Tolland and the others escape by weather balloon and survive on an iceberg is a desperate escape that offers only a temporary reprieve: Michael Tolland turns a weather balloon into a means of flight, but its cable fails, the fugitives fall from the glacier, and their attackers then send their ice platform into the sea. The slab’s unexpected return to the surface leaves Tolland, Rachel Sexton, and Corky Marlinson alive—wet, exposed, and drifting—while Delta-One assumes the ocean will conceal them.

A desperate plan

With Corky struggling against an armed attacker, Tolland weighs the uselessness of Rachel’s small ax against three armed men. Searching a bulky vinyl bag for a flare gun or radio, he instead finds a folded Mylar weather balloon. It is designed to carry a modest observational payload and has no helium tank, so it cannot function as an ordinary balloon. Tolland’s first response is despair; then a childhood memory of spinnaker-flying, suspended over the water and carried by the sail and wind, gives him a different use for the fabric.

The bag’s payload warning says the balloon should not be used in winds over ten knots. Tolland disregards it because staying where they are means certain death. He passes the folded fabric to Rachel, then clips its payload clasp to the carabiners on both their harnesses, joining them at the hip. The improvised connection is not a controlled flight system: it makes the three escapees a linked group, with Corky attached by a tether, and leaves their movement to the glacier’s powerful wind.

Carried down the glacier

Tolland throws the crumpled Mylar overhead. The wind catches it and opens it like a parachute, yanking him and Rachel off their feet and dragging them down the glacier. The tether pulls Corky away from his attackers as well; he is hauled across the ice, narrowly misses an overturned sled, and swings inward. The rope that had connected Corky to Norah Mangor now trails limp, a sign that she is no longer with them. The attackers lose their chance to seize the three as they speed away from the flare-lit scene.

The run becomes a series of uncontrolled launches over glacier berms. Rachel and Tolland clear one ridge, but the frayed payload cable snaps as the balloon spirals out to sea. Without it, they fall and slide over the next berms and across the final plateau of the Milne Glacier. Corky’s tether adds drag, but not enough to stop them before the glacier’s edge disappears beneath them. Rachel’s last recollection of the descent is falling; the apparent plunge into the ocean instead ends after a drop of roughly ten feet, when the three strike another slab of ice.

The broken terrace

The landing place is a broad, flat lower terrace, about the size of a hockey rink, that has partly detached from the glacier. A pressure fissure nearly four feet wide separates it from the Milne Ice Shelf, and cliffs border three sides. The slab remains attached only at its back, where the connection is already failing. The escape has carried the group out of immediate reach of their attackers, but onto an unstable platform poised to break away.

Rachel recognizes the danger and urges that they get off the block. Before they can work out how, Delta-One and another white-clad soldier arrive above them. Delta-One sees that the fugitives are alive, but judges their position useful: the terrace is already moving toward the sea, and a fall would leave no bodies to find. The glacier’s routine cracking booms also make a further collapse less likely to draw attention.

The slab breaks loose

Delta-One uses a military flashbang, normally intended to disorient rather than kill. He sets its delay to ten seconds and throws it into the crevasse. The blast lights the ice from within and sends a concussion through the slab. The fissure widens; the terrace shears away from the shelf, carrying Rachel, Tolland, and Corky down into the Arctic Ocean.

The slab’s descent slows as it enters the water, but the group lands hard on its surface. The top sinks below the waterline, and seawater floods over the ice. Rachel is pulled under and fights back to the surface; all three are tangled in their harnesses and tethers. Then Tolland warns that the slab is coming back up. Having stopped underwater, the immense sheet scrapes its way up the glacier face and rises rapidly, lifting Rachel with it. Water pours from the surface, and the current drags her toward the edge until the tether catches her. Corky’s momentum, transmitted through the line, brings her to a stop; Tolland is also on the slab, having grabbed Corky’s tether.

Survival without rescue

The resurfaced slab becomes a drifting island of ice, carrying the three away from the glacier in strong offshore currents. Delta-One sees three dark figures on it through a magnifier. He cannot tell whether they are alive, but assumes that, soaked and exposed to an approaching storm, they will die within an hour. Their remoteness in the Arctic Ocean makes recovery unlikely in his assessment. He tells Delta-Two they are only shadows, and the two soldiers return to base.

The outcome is therefore survival, not safety. The balloon’s wind-driven lift first saves the fugitives from the immediate attack, but the snapped cable sends them into a second crisis; the grenade intended to make their deaths look like an accident instead places them on a slab that rises again. The attackers leave believing the sea will finish what the explosion began, while the three remain alive together on the iceberg. The episode’s decisive reversal is visible even from above: the figures Delta-One dismisses as shadows are the people he failed to eliminate.