept on gesturing, his movements sluggish, dreamlike. What was the clown playing at?

  Chase kicked with his flippered feet and swam nearer. Nick’s eyes bulged at him through the faceplate. Again he pointed, but this time Chase realized that it was a frantic gesture over his shoulder toward his double cylinders. Something the matter with his air supply.

  It was difficult, trying to maneuver the awkward battery of lights with one hand while he spun Nick around with the other. Around them the blackness was total, just a speck of light in countless cubic feet of freezing water.

  The first cylinder was empty; its gauge registered zero. The second cylinder should have cut in automatically, but hadn’t, and Chase saw why. The exposed brass feed pipe was flecked with ice. The valve had frozen, and Nick was eking out his existence on what little remained in the first tank. At 130 feet that meant an ascent lasting several minutes— much too long for Nick to survive. And Chase couldn’t feed him from his own mouthpiece. Air supply and mask were an integral unit, and to remove your mask in these waters meant the cold would strike needles into your skull and kill you with the shock.

  For several seconds Chase’s mind was locked in paralysis. Nick had only a few gasps of air left. Even if he managed to get him to the surface alive, the lack of oxygen would cause irreparable brain damage, turn him into a human cabbage. The Antarctic was an implacable enemy. Relax your guard for even one instant and it would exact the full penalty. Negligence was death.

  Heat.

  You fought cold with heat. The only source available was the battery of lamps. The marine biologist grasped Nick by the shoulder, using the leverage to force the cowled arc light against the brass feed pipe. There had to be direct contact, otherwise the water would dissipate what little heat there was.

  Together they floated in inky darkness. The muted thump and gurgle of Chase’s air supply was the only sound. His companion had ceased to move and Chase found himself praying to a God in whom he didn’t believe. This was no longer the top of the world, but the bottom, with the weight of the planet pressing down on them. Below them a thick slab of ice, beyond that the tenuous troposphere, and then bottomless space.

  Wake up, wake up, he told himself savagely. He was starting to hallucinate, lose orientation. The cold was getting to him. If he didn’t concentrate he might start swimming toward the seabed, thinking it was the surface.

  Nick’s arm twitched under his gloved hand. His head turned, the faceplate misty with expired water vapor. For the second time in as many days Chase thought he had a dead man on his hands, and both times, thank God, he had been wrong.

  The valve, at last, was free. The ice on the feed pipe had melted, Chase saw with relief, and the gauge was registering again. A wavering chain of silver bubbles rose from Nick’s exhaust release and surged upward.

  Nick raised his arm and nodded weakly. He still had hold of the net, clamped in an instinctive grip. Holding the lamps above his head, Chase rose slowly, his other hand gripping Nick’s shoulder harness tightly. In minutes the two men were in sight of the circle of green lights that marked the entry point through the ice and then gratefully hauling themselves onto the diving platform. Wooden steps led upward, connecting with a plywood-lined corridor that ran from the edge of the Weddell Sea onto the Filchner Ice Shelf—the actual Antarctic Plateau. There the corridor led directly into the basement of the station, though it took the two men over fifteen minutes to reach it. Chase had wanted to leave their scuba sets on the platform to be collected later, but Nick insisted he could manage.

  He said dourly, “I hope those bloody specimens were worth getting. Are you sure we didn’t come up with an empty net?”

  Chase dumped his tanks on the rack and lifted the stainless-steel lid of the collecting vessel, in which the net sloshed in six inches of seawater.

  “Could be. Never be sure until we get it into the lab and take a look through the microscope.”

  “What?” Nick Power yelped. His face was circled with a fine red mark where the lip of the rubber hood had clung. It seemed even more incongruous because surrounding it was a frizzy mop of reddish hair and a straggly reddish beard, which for a reason Chase could never understand was neatly razor-trimmed in a crescent below the mouth while left to flourish unchecked elsewhere. An art student’s beard; odd, since Nick was a glaciologist. “Do you mean I might have killed myself for nothing? Died in the cause of science and have only two pints of seawater to show for it? Jesus bloody Norah.”

  “A noble cause nevertheless,” Chase intoned solemnly, filling the galvanized tub with steaming hot water. “And you wouldn’t have been forgotten, I’d have seen to that. Those two pints of seawater would have been your memorial.”

  “You’re all heart, Gav.” Nick stripped off his rubber suit down to a pair of briefs with a saucy motto on the crotch. His pale skin was tattooed with blue patches from the cold. Chase helped him into the tub. “The most selfless man I know,” Nick mumbled on, teeth chattering. “Think nothing of sacrificing a friend for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Allow me the privilege of accompanying you on your next suicide mission.”

  “Shut up and sit down,” Chase said. He filled another tub, stripped off his own suit, and sank into it with a blissful sigh. At first he felt nothing, and then came slowly the luxurious tingle of returning life through his frozen limbs. They’d been under the ice for nearly an hour, which at these temperatures was the absolute limit before damage was done to the body’s tissues.

  His last dive, no question of that. Very nearly Nick’s last dive, period.

  He felt a pang of guilt, mingled with thankful relief. Down there it was black, ball-freezing, and dangerous. They were both well out of it, thank Christ, alive and with all extremities intact. He cradled his privates in the hot soapy water and thought of Angie.

  The warmth began to seep through him, making him pleasantly drowsy.

  Only a few days more and then homeward bound, he dreamed, slipping into his favorite reverie. Angie’s blond hair, like pale seaweed. Angie’s lithe body and small upstanding breasts. Angie’s smooth skin, firm buttocks, and long legs. He’d always had a fatal weakness for leggy blondes with cut-glass accents. Coming from the back streets of Bolton in Lancashire, he wondered whether it wasn’t some murky atavistic impulse, the caveman instinct to possess, control, have power over something fragile, inviolate. It reminded him of the childhood thrill of planting his feet across a field of virgin snow, despoiling the serene white canopy.

  And why him? Perhaps she fancied a bit of rough. The ragged-arsed kid who’d elevated himself above his proper station to that of professional research scientist via a B.A. in oceanography and marine sciences at Churchill College, Cambridge, a master’s in the advanced course in ecology at Durham University, and a Ph.D. on the feeding ecology and energetics of intertidal invertebrates at the Stazione Zoologica, Naples.

  If he hadn’t known the curriculum vitae was his own, it would have impressed him.

  Thinking about Angie wasn’t such a good idea. It inevitably started him off on a fantasy seduction that tantalized his libido without satisfying it; better to postpone that line of thought until reality was made flesh.

  “How’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon?” he called out.

  Nick wafted his hand through the steam. “I’ve just come to the conclusion that you’re a nutcase. The original mad scientist.”

  “How’s that?” Chase inquired pleasantly, leaning back, eyes closed. The delicious warmth had penetrated right through him.

  “Why make it hard on yourself and difficult for the rest of us? If Banting doesn’t give a damn—and he doesn’t, we know that—why should you?”

  “What do you mean, difficult?”

  “By setting a bad example,” Nick clarified in a pained voice. “The tour’s nearly over. You’re off home soon and I’ve only got a month to do. Haven’t you done enough work?”

  �
��There were some specimens I needed, and it was my last opportunity. All right for you—you can get samples any time you want.”

  Nick Power’s work as a glaciologist involved extracting ice cores from a mile and a third beneath the polar cap to investigate their fifty-thousand-year-old history. Nick and Chase were the same age, twenty-seven. The two men had met for the first time at the station and become friends. In their off-duty hours they had alleviated the boredom by listening to Chase’s collection of early blues records and smoking Nick’s prime Lebanese Red, which a friendly American pilot brought in on the monthly supply run. This was Nick’s number-one priority; on the same chart glaciology came a poor second.

  “I’ve got a year to eighteen months lab work when I get back to Newcastle. I’ll need all the specimens I can get hold of.”

  “Hey, about that, Gav. Why go back to Newcastle? Why not try for a post in London? With your qualifications, and this experience at Hailey Bay, it should be a piece of cake.”

  “Newcastle sponsored me. I owe them something.”

  “Yeah, I was forgetting, you’re from the north, aren’t you?” Nick said, as if that explained everything. Having been born in Lewes in Sussex and lived most of his life in London, he visualized the north as one vast smoking slag heap populated by burly men in cloth caps and scrawny women in clogs and shawls. No civilized, educated, intelligent person ever stayed there unless compelled to. It was purgatory, exile, a blighted land.

  Chase heaved himself out of the water and reached for a towel. His jet-black hair, usually brushed sideways, hung in lank strands across his forehead. He was clean-shaven, mainly because condensation froze a beard into a spiky fringe of icicles.

  “You may find this hard to believe, Nick, but I actually like living in Newcastle. It’s a lively town, and there’s some gorgeous countryside within twenty minutes drive.”

  “Moors, you mean?”

  “The North Yorkshire moors, yes, but real countryside as well.” Chase smiled to himself. Nick obviously pictured it as Wuthering Heights country. “You know—trees. Grass. Tinkling streams. Even the occasional cow with bronchitis.”

  “The occasional cow,” Nick mused. “Are they similar to occasional tables?”

  “Near enough,” Chase agreed. “A leg at each corner.”

  He toweled himself briskly, body tingling and aglow. As they were getting dressed, standing on the slatted wooden boards beneath the puny sixty-watt bulb, Nick asked him if he’d heard anything more about the mysterious Russian.

  Chase glanced up, frowning. “How do you know he’s Russian?”

  “Well, whatever it is he’s babbling it sure ain’t English, according to Grigson. Could be Serbo-Croatian for all the sense it makes.”

  “Have you seen him yourself?”

  Nick buttoned up his plaid shirt and pulled on a double-knit navy sweater. “I looked into the sick bay after breakfast. Grigson was feeding him soup and the guy was staring into space with peas and carrots lodged in his beard. What I can’t understand is where he came from. How the hell did he get here?”

  “It’s a mystery all right.”

  “I mean, how far is the Russian base from here?”

  “Five, maybe six hundred miles. But it hasn’t been used in over two years. The main Soviet base, Mirnyy Station, is two thousand miles away on the edge of the Amery Ice Shelf.”

  Nick combed his fingers through his tangle of a beard. “One man and an eight-dog team never made it that far,” he asserted positively. “Did Grigson say anything about his condition?”

  “Didn’t ask. They’ve put his neck in a brace, which could mean he’s injured his spine.”

  Chase finished lacing his boots and stood up straight, a good three inches taller than Nick. “Anybody here speak Russian?”

  “Naw, don’t think so.” Nick thought for a moment. “Glyn Jones speaks three or four languages but Russian isn’t one of them. Perhaps the mad Russkie speaks English.”

  Chase raised his dark eyebrows. “Want to find out?”

  Dim green globes burned in the tiny sick bay, one above each of the four beds. The other three were empty, sheets and blankets folded in neat piles. The man in the bed nearest the door appeared to be sound asleep. He had a broad Slavic face and a flattened nose, the skin above the full black beard dark and crazed like old parchment. It was impossible to tell his age, though Chase guessed he was in his late forties, early fifties.

  He was lying half-raised on a bank of pillows, the plastic surgical collar holding his head at a stiff, unnatural angle like that of a mummy in a sarcophagus. The green wash of light added to the eerie impression of a body recently excavated from the grave.

  Grigson, the medical orderly, was absent, attending to some chore or other.

  It didn’t seem right to disturb the man, who might have been in a coma, though when Nick, in his usual direct fashion, went straight up to the bed and stared down inquisitively, the man opened his eyes at once and mumbled something in a hoarse broken voice. The words were unintelligible, the eyes cloudy.

  From the foot of the bed Chase asked softly, “Is he sedated?”

  Nick gave a slight shrug. He peered down and pressed the backs of his fingers to the man’s forehead, on which there was a faint sheen of perspiration. “You know something, I think he is mad. Look at his eyes.”

  “Could be fever.”

  “Mmm.” Nick shot a swift glance at Chase. “Maybe being out on the ice for so long snapped his mind. I think it would have snapped mine.”

  “How could we tell?” Chase murmured laconically. He leaned forward, seeing the cracked lips moving, straining to hear what he said. It was a word, all right. Sounded like Stan-or-Nick.

  “So,” Nick pondered, “it’s either Stan or me, is it?” He enunciated very slowly and carefully, “We do not understand. Do you speak English? English—yes?”

  “English,” the man said distinctly. Nick brightened. Then the man said, “Nyet,” and Nick’s face fell.

  “Try him with French,” Chase suggested.

  “I don’t speak French, what about you?”

  “Enough to ask the way to the Eiffel Tower and not understand a word of the reply.” Chase became thoughtful, his dark eyes narrowing in his angular tanned face. “If he is Russian, which he sounds to be, he’s either a scientist or with the military.”

  “Or he might have been prospecting for gold,” said Nick glibly. “You don’t have much sympathy for a sick man.”

  “Sorry. Next time I’ll bring him some grapes and a Barbara Cartland novel.”

  Chase came forward and gently took hold of the man’s weathered right hand. “Remind me to send for you when I’m on my deathbed,” he said, examining the small callous on the side of the middle finger, the kind caused by holding a pen. That could mean he was a scientist with a lot of desk work, writing up copious research notes. Was he a defector? Were the Russians out looking for him? Hell of a place to choose, making the break alone across two thousand miles of polar ice. Easier, and less of a risk, to pole-vault the Berlin Wall.

  Chase was more intrigued than ever. He was about to lay the hand down when it tightened on his in a surprisingly strong grip and the cracked lips blurted out a torrent of words. The incomprehensible babble went on until it trailed off, leaving him choking for breath. Again Chase caught the word or phrase sounding like Stan-or-Nick. It was frustrating. The Russian was obviously desperate to communicate. His slitted eyes were glazed, staring blankly upward at the plywood ceiling, yet he spoke with force and conviction, desperation even: a man with an urgent message.

  “Let’s try him with a pad and pencil.”

  “Why, can you read Russian?”

  “There must be a Russian dictionary or phrase book here somewhere,” Chase said. He found a ball-point pen on the orderly’s night table and pressed it into the man’s fingers. “At least it’ll give us the gist of what he’s trying to say.”

  Nick tore a leaf out of a small black notebook, affixed it
to the clipboard holding the temperature chart, and supported the clipboard at a convenient angle while Chase guided the Russian’s hand. The man held the pen as though it were an alien artifact; then he seemed to realize what was required of him. His eyes were unfocused, head held stiffly, and the pen jerked and slithered across the paper. For all his babbling he wrote only a single line before his hand fell against the covers and the pen slipped from his fingers.

  Chase held up the clipboard so that they could see what the man had scrawled.

  C02 + C03= + H20 2HC03

  Nick tugged at his beard. “What’s that?” he frowned. “Something to do with the carbon cycle?”

  “It’s the chemical interaction that takes place when carbon dioxide is dissolved in seawater,” Chase said. “It reacts with bicarbonate and carbonate ions, which allows more calcium carbonate from the sediments to dissolve.”

  “So what?”

  Chase studied the equation, still at a loss. “Search me.”

  He looked up at the sound of voices in the corridor. He thought it prudent to slip the piece of paper into his pocket, without quite knowing why. Quickly he replaced the clipboard on its hook at the foot of the bed, then straightened up as Professor Banting entered the sick bay followed by Grigson. Nick leaned against the plywood wall, apparently unconcerned.

  Professor Banting’s head shone like a polished green egg in the dim light. His close-set eyes in the narrow skull resembled suspicious black buttons.

  “Don’t you know this man is very ill and shouldn’t be disturbed?”

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Nick, unintimidated.

  “His back is broken,” Grigson stated without emotion; it was a medical fact. He went over and checked the Russian’s pulse.