Quartano paused as he took on the implications of the request. ‘Really … Are you sure?’
‘I am, sir, yes.’
‘Why, Tahm? Why do you think that? What's wrong?’ asked the tycoon, this time his voice showing some concern.
‘I don’t know for certain, I’m afraid. But I have a very strong feeling. Something about all this really doesn’t seem right. Our car was fawless on that circuit, DQ. I mean it was pitch perfect.’
‘What are you saying, Tahm … do you think there was some kind of interference?’
‘I don’t know, sir, I really don’t,’ replied the Ptarmigan team boss. ‘But there's something in all this that just doesn’t add up.’
SIXTEEN
Tears were welling in the big man's eyes. Not from the brightness of the glare, or even the blinding whiteness of the wilderness all around them. They seemed to be erupting from years of pent-up emotion. Colonel Matt Straker turned to give the big man a hug. It wasn’t going to be easy. At minus twenty degrees Celsius, both men were wearing bulky clothes: fur-lined hoods covered their heads; numerous layers of clothing, thermal underwear through to waistcoats padded and bulked out their Gore-Tex jackets. Both men wore over-sized mittens and snow shoes.
A flash – a glint of sunlight catching metal – suddenly brought home the magnitude of this moment. The big man, instead of wearing the same sort of scarlet salopette-like trousers as Straker's, was supported by two spindly shafts of aluminium which reached down from the middle of each thigh to what should have been his boots.
Straker broke from Sergeant Middlemas.
Shufling himself deftly through ninety degrees – particularly awkward in snow shoes – Straker offered an embrace, this time to Corporal Wendy Mulligan. He looked past her eye patch and the squashed spaghetti-effect of the skin covering the left side of her face – losing himself, instead, in the young woman's unfettered elation. He leant in to hug her, feeling only her right arm round the back of his shoulders.
Straker made to hug all twelve of his team in turn, including the man lying on the sledge; leaning down, Straker said: ‘Taffy, I wish you could see this, my friend. You’ve done it. You’ve reached the top of the world.’
Their modest celebrations continued, all of them revelling in the personal Everest each had had to scale over the last three months in preparing for the challenge of this two-hundred-mile trip over the polar ice cap. Something, too, showed in Straker's face. His at-rest expression was normally one of intensity, emphasized by the diagonal folds of skin sloping downwards above each eye and the bridge of his nose, which ran in a straight line almost vertically from his forehead to its tip. These striking features were intensified by the darkness of his wiry hair and eyebrows. Today, though, that intensity was softened, if not gone altogether. He smiled warmly, radiating admiration and congratulations to each member of his team.
Straker was feeling buoyed by what he had achieved, but this trek had never been about him. Whatever discomfort he might have felt, whatever stresses he had endured as expedition leader, his outcome paled beside the achievements of the others. They had all coped against the physical odds – as amputees, partially-blinded, or even totally sightless individuals.
Straker may not have been carrying the visible scars of these ex-servicemen, but he was no less haunted by a weight of psychological baggage – at least he felt he had been until this expedition. To his relief, not once during the preparation and execution of this project had he suffered one of his mind-altering flashbacks to his own combat experiences. He felt blessed passing such a milestone. These three months were the longest he had gone without an episode triggered by his extraordinary rendition and torture – at the hands of the Americans – in Afghanistan. Undeniably, immersion in this trek had been a form of therapy for him, too.
Straker brought his thoughts back to the present, ever mindful of keeping his party safe from the hostility of this environment. Everything around them, for now, may look benign – clear skies, brilliant sunshine, no wind – but all of that could turn angry in a matter of minutes. Bad weather was expected from the west within a couple of hours.
‘Two more miles,’ he declared, and, reconnecting his harness to the sledge, indicated their onward direction of travel. As a few steps were taken, the lines tautened, and the sledge clicked as it unstuck from the snow and was sliding once again.
In the previous valley, Straker had checked their bearing and distance, anxious to confirm they were honouring their route. His main concern throughout had centred on their destination not being an actual place – not being physically identifiable. But as they had heaved their sledge up this snow drift and crested the rise, they all knew they had found it.
Some distance away – out in the middle of the vast expanse of ice – was an incongruous sight. Against the white nothingness visible in every direction was a small blob of colour. A dozen or so people it seemed, in brightly coloured clothes, were gathered in a cluster.
By their presence and location, Straker knew they had reached the Pole.
Having felt tension in the lines behind them, each team member now felt the tension to their front – as the sledge started sliding forwards. They needed to hold its weight, preventing it from running on down the hill below them. Levelling out onto the ice plateau at the base of this ridge, the normal back-breaking strain was reestablished; the team of trekkers once more heaved their load across the ice cap in the direction of their RV.
Straker's back ached. His feet stung with pain. Clumping each snowshoe down he was cheered to know their trek was nearly done. Even in this relatively short distance Straker was reminded for the umpteenth time of the fabled fifty-something lexicon of words Eskimo-Aleut languages had for snow. He had no idea what each of them was, or what they all meant, but he now knew why there could be so many. In a matter of yards, the snow under his feet went from powder, to popping crusted powder, to drifting, to rock solid, to translucent. Straker's tours with Britain's Special Forces had involved jungle warfare and long-range reconnaissance; he had always ranked surviving and fighting in tropical or desert heat as the ultimate challenge. This trek had given him a new respect for those specializing in Arctic operations: he had no idea the Cold could be such a consumer of attention and be so threatening.
An hour later the trek party – its sledge and human huskies – closed in on the gaggle standing out on the pack ice. Two plastic poles had been erected: the taller one flying a pennant with the words North Pole written on it. The shorter pole, erected a small distance away, was there to form a gate and so create a finishing line. At the end of eight days and four hours, Straker's party crossed this line.
They had reached their goal.
There were cheers and celebrations all round.
In among the waiting group were several television crews. One of these broke away and made straight for Straker. As he saw them approach, Straker zipped up the bottom part of his hood, almost completely concealing his face.
‘Colonel Straker, isn’t it?’ asked the TV presenter.
‘Concentrate on the team,’ he said and reached out to nudge the camera very gently away from him to point in the direction of the others. ‘This is about the bravery of our ex-servicemen and their cause,’ he declared.
‘You’re the trek leader – and ex-service yourself,’ said the journalist. ‘What you’ve done – leading these seriously injured personnel, all the way across the polar ice cap – is extraordinary. Worthy of recognition.’
Straker turned away.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to parry any more attention: out of the dead stillness of the air an artificial sound could be heard in the distance. An engine – or engines.
In no time, two vast twin-prop Gemini helicopters – Quartech International's equivalent of the Boeing CH-47 Chinook – swooped in and banked dramatically around the huddle of people standing out on the ice. To prevent those below being blasted by snow as the air cushion reached the ground, the two helicopters put down some distance away.
The pilots did not shut down their engines, though – an indication of the dangers posed by such extreme temperatures, as well as their signalling the clear intention to get off and away again quickly. Bad weather was closing in faster than expected.
All the brightly coloured people were shortly climbing aboard the aircraft. Taffy was helped out of the sledge; its load was then packed into one of the holds along with the sledge itself. Down came the two poles, which were also quickly stowed on board.
A few minutes later the two Geminis were running their engines back up to full power. Everyone felt the airframes judder as the pitch increased and the two aircraft lifted off the ice.
Just in time.
Straker looked out through one of the miniscule windows to the west and saw what he had been working to beat. Instead of the brilliant sunshine and crystal clear air, he saw an ominous bank of brooding gun-metal grey cloud heading in their direction. At least, now, they had the speed to outrun it. Straker took a last look down at the harsh landscape of the ice floes, and finally – privately – allowed himself some satisfaction at what he had helped his team achieve.
An hour later the two Geminis, flying in formation, made their approach into the tented Barneo Ice Camp – the Russian Geological Society base that Quartech was using to operate and monitor their polar expedition. Overhead, the cloud cover was thickening, not yet as dramatically as it had been at the Pole. But it wouldn’t be long.
The moment Straker disembarked, however, he was met with something unexpected.
