Evening. I appreciate you taking my call. I've been listening for a few months now, trying to work up the nerve to do this. What I'm about to tell you, I've never shared outside of maybe three people, and two of them are dead now. I was special operations. I'm not going to say which branch or unit because, frankly, it doesn't matter and I'd rather not have anyone come knocking. What matters is that in the winter of 1996, I was deployed to Antarctica. McMurdo Station officially, but the actual operation was about four hundred kilometers inland. I can't tell you what we were looking for. I signed papers. And I mean that. But I can tell you what found me. This was a solo reconnaissance. Just me. No team, no backup within extraction range. That was the job. You go out, you observe, you report, you come back. Seventy-two hours max. I'd done it before in worse conditions. I thought I knew what I was walking into.
Day two, I was about sixty clicks from the primary observation point. Moving at night, which in that latitude in winter means moving in darkness, period. Twenty-four hours of it. You get used to it. Your world becomes the beam of your headlamp and the GPS on your wrist. The weather report had shown a system moving in, but it was supposed to pass north. It didn't. Around 0300 hours, the wind shifted. Temperature dropped fifteen degrees in maybe twenty minutes. And I mean that, fifteen degrees. I felt it in my joints before the instruments caught up. I started making for a cache point, an emergency shelter we'd set up on the approach route. Should have been six hours at pace. I made it maybe two before the whiteout hit. Complete whiteout. I couldn't see three feet in front of me. The wind was screaming so loud I couldn't hear my own breathing. I kept moving because stopping means dying. That's the rule. You stop, you're done.
I don't know how long I walked. Time stops meaning anything when you can't see and you can't hear and the cold is eating through three layers of thermal gear. At some point, the ground just wasn't there anymore. Crevasse, probably. I went down maybe thirty, forty feet. Hit an ice shelf, bounced, kept falling, hit another ledge. Landed on my pack. My radio took the brunt of that second impact. Cracked housing, exposed circuits. I tried it anyway. Nothing but static at first, then dead silence. Completely dead. No signal, no emergency beacon, nothing. I was hurt. I knew that without having to check. Something wrong in my ribs, my left leg wasn't responding right. But the real problem was the cold. Down in that crevasse, out of the wind, it was actually colder. No movement, no friction, no heat generation. I could feel my core temperature dropping. I started losing feeling in my hands first. Then my feet. Then my face. I'd seen men die from hypothermia. I knew exactly what was happening.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]