The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  His paroxysm of futile splashing and arm-waving had one benefit, however. It wrapped the bright orange safety harness round his numb hand. He looked at the bobbing strand for an instant and then he thought, ‘Perhaps this thing is still anchored.’ The vision of an ice boulder seemingly half as big as a house with his rope safely anchored to it crossed his mind. If he could pull himself across to it, he thought, he might just be able to pull himself up on it too.

  Doggedly, with the will power only ever granted to those at death’s door, he began to pull the rope in, hand over hand. The action was dangerously repetitious, however, and not even the agony in his joints could keep his mind active so that after a moment or two he began to slow down without meaning to and by the time he reached his goal he was too far gone to do anything other than hang there and wonder what it was he had planned to do next.

  In the final analysis it was Alan who saved him.

  Alan had been the unluckiest one of all. The first big ice block had hit him on the side of the head and killed him at once. His rope had held firm for just long enough to let the succeeding boulders smash into his head and face, splitting skin and bone like a Halloween pumpkin, before it had parted, dropping him into the thickest section of the ice fall. By the time he had reached the black depths of the ocean, there was hardly a bone in his body left unbroken. His survival suit was torn and bloodied, hanging in rags around him. His Mae West was punctured in several places but the gas bottle and the automatic release still worked.

  Dave, hanging comatose against the edge of the ice block, was suddenly confronted by the ruined corpse of his friend which burst out of the water beside him as though still fighting to survive. For a moment they remained there, frozen, face to face. Alan’s broken visage with its burst eyes bulging and its shattered jaw flapping seemed to be screaming, and indeed the sound of gas escaping from the ruptured Mae West would have drowned out a banshee. Dave was transfixed by the gruesome power of it. His dying body was flooded with the greatest dose of adrenaline it had ever experienced. He gave a shriek of naked terror and fought his way frantically up onto the rocking ice floe. Behind him, Alan, as though satisfied with a job well done, toppled forward to lie face down, hiding the horror his head had become. The last of the gas whispered out of his wrecked Mae West and he sank into blessed oblivion.

  ~ * ~

  They pulled up Kate and Paul with all the despatch safety would allow. As he relieved Sam at the top of Paul Chan’s line, Richard rapped to the pilot, ‘Fire up the Huey. We’ll have to go down after the other one in that.’

  Sam nodded numbly and ran. What sort of people were these? he wondered. Did they ever get lost and confused? Did they ever hesitate or stop in the face of a crisis, uncertain what to do?

  He hit the side door of the helicopter and swarmed aboard.

  The man had said to fire her up and Sam wasn’t hesitating either.

  As soon as Kate came over the edge she was running over towards Richard who was pulling her patient up. As she reached him, Paul’s body came in over the edge and she was there on her knees, her hands as busy as her eyes, making as sure as possible that the groaning man was brought onto the ice with no further damage. Only when she was satisfied, in that moment of leisure before Colin came panting up with a stretcher from the emergency hut, did she look down towards the sea where the miracle of another figure lay spread out on the largest ice floe like a bright orange star fish.

  ‘We’ll both have to go in the helicopter,’ Colin was saying as they put Paul onto the stretcher and began to hurry him towards the biggest hut.

  Richard had already gone, pulling the nylon rope from round his body, preparing to use it as a lifeline to the second survivor. Kate’s green eyes followed him as he ran across the ice.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But be careful. Remember your hand.’

  He booted the door open and then caught it on his shoulder as it rebounded. ‘I will,’ he promised.

  He swung the head end of the stretcher onto the nearest bed and paused only until she had placed the foot end safely in place. ‘Got to run,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  He was gone.

  Kate took a deep breath, counted to ten, kicked the door shut with more force than was absolutely necessary, turned the heating up full and began to take Paul’s clothes off. As she finished undoing the first zip on the survival suit, she heard the helicopter clatter up into the air.

  ~ * ~

  ‘I’ll go down onto the ice,’ Richard was yelling. ‘You lower me.’

  ‘I can do that but I don’t think I can pull you back up.’ Colin held up his left arm. He stripped off mitten and glove to reveal a hand that was all too obviously plastic. ‘It will hold while I lower but I wouldn’t trust it to pull you up. Kate was about the limit.’

  ‘OK. You get me down and then secure the rope in here. Sam, can you lift us up and carry us up to the top of the berg?’

  ‘You’ll have to be careful to tie the right knots.’

  ‘I haven’t had to pass elementary seamanship in a long while but I’ll manage.’

  ‘Look,’ persisted Colin, ‘I can go down. You’re strong enough to pull me up, I’m sure.’

  ‘Too risky, Colin. That outfit wouldn’t be much help if you went into the water. At least I’m in one of Antelope’s survival suits.’

  The big glaciologist nodded in reluctant agreement.

  ‘Nearly there,’ called Sam.

  As the helicopter danced down the last few metres to hover above the marooned man, Richard knotted one end of the rope round his waist. Colin belayed the other end to a seat foot and pulled at it until the whole fuselage shook. ‘Right!’ he yelled.

  Richard opened the sliding door in the Huey’s side and looked out into the battering waterfall of air beneath die rotors. The floe was a couple of metres below him with the body spread across about half of it. It lay quite still, giving no indication at all whether or not the survivor had heard the helicopter or was in any condition to react even if he had done so. Richard’s ice-blue eyes narrowed for a moment as he took stock. Whichever one of the men it was, he was hanging on to the anchorage point Paul had driven into the ice before it fell from the cliff top. How on earth could it have remained secure through all this?

  If it was Alan, then he was simply holding on to the rope as a safe handhold. If it was Dave, then he could well still be tied to it. Richard turned to yell at Colin but even as he did so, his big companion shoved a wicked looking knife out towards him. Richard grinned wolfishly, put the icy blade between his teeth and jumped.

  He hit the slippery surface of the ice jarringly hard and felt his knees twist in agonised protest. He pitched forward, as he had calculated - and hoped - he would, to sprawl across the body of the man he had come to rescue and share his handhold. He saw at once that it was Dave Brodski. Dave seemed to be unconscious. That was hardly surprising. He had been in the water for the better part of twenty-five minutes. He would be lucky to pull through.

  Richard knelt up on his protesting knees and sawed at the rope by the anchorage point. The knife was sharp. Half a dozen desperate pulls and the orange fibres parted. Richard pulled as much slack towards himself as possible and hitched Dave’s line to his own. Then he turned into the savage, numbing blast of the helicopter’s down draught and gestured to Colin.

  At once the Huey began to lift and he just had time to pull himself to his feet before he was lifted gently into the air. Less than a metre below him, his lolling head level with Richard’s aching knees, Dave Brodski followed suit.

  Dangling there, one hand on the rope reaching up above his head and the other on the rope down below, fighting to breathe against the constriction of the rope round him, Richard had an even better view of the Davis Strait than he had enjoyed from the front of the iceberg. And he had some leisure to enjoy it, though it was an incongruous position for sightseeing. The great bow-formed cliffs seemed to be driving southward
s now and the calming waves held enough of the last squall to look like a bow wave foaming at its counter. Beyond the dazzling, deadly beauty of the ice, the end of a bright afternoon was drawing out into die long evening of early autumn in high latitudes.

  His mind was racing. He was going over the things he needed to do at once before he left to return to Antelope tonight, and London tomorrow. And he was already drawing his plans - or, more accurately, firming up plans already drawn - to liberate six supertankers and get them here before winter set in.

  He wasn’t sure precisely when, but sometime this afternoon he had become convinced that Colin Ross’s plan would work. That they really were going to take this thing to Africa.

  ~ * ~

  Kate looked up as they carried Dave into the big hut. Paul was lying on the stretcher clad only in his Calvin Kleins and she was putting the finishing touches to a proper bandage on his thigh. ‘It’s not as bad as I’d feared,’ she said, ‘but I think he’d better go back to Antelope with you, Richard. If Dave has to go too it’ll be a bit crowded, though.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ said Richard. ‘First order of business is to see how he is.’

  As a first officer, Richard had done his stint as acting medical officer on several ships, but his knowledge had only been basic then and was rusty now to say the least. Kate went to work and there was nothing further for him to do on the medical front.

  He made some coffee and went into a close huddle with Colin. By the time she had finished, they had ironed out all the details that needed to be addressed at the moment. The three of them, with a fascinated Sam in tow, went to consult the satnav. Still in a straight line. Still due south.

  ‘She’s sailing like a ship now,’ observed Richard. ‘Perhaps we should give her a name.’

  ‘She may already have one,’ said Kate. ‘I found a plank of wood in that ice cliff. God alone knows where it came from but it was heaven sent to use as a splint. It has a name written on it.’

  ‘What? Where is it? Let’s have a look,’ said Colin, speaking for them all.

  They went back into the big hut and she found the painted plank where she had kicked it under Paul’s bunk.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, holding it out for them to see. ‘It’s part of a name. It’s Russian. I’m a bit rusty, but I think it says Leonid.’

  ‘Leonid?’ asked Richard, frowning down at the strange piece of wood.

  The Russian characters were painted in black on wood which had once been painted white. Both coats of paint were scorched and blistered now. Just looking at it made Richard feel uncomfortable, as though there was something supernatural at work here.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Kate. ‘My Russian’s rusty, as I said, but the word is familiar because it’s part of such a well known name: Leonid Brezhnev. The late Chairman of the Soviet Party. Yes. I’m sure it says Leonid.’

  Richard frowned. ‘Well, I suppose in these post-glasnost days we could give her a Russian name, but—’

  ‘Leonid Shmeonid,’ rasped a weary Bronx voice behind them. ‘This mother nearly killed two New York boys this afternoon and I guess that gives us some say in the matter.’

  They all turned round to see Dave Brodski leaning up on one elbow. He was dressed only in pyjama pants and his battered face and barrel torso were covered in so many scrapes, scratches, welts, blotches and bruises that it looked as though he had just lost a long, hard boxing match with the likes of Muhammad Ali.

  Kate was still holding the mysterious plank of wood. She used it to point at the battered man. ‘Well, what do you think we ought to call it, then?’ she demanded.

  ‘Hell, it’s obvious, lady. What you got here is a boat made out of ice that’s the size of an island. So you should call it after the most famous island in the world. ‘You got to call it “Manhattan”.’

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Seven

  The boardroom at Heritage House doubled as the dining room and was available to anyone who worked in the building and their guests between twelve and two. At two thirty in the afternoon, exactly a week after Richard had stepped down from the Huey onto the iceberg, the air in the boardroom was still redolent of gourmet luncheon, in spite of the discreet efforts of the extractor fans to push all such odours out into Leadenhall Street.

  The atmosphere was not as relaxing as the sweet-smelling air.

  The room was panelled in oak said to have been rescued from one of Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet, and on the lovingly tended wood hung a series of naval prints. At one end of the room stood a glass case containing a detailed model of Prometheus II, the flagship of the Heritage Mariner fleet. She was a supertanker, a quarter of a million tonner, currently making her way back from the Gulf with a cargo of oil; a situation which everyone in the room knew to be increasingly rare. At the other end, in pride of place under the windows looking out across the busy London street, a pair of smaller glass cases contained models of Katapult, the elegant multi-hull which represented Heritage Mariner’s unexpectedly successful move into the world of leisure boating, and of Atropos, the nuclear waste transporter, currently working between Canada and Europe, moving the byproducts of nuclear power and weaponry as safely as it was possible to do. Her sister, Clotho, was even now in dry dock at Harland and Wolff’s, having her bow section replaced and strengthened after an accident-filled and deadly dangerous summer.

  Four members of Heritage Mariner’s executive board sat silently round the table while the fifth, Richard himself, stood. Richard was unexpectedly feeling isolated, almost threatened; on trial. It was a feeling he knew well enough - he had spent part of the summer in litigation, with the future of the company at stake - but it was a novel feeling in his own boardroom.

  His ice-blue eyes swept round the table again as he re-ordered his thoughts and prepared to begin his argument again. Robin was on his side. She had met Colin and Kate. She shared the dream. Her steady grey gaze met his and she gave him a tiny smile of support and a minuscule nod which made her gold curls glint like guineas in the strong September sunshine.

  Her father, Sir William, sitting at her side, was not so convinced. Still tired looking and gaunt after heart surgery and the insertion of a pacemaker, he was ready to vote for a period of conservative retrenchment. That was understandable. His heart attack had been the climax of the worst couple of weeks any of them had ever experienced. He was still convalescent and only the importance of this meeting had called him down from Cold Fell, his great house in Cumbria where he spent almost all his time now.

  Beside Bill sat Helen DuFour. The calm, pragmatic Provencal chief executive was not convinced either. She shared most things with Sir William and she shared his opinion now. They had been lucky to survive the summer, personally and financially. The court case had come too close to ruining them, and still might do so if things went badly at the American bar. The cost of keeping lawyers in New York was crippling. So was the cost of insuring the ten hulls they owned, but the fact that it was the insurers who were fixing and refitting Clotho proved how worthwhile the crippling expenses really were. They had just survived some extremely bad publicity and they were all too well aware that they had made some dangerous enemies in the media. They had been on the wrong end of terrorist action, one of the reasons their insurance premiums were so high, and looked likely to remain a target as long as they continued to handle nuclear byproducts. All in all, it looked as though there was a hard winter coming, especially as the promised upturn in several important economies was failing to materialise. This was not the time for harebrained experimental schemes.

  And at the far end of the table, with the secretary quietly behind his shoulder waiting to continue with the minutes of the meeting, sat the least convinced board member of all. Charles - never Charlie - Lee’s eyes were long, dark and narrow, as befitted a man who had cut his teeth in the frantic markets of Hong Kong, but his face had none of the roundness of common Chinese ancestry. On the contrary, it was fine and thin with high, sharp cheekbones and a broad, domed
forehead. When he spoke, his inevitably quiet voice coupled an American twang with an English drawl in a manner which whispered of an extremely broad education.

  They had been lucky to get him, for he was a very high flyer indeed and a man of awesome business acumen. He had come to them for a whole series of reasons reaching - inevitably, given his background - back into the mists of time. He claimed Manchu blood. His face and form supported that claim. He was the only son of one of the founding families of Hong Kong. The generations before him had amassed and lost great fortunes. His father, starting with next to nothing after the war, had done much to re-establish those fortunes without moving the basis of his business out of the sight of Kowloon harbour. This was apt enough, for he had been a shipping man.