The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Take us up and over,’ Richard yelled. ‘There should be a matching bay on the other side. If there is, then we can really get to work.’

  There was.

  The two bays were similar in structure as they had been caused by the same forces working in similar circumstances upon material in the same state. As the waves swept in over the last edge of the submerged ice reef, it thundered against vertical walls of ice. Such was the force of the collision that the cliffs inevitably yielded and so the bays were born. At first, no doubt, they had been more like caves, with beetling overhangs of ice cliff, but as time wore on and ice wore away, so the spray-weakened overhangs began to collapse and at last the caves opened out enough to be called bays. The process which Kate Ross had warned about took a slight hand here and the ice rose sufficiently to cause a relative fall in water level; the last shoulder of the reef rose up and broke the force of the waves for a while, and a beach - a simple, near level slope of ice which had been beneath the reach of the waves’ action - was revealed.

  So matters stood at the moment. All Tom Snell and his men had to do was to blow the overhanging slopes down into the sea and make the upper sections of the ice safe, and the very bays they needed would be opened up. The beaches and the last dry heaves of the ice reefs would make perfect anchorage points. The bays would easily accommodate the awaited ships, and could hardly be better placed. Richard felt a huge swell of hopeful excitement as he looked onto the giant white eye socket staring blindly down towards the writhing back of the serpentine Stream which they were so soon to join. It was quite possible that the positioning of the two great ships just at the point where the greatest force of the upper sea pushed hardest against the ice would make the counter-thrust of their great engines all the more effective. It seemed logical. He would have to check it with John and Bob; if it did work like that, it would be quite a bit of good luck.

  ‘Back!’ he yelled. The Sea King swept out and up. Richard turned to Tom Snell and gestured at the overhangs falling away beneath them. ‘You’ve got until the day after tomorrow.’ If we get through tonight, he thought.

  The soldier was no mind-reader. He grinned a tight grin and gave him a thumbs-up.

  The Sea King pirouetted and dropped its nose, heading across the ice to Titan, thirty kilometres distant, invisible behind a wall of fog so solid it resembled the ice cliffs below; so huge it dwarfed them. Richard’s elation cooled further: the swirling vapour marked the first tentative meeting of the southward-flowing Labrador Current and the strongly eastward North Atlantic Drift.

  ~ * ~

  Niobe hit the North Wall first, at midnight on the dot.

  Richard was standing on Titan’s bridge, staring tensely out into the dark while Sally Bell and the other navigating officers tended the banks of instruments around him. There was nothing to see. The long deck before him carried running lights as required but they and it were cloaked in fog. The foghorn was hooting and out on the bridge wing it was possible to hear Niobe’s horn answering like the call of some mythical beast. He remembered reading of the fogs in these waters being ‘so thick you could cut them and spread them on your bread, like butter’. They were there because of the mixing of cold water and warm somewhere in the depths. There was no sign of the Wall yet. But soon, soon.

  ‘Signing on now,’ said Sally, and he knew it was midnight.

  His hand was actually resting on the cool black box of the walkie-talkie when it squawked. His fingers jumped away, then grabbed the instrument, almost fumbling with tension.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s John here, Richard. Encountering very strong eastward current. Turning to counter it as agreed . . . Now.’

  The collision alarm radar screamed. ‘He’s drifting down on us fast,’ warned Sally.

  ‘Steady as she goes, please, helmsman. You’re coming down fast, John.’

  ‘Yes, I can see. Christ, but this is fierce, Richard. You’d think we were white-water canoeing here!’

  ‘It’ll catch us at any minute. Any report from your line watch?’

  All the ships had deployed a watch on the tow line; the greatest strain of the whole voyage was likely to come now as the tankers were jerked eastwards by a force which the iceberg did not yet feel. Richard had ordered the lengthening of the tows so that the ships would stay well ahead of the ice at this point. The alternative was to risk Niobe being crushed against the ice cliffs down-Stream of her.

  ‘Line’s fine. Still drifting down on you. Niobe doesn’t like this. She’s very hard to control.’

  Titan’s deck quivered. Richard’s heart leaped.

  ‘If Niobe comes closer than three kilometres, then give me a countdown, Sally. I want lots of warning if we have to get out of her way.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  The deck quivered again.

  ‘Helmsman, watch for—’

  ‘Bugger me! Sorry sir, but—’

  ‘Three kilometres now and closing. My God!’

  Titan’s head slammed round as though America had punched her on the jaw. ‘Line watch, we’re coming left hard!’ snapped Richard into his walkie-talkie. Then he reached down for the engine room telephone and pressed it to his left ear. ‘We’ve hit the Wall, Chief. Watch her!’

  Titan groaned. It was as though she was alive. Her decking trembled, the whole of her long body shook. The stress on her sides and frame twisted towards her design capabilities. She was almost half a kilometre long. In spite of the care with which they had angled their approach to this point in the deep trench east of Flemish Cap, the sternmost two hundred metres of the ship wanted to go south and the forward two hundred wanted urgently to go east.

  ‘Still coming down on us. Two and a half kilometres.’

  ‘Thanks, Sally. Come left, helmsman, take us into it. Line watch, report.’

  ‘Capstan’s groaning a bit, Captain, but it’s holding. I’ve never seen a cable so tight.’

  ‘Niobe’s falling back a bit now. Two and three-quarter kilometres.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How is it with you, John?’

  ‘All right, Richard. I see you’re running east as agreed. We’ll swing round as soon as we’re right in. We can’t fight it, really, in any case. You’re the lucky one just giving in!’

  ‘RICHARD!’ A new voice on the walkie-talkie breaking into the tense conversation on the open channel. Richard felt his heart clench.

  ‘Yes, Colin?’

  ‘Can you hear thunder?’

  ‘No. There’s no weather—’

  ‘Captain! Line watch here. I can hear. . . My God!’

  ‘Sally! You have her. Steady as she goes. I’m just going out. . .’

  Richard ran to the bridgewing door and wrenched it open. As he did so, he reached across, with the walkie-talkie hanging from his wrist, and snatched a pair of binoculars out of their pouch by the watchkeeper’s chair.

  He ran out into clear air where moments before there had been impenetrable fog but he was too concerned to notice the change in the conditions. He raced along to the overhanging end and turned. Looking back from the furthest point port, squinting along the side of his ship from a position well outside her hull, he could see the tow and the capstan. More importantly, he could hear. There was thunder, gathering on the calm air. A deep, unending rumble of it, intensifying.

  He slung the binoculars unhandily round his neck. Pressed the walkie-talkie to his mouth.

  ‘Colin? I can hear it! What is it?’

  ‘It’s the ice! It’s shaking!’

  ‘Sally!’ he bellowed. ‘Check the bottom.’

  ‘Three thousand metres.’

  ‘We haven’t run aground then, Colin, we’re still well clear of the Cap.’

  ‘Then what is it? It’s getting louder here. The ice is shaking! It’s like an earthquake!’

  The whole of Titan lurched left hard enough to make Richard stumble. He slammed his binoculars to his eyes. The tow line, a black, gleaming bar in the moonlight, jerked and swun
g, like the second hand on some giant watch. The great ship’s wake was snatched away, the straight line coming after them out of the fog bank, broken like the fault line in a cliff, where it crossed the North Wall.

  Comprehension dawned. ‘It’s the current! The Stream must be running further northward the deeper it goes. We’re in it here now on the surface. The ice must be coming into it below the surface!’

  As he spoke, Richard looked up and what he saw snatched away his breath and his words alike.

  From out of the foundations of the solid fog wall astern, out into the clear blue moonlight here, came the prow of Manhattan as though she was a ship standing three hundred metres sheer to the forecastle head. The black cables leaped forward from their claw-like handholds to the groaning capstans on Niobe and Titan, and quivered visibly with the strain of holding firm. Below the handholds, the cutwater fell into the slick, bright surface of the sea. And as he watched, the glassy curve of die water’s back exploded upwards against the white bow as Manhattan surged on out of the fog with a foaming bow wave at her bow foot made up of white water piling against her starboard quarter and tumbling down a metre or more into the hole in the water at her port. Even as he watched, stunned by the scale of this meeting of iceberg and Gulf Stream, the bow wave in Manhattan’s teeth exploded anew. A school of sleek dolphins, gleaming, almost luminescent, flew into the air and tumbled with the blue-white surf. Time and again they jumped out of the wild swirl of water, flying, tumbling and sporting there, until the wave began to settle as the bow came well and truly into the new eastward flow. But still the sound of the thunder boomed as more and still more of the ice fought back against the pressure of the water, the huge sound of its victory over the crushing current booming across the clear rushing waters of the North Atlantic around them.

  At last Richard turned his back on Flemish Cap and Newfoundland and looked due east three thousand kilometres towards Europe.

  Right, he thought. Biscay, here we come!

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thirty-six hours later, they had just crossed forty degrees west, heading east with Manhattan still in one piece and all the lines in place, when Kraken and Psyche came steaming down from the north towards them.

  As far as Richard was concerned, conditions could not have been worse. There was an Indian summer in the mid-Atlantic and the air was calm, the skies clear, the sea warm and dazzlingly blue. The North Atlantic Drift meandered lazily eastward, sometimes helping, sometimes not. It was becoming difficult to maintain speed and impossible to slow the deterioration of the ice. Even the runoff which Yves had promised would form a cool, protective pool in the thick salt water around the berg and slow the process of melting was only causing restless clouds of fog which came and went mysteriously, inexplicably and, above all, irritatingly.

  The arrival of the two ships, therefore, could not have been better timed to lighten Richard’s darkening spirits. It gave him something to do other than worry. It gave him a project, moreover, whose speedy and successful outcome would go a long way to alleviating the difficulty with which he found himself faced. He had been waiting for this moment since they turned the corner off Flemish Cap, but even talking to the captains of the vessels as they raced westward on the northern counter-current did not put his mind at rest in the way that the sight of them, hull up and side by side over the northern horizon and steaming south, gave him.

  As soon as the two ships hove into view, he was back to his old self, feeling more in control of events again. He went through into the bridge, leaving the port bridgewing door slightly ajar behind him. ‘I’ll be going onto the ice to help with the securing of Kraken and Psyche,’ he told Sally Bell. ‘You can take the con and dog the watch if you want. I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

  He left and the first officer looked after him with narrowed eyes, deciding whether or not to take his advice and rearrange the watches to break at two and six instead of four and eight, hand over the watchkeeping responsibilities to her juniors and take overall command herself. It might be a good idea, especially as the captain would be off the ship all afternoon. He would probably be back by six, though, she reckoned. No matter what jaunt he was up to, he always came back by Pour Out - not for a drink (she had never seen him drink anything alcoholic) but for a chat, a bit of socialising and psychological pulse-taking before working dinner and late meetings and reports.

  In fact, Sally Bell was staggered by how hard her captain worked. She was a Belfast girl born and bred and no stranger to the Protestant work ethic, but she had never seen anyone pour so much time and energy into anything in all her life. Richard was up at six, woken, according to the chief steward, with a cup of tea the colour of teak. He was about the ship by six thirty, and put in a swift tour of inspection before breakfast at seven thirty. The tour formed the basis of his working breakfast with her, for during it he noted everything that needed doing or checking around the ship. When she reported to his table in the saloon at eight, usually a little drowsy after four hours’ sleep, she would find, beside his coffee cup, a neat list of things he wished to refer to her notice, and as she ate - always a full cooked breakfast for Sally - he went through them with her. By eight thirty he was in the radio shack and he first contacted his other captains, checking what was happening aboard their ships and centralising their reports about die tow. Then he talked to Colin Ross and Major Snell up on the ice. Then he made a radio report to the United Nations building in New York and to Heritage House in London. Routinely, also, he called his wife who was usually getting their twin children Mary and William ready for lunch by the time he got through to her.

  By eleven, he had assembled all the facts he needed in order to write his reports and he would routinely spend two hours typing ferociously in his day room. He shared a working lunch at one with the chief engineer who was expected to give the most detailed report on the state of the big RB211 turbine engines which powered the complex variable-pitch, twin-screw configuration deep beneath the counter.

  From fourteen hundred hours he would be about the ship again, checking that the work listed this morning was under way, and then he would check with the other captains again, and tell off Doug Buchanan the helicopter pilot for duty - on almost every day so far, there had been a meeting of all the captains, Major Snell and the Rosses either on board or on the ice. But wherever he was during the afternoon, as she had observed, he was down in the officers’ lounge by eighteen hundred, sipping sparkling Malvern water and taking the pulse of his command. For he was in command here, more so than any captain she had served under. Not fussily or dominatingly but supportively and absolutely; and if he habitually straightened every pencil on the chart table to regimented neatness whenever he passed, that was simply because he wanted to know where even the least thing aboard might be in case he needed it in an emergency.

  During dinner he would complete any business left over from the afternoon’s meeting and then share his coffee with her, checking up on ship’s business. Then he would spend another hour at least in the radio shack making radio reports which, from twenty-one thirty or twenty-two hundred, he would put onto paper in his day room. At twenty-three hundred hours exactly, on the dot, he would put through his final call, to the lucky woman in Ashenden, that house of his high on the cliffs above the English Channel. Then he would retire. As often as not, however, Sally would find him prowling the bridge, sipping cocoa, checking the log and straightening the pencils when she came on duty at midnight, so he got little more sleep than she did - and she would usually catch up in the afternoon during a siesta which he allowed her but never himself. She was beginning to wonder how long he could keep it up, but in her bones she knew. He would keep it up until the job was done, no matter how tough it got, no matter how much it took.

  She crossed to the telephone by the helm and buzzed the second officer’s number. As she did so, the first fingers of mist crept in around the edge of the bridgewing door and the huge airy bridge itself was sudd
enly filled with the smell of slightly rancid cucumbers.

  ~ * ~

  Captain Gendo Odate had come a long and varied way from his birth in the town of Tsu overlooking die bay of Ise-wan, on the south coast of Honshu, to the command of the supertanker Kraken currently nosing her way east-south-eastwards through thickening fog into a tiny bay on the north side of an iceberg proceeding towards Europe at slightly less than seven knots. He stood solidly in the middle of his bridge, looking steadfastly forwards into the dazzling impenetrability ahead, listening to the disciplined flow of information, all of it in English, which was coming via his officers from the electronic equipment all around him, and thanking various deities for the tall form of Richard Mariner who stood beside him.

  Richard had come to Kraken first because she would take up her position first. Psyche had run ahead of the convoy when the two ships drew near and was now falling back into place as they worked Kraken into her allotted position here. About the only thing visible through the clearview in front of him was the bright yellow glow of the Sea King on the foredeck, sitting waiting to take him off again in due course. He was not simply halfway between a pilot and an idle observer. He held in his right hand a walkie-talkie tuned to a closed frequency on which he could liaise with Major Snell on the ice and direct his efforts as necessary. But at the moment, he was in pilot mode, talking to the Japanese captain.