crippled fingers she tore at the fastenings.
outside the dawn had broken into a clear cold sky of palest ethereal
pinks and mauves. Although the wind had dropped to a faint whisper, the
seas were still big and unruly, and the waters had changed from black to
the deep bottle green of molten glass.
The tow-rope had torn away at the connecting shackle, leaving only a
dangling flap of plastic. Number 16 had been the last raft in the line
being towed by number three, but of the convoy, Samantha could now see
no sign - though she crawled out through the entrance and clung
precariously to the side of the raft, scanning the wave-caps about her
desperately.
There was no sign of a lifeboat, no sight even of the rocky, ice-capped
shores of Cape Alarm. They had drifted away, during the night, into the
vast and lonely reaches of the Weddell Sea.
Despair cramped her belly muscles, and she wanted to cry out in protest
against this further cruelty of fate, but she prevented herself doing
so, and stayed out in the clear and frosty air, drawing it in carefully
for she knew that it could freeze her lung tissue. She searched and
searched until her eyes streamed with the cold and the wind and
concentration. Then at last the cold drove her back into the dark and
stinking interior of the raft. She fell wearily among the supine and
quiescent bodies, and pulled the hood of her anorak more tightly around
her head. She knew it would not take long for them to start dying now,
and somehow she did not care. Her despair was too intense, she let
herself begin sinking into the morass of despondency which gripped all
the others, and the cold crept up her legs and arms.
She closed her eyes, and then opened them again with a huge effort.
I'm not going to die/ she told herself firmly. I refuse to just lie
down and die/and she struggled up onto her knees.
It felt as though she wore a rucksack filled with lead, such was the
physical weight of her despair.
She crawled to the central locker that held all their emergency rations
and equipment.
The emergency locator transmitter was packed in polyurethane and her
fingers were clumsy with cold and the thick mittens, but at last she
brought it out. It was the size of a cigar-box, and the instructions
were printed on the side of it. She did not need to read them, but
switched on the set and replaced it in its slot. Now for forty-eight
hours, or until the battery ran out, it would transmit a DF
homing-signal on 121,5 Mega Hertz.
It was possible, just possible, that the French tug might pick up that
feeble little beam, and track it down to its source. She set it out of
her mind, and devoted herself to the Herculean task of trying to heat
half a mug of water on the small solid-fuel stove without scalding
herself as she held the stove in her lap and balanced it against the
raft's motion. While she worked, she searched for the courage and the
words to tell the others of their predicament.
The Golden Adventurer, deserted of all human beings, her engines dead,
but with her deck lights still burning her wheel locked hard over, and
the morse key in the radio room screwed down to transmit a single
