Night Without End. Alistair MacLean

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      I turned and walked forward, everybody was awake now, sitting upright or struggling dazedly to their feet, their half-formed questions as dazed as the expressions on their faces. I ignored them for a moment, looked questioningly at Jackstraw as he came through the forward door, closely followed by Joss.

      ‘She won’t come.’ Jackstraw jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’s awake, but she won’t leave the wireless operator.’

      ‘She’s all right?’

      ‘Her back hurts, I think. She wouldn’t say.’

      I made no answer and moved across to the main door – the one we’d failed to open from the outside. I supposed it no business of mine if the stewardess chose to devote her attention to a member of the crew instead of to the passengers who were her charges. But it was damned queer all the same – almost as queer as the fact that though the inevitability of the crash must have been known for at least fifteen minutes before the actual event, not one of the ten passengers in the cabin had been wearing a seat-belt – and the stewardess, wireless operator and the crew member in the rest room appeared to have been caught completely unprepared.

      The circular door handle refused to budge. I called Jackstraw, but even the extra weight made not the slightest impression on it. Obviously, it was immovably jammed – there must have been a slight telescoping effect along the entire length of the fuselage as the plane had crashed into the ice-mound. If the door I had noticed behind the control cabin was as badly warped as this one -and, being nearer the point of impact, it almost inevitably would be – then they’d all have to leave via the windscreens of the control cabin. I thought of the wireless operator with his dreadful head wound and wondered bleakly whether even trying to move him out could be more than a futile gesture, anyway.

      A figure barred my way as I turned from the door. It was the white-haired, white-moustached Dixie colonel. His face was dark red, his eyes light blue, choleric and protuberant. It only required someone to get this man good and mad and he would be no more than a debit entry in the account book of some life assurance company. And he seemed good and mad now.

      ‘What’s happened? What in the devil is all this?’ He had a voice like a Dixie colonel too, the Mason-Dixon line lay far to the north of wherever he had been born. ‘We’ve landed. Why? What are we doing here? What’s the noise outside? And -and who in the name of heaven are you?’

      A big business tycoon, I thought wryly, with money enough and power enough to indulge an obviously over-generous capacity for righteous indignation: if I was going to meet any trouble, it wasn’t hard to guess the direction it was going to come from. But, right then, there was some excuse for his attitude: I wondered how I would have felt if I had gone to sleep in a trans-Atlantic airliner and woken up to find myself landed in the freezing middle of nowhere with three fur-clad people, complete with snow-goggles and snow-masks, waddling about the aisle of the plane.

      ‘You’ve crash-landed,’ I said briefly. ‘I don’t know why – how the hell should I? The noise outside is an ice-blizzard rattling against the fuselage. As for us, we are scientists managing an International Geophysical Year station half a mile from here. We saw and heard you just before you crashed.’

      I made to push past him, but he barred my way.

      ‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind.’ The voice was more authoritative than ever and there was a surprising amount of muscle in that arm across my chest. ‘I think we have a right to know—’

      ‘Later.’ I knocked his arm away and Jackstraw completed the job by pushing him down into his seat. ‘Don’t make a damned nuisance of yourself. There’s a critically injured man who has to have attention, and at once. We’ll take him to safety and then come back for you. Keep the door shut.’ I was addressing all of them now, but the white-haired man’s wrathful spluttering attracted my attention again. ‘And if you don’t shut up and cooperate, you can stay here. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead, stiff as a board, in a couple of hours. Maybe you will be yet.’

      I moved up the aisle, followed by Jackstraw. The young man who had been lying on the floor pulled himself on to a seat, and he grinned at me as I passed.

      ‘How to win friends and influence people.’ He had a slow cultured drawl. ‘I fear you have offended our worthy friend.’

      ‘I fear I have.’ I smiled, passed by, then turned. These wide shoulders and large capable hands could be more than useful to us. ‘How are you feeling?’

      ‘Recoverin’ rapidly.’

      ‘You are indeed. You didn’t look so good a minute ago.’

      ‘Just takin’ a long count,’ he said easily. ‘Can I help?’

      ‘That’s why I asked,’ I nodded.

      ‘Glad to oblige.’ He heaved himself to his feet, towering inches above me. The little man in the loud tie and the Glenurquhart jacket gave an anguished sound, like the yelp of an injured puppy.

      ‘Careful, Johnny, careful!’ The voice, the rich, nasal and rather grating twang, was pure Bowery. ‘We got our responsibilities, boy, big commitments. We might strain a ligament—’

      ‘Relax, Solly’ The big man patted him soothingly on his bald head. ‘Just takin’ a little walk to clear my head.’

      ‘Not till you put this parka and pants on first.’ I’d no time to bother about the eccentricities of little men in loud jackets and louder ties. ‘You’ll need them.’

      ‘Cold doesn’t bother me, friend.’

      ‘This cold will. Outside that door it’s 110 degrees below the temperature of this cabin.’

      I heard a murmur of astonishment from some of the passengers, and the large young man, suddenly thoughtful, took the clothes from Jackstraw. I didn’t wait until he had put them on, but went out with Joss.

      The stewardess was bent low over the injured wireless operator. I pulled her gently to her feet. She offered no resistance, just looked wordlessly at me, the deep brown eyes huge in a face dead-white and strained with shock. She was shivering violently. Her hands were like ice.

      ‘You want to die of cold, Miss?’ This was no time for soft and sympathetic words, and I knew these girls were trained how to behave in emergencies. ‘Haven’t you got a hat, coat, boots, anything like that?’

      ‘Yes.’ Her voice was dull, almost devoid of life. She was standing alone by the door now, and I could hear the violent rat-a-tat of her elbow as it shook uncontrollably and knocked against the door. ‘I’ll go and get them.’

      Joss scrambled out through the windscreen to get the collapsible stretcher. While we were waiting I went to the exit door behind the flight deck and tried to open it, swinging at it with the back of my fire axe. But it was locked solid.

      We had the stretcher up and were lashing the wireless operator inside as carefully as we could in these cramped conditions, when the stewardess reappeared. She was wearing her uniform heavy coat now, and high boots. I tossed her a pair of caribou trousers.

      ‘Better, but not enough. Put these on.’ She hesitated, and I added roughly, ‘We won’t look.’

      ‘I – I must go and see the passengers.’

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