Then something snapped inside my mind and I was all of a sudden fighting mad. Perhaps it was the thought of the four dead men – five, including the co-pilot – perhaps it was the inevitable reaction from my panic-stricken fear of a moment ago, and perhaps, too, it had no little to do with the realisation that I, too, had a gun. I brought it out from my pocket, transferred the torch to my left hand, jumped up, pressed the torch button and started running down the aisle.
It was proof enough of my utter inexperience in this murderous game of hide-and-seek that it was not until I was almost at the door at the forward end of the cabin that I remembered how easy it would have been for anyone to crouch down behind the backs of one of the rearward facing front seats and shoot me at point-blank range as I passed. But there was no one there and as I plunged through the door I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark muffled figure, no more than a featureless silhouette in the none too powerful beam of my torch, wriggling out through the smashed windscreen of the control cabin.
I brought up my automatic – the thought that I could be indicted on a murder charge for killing a fleeing person, no matter how criminal a person, never entered my mind – and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger again, and before I remembered the existence of such a thing as a safety-catch the windscreen was no more than an empty frame for the thickening snow that swirled greyly in the darkness beyond, and I plainly heard the thud of feet hitting the ground. – Cursing my stupidity, and again oblivious of the perfect target I was presenting, I leaned far out of the window. Again I was lucky, again I had another brief sight of the figure, this time scurrying round the tip of the left wing before vanishing into the snow and the dark.
Three seconds later I was on the ground myself. I landed awkwardly but picked myself up at once and skirted round the wing, pounding after the fleeing figure with all the speed I could muster in the hampering bulkiness of my furs.
She was running straight back to the cabin, following the line of bamboo sticks, and I could both hear the thudding of feet in the frozen snow and see the wildly erratic swinging of a torch, the beam one moment pooling whitely on the ground beside the flying feet, the next reaching ahead to light up the bamboo line. She was moving swiftly, much more so than I would have thought her capable of doing, but nevertheless I was steadily overhauling her when suddenly the torch beam ahead curved away in a new direction, as the runner angled off into the darkness, about forty-five degrees to the left. I turned after her, still following both my sight of the torch and sound of the feet. Thirty yards, forty, fifty – then I stopped and stood very still indeed. The torch ahead had gone out and I could hear nothing at all.
For the second time that night I cursed my unthinking folly. What I should have done, of course, was to carry straight on back to the cabin and await the moment she turned up there, as she inevitably must: no person could hope to survive for any great length of time, without shelter of some kind, in the deadly cold of that arctic night.
But it wasn't too late yet. The wind had been blowing almost directly in my face as I had been running: all I had to do was walk back, keeping it on my left cheek, and I would be bound to hit the line of bamboos at right angles, and the chances of my passing unwittingly between two of them, with the light of my torch to help me, did not exist. I turned, took one step, then two, then halted in my tracks.
Why had I been lured out here away from the bamboo line? Not so that she could thereby escape me – she couldn't do it that way. As long as we both lived, we were both utterly dependent on the cabin and would have to meet there sooner or later.
As long as we both lived! God, what a fool I was, what a veriest amateur at this game. The only way she could escape me, really and permanently escape me, was if I no longer lived. I could be shot down here and no one would ever know. And as she had stopped running before I had and been first to switch out her torch, she must have a much better idea of my position than I of hers. And these two rash, incautious steps I had taken had given her a new and even more accurate bearing on my position. Perhaps she was only feet away now, lining her gun up for the kill.
I switched on my torch and whirled round in a complete circle. Nobody there, nothing to be seen at all. Only the frozen feathers of the snow brushing my cheeks in the blackness of the night, the low moaning lament of the soughing south wind and the faint rustle of ice spicules brushing their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the ice-cap.
Swiftly, softly, I moved half a dozen long steps to my left. My torch was out now, and I'd been crazy ever to switch it on in the first place. Nothing could have been better calculated to betray my position – the light of a torch, seen head on, can be seen at twenty times the farthest distance that its beam will reach. I prayed that a flurry of snow had hidden it.
Where would the attack come from – downwind, so that I could see nothing in that blinding snow, or upwind, so that I could hear nothing? Downwind, I decided – on the ice-cap one could move as silently as on a tar-macadam road. The better to hear, I pulled the parka hood off my head: the better to see, I slipped up my goggles and stared out unwinkingly under my visored hands.
Five minutes passed, and nothing happened – if, that is, the freezing of my ears and forehead could be called nothing. Still no sound, still no sight of anything: the strain, the nerve-racking expectancy could not be borne for much longer. Slowly, with infinite care, I moved off in a circle of about twenty yards diameter, but I saw nothing, heard nothing, and so well adjusted now were my eyes to the darkness, so well attuned my ears to the ice-cap's mournful symphony of sound, that I would have sworn that had there been anyone there to be seen or heard, I would have seen or heard them. It was as if I were alone on the ice-cap.
And then the appalling truth struck me – I was alone. I was alone, I realised in a belated and chilling flash of understanding, because shooting me would have been a stupid way of disposing of both myself and my dangerous knowledge – the discovery of a bullet-riddled body on the ice-cap during the brief hours of daylight would have provoked a hundred questions and suspicions. Much more desirable, from the killer's point of view, would be my dead body without a trace of violence. Even the most experienced man can get lost in a snow-storm on the ice-cap.
And I was lost. I knew I was lost, I was convinced of it even before I got the wind on my left and walked back to the line of bamboo poles. The bamboos were no longer there. I made a wide circle, but still found nothing. For at least twenty yards back in the direction of the plane, and probably all the way towards the cabin, the poles had been removed, that slender series of markers which alone meant all the difference between safety and being irrecoverably lost on the ice-cap, were no longer there. I was lost, really and truly lost.
For once, that night, I didn't panic. It wasn't just that I knew that panic would be the end of me. I was consumed by a cold fury that I should have been so ignominiously tricked, so callously left to die. But I wasn't going to die. I couldn't even begin to guess what the tremendously high stakes must be in the murderous game that this incredibly ruthless, wickedly-deceptive gentle-faced stewardess was playing, but I swore to myself that I wasn't going to be one of the pawns that were going to be brushed off the table. I stood still, and took stock.
The snow was increasing now, thickening by the minute, building up into a blizzard with visibility cut down to a few feet: the yearly precipitation of the ice-cap was no more than seven or eight inches, and it was just my evil luck that it should fall so heavily that night. The wind was southerly, or had been, but in that fickle Greenland climate there was no knowing what minute it might back or veer. My torch was failing: continual use plus the cold had left it with a pale yellowish beam that reached not much more than a few yards: but that was the limit of visibility, anyway, even downwind. The plane, I calculated, was not much more than a hundred yards away, the cabin six hundred. My chances of stumbling upon the latter, flush as it almost was with the surface of the ice-cap, were no better than one in a hundred. But my chances of finding the plane, or what came to the same thing, the great quarter-mile trench that it had gouged out in the frozen snow when it had crash-landed, were far better than even: it was impossible that it could have already been filled in with drift. I turned until I had the wind over my left shoulder and started walking.