by Peter Tonkin
They rode up in the lift towards Richard’s day room locked in conversation. John was all for starting the final preparations for departure at once: Ajax was expected soon, though Richard knew nothing about her captain and crew other than the simple complement lists sent to him by the Mau Club in the UN building. Yes, agreed John, they would meet her captain and his men before putting them in place beside Achilles and getting under way, but even so, that was no reason for delay. . .
John had not come empty-handed, so the ride up in the lift was cramped as well as animated. As soon as they entered the day room, John unburdened himself of the largest of his gifts. ‘Yves Maille will explain the details of these himself later, but I thought you’d want a look at them.’
‘They’ were a series of charts covering the whole of the proposed voyage, starting with the chart of the Davis Strait where they were currently, then following across the North Atlantic to the west coast of Ireland and down to Biscay, then on down the west coast of Africa to the Canaries. There was one chart for the sea area surrounding the Canary Islands themselves. Then another series took them into the Gulf of Guinea past the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra into Mawanga itself.
Every chart was covered with drawings and notes which Richard, dazedly, began to recognise as the most incredibly detailed information about the currents they were hoping to follow. Mean flow speeds - at what depth if there was variation. Water temperatures - a careful gradation of colour to show which figure referred to what depth. Notes about possible variations. Offshoots, counter-currents, associated climatic conditions - whether and how they would be affected by them. Prevailing surface winds - force and temperature at surface level.
‘This stuff is really only the beginning,’ said John. ‘The professor is going to go through it all and expand it at the first overall briefing we convene. Then he’s going to update it daily and give us really detailed forecasts of all die conditions we will be sailing into from a thousand metres up in the air to a thousand metres down in the ocean. He’s drifted across the Atlantic in a submersible just following the Gulf Stream so he literally knows it like the back of his hand, and of course the series of programmes he did for the World Wildlife Fund which were on TV last year were all filmed on the coral reefs off the Guinea coast so he knows our destination perfectly too. I really cannot believe how much he knows about the ocean. It’s mind-numbing.’
‘He’ll get on with Kate Ross like a house on fire,’ prophesied Richard.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Now, here’s your next present.’
He laid it almost reverently on the desktop beside Yves Maille’s charts. It was half a metre of black cable about the thickness of a strong man’s forearm.
Richard picked it up. It was icy cold. Like glass. ‘Is this it?’
‘Some of it. The main cable’s a couple of metres thick. This is the lighter line. And it goes right down to the thickness of string. Apparently they make it as thin as thread but that’s too dangerous for general use. As you can see, though, it’s just a bundle of threads all wrapped into a cable shape then held in place by this woven skin. It’s incredible. But you’ve got to be careful of it. As I say, it’s dangerous. Especially the thinner stuff.’
‘How?’
‘Well, for a start, it’s damn near unbreakable. They’ve given us these things like pipe benders to cut it with. You clamp one round it and move a handle. It’s as though you’re trying to put a screw-thread on the outside of the cable but in fact the handle activates a laser beam which is all that can get through it. Apparently the beam gets between the molecules and breaks the magnetic link or some such. But the point is that scissors, knives, axes, oxyacetylene equipment are all useless. Even on the string. And what you’ve got to remember is that the thinner it gets, the sharper it gets. I read somewhere about someone training soldiers to use single fibres as a weapon. Use a thread of it like a garotte and you can take somebody’s head off, no trouble at all. And that’s what I’m building up to. Two of my men tried a tug of war with the thinnest string. Big blokes. Wrapped it round their hands and pulled against each other. They thought it would break. It was no thicker than a shoelace. But it didn’t break. It cut their fingers off instead. I’ve got it all under lock and key now.’
Richard looked at the cable and felt a slight shiver. It gleamed slightly, as though slugs had been crawling all over it.
‘Have you worked out how you’re going to anchor it in the ice yet?’ asked John.
‘Yes, I think so. I’m going to loop the end of the cable nearest the ice and then run two other lengths of cable through. That will give us four cable ends on the ice. And a spread of four anchorage points. What Tom Snell has done so far is to level the anchorage areas and then bore down into the ice four holes in carefully calculated positions at carefully calculated angles. Each hole is about five metres across and ten metres deep and they slope so that their bottoms are towards the ship while their tops are away from the ship. We’ll fill each hole with quick drying concrete and embed the actual anchorage points in that so there is no direct pressure on the ice from the anchorage. That way we hope to keep the pressure-melting to a minimum. We’ll have teams watching at each anchorage point in any case, certainly to begin with. In theory if even three of the anchorages fail, the fourth should be enough to maintain the tow while we get the others back into commission.’
‘But having four should give you a fail-safe spread.’
‘Like having four engines on an aeroplane.’
~ * ~
Dinner that night was close to being a social affair. Colin and Kate again came down off the ice - a five-minute hop in the Westland made it very easy to exchange visits. John had brought not only the rope from New York but also a Bell helicopter destined for Achilles’ deck - it had been agreed as part of the overall equipping of the project that there should be one helicopter for each pair of ships. Bob Stark was still aboard Titan; he would go back to his own command with the new helicopter tomorrow, for Ajax was due within the next twenty-four hours and Richard intended to get under way within the next thirty-six. They would meet Kraken and Psyche in the Atlantic and get up to full speed then. Manhattan was drifting south with the Labrador Current so quickly now that she would be in the grip of the Gulf Stream within four days at the outside and Richard wanted to have her under some kind of control before then if he possibly could. So for the first and probably the last time they were all together at this table. John and his doctor wife Asha, Professor Yves Maille, Bob Stark, Richard, Sally Bell. Tom Snell and his men were still down on Achilles, putting the final touches to the anchorage areas at the stern of the tow. The Bell would bring them back tomorrow.
In the meantime, Kate, Asha and Sally were surrounded by witty, charming, highly attractive men, who for once were not talking exclusively about the tow. Asha had eyes for no one but her John, really, and Kate and Colin drifted in and out of an impenetrable conversation about phytoplankton and microclimates. Sally, on the other hand, found herself torn. Captain Mariner was so tall and distinguished with just those wings of silver sweeping back above his ears to emphasise the jet-black hair which in turn seemed to bring out to perfection his ice-blue eyes. But Professor Maille was also worthy of attention, all Gallic charm, the most irresistible accent, and old-world courtesy. But it was Bob Stark she finally plumped for - the wide grin, the boyish cow’s lick of thick blond hair, the square jut of his jaw and the dreamy depths of his eyes.
It was a very great pity indeed, she thought glumly, that she would be separated from this gorgeous man by one hundred kilometres of ice.
They dispersed to their posts at the end of the meal. Colin and Kate were dropped up onto the ice then the Westland took John and Asha Higgins and Professor Maille back to Niobe. Richard went off to do some late checking and phoning and Sally drifted into the officers’ lounge with Bob Stark and a big cup of coffee. She was due on watch duty soon and had nothing to do in the meantime. They chatted idly, like o
ld friends. She told him about her childhood in Ulster and her education in Belfast. ‘You should talk to old Higgins,’ he informed her. ‘He’s got a lot of Irish in his background. Father’s family, mostly. He’s a Manxman, though.’ And he told her of his own Ivy League background, his youth and education in New England, his father the senator and his uncle the US Navy admiral. But he spoke of these things naturally and thoughtlessly with no desire to impress her with his family wealth or social standing.
At midnight they went up onto the bridge together and he sat in the watchkeeper’s chair on the left side of the bridge while she dismissed the third officer to bed and signed on as watchkeeper.
He crossed his legs and his trousers slid up to reveal a glimpse of calf. ‘Good God,’ she said, straightening. ‘Is that a bullet wound?’
‘Yup, sure is. Got it in an honest to God shoot-out, too.’
‘Gunfight at die OK Corral?’
‘Fighting terrorists on an oil platform called Fate. Though I was actually shot on the deck of Prometheus’
‘That’s where Captain Higgins got shot too, isn’t it?’
‘And Asha nursed him back to health. They’ve been playing doctors and nurses ever since.’
Sally shook her head. ‘Boy, do you all lead exciting lives.’
‘We all. You’re one of us now. Part of the team.’
‘In the Club at any rate.’
‘So your life should get a bit more exciting soon too.’
‘Och!’ she said, her Belfast background surfacing in the sound of disbelief.
Just then the warning light in the radio shack lit up.
‘Incoming,’ observed Bob cheerfully.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Sally and crossed to the little room. She picked up the microphone and flipped the channel open.
‘Titan, are you receiving me, over?’
‘This is Titan, receiving you strength ten, over.’
‘Titan, this is Ajax, over. Message for Captain Mariner.’
‘Hold on, Ajax, I’m buzzing him now. Captain, it’s Sally here. I have an incoming for you from Ajax. Yes, right...Hello, Ajax, the Captain’s coming up at once. May I have your current position and ETA at our position?’
‘Four hundred kilometres west of Julianehab. We will be with you by dawn, over.’
‘Thank you very much, Ajax, handing you over to Captain Mariner now...’
Richard went in as Sally came out. He put on the headphones, switched off the open channel and swung the door closed, but he was speaking at once so Sally and Bob heard his first words quite clearly.
‘Ah. Captain Borodin. Welcome to the Davis Strait...’
~ * ~
Sixteen hours later, everything was in place. Ajax had joined Achilles and their lines were secured to Tom Snell’s anchorage places. Titan and Niobe were also in place and secured to the ice. Richard was standing at the capstans on Titan’s poop watching narrow-eyed along the sag of that strange, black almost crystalline rope which stretched back behind them, seeming to grasp the ice with an unnerving, four-fingered hand. The afternoon was dull and overcast. There was a storm due to break out of Hudson Bay later tonight or tomorrow. It was time to be gone.
Richard raised his walkie-talkie to his lips. All of them had agreed on channel four as the general hailing frequency and all of the key players in this scene had their walkie-talkies close at hand, open on channel four. Up on the ice, the radio shack behind Colin Ross’s base was receiving and retransmitting channel four so that it could be heard by Bob Stark and Katya Borodin as clearly as by Sally Bell on Titan’s bridge and John Higgins on Niobe nearby.
Richard’s stomach was knotted with tension. He knew he was standing on the edge of the unknown. No one had ever tried to move anything this big before. No one in the history of the world had tried to take a piece of ice one hundred kilometres long and deliver it to a point eleven thousand kilometres away as the crow flies. He had thought about this moment, what he would say, how it would sound. He was not a self-publicist, but he knew that he had a reputation and that what he said now would add to it - or go a long way towards destroying it. He had planned a little speech. He had wondered about something as derivative as ‘one small step’, or as bland as ‘slow ahead all’, but now as he stood there on this grey, blustery afternoon looking up at the bow-shaped cliff of ice towering above him, the wind gusted five hundred metres up and blew a combination of ice dust and spray off Manhattan in two long, white horns. Because his blood was full of adrenaline and he would very much, just at that moment, have liked to be in another place or in another time, he was taken back to his childhood and the days - the only days in all his life - when he had wanted to be something other than a sailor. To the days when his first great hero on the television would turn at the end of Rawhide and say the same thing every week.
It fitted with how he felt, what they were doing and how the iceberg looked just at that moment with the white horns butting at the sky. For the first time in more than forty years he said the words Gil Favor used to say to Rowdy Yates, loud and clear, for better or worse, whether his listeners understood them or not. ‘Head them up,’ he said. ‘Move them out.’
He felt the whole of his great vessel begin to throb and he walked swiftly back to the after rail. He stood sideways on so he could look back towards the ice, forward towards the second officer’s team on the capstans, down towards the foaming water.
‘Slow ahead!’
The water was foaming up under the counter down there as though they were sitting atop an underwater volcano. The black rope had lost its sag and the thin talon quivered as it clawed at the ice. He could see the figures of Snell’s team moving about there apprehensively, checking the anchorage points with one eye on the rope in case it parted after all and cut back to chop them to pieces.
‘Slow ahead!’ he said again. The mountain of foam behind the ship seemed to grow and a low humming started. It was the tension in the rope and the sound dried his mouth out. He could hear his heart beating. This wasn’t going to work.
The humming grew in intensity and was joined by a low groaning. He concentrated all his imagination on the soles of his feet: the last time he had heard a noise like that, Prometheus had been breaking in two beneath him and his feet had been the first part of him to realise something was wrong. Would they warn him if the poop was about to come free? If they did, would he have a chance to get back onto the main deck before he was snatched away with everything aft of the capstan? No. No chance. If it all went now, he was dead.
Thank God he had told Robin he loved her last night and asked her to give the twins a special hug.
The whole ship was quivering now. Like a greyhound in a trap ready for the off but restrained. There was a thudding thumping from below. Or was it just his heart again?
The cable sagged.
Infinitesimally. Almost indiscernibly.
But it sagged.
Richard took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘Are we still at slow ahead, Sally?’
‘Slow ahead and due south, Captain.’ There was strain in her voice too, but her words lit a spark of hope in his breast. For if the ship was at slow ahead then the cable could only sag if—
‘Richard!’ Colin’s voice through channel four so loud it made him jump. ‘Richard, she’s moving. Manhattan’s moving!’
Then John came through over the top of him, yelling, ‘My God! Richard! My God!’ And behind John’s awed tones was the sound of wild cheering. Abruptly, the sound exploded out of the radio and into the air immediately around him. Every throat on Titan was yelling in jubilation.
Richard found himself pounding on the after rail and grinning like an idiot. He wanted to yell himself. To cheer with the rest and to dance and sing. He had never in his heart of hearts really believed they could pull this off. Even the seemingly unquestioning faith of the Mau Club and the Manhattan Club had seemed unrealistic and faintly unreal. Yet here they were. And here was Manhattan. And they were pul
ling and it was following. It was impossible but it was true.
‘We are moving at slow ahead, Achilles. Are you moving?’
‘Son of a bitch, Richard. Son of a bitch.’
Richard took that as an affirmative.
‘Ajax?’
‘All lines secure. Proceeding as ordered, Captain. But this “Head them up and move them out”, this I do not understand.’
‘I’ll explain it to you some time, Captain Borodin. In the meantime, slow ahead all. Come to five knots if you please. Our heading is due south.’
