The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  He was the only one so far who had approached the lead alone and, without the support and simple distraction of a companion or two, he fell more absolutely under its spell. He was still standing, alone, on the edge of it when the iceberg towering behind him moved again. It did not move far, no more than a metre or two, adjusting its position against the barrier like a wrestler trying for a throw. It was enough. Timmins’s feet shot out from beneath him and he suddenly found himself sitting on the edge of the ice with his feet dangling in the water. Stupid bastard! he thought, and went to get up. He put his hands on either side of his hips, palms down and fingers spread against the wet surface. As soon as he put any weight on them they lost their purchase and slipped. He sat down even harder and his skinny buttocks slid forward nearly a foot. The silent black water flooded into his boots, jerking him down yet further, and reached for his crotch. The shock was enough to knock the breath out of him. He was suddenly overpoweringly aware of how thin the ice was and how deep the ocean. He looked up in increasing panic. Almost everyone else had gone. Only two last figures lingered on the crest of the next ridge looking back at the iceberg. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘O’Brien!’ He wasn’t quite panicking yet, largely because this didn’t actually seem real.

  The force of his shout made him lose his grip on the ice altogether and he slid right into the water. Where he had been leaning back like a reluctant bather on the edge of a pool, suddenly he was reaching forward, arms spread wide against the steep heave of the ice ahead, the slippery edge of it under his armpits. Cold lanced into him along with shock and uncontrollable terror. He went wild, scrabbing with his hands against the ice, searching for any kind of handhold at all, screaming as he did so at the top of his voice, ‘O’Brien! Help me, O’Brien!’ The edge of the ice caught him bruisingly under the chin and he bit his tongue but he didn’t stop shouting for an instant.

  Only when the black water slapped him in the mouth and choked him into silence and resignation did he stop, look up and listen. O’Brien hadn’t moved a muscle. He was still up there, looking down at the helpless, drowning man. Their eyes met for an instant and the last thing Timmins heard before his head slid into the black, black water was the big New Yorker’s mocking, terrible, echoing answer, ‘Fuck you, Yasser.’

  *

  ‘So,’ said LeFever. ‘Why did you come back?’

  They were on the top of the central ridge now, side by side, watching the line of exhausted men toiling up over the top. Behind them, the huge berg loomed, seemingly closer still, shrouded in the driving rain, its upper reaches lost in the low, roiling clouds. The wind was pulling ghastly rags and banners of icy spray off its mountainous shoulders where they loomed above the invisible Atropos. In front of them lay the wider, shallower slopes down towards the flat ice plain at whose heart stood Clotho with the cruise liner beyond her. Both ships were blazing with light and it was possible to see the bustle of preparation to receive them on the ice. Colin Ross had already spoken to Richard on the walkie-talkie so he knew they were coming in.

  This was hardly a time for social chit-chat, but Colin reckoned he and LeFever had done a good job getting everyone safely here and he was prepared to be indulgent. ‘The bird,’ he said. ‘The bird brought us back.’

  ‘The dead auk?’

  ‘Yes. I autopsied it and found a fish inside.’

  ‘Big deal. So?’

  ‘When I autopsied the fish, I found it was full of drugs.’

  ‘I thought we’d already concluded that it would be. That’s how both the fish and the bird died.’

  ‘There was more. Semtex.’

  There was the tiniest of silences and then Henri said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought even a drugged up fish would eat something like Semtex.’

  ‘You’re right. It wouldn’t. It was eating part of a human finger. The flesh seems to have been buried in the Semtex.’

  This time the silence was longer and Colin thought his companion must be thinking with wonderment, as he had done himself, about the mentality of someone who could chop off fingers and chuck them overboard with whatever they had been clutching.

  This wasn’t quite what Henri was thinking, of course. He turned away to look back towards the distant ship. There was nothing to see but a ghostly glow of brightness from her lights, refracting in the cliffs above the anchorage, illuminating the dull grey sheets of rain and the long streamers of wind-driven spray reaching out from the berg towards them. ‘That’s incredible,’ whispered the French Canadian.

  ‘Not really. Whoever threw it overboard must have been working on the assumption that it would all go straight down to the bottom of the ocean, but I don’t think it really went very deep at all. That slipway, and the gallery around it, projects out pretty far beneath the surface. Remember, there’s far more of an iceberg under water than there is up above it. The fish I autopsied was a top swimmer, a shallow feeder. I don’t think that stuffs gone very deep at all. I think there’s about twenty feet of water clear beneath Atropos’s bow. Then there’s a shelf of ice. And that’s where all that stuff is lying. Well, the bits of it the fish haven’t eaten.’

  ‘You mean you think it’s all still there?’

  ‘Has to be. How else could the fish have got so much of the stuff?’

  ‘In twenty feet,’ breathed Henri. He was thinking, not of the Semtex or even the detonators, but the letters. Jeanne’s letters.

  ‘Very much less than that now, of course. The barrier’s closed across the bay and the berg’s tilted back. It’s all probably piled along the shoreline, if you know where to look.’

  They were still standing there in silence when Symes came panting up, pale and shocked-looking. ‘Mr Timmins is gone,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see nothing, but O’Brien says he thought he heard him calling. There’s nothing to see back there. No one left behind us. He’s gone.’

  The two tall men looked at each other for an instant. ‘You go on,’ said Henri, quietly and decisively. ‘The others may need you. I’ll go back.’ He turned, but Colin’s hand fell on his shoulder.

  ‘If he’s in trouble, you might need to give him this.’ He passed Henri a hip flask. ‘It’s brandy. French cognac. The best I could get: Hennessy.’

  *

  The tremor which killed Timmins also had its effect on Robin. Her team were working at the top of the slope of ice blocks hard against the ship’s side. The blocks were of different sizes, varying from the rough dimensions of half a brick up to those of a large tea chest. None of them were so square that they sat on each other with any firmness. They all had rough, rounded edges and they would all roll if pushed hard enough from the correct angle. The slope above the angle of the propeller was quite steep and the avalanche had actually left a kind of valley between the ship and the cliff. Spades pushed the topmost blocks down the slope quite easily at first but inevitably the more they moved, the harder the work became.

  Robin had been there from the start. As soon as the rest of the crew departed, she had been busy getting the equipment they needed and putting it to work. Kate Ross worked silently at her side. The doctor had no idea when her skills might be called upon and needed to be there at all times, and she was not the kind of person to stand idly by when others had their sleeves rolled up.

  Sam, Errol and Joe were a team within a team. While the others were primarily concerned to uncover the propeller and to discover whether there was anyone alive beneath it, the three seamen were concerned to find the ends of the broken falls. It was their mission to get these uncovered and reattached to the falls dangling from the crane itself. If the propeller could be craned back upright, or even partially so, the task of looking under it would be quickly and efficiently achieved. Don Taylor and Harry Stone were working further down the slope. As the ice from the topmost sections came down to them, they moved it further down, and, when they could, they prepared the ground for the arrival of more.

  Ann Cable was the first person to go up and keep an eye on the radio. She had remained with t
he ship in the pursuit of her next book. Her bravery was of a different type to that of the others. She was slightly shamed by it, by the self-serving nature of it. The others were working primarily, perhaps absolutely, for the wellbeing of the men they were trying to save. Ann knew all too well that her own part in this drama had another, more commercial, aspect. She had decided to stay on in the location which would be the most fitting climax for the book she was working on. And she felt slightly cheapened by her commercial calculations. This made her unusually malleable, especially when Robin gave her direct orders. She was in the radio room, therefore, when the tremor hit.

  Robin was at the top of the pile, hard up against the black side of her ship. She was working with a kind of contained rage. Most of her anger was directed at herself. Had Richard been doing what she was doing, even had he been in charge of the stranded ship as she was, she would have found it very difficult to forgive him. She was very well aware of the danger she was in but at the same time she could see no way in which she could possibly act in a different manner. Even though she had been captain of this ship for only a short time, she was nevertheless the captain. She hardly knew the missing men, and what she did know she didn’t much like, but she owed them her duty. Someone had to look for them and there was no one else to do it. She had had to ask for volunteers and by the same token she had to lead them once they had volunteered. Desperate husbands, sick fathers, potentially motherless children counted as nothing against that absolute, professional, commitment. But she could not shake off the feeling that this was an unnecessary, almost self-indulgent act. It was too dangerous. She was risking more lives in the faint hope that someone down there might still be breathing. Almost certain death bet on a very long shot indeed. It was simply stupid. It seemed to verge on weakness. Was it weakness or strength? Inspired leadership or utter ineptness?

  She had always preferred Shackleton to Scott: in their drive for the Pole, Shackleton had killed no one and Scott had killed damn near everyone. But Scott seemed to be the greater hero, so who could say who was right?

  She was quite certain, however, that if everyone here now were to die when the berg moved again, she would be seen as some bloody silly woman trying to prove a point about sexual equality. Which maybe she was.

  These thoughts did nothing to dampen her burning rage or to alleviate the sheer bloody misery of digging in a huge pile of ice in a deeply sub-zero environment during a rain storm. Her legs were bruised from ankle to groin from slipping and smashing too sharp bones against too sharp ice edges. The effort of the gruelling physical work was making her feel more sick than anything since morning sickness. The strain of holding her feet firmly on the slick, slippery surfaces made the insides of her thighs throb as though she had been horseback riding for a week. Her back ached with that exquisite agony which carrying the twins in her womb had brought. Her hands were blistered and bleeding in her gloves and she was dying for a pee. Despite the exercises recommended by the midwife and accoucheur, her pelvic floor was not what it once had been.

  The cliffs lurched upright again. Atropos was thrown to one side. The slope beneath her slid away. She was hurled forward and delivered a kind of head butt to the unforgiving side of her ship. She hit the metal so hard she actually heard it ringing. Then, face down and not a little dazed, she found herself slithering downwards, feeling with exquisite, agonising clarity every rolling edge and angle of ice beneath her on her shins and knees, hip bones and elbows, breasts and belly and bladder. She opened her mouth and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  It never occurred to Sam Larkman that his captain was yelling with anything other than perfectly understandable rage and frustration. He was lent a greater stability than she enjoyed because he had been holding onto the fall from the crane when the iceberg moved. Although his feet seemed to be dancing over the rolling participants of yet another avalanche, his left hand was clasped round the steady rope with a grip like iron. He was able and willing, therefore, to reach into the sudden waterfall of ice and pluck out his captain like a drowning puppy by the scruff of her neck. He hung there for a moment as the whole world seemed to waver and reform itself, with the weight of his own body — and hers — painfully twisting the joint of his left shoulder.

  Something slapped Robin in the face and she caught at it without further thought. She was still holding it when things calmed down again. The overpowering rumbling sound died down until she could hear simple speech. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she heard Sam saying. ‘That’s wonderful, Captain.’ At first she had no idea what he was talking about, but then she opened her eyes and realised that she was hanging on to the end of a rope. The lower end of a broken rope. ‘That’s just what we need, Captain,’ said Sam, his voice full of cheerful wonderment.

  While the crane operators effectively tied a massive reef knot in the broken fall, Robin surveyed the scene. The tiny readjustment of the iceberg had done more in a few seconds than they had been able to do with all their work so far. The cliff face behind them had dropped a few more ice boulders, but nothing major. The slope against the side of Atropos had not proved to be so firm, however. It had settled substantially and, as well as the rope, the downward movement had revealed the top of the propeller itself. Robin allowed herself a tight smile of satisfaction. This was good luck. Perhaps the whole situation was beginning to turn round.

  No sooner had the thought leaped into her mind than her walkie-talkie squawked. ‘Captain here,’ she answered at once.

  ‘Robin, it’s Ann. Have you seen the ice barrier?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s moved again. Look for yourself.’

  With her tiny glimmer of hope dying stillborn in her breast, she walked down to the bow of her ship and looked beyond its black side, southwards across the ice.

  There was no water visible any longer except that pouring from the black sky. The bay which had been at the foot of the slipway was gone and might never have existed. The ice of the barrier lay piled in pressure ridges across the whole horizon in front of her and she noticed inconsequentially that it was a different colour to the ice of the berg. And that fact, too, suddenly added to her disquiet, for she could see all too clearly that the last movement had closed in the hillsides which had formed the right arm of the bay. The hawsers which had held the hull so safely in place when she had reversed Atropos up the slipway all those weary hours ago now hung slackly on either hand, swinging in the grip of the driving, dangerous wind. One more movement like that and her command would be gripped between jaws of ice like a bone in the mouth of a rabid dog. And the thunder of the wind against the side of her streaming hood warned her that it was only a matter of time before that movement happened.

  ‘Damn you!’ she shouted at the ice, and it mockingly echoed her words of condemnation, making them a threat of its own: damn you! Damn you! DAMN YOU!

  *

  At first Henri thought the ghostly voice ringing in ice was damning him; his grip on reality was so loose now that he wouldn’t have been surprised if it really had been doing so. He could hardly believe what luck was doing to him now. The sequence of events which had forced him to ever more desperate action over the last few days seemed set to destroy him as relentlessly as the storm had destroyed Jeanne. How could he risk leaving the letters lying on the shoreline of the berg where Robin Mariner and the rest were busily digging? The drugs and the explosives might well be gone now, but there was no guarantee. They were all in dull-coloured bundles and would be difficult to tell from the rubble around them. The detonators, however, were in bright coloured packages, guaranteed to catch the eye in that dull grey wilderness, and it was in among the detonators that the letters would be lying. He simply could not take the risk. When he found them — if he did so — he would have to think of some excuse to rejoin the crew on Atropos.

  The lead which had swallowed Timmins had closed and he crossed it without ever knowing that the dead first officer was floating just beneath him. He was, of course, making
no real effort to look for the missing man and this fact added yet another little weight of guilt to his weary soul. So that when the ice cliff on his right, the last one, overlooking the beached hull of Atropos, called out to him that he was damned, he wasn’t much surprised.

  He paused, looking down on the scene, trying to come to terms with the changes which had overtaken the situation even during his relatively short absence. The whole slipway seemed to have tilted away from him by several degrees — an effect enhanced by the fact that the ice cliff now sloped back at a slightly gentler incline and the over-hang was gone. As Colin Ross had said, the water of the bay had gone and the grey moraine which had been the shore line where he and the glaciologists had taken radioactivity readings was now part of the lower slope. The bow of the ship, which had been in apparently fathomless black water, now sat high and dry. Not absolutely dry, of course: the downpour was thickening almost to the intensity of a fog. Water was running everywhere, adding the sounds of a deluge to the roaring of the ice around him. There was no hope of him being able to see even the bright detonators from this distance. He would have to go right up to the ship. What he would do if anyone was watching from the bridge and came down to find out what he was up to he simply did not know. Kill them, almost certainly. It was too late now for anything else.

  As he slid down the back of the ridge, the first clap of thunder echoed in the ice chambers beside him like the beginning of the end of the world.

  *

  Richard and Colin Ross stood side by side on the bridge of Clotho. Nico sat in the watchkeeper’s chair but he was neither on watch nor at ease. All three men were looking northwards in silence. Each one of them had a woman beyond the barrier; each one of them knew how great the danger was becoming. The only sounds in the great, broad wheelhouse were the driving of the rain and the swish of the wipers across the clearview. From their position they were able to see a vista created exclusively of deep and darkening grey. The chronometer above the wheel itself stood at 14:00 local time but it might as well have been after sunset. The sky was still the colour of coal, pressing down with terrible, absolute weight upon the dull, streaming shoulders of the granite berg. And the mountainous berg itself sat heavily on the slate breadth of the ice barrier which glittered and gleamed dangerously in what little light there was, like a deadly rock at the tide line, waiting to send the unwary foot slipping and sliding to its doom.