Black Ice by Matt Dickinson Page A

and set it upright. Sean screwed two ice anchors into the walls of the mound, and they lashed the handles of the barrel down so it wouldn’t blow away.
    Lauren fetched the marker pole, and that too was tied to the barrel, the red pennant at its top fluttering in the wind at the end of the two-metre aluminium pole.
    They viewed their handiwork from the snowmobiles. The finished result was about as good as they could hope for, as visible as they could make it under the circumstances.
    Lauren brought out her mobile GPS unit, a Magellan device not much bigger than a cigarette packet. She switched it on and waited for the transmitter to lock onto the satellites which would give the precise latitude and longitude.
    â€˜Three satellites,’ she read out from the LCD display, ‘good fix.’
    Lauren wrote down the figures on her pad and replaced the precious unit back inside her jacket.
    â€˜Sure hope we don’t need to rely on finding this depot without the GPS,’ Sean said. ‘All it needs is a real good blow and that pole could snap like a twig. Then we could end up like Scott, wandering around in circles trying to find the damn thing while we starve to death.’
    â€˜Don’t talk like that,’ Lauren told him. ‘There’s no reason we should ever need this depot. And no reason why we should end up in a situation where we haven’t got the GPS.’
    She pressed the starter on the snowmobile and drove off across the plateau, trying to clear Sean’s words from her head. A few miles later she stopped, just out of interest, to see if she could still see the marker flag.
    Even though she knew exactly which bearing it was on, she could only just make out the tiny barrel and its marker pole. A few miles later she stopped again. This time it was completely impossible to see, obscured by the ice mounds in front of it.
    After a heavy snowfall that thing would be pretty well invisible amid the many hundreds of sastrugi which dotted the plateau. Without the GPS it would be worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. For the first time, Lauren wondered why she had only brought the one positioning device with her when there were three others lying redundant back at the base.
    Anyway, she reasoned, it would be a pretty catastrophic set of circumstances which would see them stranded without their snowmobiles and without the GPS.
    Very unlikely to happen.
    She pushed her shoulders back to stretch the muscles of her back; sitting on the snowmobile for so many hours had built up a persistent ache in there which didn’t feel like it was going to go away any time soon.
    Lauren straddled her leg over the seat and looked to the horizon, where the Heilman range was waiting for them, the peaks jutting through the swirling storm. That would be the first real test for the snowcats.
    The sooner they were through it, the happier she would be.

24
    â€˜We’ll keep to the middle of the glaciers,’ Lauren had explained to Sean. ‘That’s where the ice is at its smoothest.’
    Sean had to smile at her use of the word ‘smooth’ as they rubbed their noses into the first of the huge ramps of ice. Nothing he had seen so far could qualify for that word; the snowcats were continually beating across small weathered rocks and stones which had been eroded from the surrounding peaks by frost shattering. Worse were the large collections of moraine at the glacier snouts, the runners of the sledges grating horribly as they tracked across gravel and shingle. Then they were back onto ice, accelerating hard as they bit into the climb, the engines straining as the sledges bucked and jumped behind them.
    The wind was still blowing intermittent storm force, rocking them on their seats as they leaned into it, but at least the visibility had improved. They had forty to fifty metres of clearway before them, and sometimes more as sporadic gaps in the cloud gave them tantalising glimpses of the