Free Black Ice by Matt Dickinson

and sharing around their cigarettes.
    No one could recall, in all their years of flying, Villanova turning back from a bad landing place. Romero didn’t like that. It felt wrong to him. You had to fail sometimes, didn’t you?
    Romero’s wife had given him a crucifix on a golden chain as he left the house for the airport. He could feel the metal against his skin where it lay beneath his shirt.
    Conditions were bad, the freezing storm still raging across the northern flanks of Antarctica. Both pilots knew they were in for a rough journey, but they could not delay this reconnaissance flight any longer. The thought that their fellow pilots were waiting, perhaps injured, with a wrecked plane, was enough to make the two men volunteer.
    They flew at midnight, over Cape Horn and out across the Drake Passage, a tail wind chasing them at eighty miles an hour. Like Ariza and Villanova, they took turns to sleep in the back. Unlike them, their rest was troubled by bad dreams and by the constant buffeting of the high winds.
    Just before nine that morning they reached the target area where the storm was raging ever stronger. Thick, near-black clouds were obscuring the ground, giving them just the occasional frustrating glimpse of the glacier surface.
    What they could see filled them with foreboding. The glacier was alive with airborne ice. They saw no place which would give them a realistic chance to land.
    For fifty minutes the two pilots doggedly maintained their search, sometimes getting a few seconds of visibility, but mostly with nothing beneath them but the seething tops of clouds.
    Then, as the grey mass briefly parted, Vargas cried out.
    â€˜I saw something black!’ he cried. ‘Go around.’
    Romero executed a three-sixty and headed back on the same bearing. The clouds were thicker; Vargas held his breath—had he really seen something down there, or was it a trick of the ice?
    The clouds held back, both pilots could see it, almost invisible to the eye: a solitary tent with a waving figure beside it. Next to it, etched into the ice in uneven black lines, were three large letters: SOS.
    As clouds ran across, obscuring the scene, Romero saw something else—a black object, perhaps one hundred metres from the tent. It was large—a boulder, perhaps? Sometimes rocks were carried on the surface of these glaciers.
    No. An engine.
    â€˜That’s what he’s used to write the letters,’ he told Vargas. ‘Engine oil. Villanova crashed on landing.’
    â€˜And the plane?’
    Romero did not reply; he was concentrating on keeping a level flight path as more vicious turbulence bounced them through the air. He knew these conditions; it would be easy to get disorientated, lost. They could fly into one of the nearby mountains and never know what they had hit.
    â€˜How much fuel?’ he asked.
    â€˜Right on the limit. Tank three half full.’
    They came around once more, but now the clouds had engulfed the glacier again. Two circuits later and the decision was made for them. Unless they could land, there was no assistance they could give the survivors … and in those conditions such a landing was completely out of the question.
    â€˜There’s nothing more we can do,’ Romero said, his voice choking as he spoke. ‘It’ll have to be a land rescue. Let’s go home.’
    He put the Twin Otter into a climb, breathing a sigh of relief as they broke through the dense cloud into lighter cover.
    He set the compass and began the fight, against the wind, back towards the north.
    â€˜You think those guys from the base can get there overland in time?’ Vargas asked.
    â€˜Maybe. But I reckon Villanova and Ariza are dead anyway, you saw the wreckage.’
    â€˜What are we going to tell their wives?’ Vargas asked, distraught. ‘What about Villanova’s kid?’
    Romero did not reply.
    Save the odd radio call, the two pilots passed the rest of the