The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Yes,’ answered Major Tom Snell of the Royal Engineers, seconded to NATO and the UN.

  Tom Snell was a solid bull of a man with broad shoulders and a thick waist. He had a square, pugnacious face with overhanging brows, a straight, short nose, a downcurving mouth emphasised by a clipped military moustache and a square, protruding jaw. He wasn’t too happy to be here and he was not a man to hide his feelings. But orders were orders and he and his engineers had been pulled out of their posting in Norway to come and oversee the placing and maintenance of the tow lines. He might have said more than the flat monosyllable, but further conversation became impossible as the thunder of the falling ice overwhelmed them.

  Richard refocused his binoculars up on the top of the cliff where the distant figures of Colin and Kate looked down at the results of the engineers’ work.

  The avalanche slowed and the thunder receded. For once, Tom Snell initiated the conversation. ‘We’ll need to go over for a closer look now.’

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘I’ll come anyway. Helicopter or inflatable?’

  ‘Whatever you think, sir.’

  ‘Inflatable. We’ll have to get used to nipping back and forth so we might as well start now. Unless you want to clear off ledges big enough to allow the helicopter a landing site.’

  ‘No. That would take more time than we have available,’ said the square soldier, but his eyes lingered wistfully on the bright side of the Westland Sea King as they passed it. Tom Snell did not like boats or boating.

  It took them longer than expected to reach the berg, although Richard had had the foresight to equip the crew of the big inflatable with long boathooks. Snell’s explosives had brought down a lot of ice and getting through the mess of floating boulders took persistence and time. The noise was unexpected. The ice boulders made quite a racket as they bobbed and clashed, rumbled and rolled, settling down individually and collectively, as though coming slowly to terms with the new situation. There was a very real danger of some of the larger, unstable pieces rolling over and swamping the rubber craft, so Richard who had the helm took things slowly and very carefully indeed.

  As they passed through the ice field which the engineers had created, the noise being made by the berg itself began to reach them. Bits and pieces were still falling off die cliff, and they were careful to stay clear until the man-made avalanche had stopped falling into the sea. But even when the thunder of falling boulders had ceased, a pervasive sound still came from the massive piece of ice with unexpected intensity. Water flowed everywhere, its voice varying from a tinkle to a roar, as though somewhere deep within the berg there were massive waterfalls. And as water settled downwards over the surfaces and through the depths, so air rose up, its tones echoing the water’s, from the bubbling whisper of a breeze to the distant thunder of gales magically entombed.

  Richard remembered none of this noise from his previous visit, but then he had been high up on the ice cliffs. Perhaps things were quieter up there. He hoped so, or no one at the ice camp was going to get any sleep at all during the next month or so.

  He let the inflatable bump gently along the sheer, crystalline coast of the iceberg until he found a good place for them all to climb up. Leaving one man to guard the big rubber craft, he followed the rest of them up onto the ice.

  It was wet and slippery, running not only with meltwater but with salt spray from die explosion and avalanche. Scrambling up a shallow slope behind the others, Richard almost collided with the line of men who stood looking across the gallery the explosives had created.

  It was obviously going to be impossible to tie the tow ropes to the top of the cliffs. That had never been a realistic option; too much expensive rope would have been required and the angle of pull would have been so steep as to have negated half of the ships’ power. They had known for some time that tow ropes would have to be anchored in galleries blown into the ice cliffs like this one at a level a little higher than the little poop deck behind the bridge-house, where the mighty capstans sat. None of the tankers involved in the tow had strengthened sterns, so the capstans would have to be treated with great respect and the application of power from the engines which would bring pressure and stress upon the equipment via the unbreakable rope and the all but immovable inertia of the berg itself would have to be very carefully calculated indeed. But Bob Stark would be here with Achilles tomorrow and they would be able to discuss that then. In the meantime, Tom Snell had created the first gallery by blowing away a section of the cliff. He had been fortunate to find a ledge here big enough to work on. From the back of the ledge he had drilled into the cliff and laid a series of charges designed to send a flat edge of explosive power into the ice, creating a level area half the size of a football pitch with a safe overhang above it. And so he had.

  Richard joined the group of engineers and seamen admiring the major’s work, then he helped them clear the level anchorage area of any last bits and pieces of smashed ice. By the time they lost the light, the work was complete and the first anchorage point was clear.

  ‘That’s excellent,’ said Richard, his voice raised to reach Snell over the tinkling of nearby water and the more distant rumbling of the floes. ‘I think we’ve earned our supper tonight.’

  Tom Snell gave a nod of agreement, then his usually grim face split into a wide grin. ‘Yes, Captain,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think we have.’

  ~ * ~

  The dinner was excellent but, as all meals were for Richard, a working one. He could rely on Sally Bell to run the ship for him - they weren’t going anywhere or doing much in seafaring terms at the minute in any case - while he kept in touch with what was taking place on the ice. He needed to review what had happened today and begin to plan the detail of what would happen tomorrow. So dinner was a meeting of all the available members of the Manhattan Club.

  ‘It’s excellent work to have the first anchorage area clear so quickly,’ rumbled Colin Ross. ‘You’ve hardly been here twenty-four hours.’

  ‘We’ll have the next one done by this time tomorrow,’ promised Snell. No crossed fingers or touch wood for him. “Then we’ll go down and look at the far end.’

  ‘Achilles will be here tomorrow,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll keep Bob Stark here and start talking propulsion and associated matters. His first officer will take you down to the far end, Tom, and you can look at things there. Colin, is there any dry ice down there?’

  ‘Yes. As you’d expect, given the size of the section above the water here, there’s a bit above the water there as a kind of counterweight or balance. The whole of Manhattan is the same shape as Titan here, except that it’s mostly submerged, floating at a slight angle, and facing backwards. That means the bridgehouse is above the water at this end and a kind of forecastle is above the water at the far end. It’s not all that big but it is level and clear. And not even a hundred metres high - you may be able to anchor your lines straight to it.’

  ‘That would be very convenient.’

  ‘Then all you have to worry about is where you’re going to anchor Kraken and Psyche when they arrive in ten days,’ observed Kate.

  ‘Halfway along, of course,’ said Tom, frowning, not too sure about the number of women who seemed to hold senior positions in this enterprise.

  Kate nodded. ‘That’ll be at the far end of the section above the water level. Again, most convenient. But we haven’t done much exploring in that area, have we, Colin? Maybe I’d better take a look down there tomorrow.’

  Sally Bell leaned forward. ‘You could do some reconnaissance in the Westland first. Map some likely looking areas from the air and then maybe go back on foot if it isn’t too inaccessible.’

  ‘Good idea,’ nodded Richard. ‘We don’t need the Westland for a while. More boating for you tomorrow, I’m afraid, Tom.’

  A steward appeared at Richard’s elbow, holding a portable phone. ‘A call for you, Captain.’

  Richard took the phone. ‘Yes?
’

  ‘John Higgins here, Richard.’

  ‘John. Where are you? You sound very clear.’

  ‘I’ve just arrived on Niobe. We’re proceeding full ahead and are passing off Newfoundland three days behind you.’

  Richard’s bright blue eyes gleamed with excitement as they swept round the small group at the table. He didn’t ask how John had managed to catch up with Niobe so quickly or in such a place; Crewfinders would have seen to all that. They could get anyone anywhere in the world with almost magical efficiency. ‘So Bob arrives with Achilles tomorrow and I can expect you two days after,’ he said, as much to himself as to the man on the far end of the telephone link.

  ‘What about Ajax?’

  ‘Fully crewed and on her way. Left Stavanger five days ago.’

  ‘Phew! That’s going it some! Any news of who’s in command?’

  ‘Not yet. One of the United Nations EGD crews.’

  ‘EGD?’

  ‘An old term Emily Karanga told me about last week before she went dirtside to New York. Equal Geographical Distribution. It means people who get given the job to fill a quota, not because they’re any good.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘Used to happen more in the old days than it does now, I’m sure.’

  Richard caught Tom Snell’s gaze and the officer gave a slight world-weary shake of his head.

  ‘Just so long as they can do their job,’ said John.

  ‘Just so long as they take good care of my boat!’ said Richard.

  ‘Too right. Look, just before I sign off, I’ve been told to expect two deliveries tomorrow. Professor Yves Maille, the marine biologist. I’m bringing him up to join the Club, I understand. He’s the man who knows almost as much about warm water as Dr Ross knows about cold. And I’m to expect the rope. Is it really from NASA?’

  ‘Yes it is, John. It’s not really rope, it’s non-breakable, monocellular carbon-graphite fibre woven into a cable.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’ The dazed wonderment in John’s voice was clearly audible. ‘I’ll be bringing that up too, then. OK?’

  ‘OK, John. Over and out.’ Richard put the portable phone down on the starched linen of the table cloth. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Achilles will be here in three days, together with Professor Yves Maille and the rope. Which will, of course, give us yet another interesting conundrum.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Tom Snell.

  ‘How do you cut a length off something that’s supposed to be unbreakable?’

  ~ * ~

  The unbreakability of the rope was something which exercised the minds of Richard and Bob Stark the next afternoon.

  Richard was there by the helipad to welcome his old friend aboard. The last time they had seen each other was at John Higgins’ wedding and that had been nearly three years ago when Robin had been pregnant with the twins. Even then Richard had been struck by how little the American chief engineer had aged over the long years of their acquaintance. And now he was struck anew by the physical power and dynamism of the newly-promoted captain of Achilles. With his film star good looks, his Ivy League background, and his New England Four Hundred family you would have expected to find him following his father’s footsteps into politics. Or at least his uncle’s into the US Navy. But no. A love of marine engines and some vagaries of maritime chance had brought Bob to Heritage Mariner and he had always seemed content to remain, working his way up slowly but surely from third engineer to captain.

  He looked at Richard almost quizzically as they shook hands. Then he looked at the iceberg. His blond eyebrows met his rich, straw-coloured head of hair and his dark blue eyes held an expression of incredulity. His wide mouth, over an impossibly wide jaw, turned up at one sculpted corner and he shook his head in mild disbelief. ‘You really think we’re going to be able to move that thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard decisively. ‘We have the power. We have the rope. All we need to do is think it through.’

  Half an hour later they were in conclave in Richard’s day room while Bob’s ship Achilles sailed off under command of its first officer to take Tom Snell and his men to the far end of the berg. Bob looked down at the diagrams on the desk. Then, sweeping the cow’s lick of blond hair out of his eyes, he said, ‘Even if it’s unbreakable, there has to be a little give in it because it’s woven into cable. Each individual fibre may have no elasticity whatsoever but when you wind them round each other they will stretch a little, even if it’s only while the whole thing tightens up. And I guess that’s all to the good because a little give will work to our advantage, give us some leeway.’ He grinned. ‘Cut us some slack.’

  ‘OK,’ temporised Richard, ‘but we’ve still got trouble at both ends.’

  ‘Damn right. The way I see it is this. Once you’re anchored to the ice, that’s it unless the anchorage points fail - which is a possibility we can look at in a minute. But the point is, if things go wrong, the cable isn’t the weak link in the chain any more. It won’t snap before damage to the ship occurs. So what would come next?’

  ‘Capstans.’

  ‘Right. Now each pair of capstans is motorised. So. The capstan post could be cut off or it could be pulled out of its mountings. With or without its motor.’

  Bob paused there while Richard revisited one of his more recent nightmares. Beheading the capstan would be bad enough, but pulling it bodily out of the poop deck like a rotten tooth was something he didn’t want to think about. And yet even that was preferable to the alternative.

  ‘Or, of course,’ he said to Bob, his voice rusty as though he had been shouting a lot recently, ‘we could simply pull the whole back end off the boat.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Bob, ‘we could certainly do that.’

  The pair of them sat in silence for a moment, considering imponderables like if the poop did break away, how much of the stern would go with it. Whether the hull would remain watertight under those circumstances. Whether the engine would continue to function.

  The impact of such a catastrophe was incalculable. It was one of those things you had to live through in order to get a proper hold on it. Like the separation of a supertanker. Richard had come through that by the skin of his teeth, standing on the deck of the first Prometheus in the English Channel in a storm while she broke in two beneath him. All the foresight in the world could not have prepared him for the actuality of that. The same was true of pulling the back end off your boat.

  ‘We also have the facility,’ said Richard, ‘of running a line back from the forecastle head.’

  ‘So as well as being able to pull off the back end, you could pull off the front end too. You’ve started living dangerously in your old age, Richard!’

  ‘Is it feasible? Would it help?’

  ‘In theory it wouldn’t help the actual tow. I mean, if you’ve got one unbreakable rope, why would you need two of them? Would it ease the strain on the hull? Probably not at this end. As I understand it, we plan to guide the thing and maybe get its mean speed up to five knots faster than its normal rate of drift, which should take it across the surface of the earth at about ten knots. Right?’

  ‘Right. We would have to move at five knots faster than the current in any case, just to give the ships steerageway. Any slower than that and we’re just drifting, really.’

  ‘OK. I see, that. So, what we need to do is apply propulsion to make it move faster until you have steerageway for your vessels, then force at some points to vary its course - you can’t expect actually to turn it at all. Obviously the lead vessels and the rear vessels will have to do steering as well as propulsion while the middle vessels will just do propulsion. Therefore . . .’

  The talk suddenly took an extremely technical turn.

  ~ * ~

  Niobe hove into view thirty-six hours later and John Higgins came aboard at once. He and Richard shook hands a little formally. Although they were close friends - Richard had been John’s best man - they had seen little of each other during the last couple
of years, except for a taxing few days they had spent together in court fighting a case which threatened to cripple Heritage Mariner and destroy Richard and his family financially for generations to come. ‘Asha will be over later,’ said John. ‘I thought you’d want to get the business bits over first. I told Yves Maille to wait too. He’s full of ideas and wants to discuss them, but we won’t really be coming into his area of expertise until we swing her round into the Gulf Stream. I say, though, that’s a bloody big bit of ice you’ve got there!’

  Richard smiled down at the dapper, decisive man he had first met nearly fifteen years ago. Physically, John had changed little since that time. Five feet ten of restless energy, he only seemed slight when close beside Richard’s six feet four inch frame. He had filled out perhaps, but there was no fat on his body; and if he carried himself a little stiffly these days, that was less to do with the passage of years than with a terrorist bullet in the ribs five years ago in the Gulf. The character was different, however. The happy-go-lucky third officer of Prometheus that Richard had first met had matured into a solid, reliable, senior captain who wore the weight of command easily and well. And the gifted navigator who had religiously taken noon and night-time sights with a series of beautiful old sextants had matured into a navigator of real genius, someone who they could rely upon to do even more for them than the dazzling array of navigation aids they had at their disposal.