Moon Mask (47 page)

36:

On Ice!

Laguna Viedma,

Argentina

The
tender’s outboard shrieked in protest as King gunned the engine, sluicing through the water. Behind them, the PBY Catalina Flying Boat picked up speed as it pushed away from the jetty and powered after them.

King turned the boat into an arc, heading towards the shore closest to the mountain highway but all of a sudden the water before him exploded in froth and spray as the Black Cat’s guns were loosed upon them. Cursing, King pulled back around, the boat tipping haphazardly.

“Stay
with them!” Bill barked angrily into his headset to the Black Cat’s pilot.

The agony coursing through his leg from the torn hole in his foot threatened to spill over into anger but he resisted the urge to simply gun down King and his girlfriend as he sat at the gun controls in the nose of the plane. King had the map and if the boat sank and he went with it, it would take far too long mount a diving expedition to retrieve it.

Instead, he tried to drive King away from any possible escape route. If he made it to the highway he might be lucky and flag down a passing car, or else hijack one in his desperation. But, there was one place close were he could mow down the archaeologist without fear of losing the map. A place of no escape.

“He’s
herding us towards the glacier,” Sid realised.

Hunched in the front of the boat, bitterly cold spray spat over the bow and the wind bit into her exposed face and hands. The roar of the outboard was almost drowned out by the roar of the wind as the tender bounced along the surface of the lake.

Once again, King tried to swerve towards the shore but was confronted by a barrage of machinegun bullets. They were far enough away to cause no harm, but close enough to send the fear of god into the boat’s inhabitants.

King spun the boat hard about and powered away from the pursuing behemoth. The Black Cat also sluiced through the water, the larger vessel needing a much wider turning angle. Its starboard wing dug down, the float steadying the vessel and helping it to pivot. Another burst of gunfire erupted from its nose.

“What do we do?” Sid asked worriedly.

“Hold on,” King warned and shot towards the monstrous terminus of the Viedma Glacier. Even from a distance it loomed with an omnipotent menace but it wasn’t so much the terminus itself which King headed for, but the dozens of small icebergs which floated away from it. Bunched fairly close together they would provide the perfect obstacle-course in which to evade their pursuers.

Bill evidently realised this also and let loose with another volley of machinegun fire, but it was too late. King slipped the tender into the field of icebergs.

He spun to the left around one, weaved to the right around another. With a thunderous crack, the wrenching of tearing ice, another ice berg cleaved away from the terminus and splashed into the lake. The displacement sent a large ripple reverberating out, pushing the floating bergs. One heaved up on the wave and loomed above the tiny boat. King tried to steer away from it but was too late. The free floating island of ice struck. Metal ground against the solid surface as the berg settled again in the wake of the wave. But the damage was done. The tender was half out of the water, caught on the edge of the berg.

Behind them, like an orca coming in for the kill, the Black Cat manoeuvred slowly around the ice field. Menacingly, it turned towards them.

“Damn! Come on, push us free,” King barked at Sid and they both leaned over the side and pushed against the ice berg, their exposed hands raw against the frozen surface. The boat slithered forward, whatever had caught them snapping free and then it slipped back into the water just as the tip of the ice berg blew apart under a hailstorm of bullets. Chunks of solid ice rained down like a hailstorm from god, pounding the boat. King and Sid shielded their heads against the onslaught and were lucky enough to avoid the full brunt of a killer ice cube.

The propellers chewed up the water again and shot them forwards. King aimed towards the shore but the edge of the small ice field came into sight. Once out of it, they would have no cover. They’d be sitting ducks.

As it was, King didn’t even have the time to make the mad dash across the open water. With a cough and a splutter, the outboard jerked in his hands. He looked in time to see a spurt of fuel shooting out of a torn line and suddenly remembered how whatever had snagged the boat on the berg had broken free.

In a desperate move, he grasped the torn fuel line. Luckily it hadn’t ripped in half but had only torn a hole in it. Nevertheless, even gripping it as tightly as he could didn’t prevent the loss of pressure. The boat slowed.

“What now?” Sid asked. King could see the desperation in her face and again he felt a terrible pang of guilt for having dragged her into this mess.

He stared longingly at the shore. It wasn’t that far. In fact, he knew he’d be able to swim it. If the water wasn’t cold enough to kill in a matter of minutes and there wasn’t a World War Two era retrofitted warplane hot on his tail, that was.

Cursing angrily, he threw the outboard around and coaxed as much juice as he could into it, gripping the torn line tightly. His hand was slick with fuel and the pungent smell made his nostrils burn and his eyes sting.

He turned and headed away from the far shore and darted past the ice field towards the towering cliff of the glacier’s terminus. He turned parallel to it, shooting with ever diminishing speed in front of it. The throbbing power of the engine faded until finally it spluttered its last breath and they coasted in towards a spit of rock which marked the right-hand-most limit of the terminus.

While the terminus itself was sheer and un-scalable without ice climbing equipment, the spit of land had a shallower incline, strewn with massive boulders which had been deposited like a petulant child’s toys by the glacier. High above, a wooden jetty marked the setting down and picking up point for the daily tourist ferry to the glacier but the tender scraped onto the shingle beach at the foot far below.

“Hurry,” King said, dragging Sid from the boat before it had even ground to a halt. In the lake behind, the Black Cat altered course towards them.

Desperately, they scrambled up the rocks. They were glassy-smooth, polished by the glacier for hundreds of years before global warming caused it to retreat, unveiling what had once been hidden within its serpentine folds.

Exhausted, their panting breath pluming as vapour in the frigid air, they reached level ground, at the same elevation as the jetty, just as Bill opened fire again. Bullets flared and sparked across the rocks as they ducked behind the cover of the boulders, still climbing higher.

Below,
the Black Cat swooped in towards the spit of land. From its side hatch, a black-clad figure emerged, a fresh MP-5 submachine gun in hand.

Bill scrambled up the maintenance ladder affixed to the hull and pulled himself onto the top of the plane. Careful of the whirling motors set close to the fuselage, he ran down the length of the vessel’s starboard wing just as the pilot turned from a head on collision with the glacier. The Black Cat spun, the wing coming more or less parallel with the wooden jetty and, without slowing his pace, ignoring the pain of his foot just as he had been trained to do so, Bill ran to the wing’s very tip, leapt over the gap between it and the jetty and rolled onto the wooden construction.

Expertly using the momentum of the roll to propel himself back to his feet, he started up the incline towards his fleeing prey. Behind him, the pitch of the Black Cat’s engines stepped up a notch as the propellers spun faster and the flying boat sped down the length of the lake, hitting take-off speed and taking to the skies.

Then, like a bird of prey swooping in on two petulant mice, it came about and flew back towards the glacier.

“That
can’t be good,” Sid said as she noticed the plane take flight.

They stepped cautiously over the threshold between rock and ice, the point where the glacier’s unstoppable force had gouged a channel into the very mountains.

Instantly, King and Sid felt themselves slipping. Glacier trekking without crampons was not recommended, but neither of them had that luxury. Instead, with no agility whatsoever, they slipped and slid across the flat field at the edge of the glacier towards the forest of frozen shapes deeper in.

A burst of gunfire rattled behind them as Bill gave chase. The bullets chewed up the ice at their heels. They both went down, hard, slipping again. Their hands and knees were bloody and bruised already but they had no choice but continue on. Another barrage of fire almost caught up with them seconds before they vanished into the warped and twisted heart of Viedma.

It was like a storm-tossed ocean, flash-frozen by some phenomenal force of primeval nature. Huge waves of frozen ice towered thirty feet above them, frozen solid as if caught split seconds before breaking. The landscape rose and fell in dramatic crests and troughs. Lonesome pillars stood out like Indian totem poles; spiralling twirls twisted as though spun into a frozen flurry by an angelic ballerina; sheer cliffs, narrow chasms and bottomless pits all sparkled crystalline blue, glittering with a hidden menace. It was like being inside a Christmas bauble, a world unto itself, a staggeringly enchanted land of outstanding beauty.

And apparelled danger.

King led Sid in a blind dash down one of the narrowest channels which wove its way deeper and deeper into the heart of the glacier. They ran for about fifty feet, using the close walls to steady themselves. There didn’t seem to be any end in sight, the horizontal chasm seemingly unending and King realised his fatal mistake of bringing them in to it when Bill appeared back at the entrance.

They were sitting ducks. Again.

Bill opened fire.

A break in the wall appeared as if out of nowhere and King threw Sid into it just as Bill’s bullets punched into the channel. King dived in after her and only then realised that the off-shoot of the channel was not level but angled downwards at a substantial angle. With no way of stopping themselves they slid down the slope as if it was an adventure playground. Behind them, secured in crampons, Bill crunched robotically down the channel.

Sid hit the bottom of the slope first. The momentum and the frictionless ice spun her on her bottom and she continued to slide, this time to the side. King followed behind a second later. Above, Bill reached their escape chute, brought his gun up and aimed just as they slid out of sight.

Unable to stop or control their movements, both Sid and King screamed in a mix of fear, adrenaline and an odd addition of excitement until the incline levelled gradually and they were able to haul themselves to their feet.

Again, King grabbed Sid’s hand and they raced into a twisted array of grotesque natural ice sculptures, the tallest about fifteen feet high. Some looked almost like the petrified bodies of ancient humans though King knew that was merely his imagination running away with him. Nevertheless, he led Sid through them, ducking and diving, weaving and gliding up, over, under and around the alien landscape.

On the far side of the ‘forest’ several paths opened up to them. They headed right, hoping to veer back closer towards the terminus. Though neither King nor Sid had a plan of escape, they both knew that fleeing too far into the snaking glacier would mean certain death.

“I’ve
lost them!” Bill barked into his radio.

“I’m on it,”
his pilot replied. In response, he heard the whine of the Black Cat’s engines above as it swept in towards the glacier from over the lake. With its infrared radar, spotting the heat signatures of two exhausted humans on a slab of solid ice would be easy.

Bill kept watch on the G.P.S. transceiver in his hand as the Black Cat’s sensor fed it directions. Two blurs of deep red against a background of blue appeared but Bill didn’t head immediately in that direction. Instead he paused and watched as the Black Cat came in for the kill.

Another
narrow chasm suddenly opened out into a deadly booby trap wrought by the forces of nature.

To the one side the sheer wall of ice continued for another eight feet, but to the left a gaping expanse of nothingness dropped for as far as the eye could see. The enormous hole shone with an eerie blue light, as though the fires of hell far beneath the earth were reflecting through the ice. There was no bottom to the abyss that King could see. It stretched as though into the abyss of eternity.

They halted at the threshold and glanced back the way they had come. But Bill would be out there, they both knew.

“What do we do?” Sid asked, though they both knew the answer. King glanced at the narrow ledge which ringed the abyss. It was barely two feet wide.

“We go around,” he replied, though with less confidence in his voice than he would have liked. “I’ll go first. To make sure the ledge will take my weight.”

“What if it doesn’t?” Sid asked.

King frowned at her. “I’d have thought the alternative was fairly obvious,” he mumbled. He looked down at the abyss again. His heart raced. Though, in all honesty it had been racing for quite some time now.

Taking a deep breath, he summoned up all the courage he felt- which wasn’t a lot, he realised- then stepped-

“Wait,” Sid grasped his arm and spun him around, planting a powerful kiss on his lips. It was something of an anti-climax after preparing for almost certain death. “I love you.”

The words, said a hundred times, suddenly took on a deeper meaning. A more real meaning. As though they had never been uttered before. “I love you too.” Then he turned back to the abyss, took another breath, fumbled in his pocket, felt the ring box, went to step out then-

“Sid, will you-”

“Just do it,” she snapped, unable to bear the suspense any longer.