The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Everyone was in off the ice now, tucked up snugly aboard Northern Lights, all with so many hair-raising stories to tell that for once the radio was silent while the American media people avidly interviewed them instead of Richard. Only Colin Ross had come aboard Clotho, for he and Richard had communed at length over radio and walkie-talkie and the huge glaciologist knew that the captain was desperate to take further action while there was still time to influence events. He had only been on the bridge for the briefest moment, and his clothing was still dripping on the floor as he strove to take in the view which the added height of Clotho’s bridgehouse afforded him.

  The silence was broken, not by any word from either of them, but by a column of dazzling brightness which connected the sky to the top of the distant ice mountains. Almost immediately, thunder boomed through the waiting Clotho. ‘That just shows you how close the berg actually is,’ mused Richard quietly. He had never lost the childhood habit of counting the seconds between lightning flash and thunder roll and the unexpectedly low number he had reached genuinely surprised him. ‘Is the barrier melting, do you think?’

  ‘Hardly,’ answered the glaciologist. ‘But it’s certainly getting narrower. The berg has pushed all the thinner outcrops to the north of the central ridge out of the way, that’s all.’ He looked down at the map Richard and Nico had drawn using the ice blink. ‘All of this has gone now, I’d say.’ His broad right hand, big as a bear’s paw in its mitten, swept across the whole of the northern plane. ‘The berg is hard up against the central ridge. The ridge itself has closed off the anchorage and the angle it’s sitting at seems to be closing the sides of the bay together. You’ll have lost your ship within the hour and if they don’t get off the berg soon, they’ll all be in very bad trouble.’

  ‘Do you want to go back and help them?’

  ‘I want to talk to Kate first. I’m not going to hang around here if they need me but I’m not going charging back across there without warning them.’

  ‘Bill,’ called Richard through into the radio room, ‘get Atropos for me, would you?’

  But before his order could be carried out, the walkie-talkie on the arm of Nico’s chair buzzed. He picked it up and switched it on.

  Ann Cable’s excited voice filled the room. ‘They’re still alive! My God, they’re still alive!’

  ‘Ann,’ said Nico, ‘is that you? Ann?’

  Colin exchanged a look with Richard which was suddenly full of hope. In her excitement, the American reporter had contacted them by walkie-talkie instead of by radio. And it had worked. She had got through.

  The ships were within walkie-talkie range of each other.

  *

  There was nothing there. Ross had sent him back for nothing! Henri raged among the ice blocks along the old shoreline and down along the slick, running slipway to what had once been a submarine ridge where the rain was gathering in pools and puddles which were already freezing over. Nothing! He had been foolish to come. He was stupid to stay longer. There was no trace of anything incriminating, and the team of men and women working up on the rubble by the ship’s side showed no sign of coming down here at all. And if they didn’t, no one else would, that was for certain.

  He would give up and go to join them. He would go back across the barrier and away to safety with them, and they would never know the truth. Unless he joined another crew and completed his mission, of course.

  He turned and began to climb the slope towards the high bow of the ship. Walking up this way, he could see what they were doing up there quite clearly, for all that the impenetrable downpour still effectively hid him from their sight. The crane was still extended at its fullest reach and someone had reattached the fall. As Henri walked up towards the ship, he could see that the crane was being used to lift the propeller back from its position against Atropo’s side and, as it did so, the ice rubble was sliding back as well. The team involved in the rescue were all looking down into the gap which must slowly be opening between the black metal and the bright brass. Certainly, none of them was looking his way. Idly, Henri began to speculate, like a child playing hide and seek, how close he could creep up behind them before they realised he was there.

  When he fell over he thought he had simply lost his footing; it was only when the whole slipway began to jump and heave beneath him that he realised what was going on. The sound overwhelmed him. It seemed to be much more terrible down here on the surface of the ice itself. He did not realise that the increased power of what he was hearing — though in fact the experience went well past anything he had ever thought of as hearing — was a combination of noise and echo. The submarine ledges of both barrier and berg which had been grinding against each other down the black fathoms beneath were tearing each other apart as the next great thunder squall powered into the north-west quarter of the berg. The berg heaved up and then thrust itself massively downwards and hard ice clapped thunderously against hard ice. The caves within the spine of the ice barrier took up the sound and doubled then redoubled it. This was a quake which made all the other movements so far seem little more than tremors. It was only the fact that all the loose ice on the cliff had already come down in the original avalanche that stopped Atropos being buried.

  But Henri knew nothing about any of this. All he knew was that the ice of the slipway leaped up and smacked him in the face. Then he was drowning in a cacophony of sound so overpowering that he could not catch his breath. Literally. Every time he tried to breathe back in the breath which the first impact had knocked out of him, the overpowering throbbing which was moving through the air caught in his throat and lungs and the shaking became so terrible that it seemed to him that his very heart would be broken loose within him.

  But at last the agony began to ease. The icequake was passing. Water washed up around him and he hurled himself up onto his knees with wild, mad strength, only to remain there as though he was praying.

  As, indeed, he may have been. For Atropos was grinding down the slipway towards him like doom, and gathering speed as she moved.

  *

  Sam Larkman’s magic hands tickled the controls of the crane’s lifting mechanism. The propeller lifted back fractionally, opening a slim black mouth between the side of the ship and the bright, bent brass blade. Robin danced on the sliding, settling slope of ice and called, ‘Hold it, Sam!’ into her walkie-talkie.

  In the sudden silence, someone deep and distant called, ‘Light! I see light!’ And the words came from the bottom of that black pit.

  ‘Ann,’ said Robin into the cold little handset, ‘there’s someone still alive down there. Tell Clotho we have survivors.’ She snapped off the radio and flung herself down on her knees. ‘Walt?’ she bellowed, and Walter Hogg’s disbelieving voice came back up at her.

  ‘Captain?’

  ‘Hang on for a moment. We’ll soon have you out. How many are there down there?’

  ‘Three. The whole team. There’s a kind of a cave. We —’

  ‘Any of you hurt?’

  ‘Few bruises ...’

  ‘Okay. We’ll try and open things up a bit more then we’ll send down a rope.’

  Robin looked up at Kate. Thank God she wouldn’t be needed after all. Not as a doctor at any rate. They would still need a guide across the barrier though. ‘We need a rope, maybe a ladder,’ Robin snapped and Kate automatically sprang to obey, but in fact Robin was talking to Don Taylor. The two of them went off together, however, leaving Robin and Joe Edwards side by side on the top of the ice fall.

  Robin put her walkie-talkie to her lips again. ‘Right, Sam, let’s try that again. Very, very gently.’

  The fall creaked and the propeller blade stirred once again. The ice blocks began to tumble back, the majority of them falling at an angle dictated by the slope down towards the cliff and the slope of the slipway down towards where the sea had been.

  Robin moved round to the up-slope section of the jumbled pile, looking for a new position of vantage. The action saved her life.

>   Suddenly all hell was let loose and her world was brought as close to destruction as was Henri LeFever’s. Her pain was less than his because she was further from the echoing cliffs of the ice barrier. But he was on solid ground and she was on a tumbling jumble of rock-hard boulders. Her feet flew out from under her and she felt herself tumbling backwards. She had fallen down the long staircase at Cold Fell on the night of her twelfth birthday and now, of all times, she remembered her father saying to her, ‘If that happens again, roll yourself up into a ball. Much the safest thing.’

  It had seemed good advice then. It seemed good advice now. Her last conscious thought for an unknown length of time was that she should get her knees up by her nose and hug them for all she was worth.

  She came to lying flat on her back on a lumpy pile of ice with the cliffs on her left looking down the slipway. In front of her, towering over her but thankfully leaning back away from her, was the propeller.

  She sat up so suddenly that she slid a little down the slope towards the dazed, dazzled bunch of men she had stayed here to save. They were looking around themselves with about as much intelligence as a bunch of lice on a suddenly upturned log.

  The ice beside her moved and she jumped. But it was only Joe. ‘It swung round, Captain. The propeller fell back and swung right round.’ He moved his shaking hands to show something moving through ninety degrees like an opening door. She looked up, and saw with simple wonderment that there was smoke pouring from the underside of Sam Larkman’s crane. Distantly, she hoped that he and Errol weren’t getting roasted up there. Then she looked back at Joe Edwards.

  He was screaming words so loudly that the veins were knotting on his forehead below the grey crew cut. And she could only just hear him.

  She looked right, awed by understanding. What he had described to her could only have taken place under one set of conditions.

  It could only have happened if Atropos had moved. And, judging from the overwhelming rumbling sound that was going on around them, the ship was moving still.

  *

  ‘She’s moving. My God, she’s moving!’ There was absolute, utter terror in Ann Cable’s voice and it was reflected in the expressions of horror on the faces of the three men aboard Clotho, who were listening to her.

  ‘Ann! Who else is on there with you? Who else is aboard?’

  ‘No one. I’m on my —’

  The walkie-talkie went dead.

  Clotho’s bridge was no longer a silent place and there was more than the echo of Ann’s words disturbing the atmosphere. The ice wall in front of the ship was going wild. Although all of them had had proofs aplenty of its solidity, as they looked at it now they might well have been forgiven for doubting their experiences or their memories. For the whole barrier seemed to be twisting as though the entire length of its great grey flank was the back of a great grey serpent. The grinding thunder was shot through with sharp reports as though there was lightning crackling down all around them. For the first time in many days, the battered ship was stirring as waves rolled beneath her keel. The flat plain of ice at whose heart she lay like a dagger point seemed to be rippling. Everything they could see, hear and feel was in violent, terrifying motion.

  Colin looked down at Richard, but he was paying no attention to his guest; he was on the telephone to the chief engineer and his hand on the engine room telegraph was emphasising his words as he screamed over the thunderous sounds, ‘FULL ASTERN. FULL ASTERN. FULL ASTERN!’

  *

  The hawsers on Atropos’s port quarter had gone, along with their anchorage points in the avalanche. The two remaining on her starboard had been slackened by the movement of the right-hand reach of the ice. So it was that she gained so much speed on her slide down the slipway before they tightened once again. They pulled her round to the starboard until the single, thread-thin fall from Sam Larkman’s crane, anchored still to the great weight of the propeller, snagged in spite of the fact that he had hit the release button before he and Errol abandoned the cab, and managed to bring her up short. But not for any great length of time.

  Robin was in action most quickly. It was the frayed end of the broken hawser hanging from Atropos’s port quarter which prompted her, because it swung in from the black overhang of the poop which was suddenly right above her, moved by a momentum which the still hull no longer possessed, and nearly took her head off.

  ‘Quick!’ she bellowed, with the full power of her quarterdeck voice. ‘Get aboard! GET ABOARD!’

  Ann’s estimation that she was alone aboard was mercifully inaccurate, because even as Robin gave her bellowed command, Don Taylor thrust his head over the railing far, far above and shouted, ‘Look out below!’

  Even as his words reached her, so did the reason for shouting them: the end of the spare Jacob’s ladder.

  She caught it at once and yelled to the others, ‘Get aboard!’

  Joe was quickest to obey and she stood back to let him pass, still holding the bottom rung. ‘HOGG! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! MOVE!’ The ladder, as sensitive as a fishing line, joined her left hand to the deck of her command and warned her all too vividly that Atropos was not sitting quite as still as she seemed to be.

  Ann Cable, pale as a ghost, was waiting at the top of the ladder when at last Robin scrambled over the rail onto Atropos’s poop. She paused for a moment beside Ann. ‘We won’t be sitting still for long,’ she said. ‘The others will be loosening the hawsers when I tell them. You stay in charge of the ladder here. We may need it later so I don’t want to lose it. If it snags on anything, though, you just pull this line and it will go over the side.’

  Ann nodded dumbly and Robin rushed up onto her bridge. The ship was still trembling on the very edge of stasis when she got up there and started calculating the odds. That last movement of the ice had opened the bay in front of them only a little. Across the whole prospect in front of her, there still stood that mocking cliff of ice which was the backbone of the barrier. If she told the crewmen at the stern to loosen the hawsers, she would only run her command down into that solid wall of dirty grey. If she didn’t issue the order, the jaws, of ice already holding onto the sides of Atropos would crush the life out of her the next time the iceberg stirred.

  In a frenzy of desperation she looked back at that solid, unforgiving, immovable cliff of ice, and at the second she did so, the very centre of it, exactly in front of her, immediately before the sleek head of Atropos’s forecastle though a mile and more distant from it, exploded into a column of fire.

  The waves of power from that explosion, washing over Atropos as inevitably as waves on the open ocean, rattled the windows, shook the superstructure, and started the ship’s wild slide again.

  *

  Ann Cable stood rigidly on the poop deck. She was still trying to come to terms with the depths of terror she had plumbed when she believed she had been on the sliding ship alone. She was a strong woman, and basically self-reliant, and yet, at the bottom of that pit of despair, with the deck trembling terrifyingly beneath her feet and the cold angularity of the walkie-talkie pressed to her lips hard enough to bring blood into her mouth, the fact that she had been talking to Nico really made a difference. Only Don Taylor’s utterly unexpected arrival at the door of the radio room had made her break contact and ever since she had done so, she had regretted it. Standing on the poop deck of Atropos, feeling her straining to be gone down the slipway no matter what might await her at the bottom of it, made Ann all too well aware that she had not been playing fair with her gentle, witty, understanding, genuinely macho Neapolitan lover. Son of a bitch, she thought. How I miss the son of a bitch.

  She felt the deck begin to stir beneath her feet. She heard a distant rumble of thunder and looked up at the low, black sky.

  And Atropos was in motion.

  It was slow to begin with, a kind of gathering of inertia as she began to grind down the slope again. Ann was held rigid by the lingering power of the shock of her terror, distanced from the current scene, which might w
ell have terrified her even more.

  As the foot of the ladder swept past the pile of ice blocks behind the sprawl of the propeller which was no longer attached to the fall from Sam’s crane, it jerked and she looked down over the edge of the poop. Someone was climbing upwards.

  At first she had no idea who it was. The hood of the cold-weather gear hid the face absolutely from her sight. She frowned, wondering whether this was some kind of hallucination brought on by the terror she had felt.

  But then the figure looked up, and it was Henri.

  She ran to the rail, the better to look down at him. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he safely aboard one of the other ships?

  What was going on?

  He was near the top of the ladder when he looked up and saw her there. He grinned, and the flash of his teeth turned her knees to water.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she called down to him.

  ‘I’ve brought you a present,’ he called exultantly. ‘See. It’s cognac. The best: Hennessy.’

  That one word brought it all into focus for her, suddenly and utterly unexpectedly. Hennessy.

  That was the name of the terrorist woman who worked for La Guerre Verte. Joan Hennessy.

  She had seen the poster and all the information which had come in from Heritage House. It had seemed to her that Joan Hennessy was a New York Irish name — belonging to someone like O’Brien.

  But now she understood.

  Cognac Hennessy. It was a French name, belonging to someone who was French Canadian, perhaps. And the given name, Joan. Like Joan of Arc, it would be Jeanne in French. Jeanne. Sounding, in oddly accented French Canadian, so much like John.