The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  The lift doors opened and a group of people got out. Maggie glanced up and down again, her dark cheeks burning with rage. It was the group of men and women who had done this. John Stonor and Harriet Lang, quietly, side by side, their faces slightly stunned. Signor Verdi had picked up his sidekick from the trial, the tall lugubrious Signor Nero of Disposoco. The American lawyer Gordino walked between them, in intense conversation with them. She knew what he would be saying well enough: It’s bad luck the old guy fell ill but remember, your suit is with his company. Don’t weaken; let’s go for it.

  She looked away from them through the glass doors. Out in the dark street, a bright ambulance pulled up. Its rear section swung wide and two white-coated men hurried towards the building. The doors opened and the falling whine of its siren followed the paramedics into reception like the cry of a dying wolf. Maggie was swept up into the bustle of things again as they relieved the first aid men and began rattling off questions to her. Questions she could not answer for the most part, about medical history and allergies. Doggedly determined he would not go to the emergency unit alone, she followed out into the street.

  A small crowd had gathered, even at this time on a Sunday night. Maggie hardly noticed them as she rushed forward with Sir William, but something about the way they stirred made her stop and look back. The crowd had reacted to the fact that John Stonor and Harriet Lang had come out. They were obviously famous enough to make the little crowd react in a way that the sight of a dying man on a stretcher had not. Maggie felt like screaming at them. Didn’t they care about anything important? She was dangerously close to tears. A motorcycle pulled up behind the line of people. Its pillion passenger swung off and began to walk forward. The driver sat hunched forward with both feet firmly on the ground, helmet and filter mask in profile against the slick brightness of the wet street.

  Out through the door behind the television personalities came the other three. The pillion passenger began to push through the little crowd. Maggie’s attention switched back to Sir William as the ambulancemen slid his stretcher up into the back of their vehicle.

  Everything seemed to Maggie to be happening very slowly now — she was deeply in the grip of shock. The extra time everything was taking gave the images a better opportunity to burn themselves into her memory, but she hardly felt a part of the scene at all.

  The pillion passenger walked deliberately across the pavement. There was nothing about the figure to attract her attention except for the sinister anonymity of the black leather and the visored helmet, but something made her look for just that little bit longer. So she, perhaps she alone, saw the right arm come up until the machine-pistol was at shoulder height. John Stonor and Harriet Lang had vanished as soon as they saw the waiting crowd. The three men behind them were hurrying down the steps and were so close to the black-clad figure they could almost have touched the weapon.

  Had Maggie been less deep in shock already, she would have acted far more quickly — and would probably have got herself killed in the process. As it was, her first action was to push Sir William’s stretcher further into the ambulance as though, having got him this far, he was now her responsibility. Then she opened her mouth and sucked in breath to yell a warning. But her cry of ‘Look out!’ was lost in the stutter of the gun and the throaty roar of the revving motorcycle.

  The three men danced backwards and their attacker stepped forward after them, still firing. Then the man turned, the smoking gun down at arm’s length by his side, and began to walk back. The little crowd beside the ambulance scattered in all directions. A pair of hands grasped Maggie and jerked her up into the ambulance. The doors slammed shut. There was utter silence except for Sir William’s wheezing breath and the roar of the motorcycle which rose and began to fade.

  ‘Get us out of here!’ yelled someone in the front of the ambulance.

  ‘No! Wait,’ yelled the man holding Maggie. ‘There’s work to do out there!’

  He hit the door and dropped to the pavement. Maggie went with him. The motorcycle had gone as though it had never existed, and three almost child-sized figures lay hunched on the steps in the light from the lobby just behind them.

  It was as though the blood had always been there and the sad little bodies had simply fallen into it. The ambulanceman reached Verdi first, turning the man over gently, as though he was actually a child. The blue eyes were protuberant and fiercely fixed. The moustache bristled with indignation. There was nothing left of the face below it.

  ‘Aiuto!’ whispered a voice, and Maggie was on her knees at once, paddling through the blood, trying to work out which of the other two victims might have spoken. It was Signor Nero. She cradled his head in her lap, utterly indifferent to the blood which marked the front of her midnight-blue suit like tar. It was hot against her shock-chilled skin. His soft, sad brown eyes looked up at her out of bruise-dark rings. His lips writhed as he tried to form words. She leaned down to hear. Far, far away, the ambulanceman said to someone, ‘No, the other guy’s dead as well.’

  Nero’s breath smelt of garlic and wine and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The Italian coughed convulsively and the strange smell got stronger. Of course, it was the smell of blood.

  ‘They kill even the lawyer?’ he asked, his voice light as down on the wind.

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. How recently and how bitterly she had hated this poor man. She felt more soiled by the memory than by his lifeblood.

  ‘The lawyer too.’ His voice was infinitely sad.

  She looked up. The ambulancemen were standing, watching her. They all knew the wounds were fatal.

  ‘They say,’ continued the Disposoco man, his face working to form the words, as though they were the most important thing in the world, and Maggie suddenly, sickeningly knew that ‘they’ were the murderers on the motorbike. ‘They say the case is closed. In’s’allah. You understand. It is message for us all from the PLO. It is their promise from so long ago. In’s’allah. The case is closed.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Day Thirteen

  Monday, 31 May 10:00

  The three figures came over the low ridge and paused, looking down at the scene of bustling activity below. They all wore thick cold-weather gear of Eskimo manufacture and except for their size they seemed almost identical. The right-hand figure was the tallest, very nearly a giant, in whose mittened hands the ski poles looked like toothpicks. The harness round the immense barrel of his chest reached back to a fully packed sled which, seemingly, he would have had little trouble carrying under one arm. Inuit are a small-framed folk; the clothes he wore would have dressed two of them. Or both of the slighter figures beside him. The left-hand figure stood reed-straight, up past his shoulder, and the central figure, every bit as tall in fact, seemed shorter because it drooped with fatigue. Even so, it was the central figure which moved first, pulling down the covering over the lower part of its face to say, ‘Here we are. Atropos. Home sweet home.’ The noise coming up the wide ice valley towards them was loud enough to require quite a shout, but even so there was no mistaking the voice of Ann Cable.

  ‘I would never have dreamed this could be possible, would you, Colin?’ called the second, slighter figure.

  The giant simply shook his head, looking down at the hive of activity around the beached ship. Their current position effectively put them at the highest point of the slope of ice which, further down, became Robin’s slipway. The height was just enough to give them a panoramic view reaching even over the high bridgehouse with its tall thrust of funnel to reveal the bustle on the forward deck. Here there seemed to be a gaping hole as though a military shell had landed between and immediately forward of the split windlass to leave a rough-edged, round, dark crater. More lengthy inspection, however, revealed that what seemed to be a hole was in fact a dark section of decking, from which a circular object had recently been lifted. No, not circular; bladed. But its fixings had been circular. And the object itself was being raised now, like s
ome massive brass-coloured three-leafed clover. It was being pulled erect by the power of a box-shaped gantry sitting far forward on the deck, seeming to squat like a weightlifter above it.

  Clustered in another circle round it stood a group of people whose minuscule size seemed to emphasise the scale of the propeller above them. Five of them standing in a column on each other’s shoulders might have reached towards the top of it. Five like the giant looking down on the scene — six or seven of the people actually involved in it. No sooner was the propeller upright than the gantry began to grind back along the deck. Its movement was so slow at first that only the echoing sound of it gave notice that it was moving.

  Five hundred feet nearer, the activity was less easy to characterise. A large group of people, arranged on several levels up a series of makeshift scaffolds, seemed to be freeing the distorted brother of the propeller on the forward deck. There was no gantry here to squat like a titan and raise or lower the massive weight. Instead, a strong hawser, attached at both ends to the capstans on the poop deck and looped round the hollow-centred propeller, was lowering it carefully to the ice. The noise was deafening — the roar of fire from oxyacetylene torches, the bellows roar of turning capstans, the twang of overstrained ropes. The insistent, overpowering tintinnabulation of metal against metal. It sounded like some monstrous blacksmith’s forge.

  Even Ann, who knew what Robin’s plans of action had been, was astounded by the scale of what was going on. She could hardly guess what its effect upon Colin and Kate Ross was, especially as her rescuers had been alone on their drift ice station on the western coast of this iceberg for the better part of six months; ever since the massive craft of ice had been swept out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Davis Strait, in fact. She had no desire to linger here, however. She was burning to find out what had happened to Henri. The unexpected intimacy of their experience had disturbed her in many ways and the thought that he might not have made it back alive was incredibly painful to her. Colin and Kate would have been much happier simply to have radioed news of her rescue and given her a couple of days’ rest to recover, but something had made her beg them to bring her back as quickly as humanly possible. They had not been loath to fall in with her plans; the thought of doing some socialising was very welcome to them, even under these rather extreme circumstances.

  The three of them rocked forward over the crest of the slope together and began to slide easily down towards the nearest group of crew members. It was Chief Lethbridge who saw them first. Ann, wearing a pair of Kate’s Polaroid sun goggles, saw him much more clearly than he could see her and she was able to discern the fleeting shadows of surprise, shock and suspicion with which he viewed three apparent strangers. She saw him glance up, see them outlined against the bright sky and frown. She saw him check around his men and make sure none of them had strayed up here. She saw him look back up and realise that they were wearing outfits unlike anything Atropos could supply. She saw him speak rapidly to a man beside him and then jerk his walkie-talkie up to his lips. As he talked urgently into it, the blacksmith’s chorus of sound died down around him so that only the slow grinding from the forward deck remained on the air. It was at this point that she regretted her insistence upon silence; upon this highly dramatic entrance which was already designed in her own mind to form the climax of her next book.

  ‘Suspicious bunch,’ growled Colin Ross. Ann still could not get used to the gravelly depth of his speaking voice. He slurred his ‘S’s slightly, his accent whispering distantly of Scottish ancestry in a way that Richard Mariner’s did not.

  ‘Do you think something might have happened?’ No more could Ann get used to Kate’s calm English tones, more suited to an Oxford professor’s garden party than a wilderness of ice.

  ‘They’ve lost two crew members so far,’ said Ann. ‘For all I know, they think they’ve lost two more within the last two days. On top of that, there’s someone somewhere aboard who may be trying to kill them all.’ Her voice sounded suddenly worried and uncertain even in her own ears. ‘That might well make them jumpy.’ As she said it, the spectre of Henri’s possible death reared up before her again. Is he dead? she asked herself once more. And, if so, what blame do I bear for it?

  Two familiar figures loomed atop the rapidly nearing poop and suddenly Ann found herself tearing back the hood and pulling down the goggles so that they could see her face. ‘Henri!’ she called exultantly. ‘Robin! It’s me. I’m all right!’

  The silence disappeared at once and the three of them found themselves skiing down into an overwhelming thunder of cheering. A thunder which abruptly came from the ice as well as the assembled throats. The cliff slopes on either hand vibrated and the slope heaved beneath them. Ann went sprawling and the others, more sure-footed than she, had difficulty staying erect. The real thunder silenced the welcome, for it was unexpected and utterly unnerving, like a minor earthquake. Everyone looked up in sudden fear at the glistening upper slopes, but apart from some clouds of crystals which rapidly formed a rainbow above them, nothing else happened. Robin and Henri had disappeared — onto the main deck, no doubt, to see whether the tremor had affected the mobile gantry or its load.

  ‘Icebergs don’t have earthquakes, do they?’ Ann asked Kate as she struggled to get back onto her feet.

  ‘No. That’s just this berg getting to grips with the ice barrier,’ said the English woman. Her voice was calm, unruffled, but the white forehead was frowning slightly with concern. ‘It’ll get worse until one piece of ice decides to give way. Nothing to be concerned about normally, but it looks as though your friends had better get a move on or they will have something to worry about.’ Colin’s massive hand fastened round Ann’s upper arm and brought her back to her feet as Robin and Henri reappeared on the after deck and the cheering, mutedly, was resumed.

  *

  They already did have something to worry about. It took Ann no time at all to realise that the grim mood, already darkening even before she and Henri went up onto the ice, had darkened further. The welcome she received was joyous; Henri especially seemed nearly tipsy with relief. But Robin was almost perfunctory in her welcome to her miraculously living friend and her quiet rescuers. It was clear that she had something on her mind. ‘What is it?’ asked Ann as soon as she decently could. ‘What’s the matter — apart from the obvious?’ Her glance took in the ice cliffs and the whole situation of the ship.

  ‘Dead fish. A whole lot of them have just come up to the surface.’

  They were on the deck, walking forward past the port side of the bridgehouse. Colin and Kate Ross were just behind them with Henri also in tow. Tea had been sent for and would catch up with them wherever they were. Robin seemed to be drawn and almost febrile with a combination of fatigue and driving power. At first offended by the curtness of the welcome afforded by her captain, Ann was rapidly beginning to see how dangerous Robin thought their situation was; she could hardly have timed her resurrection less well. With the damaged propeller off and the spare one still grinding back up the deck at a snail’s place, Atropos was highly vulnerable. Another shock like the last one — and Kate had said there would be more, and worse ones — and the ship could all too easily be shaken loose. Ann could imagine the horror of parting lines whipping left and right, of the collapsing galleries astern with men thrown hither and thither as Atropos began to slide into the water. They would never get her fixed in time if that happened. They would all have to follow Colin and Kate onto the ice and watch their ship get crushed to death — assuming they themselves survived further violent contact between the barrier and the berg. And then there was the possibility that in the maelstrom one or more canisters of their lethal cargo might burst.

  That thought gave an added shock of horror to what Ann saw when Robin took her and her rescuers past the slowly-moving gantry with its giant brass pendulum and past the uncovered circle on the deck onto the forepeak. The prow of the ship, unnaturally deep in the black water because of the angle of the rest of the h
ull, was surrounded by dead fish floating belly up.

  ‘What killed them?’ The rumble of Colin Ross’s basso profundo held a distant hint of anger and disgust.

  ‘We have no idea,’ answered Robin wearily. ‘And we haven’t even had a chance to take a sample yet. But I’d give a lot to know.’

  ‘We could tell you,’ said Kate, her voice as disapproving as Colin’s. ‘This sort of thing is in our area of expertise. But we haven’t got our equipment.’

  ‘Let’s get some up for testing pretty quickly,’ suggested Colin. He looked up at the blue sky. ‘It won’t be long until a gull notices something. Then they’ll all be gone in minutes.’

  ‘According to my equipment,’ said Henri suddenly, his voice speculative, ‘there’s radioactivity out here.’

  ‘What?’ They all swung round to confront him, but Robin asked the question, her face pale with shock, her eyes wide and dark. ‘How do you know? When did you find out?’

  ‘Earlier this morning. I was doing a routine check when I noticed the fish.’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me at once?’ snapped Robin.

  ‘It’s not much and it’s not the cargo.’ His voice was flat. His eyes travelled from Robin to Ann and back again. ‘There’s nothing registering anywhere in any of the holds. Just out here. I think it’s the ice.’

  ‘Is that possible?’ Ann asked Colin. She had come to respect the opinion of the Rosses on anything to do with ice very quickly indeed.

  ‘Anything is possible,’ answered Colin. His face was blank. His gaze lighted on the tall Canadian and it was as cold as the slopes around them. ‘Are you saying there is enough radioactivity here to explain all these dead fish?’