by Peter Tonkin
When she started to scream again he thought that his brutal words had driven her over the edge of hysteria.
They hadn’t. The forest wall of the Dr Julius Karanga Game Reserve two hundred and fifty metres behind him was behaving in a very peculiar way. The trees were leaning of their own accord, preparing to topple out and down into the dry river bed. Something behind them was pushing them, shrugging them aside with thoughtless power as it strove to come out towards them.
All she could think of was that the elephants were coming back. Robert’s words by the pathway in the forest had been correct. His prophecy was coming true. The great grey tusker with its widespread ears and mad black eyes was coming back to tear them limb from limb and trample what was left of them into the ground. In her mind’s eye she could see the great grey bulk of it shrugging the trees aside as it came roaring into the open trumpeting its warcry, its trunk high and its tusks reaching out.
But that was not what happened at all. The monster that emerged from the forest shadows over the trunks of the fallen trees was grey but unwrinkled, not animal but machine, and what reached out in front of it was not the trunk of an enraged elephant but the barrel of a 125mm smoothbore gun extended by a bulky flash-guard. What was coming out of the jungle towards them was not an enraged and maddened tusker, it was worse.
It was a Soviet-made fully armoured T-80 main battle tank.
~ * ~
STREAM
THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
And the gilded car of day
His glowing axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantic stream . . .
John Milton, Comus
~ * ~
Chapter Thirteen
‘In the south-western quadrant of the North Atlantic, here, between Bermuda and the Bahamas, there is a hill made of water. It does not stand very high, this hill; perhaps two metres above the level of the rest of the ocean at its peak. It is covered in sargasso weed and it is the Sargasso Sea. The hill of water is caused by currents flowing into a circle very fiercely, and, although the mass of water making up the hill is very still, there are currents also flowing out of it, and currents flowing around it. A strong current comes westward from the coast of Africa, driven by the trade winds. Just as this current reaches the southern slopes of the Sargasso, it is joined by the outflow of the Brazil current which pushes along the coast of South America from Natal to Caracas . . .’
‘The Spanish Main,’ supplied John Higgins.
‘As you say,’ agreed Professor Yves Maille with a Gallic shrug of his slim shoulders. He glanced round the table in Richard’s day room to see whether the interruption had disturbed any of his audience at the first full captains’ briefing. All eyes were fixed on him. His own eyes lingered on those of Captain Katya Borodin whose looks particularly appealed to him. A slim, slight, lined, dark-skinned Mediterranean man himself, he was drawn to the blonde Nordic farm girl type, of which she was a perfect example. Dragging his eyes away at last, he gestured at the Atlantic chart before him. ‘But now, look. The currents meet. Their speed is augmented by water flowing out of the southern flank of the Sargasso. They run westward and, because of the Coriolis force, they wish to run northwards, and here before them is a land mass which guides them further northward over a shallow continental shelf. So the currents turn and run up the coast of the United States at five knots and more, past Florida and up the coast to Cape Hatteras. And so the Gulf Stream is born. It is a ribbon of water moving very fast, powerful, like the outflowing of a fire hose.’
‘When it is moving at speed, it even throws up a wall,’ added John, the practical sailor as well as the nautical historian. ‘Whether there is much to see at the surface depends on the conditions, but I have heard sailors talk of a west wall and a north wall on the outer edges of it. And they mean a wall of water. Something that can stand up above the level of the rest of the sea. Like the professor’s Sargasso Hill.’ The faces round the table were grim. They all knew they were due to start crossing the North Wall at about midnight tonight. At their current speed, if Titan went over on schedule, Achilles would be crossing at breakfast time. The iceberg would be passing through the wall of water for eight solid hours. There was much dark speculation as to what that would do to the massive piece of ice.
‘Yes indeed. This so-called wall is a reflection of very strong changes in temperature, salinity, water speed and so forth at the interface. It can be very powerful indeed. It will be the first great test of Manhattan’s true strength. But look, we have calculated on this, Captain Mariner and I. We will not be crossing the wall at right angles but coming in along this confluence with the Labrador Current here.
‘Regard. The mass of the Gulf Stream turns away from the American coast here at Cape Hatteras, and no one is quite certain what happens to it then. It changes its name, to begin with, and becomes the North Atlantic Drift. Perhaps it changes its nature too, but I think not much. It wavers and spins and twists. It goes up and down in massive waves. For your purposes this does not matter too much because the current is there and running at some speed at one depth or another for most of the time and, even more importantly, at this latitude it runs under the constant weather coming across from the west and heading eastwards for Europe.’
‘So,’ Richard summed up the meeting so far, ‘if we can get Manhattan over the North Wall out of the Labrador Current and into the Gulf Stream - North Atlantic Drift - we will have the help of water and weather moving eastwards at some speed.’
‘Oui! The current will be moving at a mean five knots, the surface features - the waves - at a mean twenty knots if the wind averages force five on the Beaufort scale. Of course at that force the wind itself will be moving at nearer thirty knots and will be pushing at the exposed section of ice as though it were a sail. You wish Manhattan to average ten knots . . .’
‘More if we can manage it. The water will be warm.’
‘Perhaps. I have two thoughts on that. First, the main current may not be all that warm and in any case, as I said, it will come and go, wavering up and down and from side to side. And secondly, as the iceberg melts, it will automatically lower the temperature of the water around it. Even though you move it faster than the current, you may still find that the more it melts, the more slowly it will melt. It is a huge thing, you see? It will create its own climate. But in any case, all of these factors will help the berg move quickly. And more quickly still when the last two ships arrive and become attached.’
Richard nodded. ‘That’ll be within the next couple of days. We need them to drive Manhattan forward through the Stream - or the Drift - while we guide her down across it.’
‘Again, the size of the berg and the enormity of the forces you are dealing with will help you. As the Coriolis force makes the Stream turn north off the Gulf of Mexico, so it will make Manhattan pull southwards as you move it at speed. The Gulf Stream tends southwards itself, though it sends eddies to the north. The main bulk of the water movement is pulled southwards across the Western Approaches to La Manche - what you English call the Channel - and becomes part of the Canaries current which then goes into the current which flows west below the Sargasso. It is one huge circle. What my friends of the Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole call the North Atlantic Gyre.’
‘And once we get on it, we will ride it to the Canaries and catch an offshoot called the Guinea current down to Mawanga.’ Katya Borodin’s voice was cool. Her English correct. Her pronunciation had a combination of Russian roundness and American nasality which Yves Maille, for one, found irresistible. Her tone was one of not so mild amazement that any set of apparently sane captains could possibly be engaged upon such a hare-brained enterprise as this.
‘But you are riding it already, you know. The Labrador Current which carries us south as we speak is but an offshoot of the North Atlantic Drift returning from Baffin Bay.’ Yves did his best to make his answer sound seductive.
‘Right, thank you, Yves,’ said Richard, bringing the meeting to
order. ‘Any questions?’ His eyes also lingered on Captain Borodin, but only because he sensed her lack of faith and wished to allay it at once. But she did not accept his invitation, so he continued. ‘No? Any observations, John?’
‘No. The navigation is theoretically simple, in the big picture, certainly, but I suspect we’ll find it challenging enough when we get down to the detail. We’ll need to know exactly where we are at all times if the information Yves is promising about water and weather is going to be used properly.’
‘Yes. I see that.’ Richard nodded. ‘And, of course, it will be of absolutely crucial importance with regard to sailing orders. Over to you, Bob. Propulsion?’
Bob Stark leaned back in his chair and stretched his long legs under the table. He brought his broad palm up his forehead to sweep the golden cow’s lick out of his eyes. Katya Borodin observed him in much the same way Yves Maille observed her, and they made a striking couple as they sat side by side: Nordic farm girl meets Kansas cow hand. But the good-looking New Englander was unaware of her gaze; he was concentrating absolutely on the matter in hand. ‘It’s taken us two days and more to get Manhattan up to a mean speed of seven knots, and we’ve only been sailing in a straight line. We’ve got to try and turn left off Flemish Cap tonight. How will that work? As Yves has said, we’re reckoning on a lot of help from the Labrador Current swinging east at that point to push us through the North Wall and into the main flow, but the whole plan relies upon picking up speed. What we haven’t had to face yet is how on earth do we actually control this amount of momentum once we build it up? Have you done your sums on that one, John? How much force is actually involved in moving one and a half billion metric tonnes at ten knots? How long will it take us to stop it, if we can stop it at all?’
‘God knows. But it has to be moving with enough momentum to do some serious damage to any poor sod who gets in the way,’ observed John.
‘Or any poor island. Or any poor cape. We don’t want to arrive off Africa with Cape St Vincent and a couple of Azores wedged up against our bowsprit,’ Richard commented wryly.
A chuckle went round the table, though they all knew Richard was only half joking. Then Colin Ross met the chairman’s eye and, on Richard’s tiny nod, stepped in. They were brushing against his areas of expertise now. ‘In fact,’ he growled, ‘it would be a mistake to see Manhattan as being particularly solid. Not now; certainly not later on. Under the circumstances Professor Maille has described, with warm seas and following weather, average winds of force five and waves of twenty knots, we can expect a good deal of water loss through melting and runoff - runoff depending on sunshine and air temperature too of course - but most of all from wave erosion. We’ll have to choose the anchorage sites for Kraken and Psyche with extreme care because they’ll be at the rear of the ice island above the surface and the following seas will smash that section to pieces.’ They all nodded. Richard, Colin and Kate were due to be scouting for those very locations in the Sea King with Tom Snell the engineer this afternoon, in fact.
‘You’ll have to keep an eye on Manhattan’s bow section as well,’ the glaciologist continued. ‘Remember, the bows are just hard ice, they aren’t steel or rock. They’ll wear away fantastically quickly. We’re just hoping they’ll wear away evenly, or all the Coriolis force in the universe won’t swing her onto the right course.’ He looked round the table. It wasn’t quite a glare, but it was an expression of warning. ‘You’ll have to watch the ice all the time. Don’t let the size of these boats fool you. One bad ice fall and even Titan would just vanish. Don’t think of it as a hulk you’re towing. Think of it as an enemy. Take your eye off it, turn your back for a second, and it will kill you.’
‘So far in this project,’ expanded Richard, ‘it’s killed one man, crippled another and landed a third in hospital. It did that for openers on the first day. Colin’s right. Watch your course. Watch your instruments. But, above all, watch the ice.’
~ * ~
Titan’s Sea King helicopter hung low in the restless air over the cliffs at the blunt northern end of Manhattan. Richard, Colin, Kate and Major Tom Snell looked down gloomily. Long grey rollers rode down the back of the Labrador Current, making the sea look like a huge dull file. For fifty kilometres further to the north, the submerged section of the iceberg acted on the water like a reef and its existence was revealed by a disturbance in the otherwise regular pattern of the waves. On the distant horizon, looming out of the freezing mist, the twin hulls of Ajax and Achilles rode astride the white islelet of the far end of ice.
Immediately below the helicopter, at the foot of the square cliffs, was a seething maelstrom as the waves, propelled by the fresh breeze, foamed up against the white ice in a dazzling surf. It was clear to the watchers that all that stopped the cliffs from being undermined in short order was the pale reef of ice which swept from a brief, smooth beach away beneath the worst of the foam into the slate-grey depths beneath the serried ranks of freezing water. Finding anchorage points for the last two ships was going to be more difficult than they had expected. Working on that foam-weltered glass-smooth beach was clearly going to be impossible and, in any case, putting all too fragile hulls so close to submarine ridges of ice was unthinkable, especially to someone like Richard who had come within an ace of joining Titanic in her grave two miles down in the Western Ocean south of here.
Colin Ross beat Richard on the shoulder and bellowed over the deafening combination of engine, rotor, wind and water, ‘And it’ll get more complicated. As the berg melts it will rise - float higher in the water. That little beach will be a kilometre wide in a week and the reef which is two hundred metres down will be one fifty metres down. If you anchor your boats above submerged ice, they’ll end up aground.’
‘That’s another thing you’ll have to watch anyway, even with one as big as this,’ added Kate anxiously. ‘It will keep going straight up out of the water as it melts until its centre of gravity gets too low to support it. Then it will roll over. It’s difficult to predict and there’ll be no warning. It’ll roll right over on top of you.’
Richard nodded. He knew about the instability of icebergs, but they had problems which needed to be dealt with before they had to worry about the whole berg turning turtle on them.
‘What we need, then,’ yelled Tom Snell, ‘is a matching pair of steep-sided bays with no ice bottom. One on each side. They have to be big enough to berth the last two boats. The bays have to have a wide enough beach to tether a line fore and aft and maybe midships as well. The back ends of the bays really need to be open - sufficiently so, at any rate, for the ice not to interfere with the thrust of the ships’ screws. This is particularly important because the two ships are oil-powered single-screw jobs, extremely powerful but not as flexible as the other four. They will be the main motive force for your dash along the North Atlantic Drift. So their placing is of paramount importance.’
Richard nodded again. There was nothing more to say, really; Tom had summed up the situation perfectly. He roared through to Doug Buchanan, the pilot, ‘Take us down.’
The Sea King dropped over the western edge of the cliff and started working south along the fifty-kilometre flank of ice. The wall before them varied in height and sheerness - it was not all vertical by any means. Some of it reached out in dangerous overhangs, extravagantly fanged with massive icicles, the longest of which dropped off to stab the ocean as soon as the rotors disturbed the air around them. Sections of it were honeycombed with massive caves into which the waters washed, losing their dull greyness at once and taking on the hues of blue and green so spectacularly lacking in the mass of the dead-white ice. In some places the cliffs fell back into broad bays backed by gentle slopes and apparent dunes. The bays were floored by ice running like white sand beaches far, far out into the dull grey water. Only one tenth of the iceberg’s enormous volume was visible in the ice island - the dry ice, they called it - above the surface of the sea. The rest was submerged and plunged out as well as down, in those
huge submarine reefs. Because of the dictates of chance, augmented by the work of the engineers and explosives experts, the submerged ice reefs which swept out like wings for two-thirds of the iceberg’s length vanished altogether for the one-third nearest to the bow section. For the thirty kilometres of the high, artificially created forecastle, the cliffs plunged vertically into the depths.
After ten kilometres flying south towards this forward section, the edge of the reefs became visible, swinging up and in to meet the side of the island, and after sixteen and a half kilometres, the reefs ended altogether - and so did the protection they afforded to the sheer sides of Manhattan’s main island.
‘Take us down closer,’ ordered Richard.
This was the area which Colin, Kate and he had discussed at such length, for which they had great hopes. Here the dry ice lost its submarine protection from the battering rams of the surf, and the effect was all but inevitable. Under the solid overhang of cliffs, a great eye socket had been carved by the action of the following waves. They had chosen to start here because this was the side which had been best protected by the hook of ice blown off by Paul Chan and his men. And there it was. The very bay they had been looking for. The perfect place to start.
