The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  Suddenly, abruptly enough to make him shout with fright, the ragged wreckage of a dead seal tumbled past, trailing a bright cloud of shrimp.

  ‘Richard? RICHARD?’ Colin, distantly, and Bob, calling his name together.

  ‘It’s all right. Dead seal gave me a bit of a fright. That’s all.’

  ‘See anything, Bob?’ asked Colin.

  ‘Nothing of any use. I was hoping I’d be able to make out the beam of her torch but I’ll be damned if I can. How much time has she got left?’

  ‘Depends on how deep she is.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess it does at that. OK, Richard, cut me some slack. I’m going on down.’

  Richard watched the angle of his friend’s body change and he suddenly swooped down, the extra speed of the dive pulling him forward through the current for a while. Soon his body became difficult to distinguish against the dark, and only the bright blade of light remained clear. Even his voice began to break up so that Richard only caught snatches of commentary.

  ‘Hell... all sorts of rubbish ... here . . . wood too . . . packing cases I guess . . . flotsam ... wreckage ... not so many fish down ... colder too ... noisy. Can you hear? Hell of a ... See the bottom now ... more of a narrow . . . say again, narrow crack ... wide funnel sides . . . narrow crack... ridges down the funnel... all sorts of shit. . . HEY! I SEE HER LIGHT! I SAY AGAIN I SEE HER LIGHT . . .’

  ~ * ~

  Only the certainty that he could see Katya’s light would have made Bob risk going down further. He had kept up a constant report to Richard and Colin as much to ease the tension he was feeling as to keep them informed and even then he wasn’t certain they had heard him; certainly, he had heard no replies. The current was getting very strong here and he would have to be careful not to get sucked into it. As he had been explaining to Richard, it looked as though the chamber bottomed out here at the back, off axis. Immediately below was a wide funnel with shallow, ridged sides on which was piled all sorts of junk which must have drifted down over the years, but it looked to him as though the actual current exited the chamber through a long, narrow crack in what he reckoned must now be the west-facing quadrant of the lower wall. The wide-throated funnel in the floor was below the bottom of the gyre, therefore, and caught anything drifting down out of its clutches into the bottom ten metres of relatively still water. And it was here that the light of Katya’s torch tempted him to brave the fierce suction towards that long, tall, ice-fanged, deadly looking crack and head for the ten metres of still water below it.

  In fact, as he found out immediately on arrival, the water wasn’t as still as he had calculated. Even down here, there was an appreciable drift towards the roaring suction of the crack, but he was able to hold himself still enough to follow the beam on down. Because the beam was shining directly up at him, he was dazzled by it and could not see what lay behind it at all. He simply prayed that it would be Katya, lying stunned but otherwise uninjured on the icy hollow of the floor. And, as he came closer, it seemed that he might well be right; he could see a shape in the strange shadows made by the ever so faintly glimmering ice ledges. ‘It’s OK, Katya,’ he crooned, ‘I’m here to get you. It’s OK. . .’ He reached down and grabbed the light, moving it with ever such gentle hands.

  ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ he shouted.

  ~ * ~

  Bob’s bellow of shocked surprise jerked Richard out of a reverie induced by the hypnotic effect of the whirling, dancing life in front of him and by the drone of Bob’s monologue, which had had the further effect of stopping Colin Ross from breaking in for updates and reports. And it could not have broken the spell at a more opportune moment for as he leaped into shocked wakefulness, the entwined bodies of the unconscious Katya and her dead partner drifted past, having just completed their first circuit of the hellish ballroom this place had become.

  At first Richard simply could not believe what he was seeing. Their entwined bodies, bound at the waist by the bright serpent of Katya’s lifeline, slowly swirled towards him out of the shadows and into the beam of his torch with all the balletic grace of a spacecraft in orbit or a tiny planet spinning round a dark star.

  He supposed Bob must have called him on purpose to warn him. But no, surely Bob was too far down to see what was going on up here. He would be looking up through more than a hundred metres of thick, whirling black water at what? At four feet dancing on air! Such was Richard’s stunned confusion that he almost let the nightmare vision sweep by.

  As the Soviet sleeping beauty floated past in the arms of her dead beast in United Nations fatigues, Richard launched himself forward, dangerously stretching his own lifeline to the limit and provoking a roar of protest from Colin. The loops of Bob’s lifeline that Richard had been holding tumbled into the cavern as he closed his fists like steel grips round the cut end of Katya’s lifeline.

  The reciprocal tug of the contracting line was augmented by a sharp tug from his team. He performed a half-flip back into the tunnel entrance like a miraculous high diver returning to the board. The jerk of Katya’s line brought him up short with a shock which nearly dislocated his shoulders but he was ready for that now, having shrugged off the last dangerous dreaminess under the old familiar imperative of urgent action. His fists did not relent, nor did his wrenched wrists, his torn elbows or shocked shoulders. He had no idea he had shouted in pain until Colin bellowed ‘RICHARD! What is going on? First Bob, now you!’

  He did not reply - and he noted that Bob was saying nothing more for the moment either. Instead he concentrated all his massive strength on holding onto the bright, braided rope as the forces unleashed by his wild dive transferred themselves to the gently floating, weightless, fairytale couple at the far end of it. Suddenly their dream waltz picked up speed, took on the features of a wild, whirling tango. On axis, like a planet, they spun in the void twice, three times, faster and faster, until Katya was brought up short by her harness, provoking a gasp from Richard that sounded as though he had been punched hard below the belt, and Jock broke free in a whirl of arms and legs to perform a gruesome Highland fling away into the merciful black shadows.

  Richard tugged gently, hand over hand, until he held Katya cradled in his arms, as tenderly as though she had been his daughter.

  ‘I’ve got her, Colin!’ His voice throbbed with relief. ‘Bob, it’s all right. I’ve got Katya.’

  ~ * ~

  Bob Stark knelt on the bottom, right down in the ice-green, dead cold throat of that wide funnel on the floor of the cavern’s hourglass shape. He held Katya’s torch beside his own, both of them shining downwards. Richard’s voice distantly began to penetrate the layers of shock which surrounded him like deadly cotton wool. His dark eyes came alive. His wide mouth choked in a breath. Bubbles rose again from the vent beside his head. His heart fluttered painfully and continued to beat, his blood moved in his arteries and he felt the hot surge of it as though it had been stopped for a while. He moved his face a little, shook himself, looked down anew at the body lying supine between his knees, at the white overall clinging in rags to the wreckage of bony limbs, at the grinning, eyeless death’s mask face with its Nordic farm girl’s wealth of long blonde hair stirring and floating in the current, home to a host of darting fish, and he said, ‘Richard, if you’ve got Katya up there with you, then who in hell’s name is this dead broad I’ve got down here with me?’

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took them a week to cross the North Atlantic. Seven days and nights of hard sailing and grinding effort as everyone began to put in the sort of hours Sally Bell had observed Richard Mariner working and he worked even harder. The better part of two hundred and fifty people were directly involved here, but it was the senior officers who worked the hardest. They battered out the routines which fitted with the requirements of ship handling, general sailing, weather and ice. The crews followed their orders, did their jobs and took their food and rest. They watched the monster they were towing with a kind of proprietorial awe, but it seemed t
hat only the upper echelons felt the responsibility, the urgency.

  Tom Snell recovered quickly and moved his men off the ice - it was getting too wet and dangerous up there for camping any more. As the surface of Manhattan began to weather, so the foundations of the huts began to weaken and there came a distinct worry that they would blow, or simply slide, over the edge one night. The ice was always covered in a skim of runoff, even on the rare days when the constant flow of frontal systems which swung in behind them after that first squall did not bring a good deal of rain to accompany their welcome westerly winds.

  Colin and Kate Ross moved off their encampment, last of a series that had been on various locations on the berg for nearly a year, and took up residence in Titan, although Colin was often called to Psyche or Kraken, especially during the early days when the two ships closest to the ice required constant advice and assurance about everything from dealing with cascades of runoff thundering onto their upper works with the sound of avalanches to the rate at which Manhattan could be expected to rise in the water as it melted - the rate, consequently, at which the unbreakable lines needed to be paid out to stop the ships being picked up out of the water. In the early days, such a horror seemed entirely possible.

  After the discoveries in the underground cavern, anything seemed possible.

  The cavern was the first of their difficulties. It was obvious that they could not just close the hole in the ice and forget about it. There were at least three bodies in there, though the presence of a second woman was the cause of much speculation, not least that Bob Stark had imagined her. It was equally obvious that none of the divers who had gone down in fact had the experience to deal with the situation. The conditions could be expected to worsen in any case. The iceberg was picking up speed. The currents feeding the whirlpool would only be getting stronger, making it that much more dangerous.

  When Yves Maille hove back into view, he was astonished that his lack of simple precautions should have had such repercussions. Truthfully, he told Richard later, he had gone off incommunicado on purpose. He found all the close proximity a little overpowering and longed to be away from the rest, with only the smallest group of men required for safety this far out on the ocean. He shrugged resignedly. He would be more careful in the future. And, in the meantime, if Bob would help, he would guarantee to bring the dead men out of the cave tomorrow. The dead men and Bob’s phantom woman.

  It was a hard dive in difficult circumstances, but the Frenchman was as good as his word, a fact which went a long way towards rehabilitating him in the eyes of the crew and most especially in the eyes of the soldiers currently berthed aboard Kraken. By noon watch, just less than twenty-four hours after the arrival of the two ships, three sopping body bags were resting in Psyche’s cold store, awaiting offloading and official post-mortem examination in England as soon as possible.

  Not all of Tom Snell’s men were on board Kraken. Dougie Dundas was still aboard Psyche, too ill to move and in imminent danger of joining the three in cold storage below. Asha Higgins, assisted by Kate Ross, toiled unceasingly over the comatose soldier. He was isolated, of course, in case whatever was killing him was contagious, but none of the medical books available to the two women described anything like his symptoms. One particular manifestation of his illness might correspond to one type of disease or other, but the whole pattern fitted nothing they could find out about. The bleeding round his gums might be the old-time sailor’s dreaded enemy scurvy; the sores around his mouth, on his tongue, throat and skin did seem like some sort of vitamin deficiency, but he showed no response at all to vitamin doses. And his increasing jaundice didn’t fit in, nor did his uncontrollable incontinence or his dramatic weight loss.

  Exhaustive tests on various samples proved little more helpful. His blood was increasingly anaemic, but there was no organism there to cause it. His liver and bone marrow seemed to be failing but there was no sign of leukaemia. His vital bodily functions seemed to be closing down inevitably as his major organs failed one after the other. And all for no discernible reason. Pan Medic calls got them no useful advice; and although there were other ships in the area, some with doctors aboard, it proved impossible to get Dougie Dundas off or further help on. So Asha Higgins scratched her head with increasing sad perplexity and slowly tried to come to terms with the fact that she was going to lose this patient.

  Time and again, as they surged eastwards with the storm winds battering along behind them, Tom Snell took the uncomfortable helicopter ride over from Psyche’s sister ship to be with his sergeant. Together, Tom and Asha went over and over the events in the ice cave, looking for clues, but there was none to be found. Tom went over it with Richard too as he wrote up the accident in Titan’s log, which doubled as Manhattan’s log. And Tom wrote his own reports for his superiors in London and beyond. But there was no clue to the dying sergeant’s ailment, for there was no way that any of them could even begin to imagine what he had done.

  Asha had no X-ray machine, no scan of any kind, in fact, and short of an operation, nothing else was likely to reveal the fact that Dougie Dundas had a highly radioactive rough glass ball wedged in his digestive tract. Only a Geiger counter might have given a clue and, although Kate had brought one off Manhattan with the rest of her scientific equipment, neither of them thought to get it or to use it on their dying patient.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Any news of Sergeant Dundas?’ asked Richard at the opening of his first full captains’ meeting since turning the corner at Flemish Cap four days ago, the second day since the two new ships had joined. Tom shook his head. He looked tired, thought Richard grimly. So did they all - increasingly tired and depressed. They were making good progress. Both John and Yves had positive reports to contribute, he knew, but there was an air of gloom which seemed to be seeping rapidly out of Psyche in spite of anything they could do. It was too late to move the dead to another ship now. There was no question of moving poor Dundas at all. But Richard could think of no other answer to the situation. He would talk it over with Peter Walcott in private immediately after this meeting. The Guyanese captain was cheerful and open with a wide, welcoming smile which was always at the ready, but even this could not disguise the increasing wariness in his eyes and the deepening lines of strain around them. They all knew that Psyche had acquired a nickname. Everyone called her Psycho now, transforming her from a Greek maiden to a mad murderer. It was only half in jest. She was beginning to be viewed as a Brute, a Death Ship.

  ‘Right, then.’ Richard called the meeting to order. It was getting cramped in his day room these days, but there was just space for the eight of them round the desk which had been augmented with a table from the dining salon. But the new arrangement still could not accommodate the current chart, so, in preparation for his part of the meeting, John Higgins was securing the big square of blue, white and sand-coloured paper to the wall. As he waited for his friend to finish and join them, Richard looked into the eight other varyingly weary pairs of eyes. Colin Ross’s clouded blue gaze was distant, his thoughts, no doubt, still up on the ice. Bob and Katya clearly hadn’t got over their adventure deep beneath it yet. Obviously Tom hadn’t either. He had only been allowed out of bed this morning. Peter Walcott was clearly worried, but Gendo Odate seemed more relaxed, as did Yves. The Frenchman had been quick to forgive himself for his absence when needed so badly and now even gave Richard the ghost of a wink, eliciting a weary grin in reply.

  They were only one-third of the way, Richard thought. They had better get sorted out better than they were or the whole project would turn into a fiasco. A cold dry wind thundered up to gale force from the west. Titan shook in the grip of it, the whole of her massive length surged and jerked in an action most unlike anything a supertanker normally performed. The tea cups in front of the assembled men and women chimed, sliding in their saucers, struck by their silver spoons. John sat down at Richard’s right. They were ready.

  ‘First let me welcome Captains Walcott and Odate to the team,�
�� Richard began. ‘I do regret that your arrival should have been attended by such tragedy, gentlemen, but I’m certain that now you are in place and running at speed, we can look forward to a very quick crossing indeed. And, on the subject of propulsion, I’ll hand over to you, Bob.’

  ‘Placing Kraken and Psyche, as you say, has made an enormous difference almost at once.’ The tall American leant forward, frowning with the intensity of his thoughts. ‘It is just under forty-eight hours since they were secured to the ice and already our mean speed has doubled. I know both Yves and John have more to say on the reasons and the situation, but according to my current log, we are proceeding at more than thirteen knots, with every chance of continuing to do so at least until we begin to turn south. Fuel shouldn’t be a problem, we’re exactly on projected consumption in all ships, even though the engines and motors are having to do more work than we estimated. But it will be conditions further south which will really be testing. This was supposed to be the easy bit.’