The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Closer still, and absolutely fixed in terms of height, a great banner of white, crystal-filled mist was streaming off the cliff top and away south immediately above her head. It was as though the frozen wave of ice was breaking at last. So real was the effect that she stepped back involuntarily, as though expecting the whole ice wall to come tumbling down upon her head. The movement against the sky was made to look even more frantic by the fact that the sun was well past its zenith and seemed to be casting its light from behind the streaming clouds.

  As she stood transfixed, her breath caught in her throat, the strangest effect of all reached out towards her. As though the banner of mist streaming out from the cliff top were some sort of screen, a shadow was projected across it. The tea mug dropped from her nerveless fingers to shatter on the deck and the drops of tea within it rattled down around her feet like brown hail, frozen in the air. Her knees threatened to give out on her and only the greatest effort of will held her erect. Stretching out above her, cast across the flat plane of vapour in the sky, the shadow stumbled out towards her as though it would hurl itself down over the edge and into her waiting arms. It was clear and unmistakable, hooded, jacketed, and gloved. She could even see the bulges where its trousers were tucked into its boots. It was real in every detail, but distorted by the light. It hung like doom above her. Its hands reached out blindly, imploringly, seeming to reach towards her. There was a high keening sound which seemed to attain unbearable intensity and she thought it must be the sound of the wind in the ice cliff. Or it might have been a sound she was making herself. She blinked, slowly, feeling her tears freezing on her cheeks and tore her eyelids open again before they were frozen shut.

  And the shadow was gone.

  *

  ‘Look,’ said Lethbridge, ‘if it was a real shadow then it has to have belonged to Miss Cable or to Henri. But it sounds as though it could have been a trick of the light.’ He was shouting the words over the sound of the workers beginning to break through the welding at the back of the propeller boss.

  ‘I agree. But what would they still be doing up there? It’s nearly a day later ...’ Then she answered her own question. ‘It looked so lost ...’

  ‘Well, I guess Harry Stone and his team will find anything up there. Unless the weather makes it too risky to go far enough to see anything. Hell, Captain, it certainly brings it home how sheltered we are down here. Anything at all could be happening on the far side of the hill. At least they’ve got the walkie-talkie with them and orders not to go beyond its range.’

  Robin nodded. She bitterly regretted not doing the same with Henri LeFever. If she had realised that Ann would be going with him she would certainly have done so.

  She shivered, but not from the cold. The strange feeling of disquiet that the experience had roused within her would not leave her. It was as though all the unsettling little things she had noticed about the massive iceberg had joined forces with her increasing worry for her missing friends to form that ghostly shadow. For the first time, really, she missed Richard. They were so seamless a team as to be almost one person. When they were together, their thought processes worked so closely in union that they verged upon the psychic. Together they would have worked out what was troubling her and the best way to put it to rest. Alone, she could only talk it through with one or two of her command and even then not fully. It niggled away at the back of her mind like an itch she couldn’t scratch.

  The team had finished their assault on the welding and a length of cable came down from the deck above them, uncoiling with all the lazy grace of a massive python. The men caught it and began to wrap it round the hot metal of the boss. Immediately above Robin’s head, a lighter line wound down and when it tapped her hood she jumped. Lethbridge saw this, and wisely said nothing. ‘Right,’ she said decisively. ‘Time to get on. I hope this works.’

  ‘I’ll keep the hammers and the oxyacetylene equipment down here just in case,’ offered Lethbridge.

  ‘Yes. If there’s any problem, then we’ll heat up the boss and give it a gentle tap or two. But we can’t risk distorting it. We’ll be well up the creek if we can’t get it back on again.’

  ‘And without our paddle with a vengeance,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll be gentle, I promise.’

  ‘I’ve heard that one before,’ she said and began to climb back up to the poop deck.

  Her plan was simplicity itself in essence. The length of cable which Timmins had lowered to the engineers was secured round the starboard inner capstan post. As Robin arrived beside him, Hogg pulled the end back up on the line which had made her jump and secured it round the port inner capstan. The cable now went from one post twice round the propeller boss and back up to the other. In theory, all they needed to do was tighten the cable to the correct tension then feed it out from one capstan while pulling it in to the other and the friction of the rope wound round the propeller boss would cause it to unscrew. If they failed on the first attempt, Lethbridge’s men would heat things up until the boss expanded and came loose, like the cap of a jar held under a hot tap in the kitchen.

  ‘Right,’ she called back to the two officers behind her. ‘Let’s go.’

  Half an hour later, the cheers of Lethbridge and his men as the boss cleared its final screw thread were so loud that they almost drowned the insistent sound of the walkie-talkie. Robin’s face was still split into a wide, victorious grin as she slid the icy earpiece under her hood and thumbed the buttons.

  ‘Captain here.’

  ‘... Harry Stone ...’ The signal was weak. They were clearly at the furthest limit of their range.

  ‘Come back, Harry. You’ve gone too far already. I say again, give up and come home.’

  ‘... bring ... with us ... too weak to walk but I think we can ...’

  ‘Say again, Harry. I can’t make you out.’

  ‘... white-out here. It’s a miracle we found him. I think we can get him back all right, though. I say again, it’s a total white-out here, but we marked our trail and I think we can get Henri back ...’

  ‘I hear you! I understand you have found Henri LeFever and are bringing him back with you. What about Ann Cable? I say again, what about Ann Cable?’

  ‘She’s gone, Captain. I’m sorry, but she’s gone.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Day Twelve

  Sunday, 30 May 18:00

  Ann Cable was lost, but not quite gone. She was staggering through the ice blizzard, her right arm crooked before her forehead, trying to protect her face from the wind. She could see very little now, for the vicious spicules of ice which seemed to be driving like needles into her cheeks were scoring the glass lenses of her goggles like diamond dust and settling in miniature drifts across them. She was staggering forwards, her skis long gone, into a tunnel of gathering darkness at the heart of the white-out, as though departing from reality altogether.

  The thin material of her hood drummed against her ears deafeningly so that the banshee howling of the wind seemed to be receding as mysteriously as the light. The whole of her outfit had been designed for ski slopes not polar storms, so that even the agony of the cold was beginning to fade as the deadly numbness of frostbite stole over her. Only the brave, burning strength of her indomitable life force kept her moving and there was very little of it left. She knew this well enough but kept before her mind the one thought — her last thought — that if she stopped moving, she would die. She had no idea where she was going. She had no idea where she was or where she had come from. She was too tired even to be afraid any longer, though fear had kept her going since she had lost contact with Henri. She was moving now only because she was a living thing and some atavistic instinct told her that stillness meant death.

  Abruptly, she began to shiver. This was not the gentle trembling of chilled muscles familiar from cold winter mornings, but a bone-deep juddering which came without warning and rooted itself in her most vital organs, sapping the last of her energy at a terrific rate. Only her single ski pole held her erect as she stoo
d helplessly in the grip of it. Only the fact that her right arm was frozen to the fake fur of her hood kept it in place. Unlike the first attack a few minutes ago, this one was fierce enough to cost her part of her tongue and the caps on two teeth before it passed. She should have been in agony but she felt nothing beyond the numbness and the slow calming of the cataclysm within her. A trickle of blood froze, as bright as scarlet nail varnish, on the dull white of her ice-caked chin. She fell forward and her legs took up their stumbling motion again, much more weakly than before.

  She had only moments left to live.

  *

  It had begun as the simplest of adventures little more than twenty-four hours earlier. As soon as Henri had appeared ready to go up onto the iceberg, with the lifeboat’s emergency beacon in his hand, she had been ovcrcome by a desire to accompany him. It was much more than the complex tangle of friendship, suspicion and simple desire she felt for him, it had been something to do with the iceberg itself. She had been ‘ashore’ with the anchorage teams, but that had only served to put her under the spell of the ice. Something high in this alp of frozen water called to her with a disturbing intensity. Henri was going out to it. She had to go too. It was not something over which she had any control at all, really.

  Unlike Clotho, Atropos had ski equipment aboard. Ann had no difficulty in kitting herself out with the sort of stuff she felt would be perfect for the adventure. She took skis, poles, a parka with a hood, and waterproof leggings. On her back she strapped a small backpack with some basic survival equipment in it — a silver thermal blanket, a thermos, and one of the hand-held walkie-talkies which would communicate with the bridge from a distance of more than two miles. Henri had one emergency beacon; she took another and slung it round her neck. Henri had a small tent in his backpack, but that just seemed like so much excess baggage to her.

  As the afternoon began to think about stretching itself into the long, lingering evening, the pair of them climbed out of a lifeboat and carried the skis, poles and all the rest up the shelving beach to the beginning of the dry ice. Side by side and silently, they kitted up and prepared to set off. They said no farewells and, in fact, none of the busy sailors seemed to notice that they had gone. There was no need for any warnings or injunctions to take care. They were not going far. They were going together. They were going through a clear afternoon which would linger into a bright evening which would give way to a luminous, starlit night with the promise of a fat moon later. They had the walkie-talkie. They each had a beacon and could switch it on so the crew of Atropos would have no trouble in finding them should anything untoward happen.

  There was no snow, really. No doubt snow had fallen on the great river of antediluvian ice which had spawned the berg, and upon the berg itself since it had set sail onto the Arctic Ocean, but it had either set into the rest of the solid surface or had blown away like frozen feathers in the breath of the polar wind. They soon found themselves skiing across a gentle slope of rock-solid ice, moving up and away from the bustle around the anchorage point. They were effectively climbing the shallow steps of a great semi-circular amphitheatre to begin with. The tops of the steps were flat but only a hundred yards or so wide. The vertical fronts were drifted slopes, not quite steep enough to test their technique in skiing uphill. Above the highest gallery, a gentle ice slope rose like a solid river flooding round a high, absolutely vertical ice bluff. The bluff reached out in two towering cliff faces, coming to a point less than a mile away. They paused at the bottom of this slope, and looked around themselves. Up ahead of them, the rise, like the shoulder of a low white hill, led round the vertical abruptness of the first ice bluff which rose on their right as though it were the bow of a great ship sailing southwards and the slope they were about to climb were a bow wave before it. Their first objective was to go round the point in the hope that the slope would continue to rise beyond it, leading them up to the higher galleries.

  Twenty minutes of silent skiing proved their hope to be well founded. They skirted a jumble of ice boulders at the foot of the bluff and swung wide until they had a good view up behind it to the north. Here they paused again, both looking back over their shoulders at the suddenly distant Atropos and the miniature bustle on her forward deck. The anchorage points and the stern of the ship were hidden by the gleaming slope behind them. Then they looked ahead, to the north. Here the slope they had been following climbed up the side of the cliff face of the bluff, which came to a point on their right hand. On their left, the slope fell away until, distantly, it became the foot of another great cliff which stood like a wall in front of them. Behind the slope, somewhere before it became a wide ledge high above, the cliff stretching east to west ahead of them met at right angles with the southward thrust of the bluff. From the ship they had only been able to see the bluff. From here it was possible to see the second, infinitely larger cliff stretching away so massively it might almost have stretched to America itself. And at their feet, reaching up the side of the bluff and to the top of the cliff in a single, unbroken run was the slope of ice they were following upwards. No matter how high the cliffs ahead of them, no matter how massive the feature further west, here it looked like an easy climb to the upper slopes — and to whatever mountainous beauties lay beyond.

  ‘En avant!’ called Henri suddenly. The merry, indomitable, human cry echoed off the icy walls around them and Ann caught the excitement in his voice. With a great surge of freedom, as though she were escaping the humdrum and entering a world of infinite possibilities, she struck forward, northwards up the new slope. As soon as she did so, the great ship’s bow of the ice bluff hid Atropos and everyone aboard her from her sight.

  As she moved, she felt the freedom buoy her up. Away from Atropos, all of her worries and wondering were put into some kind of perspective. The roller-coaster which her emotions had ridden recently now seemed to be a relatively paltry thing. Jamie Curtis’s thoughtless words about Nico and Robin, followed so quickly by Nico’s apparent death had set a worm of suspicion gnawing painfully within her. But Nico’s rebirth and Robin’s almost girlish glee at Richard’s arrival had made her suspicions seem so childish. And now this new environment, the simple distance from the claustrophobic little world of Atropos, made all of her worries seem like a storm in a teacup. Something more to do with exhaustion and paranoia than reality. As she strove to catch up with Henri, she was actually laughing at herself.

  She would not have been laughing had she had any idea what effect the same pressure of claustrophobia, exhaustion and paranoia were having on her massive companion.

  On this side of the ice bluff, the slope was steeper and clearly led upwards to the top of an ice cliff which stretched away to the left like the edge of Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Where that great tectonic mountain had been fringed with overhanging foliage, this one was edged with massive icicles. Where those black cliffs had been scalable only from a rocky point nearby, these blindingly white ones were easy to reach up the slope Ann and Henri were now following. As they climbed, however, it soon became obvious that they would have to keep the west-facing cliff of the bluff ever closer to their right shoulders as the outer reaches of the slope on their left fell away more and more steeply. After half an hour they were effectively on a ledge, albeit one which was wide enough for them still to be climbing side by side. Ahead of them, the slope was steepening, like a child’s slide made of sugar icing, up to the hard edge of the cliffs against the dark blue sky.

  ‘One last push,’ called Henri, his voice breathy with the exercise, but still exultant.

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t too steep?’

  ‘No. It’ll be easy!’

  He pulled ahead and she was content to follow him. Looking up past his hunched shoulder, she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. At the high groin where the bluff joined the main cliff, there was a cleft. It looked a little strange, as though an arm did not quite join the shoulder after all.

  After that one glance up past him, she looked down and
concentrated on keeping her skis in his tracks. She was an accomplished skier, but soon found that her work at Aspen and Cortina d’A was not quite the preparation needed for this. Soon the parallel tramline markings of Henri’s ski tracks in the ice drift became herringbone markings. Soon after that, she paused again, her legs threatening to cramp as the muscles down their outer curves cried out, unused to this duck-like form of locomotion. She was breathless and covered in perspiration. Her light-sensitive goggles were beginning to fog up and it suddenly seemed to her that the last of the daylight was fading with unnatural rapidity. On looking up, however, she was given renewed strength by the nearness of their goal and she realised that while she had been concentrating on fitting her skis into his tracks, they had scaled the final section of the slope. The gathering darkness was in fact a shadow from the cliff top above them. Just before her, just above her, Henri was standing, looking ahead. As though wearing leg irons, she moved forward to his side.

  If anything, the slope eased off. On their right, very close at hand, the southward reach of west-facing cliff was reduced to little more than a hillock and she saw at once that what she had taken for a cleft was a simple undulation in the snow slope. Ahead, and still above them, the south-facing cliff which reached far away to the west on their left hand was the crest of a low hill, but it still held the skyline as though there was nothing more of the iceberg beyond it. Abruptly, the hard edge of the horizon wavered. Tendrils of smoke reached out towards them only to whisper past just above their heads. The effect was extremely sinister, as though they were being summoned by ghosts. For a moment, the whole of the slope before them seemed to go out of focus and Ann found herself squinting as though she were suddenly short-sighted.