by Peter Tonkin
‘We have to position Kraken fifty metres offshore and hold her course parallel at just less than seven knots,’ Richard was saying gently. ‘Major Snell and his men will fire the lines across fore and aft. We can pull them aboard by winch and capstan and take it from there. John Higgins, Bob Stark and I have drawn up the disposition diagrams for optimum patterns of attachment, but I’m sure you will want to study them and discuss any points of concern.’
‘One hundred metres and closing on the starboard side,’ sang out the first officer who was crouching over the collision alarm radar. ‘Ice across the stern at one hundred and twenty-five metres and closing.’
‘Come to seven knots, please,’ said Captain Odate. ‘It seems you are maintaining a better speed than you thought, Captain Mariner.’
‘Seven knots,’ said the helmsman, his words coming under Captain Odate’s observation and Richard’s surprised grunt of agreement.
The pounding of the great oil-fired motor below moved up a beat.
‘Perhaps a degree further south?’ suggested Richard.
‘Steer one degree further south,’ said the captain.
‘One degree further south,’ said the helmsman.
‘Ready with the thrusters, fore and aft.’ Captain Odate was willing to listen to Captain Mariner, but he would be ready to take evasive action if his tall adviser got it wrong. How could even this legendary seaman pilot a supertanker into a floating dock alongside an iceberg?
‘Ready with thrusters.’
‘Seventy-five metres and closing on the starboard side.’
‘Steady as she goes.’
‘Fifty metres on the starboard. Steady at one hundred metres astern.’
‘Very good. Bow thruster ready if we go nearer than twenty-five metres.’ Odate was a little more relaxed now; perhaps Captain Mariner was as gifted as they said after all.
‘Fire away the forward line now, Tom,’ said Richard into his walkie-talkie, and even as the Japanese captain began to relax, he instantly tensed up again.
An arc of light suddenly cut through the mist as though a sky rocket had been fired a month early to land somewhere beyond the brightening glow of the Sea King. At once the walkie-talkie in the fourth officer’s hand squawked, and the young Senegalese officer reported to his captain that the first line was aboard.
Captain Odate nodded once. ‘Take it to the windlass and winch the main cable aboard,’ he commanded. ‘Steady as you go, helm, and watch in case the weight of the cable is sufficient to pull you further over.’
Richard thumbed the SEND button. ‘Line well aboard now, Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s going down to the windlass now. Stand by.’
He listened to Tom Snell’s monosyllabic acknowledgement, then he stood and watched silently, knowing that the carbon fibre cable was nowhere near heavy enough to affect the stately progress of the great ship. His feeling of elation was at a new peak now, though combined with a certain amount of tension. For a start, he was surprised to find Manhattan was picking up speed. Perhaps they had lucked into a surge of the current; perhaps there was something else going on. He would have to check later, though. Tethering a supertanker to an iceberg was something no one had ever done, and God alone knew if they were doing it right. The plan was simply to get the bow attached, then allow the hull to swing in. Both Kraken and Psyche had come with enough buffers to stave off an avalanche and these were now disposed along the great ship’s starboard side to protect her plates from the rough embraces of the ice. Tethered at die bow, with her side well armoured, she would settle in against the ice itself and be tethered again from the stern. As the same process was being completed with her sister nine kilometres south, the black lines would be finally adjusted and, on Richard’s order, hopefully tonight, the six ships would slowly begin their run up to full speed, moving Manhattan right along with them.
The walkie-talkie spoke again and the young fourth officer -the UN could afford larger crews than Heritage Mariner, Richard observed - informed his captain that the main cable was coming aboard. Unable to stand as stolidly as the Japanese captain, Richard crossed restlessly to the starboard bridge wing and opened the door. The bridge filled with the smell of cucumbers. ‘What is that odour?’ demanded Captain Odate, surprised out of his studied imperturbability.
‘It’s Manhattan,’ answered Richard. ‘Apparently all icebergs smell like that.’
Silence returned - or partly so, at any rate. The opening of the door admitted more than Manhattan’s smell. It let in some of the sounds she was making. The cascading of runoff, as though Kraken’s bow wave had suddenly leaped much closer. There came a grating rumble as though her well-buffered side had struck already. There came a sharp crack as though the line had parted. Richard caught Captain Odate’s eye. ‘It’s safer than it sounds,’ he said, and stepped outside.
As soon as he did so, he felt the kiss of the wind on his right cheek. So that was why Manhattan was moving more quickly. Some sailors know there is wind about because they hear it, magically, in the far distance; others, like John Higgins, could find wind with their eyes, reading sky and sea with uncanny accuracy. Others used their noses. Richard used the skin of his cheeks, which was fortunate since all the other alternatives were out of the question under the current circumstances, with sight, hearing and smell overwhelmed by the nearness of Manhattan. Richard moved his face like a blind man, searching the damp, cucumber-smelling air for another kiss. It came, and he smiled. There was some weather swinging in behind them at last.
Suddenly the mist was snatched away and Richard found himself looking into one of the cavernous bays they had been exploring in the Sea King less than forty-eight hours ago. From the helicopter it had seemed little more than an impressive natural formation, like a cliff-backed cove on a rocky coast. Now, it took his breath away. It stretched out on either hand, curving like an archer’s bow bent slightly out of true, not quite into a half-pear shape one kilometre long. Before him, the limpid blue water washed up against a beach a hundred metres wide, sloping gently up from an edge of ice falling sheer into black darkness in the ocean’s depth. The beach ran up into the curve of a cave as shadowed as anything made of lucent white can be, then sloped up into an overhang which took into its gleaming opacity every shade of blue from the sea. And, above that outward curve, towering above his head in a carefully dynamited slope back to the crest and the skyline, was a hundred metres more of ice which reflected almost to the point of being unbearable every liquid hue of the cerulean sky. And liquid was an apt word to apply. The blast-slick slope was running with a river of runoff and a waterfall hung like a jewelled curtain a kilometre wide before the mouth of the broad, shallow cave.
From a point the selection of which was the result of almost Einsteinian calculation came the first line, reaching forward through the pouring brightness to the windlass on the forecastle head, overseen still by Tom Snell’s men upon the ice. Just less than a full ship’s length behind, the second of Snell’s teams was ready with the equipment to send the second line aboard. Beyond them, perched apparently precariously on the square dry shoulder of the raised ice reef, sat the Bell Iroquois helicopter from Achilles, ready to lift them across to the other shore in due course.
Richard found himself swept in and in, until the waterfall was so close he could have put his hand into it had he reached out from the furthest end of the bridge wing. Instead he was content to stand, feeling the wind steady, looking down through the dancing drizzle to the shadowed ice below. Stretched out and hammered home, the iron points of eight claws dug into columns of carefully angled concrete plunging down into the white shelf. Even as he watched, Kraken gave the slightest shudder and he looked straight over the edge to see the fenders between the ship’s side and the sheer ice bulge upwards and become slick with spray and runoff as they were nipped between the sides of two of the largest things ever to float across the Atlantic Ocean.
He thumbed the SEND button again. ‘OK, Tom, let go the aft line now.’
A flat report warned him that the second line was on its way aboard, and he walked back onto the bridge just in time to see the fourth officer report the fact to the captain. Richard’s job aboard here was finished for the time being. And quite successfully so, from the look of things.
‘I’ll go across to Psyche now, Captain Odate,’ he said, ‘and let you get settled in here. There will be a full meeting of all captains on Titan at sixteen hundred and it will last until Pour Out at eighteen hundred, when I hope I shall be able to buy you a drink.’
Captain Odate looked around the bridge but his eyes clearly took in everything beyond his command as well: the glacial bay, the overhang, the cliff and the runoff, and the eight-pointed anchorage of two unbreakable cables tethering himself and his command immovably to the side of the iceberg.
‘Yes, thank you, Captain Mariner,’ he said. ‘You can most certainly buy me a drink. A whisky. A double whisky. Suntory, twelve-year-old, if you have it.’
~ * ~
Things started going wrong for Major Tom Snell, Royal Engineers, and his men as soon as they started trying to get Psyche secured in the second little bay. For a start the wind was freshening and although he was by no means a nautical man, Tom knew nasty-looking squall clouds when they started building themselves up all too close behind him in the west. Probably because of the wind, the Huey helicopter’s pilot had the devil of a job getting them down on the southward facing reef. On their first pass, the helicopter -in no way a thistle-down aircraft - was whirled right to the forward end of the bay, and the dazzled eyes of the officer were treated to the sight of a honeycomb of little caves which marched up from the waterline, the biggest of which presented him with a bright white cave mouth a metre and a half high, backed with a cavern of cobalt shadows. He thought no more of it as the helicopter jerked up into the air to speed back along the length of the ship to the outthrust of dry reef astern of her.
Once they were down, they leaped out of the trembling craft and began to unload their equipment only to find that the freshening wind was bringing an icy, stinging spindrift over the low crest from the nasty-looking surf behind. In a moment, everything they wore and carried was drenched. A moment more and their hands were becoming clumsy with numbness.
The gloomy, threatening atmosphere in the little bay could hardly have been more different from the bright blue seaside feeling which, after the mist had lifted, had filled the first bay on the north coast of Manhattan. But Tom and his men were soldiers. Atmosphere -weather conditions - meant nothing to them. Following orders and getting the job done, that was all that counted. And if conditions were deteriorating for them, so were they for the supertanker and the two captains in charge of her, Peter Walcott and Richard Mariner.
Tom was very keen not to let Richard Mariner down, for the tall, almost visionary captain had filled the hard-bitten, widely travelled soldier with a respect that bordered upon awe. And Tom had spent enough time in the desert hellholes of Africa, watching in helpless fury as the United Nations just failed to stop situation after situation sliding into war, to come as near as he could to praying that Richard could pull off this wild, wonderful project. For Mau, for the UN, and for all those poor hopeless people who would die if they failed.
It was fortunate that they had done the really dangerous digging, filling and blasting in the bright warmth of yesterday. All they had to do now was repeat the smoothly efficient operation they had just achieved with Kraken all over again with Psyche. But that was far more easily said than done. The wind for which Richard had been praying arrived half an hour too early and its very presence made the replay of Kraken’s flawless docking a nightmare for Psyche. For a start, it blew the thickening waterfall of meltwater down into the faces of the soldiers on the sloping, slippery beach. Then, no sooner had the two captains got Psyche into some sort of position and Richard warned Tom over the walkie-talkie to get ready with the forward line than a blustering gust took the supertanker so hard on her high superstructure and tall, unladen side that she had to sheer off. The infinitesimal effect of the wind force on something of her size and weight was puny but nevertheless sufficient to disturb the exact calculations going on in her bridge. And when the long-suffering captains got her back in position again, riding steadily, able to make allowance for the increasing squally bluster from behind, the wind took the first rocket and blew it halfway to Biscay anyway, far beyond the forecastle head of the mighty vessel in spite of the fact that it was riding so unnervingly close to them.
‘How did you manage to miss that, Sergeant Dundas?’ snarled Tom in bitter frustration. ‘I mean, it’s only half a kilometre long!’
‘Dunno, Major,’ answered the Scot phlegmatically. ‘Wind must’a took it like.’
‘Pull the line back in and set up another one. Aim aft of the Sampson posts this time, just in case.’
‘Yessir!’ answered Dundas, busily pulling the icy, soaking line in hand over hand with his two private soldier colleagues. He hesitated, then, ‘Ah, whit d’you mean aft o’ the Sampson posts, exactly, sir?’
By the time they got it set up properly again, Psyche had drifted off station and they were back to square one.
‘Coming in again, Tom,’ said Richard distantly over the walkie-talkie. And just as he did so, it began to rain in earnest.
The walkie-talkie squawked again and Tom put it to his face, expecting more instructions from Richard, but it was the helicopter pilot. ‘I’ve got to go, Major. This lot will blow me over into the sea otherwise.’
‘Now just you wait a minute . . . Dundas! I’m going back to the chopper for a minute. You fire again on Captain Mariner’s order. Behind those bloody great mast things halfway down Psyche’s deck. Understand?’
‘Yessir! Halfway down Psycho’s deck. Yessir!’
Tom set off at a slipping, staggering run across the sloping ice, past the second little team crouching shivering at the second anchorage point. ‘OK, men?’ he bellowed in passing and received a shivering thumbs-up. Normally that lack of soldierly propriety would have earned a reprimand. Not now. He ran out onto the foam-washed reef and kept his footing in spite of the push and suck of the ankle-deep foam. He half fell into the side of the helicopter and took out his considerable, mounting ire upon the pilot. ‘Now just what the hell are you talking about? You can’t leave us here, you nasty little man!’
‘Either you get aboard now or I do just that, Major. I’m sorry, but I’m not joking. I’ll be off the ice inside five minutes, either flying or floating, and I know which I’d prefer!’
‘We can’t leave until they have the lines aboard Psyche. It’d put the whole show behind by a day at least.’
‘Look, Major, I’m sorry, but I’ve got no choice. Get the survival equipment and the rubber dinghy out of the back just in case. I’ll be back for you the minute I can land here again.’
Tom reached in and tore the two big bundles free, then he fell out into the surf, dragged himself to his feet by an exercise of pure rage, and staggered ashore. It was not until he was crouching there, gasping for breath, that he realised the mouthful of foam he had choked on while trying to get back up had been absolutely fresh water. While he crouched there, licking his lips in wonderment, he felt the numbing buffeting of the wind on his back intensify and he knew that the helicopter was gone.
He took the survival equipment up to the very back of the beach and wedged it against the curve of wall where, in about half a metre, the steepening curve of beach took wing to become the soaring overhang of the roof. Then he turned and began to fight his way through the buffeting maelstrom of rain, saltless sea spray, runoff and wind to crouch beside Sergeant Dundas again.
The sergeant and his team were paying out the last of the line and preparing to stand back as Psyche winched the black cable aboard.
‘Yon bastard’s away wi’ the chopper then, sir?’ enquired the sergeant.
‘Yes,’ answered his commanding officer, who until today had never been heard to swear, ‘the bastard is.’<
br />
The walkie-talkie buzzed angrily and Tom picked it up only to drop it again at once. Sometime during the last few moments, his fingers had gone completely numb. He beat his hand against his thigh and found that it was equally insensible. It was a moment or two before he could pick up the walkie-talkie and hold it to his face.
‘Christ, Tom, what is going on over there? Are you all right?’
‘It’s pretty cold here, Richard. And we’re stuck. Didn’t you see the chopper lift off?’
‘No I did not! Right. We’ve got the forward line aboard and we’re drifting in fast. Can you take care of the stern one or shall I sort something out from this end?’
