Linda was thirty-three years old. She might have been good for another twenty years. On Thanksgiving Day, 1990, Linda chugged onto the Ross Ice Shelf. The floating, snow-covered sheet of glacial ice reached endlessly ahead. A gray overcast stole the horizon and robbed the Shelf of all its shadows. Linda carried her blade high over the snow. She pulled a twenty-ton sled loaded with thirty thousand pounds of dynamite.
Linda was special, a D8-LGP bulldozer built for Antarctica. Steel spliced into her chopped frame stretched her over twenty feet long. And she was light-footed. Sixty thousand pounds of yellow iron spread over a pair of fifty-four-inch-wide tracks made her a low-ground-pressure machine.
Brian Wheater had just finished his four-hour stretch at Linda’s stick. He’d brought her from Williams Field skiway that afternoon. Now he sat off to the side in Linda’s spacious cab while his partner took a turn. A diesel-fired heater at their feet kept them warm.
Working only his second season on the Ice, Brian volunteered for anything. Now he staged explosives for a seismic project to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. This was the glacier that Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackle-ton before him, traversed over the Transantarctic Mountains onto the Polar Plateau. To get to the Beardmore, Brian had to cross four hundred miles of Ross Ice Shelf. It had been decades since the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) sent anybody out this way over the surface. From airfields on the ice, near the stony ground of McMurdo Station on Ross Island, the United States flew supplies to its remote outposts on the continent.
The Ross Ice Shelf was a long way from the jungles of Vietnam for Brian. Nothing green here. Nothing growing, nothing wet, nothing warm. Brian kept his vigil no less keen. He was rock solid, a decorated sergeant of the U.S. Marines. Behind his rigid bearing lay an amazing mix of literary erudition and an often-silly sense of humor. He thought carefully before speaking. He chose his words well. But he rarely spoke. Grim-faced, Brian peered through the blank whiteness outside Linda’s windows for the other tractors in their caravan.
Linda’s sister Pam followed a hundred yards behind. Pam pulled another twenty-ton sled of fuel drums. Two mechanics from Williams Field alternated at her controls. A four-tracked Tucker Sno-Cat, one-quarter Linda’s weight, ran out in front carrying their food, survival gear, and blasting caps. A Kiwi mountaineer ran the Tucker, leading their caravan along the same route explorer Edmund Hillary took in the 1950s.
The orange Tucker disappeared from time to time, and then reappeared. Brian watched it closely, never losing sight of the flag atop its tall whip antenna. He sensed they were on uneven ground, on a lazy ocean of long, slow snow rollers. The Tucker disappeared again. Brian elbowed his partner, pointing. Both stood up, craning for a look. No shadows, no tracks. The last thing Brian saw was the flag on that whip antenna when gravity struck.
Linda plunged right. Snow exploded through her window. She ricocheted left. Her side door broke in. Snow blasted Brian against his partner, burying them both. Then Linda fell, completely vertical, racing straight down, pulling her sled after them.
Linda crashed against the edge of an ice wall, wedged. Her windshield broke out. The snow that had encased Brian and his partner spewed into the black void below. They hung up on Linda’s dashboard, waiting for the dynamite sled.
It never fell.
They found the throttle under what snow remained in Linda’s cab and killed her engine before its fumes killed them. One hundred gallons of diesel from Linda’s tank had spilled over everything. Brian killed the pilot flame on the cab heater, refusing to burn to death in the icy crevasse.
Neither Brian nor his partner spoke after that. Moments became minutes. Brian checked to see if he was all there and working right. He looked straight up through the broken rear window. A promise of light filtered through a ragged aperture at the surface. The dynamite sled’s front skis dangled in space, held back by a heavy chain. Its deck had rammed across the collapsed snow bridge into the opposite wall of the crevasse.
The dark fissure clouded with their frosty breath. All was silent but for the “tink” of metal on metal shrinking in the intense cold. A scratching sound prompted Brian to dig for their radio. Its red light came on when he pressed transmit. They still had battery. Brian looked at his watch for the first time: 7:45 p.m. He couldn’t make out the reply, but he recognized the mechanic’s voice.
Russ Magsig had seen Linda disappear. He stopped Pam. One step at a time, the bearded mechanic in grease-stained overalls plunged a slender eight-foot metal rod into the snow in front of him. A well-dressed mountaineer probed from the opposite direction. Both converged on the twenty-ton sled bridged across the gaping black hole. A half-hour later, Russ reached it first. He lay on his belly, looking into the hole, and shouted.
Brian spotted Russ’s silhouette against the vague light. He considered climbing up the dangling chains with the mountaineer’s rope around him, but his partner’s legs and hip ached. Brian stayed with his partner. The mountaineer had already called for a rescue team. No one else would approach the crevasse until it arrived. Insidious, -55 degree cold penetrated them.
Brian’s partner shifted his weight, kicked at some snow and hit something. They found the military thermos they’d filled with coffee before they left Williams Field. The coffee was still hot.
The first of three helicopters flew over. Brian never looked up. He looked at his watch the second time: 9:30. A chunk of snow hit Linda: 10:00. Another Kiwi mountaineer hollered that she was coming down. Her rope swung six feet to the side of Linda’s cab, dangling into the void. She kicked over the edge and rappelled sixty-six feet down to them. In the closed space she smelled the stink of machines, fuel, and human bodies.
They hauled Brian’s partner out first. Then Brian roped up and swung over the abyss. He reached the surface at 10:25 p.m., startled by the clear blue sky and bright sunshine.
They’d been in the crevasse for three hours and ten minutes, cold soaked. Brian warmed a bit during the forty-minute flight to McMurdo. When he got there his core temperature was up to 95 degrees. The doctor thought the coffee had saved them.
Linda stayed in the crevasse. The place where she fell was called the Shear Zone.