The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  Everything depended upon whether this explosion had in fact given the berg a set of bows which would steady her and allow her to follow a simple straight line.

  Deep in thought, Richard moved forward once again, his eyes at last busy beyond the edge of the ice. The point on which he stood afforded him an unrivalled view across the grey reaches of the south Davis Strait, along the course which they all prayed the berg would be following soon. Tall grey seas were rolling southward in majestic series, pulling at the departing skirts of the autumnal squall as they sailed away into the distance. It seemed to him then that he could see the whole of the North Atlantic at this point, from Baffin on his right hand to Greenland on his left, the one a brown-black line on the western horizon and the other a white glow far away to the east. But this was fanciful nonsense. All he could see was a couple of hundred square kilometres of rough water and the back end of some dirty storm clouds. A new wind patted him on the back and wrapped its chilly self round him, smelling of old ice and Arctic air. It was cold and would get colder, he thought, and the rain was gone for now, too. The berg would stop melting for a while, above the waterline at least, and that, too, was good.

  He stood, lost in his thoughts, as the storm continued to clear in the distance and some blue sky began to peep through the overcast. Then, in the last of the distant shadow under the heavy clouds, something caught Richard’s eagle eye. Far away towards the phantom glow of Greenland, a light shone out green and eye-wateringly bright. It was Antelope, the better part of thirty miles away.

  ‘Richard!’

  Colin’s excited cry called Richard back to himself. ‘Yes?’ He turned and found the big glaciologist pounding up the slope towards him, waving a pale paper flimsy.

  ‘Look at this,’ called Colin. ‘It’s come through more quickly than I could have hoped. Look at this and then we’ll go back to the hut for confirmation. Kate’s getting the next read-out now.’

  Richard obligingly looked at the paper. A frown gathered on his high forehead as he concentrated, then it cleared and he smiled. ‘You’re right. Let’s go talk to Kate.’

  It was warm in the hut and Kate had taken off her outdoor clothing. Richard was poignantly reminded of his own wife Robin by the way in which the marine biologist’s hair tumbled in a thoughtless golden profusion; but there was nothing of Robin’s steady grey gaze in the green gleam of Kate’s eyes. ‘It’s just coming through now,’ she said. ‘And it’s looking very good indeed. Here.’

  On the table in front of her lay a chart of the Davis Strait. Marked across its wide blue surface was a series of points. They were increasingly dense but it was possible to see that they were joined by a line which corkscrewed in a south-westerly direction.

  Colin and Kate had been plotting the progress of the berg for more than a year now and the denser series of points showed the regular readings obtained on a twelve-hourly basis since the full station had been set up less than three months ago. And in all that time, the berg had been literally going round in circles.

  But not now.

  Richard had lent the scientists a satnav system from one of his ships against this very moment. The first flimsy Colin had brought up to Richard on the forecastle head was the test printout from the equipment. Kate was now receiving the first official confirmation of their exact location on the surface of the globe as read by a low-orbit satellite somewhere not too far above. She took the reading across to the chart and plotted it. She drew a line up to the previous mark and straightened. Then she turned to the men, her face alight, the whole of her slim body vibrant with excitement. ‘Look!’ she whispered. And they did.

  For the first time since the readings started, the iceberg was moving in a straight line.

  A straight line heading due south.

  A beam of sunlight came in through the window and surrounded the map with a glory.

  And Sam came in through the door with an empty coffee mug in his hand yelling, ‘Your men have fallen over the cliff! The edge of the ice collapsed and I think all three of them are gone.’

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Six

  Disaster struck Dr Paul Chan, medical doctor, scientist, explosives expert, jack of all trades and United Nations worker, with a sound like a rifle shot. Later he rather fancifully thought that perhaps it had been the sound of Death’s scythe hitting the ice. But he never really got it out of his head that it all began with a rifle shot.

  There was no overhang and the new ice cliff had seemed to be absolutely safe, which was why the engineering team had chosen this particular spot to check their handiwork in the first place. The cliff was sheer. At first glance it looked disturbingly like a wall of green glass but there were fissures and even a small gallery or two and the way down looked easy - another good reason for checking here. Even so, Paul had insisted on full safety gear, including hard hats, and he had been careful to anchor the ropes securely at the top before he and the others went over.

  They each had a rope of their own and were spread along the whole section of this face. The other two had gone first, with Paul checking the anchorage of their lines. Then he had caught up an ice axe from the equipment box beside the anchorage point of his own rope and gone over himself. He had half-expected to be abseiling down a massive slope of glass, which was why he had brought the ice axe, but the cracks and ledges he had seen from the top in fact made his descent easy. It wasn’t even climbing, really. He found himself turning side on to the crystal cliff and walking down an overlapping series of ledges like a complicated staircase. Even in his bulky bright orange survival suit with its built-in Mae West, it was easy. A glance down showed that the others were doing very much the same thing. It was a brief glance down, however, for Paul was all too aware that nothing lay below them but the freezing depths of the North Atlantic; one slip would mean a swim, something he didn’t fancy, even in this outfit. It was a brief glance also because he wasn’t here to admire the view. He was here to check the state of the newly exposed ice.

  Blowing the ice hook off the front of the berg was only the beginning, really. They had to make sure, as far as was possible, that the new cliffs were going to stand the pressure of being the bow of a ship one hundred kilometres long. The weathered cliffs on the other side were obviously up to the job; they had been standing up to the full force of the sea for however many years the berg had been afloat. These new cliffs might not be so strong, impenetrable cloud of mist and spray which roared up into his face. It was unexpected and wildly disorientating, as was the thunderous noise which told of a massive battle being fought between water and ice somewhere invisibly below. He was a fisherman, however, and his fingers read the rope as well as they could read a fly line; he knew there was a body on the end of it. A live body, by the feel of it. ‘There’s someone down there on the end of this rope,’ he called into the freezing fog and the deafening thunder.

  ‘That’s Paul’s rope,’ came Kate’s reply indistinctly, seemingly from some distance.

  ‘No such luck with the other two,’ observed Colin grimly. His voice was suddenly clearer. Richard looked back over his shoulder to see the loom of Colin’s great body through the thinning vapour.

  The mist fell away then and Richard was able to follow the orange thread of the rope down and down until at last it was connected to the bulk of an inert body hanging helplessly against the sheer cliff face.

  ‘Quick! Pull him up!’ called Sam as he scrabbled to a slippery halt beside them. The other three hesitated, looking at each other.

  ‘Just a second,’ temporised Richard. ‘We don’t know how badly he’s hurt.’

  ‘He’ll be dead for sure if you don’t hurry,’ insisted the helicopter pilot.

  ‘I know—’

  ‘Richard’s right,’ Kate interrupted. ‘It’s no use rushing if we put him more at risk. I’m going down to him. I can check that it’s safe to move him, it’ll only take a moment. I’ll get my bag.’

  ‘She’s a doctor,’ Colin explained to Sam who was
looking after the determined woman with wonder on his face.

  While they waited, Richard kept an eye on Paul’s inert body and Colin prowled the very edge, searching in the surf below for any sign of the other two. There was nothing to be seen but grey waves, white foam and a restless jumble of ice. The big glaciologist’s lips tightened in a grimace of frustrated anger at his inability to help the missing men.

  Kate was back after a few moments carrying her bag and another length of nylon rope. It was taken for granted she would go; she was the best qualified, though her doctorate was in biology, not medicine. She was the expedition medic. She was also the lightest and perhaps the weakest. The men could lower and lift her easily and relatively safely. She could not do the same for either of them.

  She tied the rope round her waist and looped it round the handle of her medical bag.

  ‘Keep an eye on Paul’s line, would you please, Sam?’ asked Richard, picking himself up.

  By the time the pilot was crouching over the orange rope, the two other men were standing side by side, ready to lower Kate over the edge. No words were exchanged between them, but they worked with a mechanical precision - a perfect team. It was hardly surprising that Colin and Kate should have this facility, but Sam was struck by the ease and efficiency with which Richard Mariner fitted in. When all the knots were tied and tested, and Kate was ready to go, Richard stooped and handed her the little ice axe from the equipment box at their feet. ‘You may need to cut yourself a foothold,’ he said.

  The slim figure of the doctor backed over the edge and began to walk carefully down, with the men paying out the rope as she went. There was quite a slope, but because a whole section had fallen away, the cliff did not become vertical until she was quite near the unconscious man. It was hard work keeping her footing, for the surface of the ice was flat, featureless, slick and slippery. After her first fall, she learned to twist her body so that her shoulder hit first, not her forehead. Richard could well be right; she might indeed need to cut herself a foothold or two.

  Like her husband, she was coldly furious that fate should have robbed her of two, possibly three, important colleagues just at the moment of apparent triumph. Typically, she was less concerned about herself and the danger she was going into than about the wellbeing of the victims and the potential damage to Colin’s plans. What effect would this accident have on the still sceptical men at the United Nations? They were already voicing some concern about the potential cost. Chartering Richard Mariner’s ships would not be cheap, even though he was offering a special rate, and there were no others on offer. Would this accident give the doubters the excuse they needed to pull out? Would this be the end of their research, their plans, the iceberg itself? She was not a sentimental person, but she had formed some attachment to this great timeless piece of ice during the year she had spent camping on it and the thought of having the US Navy blow it out of the water was not a pleasant one for her.

  Still, let come what would come. She would worry about imponderables later. For now she had a hurt man to check on. She hung beside Paul’s body for a moment, working out the best way to start tending him. It would be even harder than she had feared. The first move would have to be to get over him somehow. By stretching her legs apart until the insides of her thighs smarted, she could just straddle him and this is what she did, placing her feet on either side of his knees and leaning in against the pendulum pull of the rope to check his head and thorax. If he had broken legs or a broken spine at pelvis level, there was little she could do, but she would check these later. Her prime concern was to discover whether he had a broken skull, neck, or shattered ribs which would do him fatal damage when he was moved.

  It was hard to be sure, especially through the bulky cold weather gear, but careful exploration revealed the pulse was steady and strong. As soon as she was sure he was alive, she injected the strongest dose of painkiller she dared, straight into the pulse in his throat - the only bare skin she could get at other than that on his face. At once he seemed to relax into an even deeper sleep. Only then did she continue her manual exploration which within the next few moments revealed a dislocated shoulder and a nasty gash on his scalp. There were swellings and bruises aplenty, but these seemed to be the only serious damage. Relief welled up in her. She leaned back and yelled up, ‘He’s OK from the waist up. I’m just going to check his legs!’

  Here the luck seemed to have run out. As soon as she began to run her hands down his right thigh, she knew they were in trouble. Even through the bright survival suit he was wearing she could feel the thigh bone moving. She froze at once, all too aware of the possibility of sharp splinters of bone cutting into the huge arteries or veins of the thigh. Hell! she thought. They shouldn’t even try to move him without some kind of splint to keep this mess steady. She checked the left leg. That seemed fine. Could she bandage his legs together and use the good thigh as a temporary makeshift support? Yes, if push came to shove, but she would be far happier if she could put something else on die other side as well.

  She looked up towards the hard line made by the cliff edge and the sky. Because of the slope, neither of the men holding the rope was visible. She could call up and send one of them to get her a splint of some kind, she thought. Colin would be quicker.

  As she hesitated, Paul began to come round. His first sign of returning consciousness was a deep groan of agony.

  Kate looked around with gathering concern. They had better be quick about this. She didn’t want an agonised patient thrashing about like a drowning man, doing himself heaven knew what damage. She opened her mouth to call up to Colin.

  And just as she did so, something strange caught her eye.

  In the ice beside Paul’s lolling head, some debris was buried. The ice all around was deep, green, crystal clear, with nothing but silvery air bubbles like fish suspended within it. But just beyond Paul’s head there was something else. It looked like a plank of wood. It wasn’t very big, scarcely a metre long and maybe fifteen centimetres wide, but it was planed and square. It was battered and burned, but looked as though it had been painted. It was man-made.

  It was exactly what she needed. With no further thought, she pulled the ice axe into her hand and started to chop the plank free.

  Five minutes later she was able to worry the wood out of the ice, her eyes busy to see whether there was any more debris deeper in the cliff. Five minutes after she had decided there was nothing else and this miraculous piece of wood must have been dropped by a passing gull - a very big gull - she had it strapped in place. Paul was definitely coming to now, in spite of the drug she had injected, and it was imperative they get him up.

  She swung back and pulled in her breath to call out, only to have her cry drowned out by Sam’s astonished yell of, ‘There’s somebody down there! Look! In the water! There’s somebody down there alive!’

  ~ * ~

  Dave Brodski hated taking orders. Even when someone told him to do something self-evidently sensible, like putting on a survival suit before climbing down an ice cliff three hundred metres above the freezing ocean, he still gave them a hard time. This time the order had saved his life. So far.

  He had not been as quick-witted as Paul. He hadn’t heard any sound and he hadn’t looked up to see the ice coming down on his head. It had come as an absolute surprise to him to find that he was suddenly falling. It had come as a stunning revelation to discover that about a million tons of ice were falling with him and that his safety line was securely anchored to the biggest lump among the whole collapsing mess. He actually saw it sailing past him, the rope still secure, then it simply jerked him firmly after it, deeper into the heart of the falling ice. He got a clear if momentary idea of what it must have felt like to be the captain of the Titanic. Then he hit the water and the last of the ice came down on top of him. His hard hat remained in place for long enough to save his skull from being shattered and he was swept down into a stunning maelstrom of foam, ice and water. The cold knocked the breath fr
om his body and a blessedly small ice boulder knocked him senseless.

  His life preserver inflated automatically and in an instant the fat, air-filled Mae West was pulling him to the surface where he floated for a while, still unconscious, hidden among the varyingly massive blocks of ice. How many minutes passed before he came to his senses he would never know. Perhaps fifteen, but no more than that, for the survival suit could only have kept him alive for twenty or so under these conditions. It was the pain which woke him: not the pain from battered limbs and bruised bones, but the growing agony of having the vital warmth leeched out of his limbs and organs. This was no restful numbness tempting the weary survivor into a deadly slumber. He felt as though every joint in his body was expanding from within, as though he was on some terrible, invisible rack and ready to explode. He screamed and the sound he made echoed so strangely that his eyes sprang open - though he had not really been aware that they were closed.

  He looked around in wonder, as close to being awed as his sardonic soul could come. ‘Now I know what it feels like to be the olive in a Martini,’ he thought. All around him were lumps of ice, from cubes to boulders, bobbing in the grey water. The waves rolled under him, lifting and turning him, sucking him in towards the foot of the ice cliff he had just fallen down. Such was the scale of the thing that he gasped. Water went into his lungs. He choked, puked, started coughing and fighting for his life. The first thing he did was panic. He thrashed around and screamed but it soon dawned on him that no one could hear or see him down here among the ice. So he calmed down and started to think.