Rogan stepped out onto the landing strut and then
jumped blind.
His landing was
unreasonably soft, as if jumping into a bed of feathers. He righted
himself but still couldn’t see anything—had no idea which direction
the wreckage lay.
“Okay, take it
up slow, Wayne.”
He waited while
the chopper moved away; carefully ensuring that he had plenty of
slack on the cable. The ash was heavier than most dust or snow and
settled immediately the wind was off it.
Rogan, wading
almost knee deep in the ash, plunged toward the wreckage
unsteadily, the cable dragging behind him like a long tail. It was
a section of the side of the fuselage that he could see—beyond he
could make out a furrow where the wreck had slid almost a hundred
metres downhill since impact. The rest of the helicopter might be
anywhere. Rogan pushed his way forward, shovelling ash with his
hand, in the direction in which the fuselage seemed to widen, and
where he hoped he might find a door.
Eventually, he
had to clamber up onto the body, where he discovered that the door
handle had been melted. He had a screwdriver hanging from his belt
and levered in a place where the door had buckled, and finally
wrenched it open.
He manoeuvred
around and peered in, grabbed his torch and directed the beam
inside. There was an almighty tangle of seats and people. Five
people he guessed, twisted and bloodied. He pulled off his glove
and reached for the nearest flesh he could see, the arm of an
over-weight woman of fifty or more. The coldness was that special
kind he knew only too well.
He was obliged
to stretch further in, knowing there was no hope. The warmer air
inside the mangled cabin was escaping. A fog was settling in there.
His own breath, coming in blasts of whiteness, was enough to
obscure his view. Then he realised—it wasn’t just his own breath.
There were other puffs of whiteness appearing momentarily. Rogan
reared back and looked toward the hovering helicopter.
“Jesus, Wayne!
Drum up some help! There’s people alive in here!”
*
Only with the
coming of daylight, more than twelve hours after the eruption, did
the various rescue teams begin to penetrate the main area of
devastation. The fifty or so rescue workers who had already arrived
on the scene were divided into teams of a dozen and equipped with
whatever was to hand.
A group of
firemen wearing heat-proof suits and with breathing equipment were
attempting to make their way up the ridge to the Ruapehu Chateau
where they knew the greater number of victims in the quadrant of
destruction would be found. At one kilometre from the epicentre,
there was over a metre of ash in low places, forcing them onto
higher ground.
Soon, they
passed beyond the newly created edge of the forest—even there the
trees were stripped of their leaves and twisted and laden with ash.
Ahead, the logs lay in a weirdly orderly fashion, as if felled by
human hands. As far as they could see, the rows of denuded trunks
carpeted the earth, and they could make their way forward only by
traversing the logs like lumberjacks.
On the low
ridge ahead, they should have been able to see the chateau but
there was no trace of it, not even the chimneys that usually stood
after fires. Beyond that, the smoke pall from the crater still
ascended skyward even though there had been no more eruptions. The
firemen, led by Del Shannon, worked their way up until they came to
the bottom of the ski-slope that led directly to the chateau, but
there the logs ran out and they were faced with snow and ash drifts
metres thick. That might have been the end of their attempt, had
not Jerker Teasdale spotted a strange shape away to their
right.
“What’s that?”
he asked in puzzlement.
It was a curved
metal shape about two metres long with four short feet sticking
upward, like a dead cow chopped off just below the shoulders.
Shannon laughed.
“It’s a
bathtub. Lou had them old type ones installed right through the
chateau. Cost him a bloody