This is an expansion of a scene from the Thunderbirds novel "Countdown to Action". I confess, I'm a bit of an Antarctica nut after being involved in researching and writing a big Call of Cthulhu roleplaying campaign set there, and I'd have liked to see far more of Scott's Antarctic trip than the half a page on the wrong end of the radio that the novel gave us. Well, you know what they say: if you want something written a particular way, write it yourself :)

The situation, for those not familiar with the novel, is that during the period when the Thunderbird craft are being field tested but IR hasn't yet gone public, one of the researchers at the South Pole base has been taken ill. He urgently needs special medication and equipment, and while the Air Force have dropped it for them, it's landed about a mile from the base, too far away for them to retrieve in the current weather conditions. Scott's sent out with the intention of covertly shifting the package much closer, without being seen or heard...

Thunderbirds belongs to Granada, the plot of Countdown to Action belongs to Joan Marie Verba. No copyright infringement intended. I'm just playing with my favourite characters for fun. Many thanks to my husband for beta-reading.

First Rescue

Scott would never have admitted it to anyone, but for the brief moment when he thought his father would veto the Antarctica mission, he'd felt relief. Only a box of medical supplies. Only a mile away from the base. Surely they could wait a couple of days, and just walk out and get it when the weather improved?

But he'd spent far too much of his childhood reading about Antarctic exploration, drawn initially by a simple coincidence of name, to believe it - and how would he feel if that poor researcher died out there, with the medical equipment which could save his life just a mile away? He felt he knew just how bad conditions could be, even though he'd never been to Antarctica. More than that, he'd actively gone out of his way to avoid transfers which might take him there. The stories were unequivocal, written by brave men. Only brave men - and women - went there in the first place, and if they hadn't retrieved the package by hand it was because going out there was genuinely impossible. The stories written by aviators, encountered later on when he'd read anything and everything with a plane in it, had particularly stuck in his mind. Winds so strong that you could be unable to fly forwards. Complete, utter whiteout conditions lasting for days. Pilots being left with no choice but to set down blind and pray the surface was solid, flat and unobstructed. Temperatures so low that engines froze solid within minutes of stopping. Nobody could walk a mile and back in that weather, or go by snowmobile.

Of course, he reminded himself firmly as he headed for the line of low white cliffs on the horizon, the pilots in the accounts he remembered so vividly had been flying conventional aircraft. No storm wind could outpace Thunderbird One's top speed. His atomic-fuelled engine couldn't freeze. His navigation equipment didn't depend on unreliable polar magnetic fields.

But it was still possibly the very last place he'd have chosen for the first field test of his new craft. Too much ice on the control surfaces, or frozen up swing-wings, could really spoil his day.

"Look on the bright side," John had said to him on a private channel as he headed south from Tracy Island, "if she's up to this, you know she can take anything."

And if she isn't? He hadn't said it then, and was trying not to think it now. He had emergency cold-weather gear - but Scott knew full well that if he made a mistake out here he might well not survive it. In the Antarctic interior, survival times were measured in minutes. Or shorter.

As he approached the coastline - well, what looked to him like the coastline, though he was aware that it was only really the transition from sea ice to barrier ice - the conditions weren't as bad as he'd expected. The sky was a clear powder blue, not a cloud in sight, and only a fuzziness of blown snow showed visually that the wind was almost gale force. He could feel it, of course, in the response of Thunderbird One, but it was constant, for now, and that made it not a problem. He knew it wouldn't last. Black rocky peaks were starting to become visible, real land at last. They would alter the airflow significantly, and not for the better. The Antarctic continent proper was beneath him. A little over a hundred years before, men and dogs had struggled across that landscape, heading for the same goal that he was: the Pole itself. It had taken them weeks and months. Not all of them had returned. Now he was covering the same distance in minutes, in the warmth of his cockpit. It seemed almost disrespectful.

As he approached the higher ground of the central Antarctic plateau, the distant stormclouds reminded him that his task wasn't simple either. He might be still a couple of hundred miles from the Amundsen-Scott base, but it was time to throttle back. He didn't fancy going into that weather system at full speed - and was more than a little concerned that he could see it this far away from the base.

"I can see the cloud tops of the blizzard," he reported on the radio. "I'm reducing velocity and height. I can't get anywhere near the base at supersonic speed; they'd definitely know I was there." And I'll practice supersonic flight in zero visibility some other time.

All his father said was, "F.A.B." Scott was briefly perturbed, but then smiled at himself. What more confirmation could he have that his father trusted him, and his judgement, absolutely? It had been Jeff's decision whether or not to send him out. But once out here, in the field, it was entirely Scott's call how to proceed.

In that brief time, he was over the mountains ringing the plateau and almost on top of the storm. Scott took a deep breath to steady himself, and throttled back as he gently lost altitude. He didn't have to lose a lot - the ground level was close to ten thousand feet up here. High, cold, and the most remote place on the planet. And about to be invisible, too. He didn't like the look of the thick, forbidding clouds at all, and every pilot's instinct he possessed screamed at him to turn away. Instead, he plunged directly into the grey mass ahead of him.

He was instantly, hopelessly disorientated. All his visual screens showed the same featureless off-whiteness - and his instruments were abruptly all over the place. The winds were gusting furiously here, but surely not enough to explain the wild, unstable slewing he was getting. It was all he could do to stay right side up, and this was only the very edge of the storm. It felt terrible. Almost as if --

Very, very grateful he was alone out here, Scott reached out and activated the swing-wing controls. There was a brief horrible moment of no response, but then warmed hydraulic fluid did its job and he felt the rocket plane stabilise as the flight surfaces extended. Up and down became well-defined, and while he was still being buffeted in all directions, he felt in control again. He wasn't going to flip unexpectedly, or nosedive into the ice, or go into a flat spin. The beacon attached to the package bleeped away steadily, no longer at the edge of his radar screen and moving perceptibly closer to the middle. Scott felt calmer, and, oddly, given the rookie error he'd just made, better. He'd made a mistake and he'd recovered from it. Even so, he needed not to make any more. He needed a safety net, especially for the extra complications required to hover and snag the package. Someone to listen to what he was doing, who would notice and pull him up on it if he got it wrong again.

If Jeff figured out why he was suddenly getting a running commentary, he didn't say so. And Scott felt better just for having the excuse to talk himself through it out loud. He was almost over the beacon now, and needed to start slowing. To snag the package, he'd need to be in a very controlled hover. The base buildings were extensive these days, to say nothing of the multiple satellite dishes and other experiments apparently scattered about randomly. He was only glad that in this age of satellite communications, he didn't have to contend with radio masts and aerial wires.

The package was dead centre of his radar screen, and Scott stopped all forward velocity. Well, 'stopped' was a poor term to describe being buffeted in all three dimensions, but it would have to do for now. He switched to a much finer scale on the radar, and began to reel out the magnetic grab. There was a second beacon on the end of the cable, that one set to appear as a red light on his screen. Also a camera, but he suspected that would be about as much use as a chocolate teapot in this visibility. At least he'd be able to determine that he'd snagged the entire package, not just the part with the sensor on. He needed to be gentle here and keep the package in one piece. If he caused it to fall apart - or it had already fallen apart - it was mission over. He had no chance at all of picking up a package without a beacon on it.

Fifty feet of cable was what he'd planned, but he could tell it was hopeless before he'd even managed to extend it that far. Even at thirty feet, the end of the cable was whipping around uncontrollably. He was going to need to use a shorter cable, and that meant hovering far closer to the ground. Twenty feet. The thought made him want to throw up. No ground effect to stop him going in, either. He needed to get this right. To go in, smooth and steady, hook the package, drag it the mile to near the main living areas of the base, and get the hell out of there without anyone seeing or hearing him. Piece of cake, if he didn't think about it too closely.

That was the right way to go about it, of course. Not thinking about it too closely. Let his instincts balance the plane, ride the gusts, and just focus on lining up those two little dots; the red one and the white one. He only needed to get within six inches, and then magnetism would do the rest. He had the magnetic field cranked up to maximum. He needed all the help he could get.

All else vanished. The howling of the storm was gone. All Scott's concentration focused down to those two points of coloured light wandering maddeningly randomly round the centre of his screen. If asked, he couldn't have explained how to get the two together. He just relaxed, focused, and let his instincts take over. And, on his second try, it worked.

He barely heard his father tell him to be careful, so focused was he on dragging the package slowly and carefully towards the station. There was a single big building right in the middle; several stories high, and long enough to provide some protection from the storm. If only he could get the package that close, they'd be able to come out and get it. At this point, he just had to hope that the storm would hide the noise of his engines, as well as any chance of visual contact. He had no chance at all of running the noise abatement procedures he'd practiced in the simulator. He'd go in fast, and hope that they'd equate a sudden roar together with the arrival of the package with an extra strong gust of wind.

Or maybe he wouldn't need to worry. There was a sudden massive crack of thunder as the storm intensified. Only belatedly did Scott realise just what a good lightning conductor he was sitting in right now, earthed perfectly down the cable. This day just kept getting worse, and he was out of options. No more time to be gentle. The package would have to take its chances. Scott headed for the base, not exactly fast, but fast enough to make him nervous. A big gust at the wrong time and there would be an uninvited guest for dinner on the third floor of the station, rocket plane and all.

A hundred feet from the main building, and they'd have to do the rest themselves. Scott cut the power to the magnetic grab just moments before his father told him to do so, and swung round back the way he'd come. There were buildings all over the place here, most of them fortunately low, but plenty high enough for him to hit at this altitude, and he had a steel cable hanging down at ground level. He hit the button to retract it, and grabbed at the controls again as the wind whipping round the end of the building caught him side on and rocked him almost over on his side.

Only as he regained control did he register the flashing red light on the winch control panel. Scott was already reaching for the emergency release when he froze, hand hovering above the switch. He couldn't sever the cable. Not here. There was far too much of a chance that it would be found before the snow covered it - in fact the snow was likely to build up around and against it, making an all new feature snowdrift shouting 'come look at me!' All the secrecy would be for nothing.

He returned his hand to the flight controls and, gently and carefully, eased Thunderbird One away from the base and back out into the open snow, slowly gaining height. He needed not to swing round and snag the magnetic grapple on anything. He needed not to use any more power than absolutely necessary to keep the noise down. He needed to go now, before a chance break in the storm left him visible to anyone looking out of the windows only a couple of hundred yards away. And he needed to get out of here before his luck ran out and the storm noticed the biggest lightning rod for several hundred miles in any direction. All this in zero visibility and hundred mile an hour gusts, with twenty feet of frozen stiff steel cable trailing beneath him.

Brains definitely needed to add this one to the simulators. He could have done with twenty or so practice runs under his belt.

It seemed to take forever to gain just fifty feet of height, and three times that in distance. At least the cable no longer reached the ground - but the storm was intensifying, thunder crashing all around him. Scott made a tactical decision. In this much noise, nobody was going to notice his engine noise and anyone seeing the flare of his jets would take it for a bizarre Antarctic form of lightning. He hauled his nose up - she was becoming frighteningly unresponsive, and he suspected ice formation on both wings and fuselage - and fired the main engines. He wanted out of this storm right now.

He never could get used to the way you came out of the top of a stormcloud to a perfect blue sky. Even in Antarctica it happened like that. One moment it was greyness and driving snow, the next brilliant sunshine. Scott squinted and blinked, his eyes watering in the sudden brightness, before the screens adjusted and showed him something his visual acuity could cope with. That was one serious storm below him. Black as your hat, towering anvils of thunderclouds as far as the eye could see in all directions. As he watched, he saw flickers of lightning from several of them. He was well out of there.

Still trailing twenty feet of cable, though. Scott tried the winch again, with the same red light result. He could sever the cable now, of course; dropped from a few thousand feet up and miles from base, the cable would bury itself in the ice and nobody would ever find it. But still he hesitated. This was a field test. In a real emergency it was entirely possible he'd need the grapple again before he had a chance for a return to base and a refit. No, if at all possible, he'd take Thunderbird One back to Tracy Island in one piece. So, how to get that winch working again?

He might be out of the storm, but it wasn't any warmer up here - if anything, it was probably colder. He needed to get heat to it somehow. He had plenty in here, even more in the engine, but getting it to the winch was less easy. Something else to discuss with Brains. He had a warm cabin, and a downright hot engine exhaust, but it was nowhere near the winch, not at the moment...not without a thermal conductor...and he just happened to be trailing one. All he needed was to trail it at just the right angle...

There were times when Scott longed for an audience for his flying, and times when he most definitely did not. This was the latter, as he stood Thunderbird One on her tail and rocked her back and forth. The electronics in the magnetic grapple were going to be completely shot, but the temperature sensor held together for long enough to tell him it was working. Every time the grapple swung into the exhaust, it heated up a little more, and steel cable was a darn good conductor. It wasn't long before toggling the winch control produced a green light, and then it was only seconds until his unwanted tail was reeled in and he was good to go.

Only then did he wonder when the last time was he'd said anything over his still open radio connection. He didn't want a discussion of what he'd done, not now. The details could wait until later. "It's down," he said simply. "Retracting the line and the wings and accelerating. I'll make sure not to hit Mach One until I'm well away from here."

He listened to his father's response, and then closed the channel. He needed to be properly alone now; to calm down and just fly. Him, the sky, and his plane, over a sea of black stormclouds and, in the distance, the black and white jagged peaks rimming the Antarctic plateau.

He was over them, away from the storm, and streaking over the unbroken white beyond, when the radio light flashed. It was John.

"They've retrieved the package. Seems it's one hell of a storm out there and no sign of it abating. Some discussion of guardian angels bringing it that close to them, but nobody says they were silver and jet-engined. You did it, Scott."

Scott smiled to himself as the radio fell silent again. Yes, he'd done it. Through the worst conditions on the planet, despite problems and mistakes, he'd done it and Thunderbird One had never let him down. No other plane could have done what he'd asked of her today. She'd saved a life. One day soon, he'd get a chance to show what she could do in public.

And maybe one day he'd come back to Antarctica and take a proper look.