The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  Jones bustled across to the far side of the room and began to rummage around in his case while Penmarrick looked down at the concavity between Dundas’s chest and navel as though the lump would be as apparent to his eyes as it was to his fingertips. Jones began to whistle tunelessly and it was only after a few moments that the bemused doctor realised that the professor was sorting out the contents of his case to the tune of ‘Mack the Knife’.

  ‘Done much post-mortem work?’ he asked cheerfully five minutes later and Penmarrick said ‘No’ very faintly indeed. His eyes followed the line made by the big scalpel as it moved from the hollow of Dundas’s throat in one sure sweep down almost as far as the navel. Then two shorter slices created an inverted Y shape and Jones slid his thickly gloved fingers into the sergeant’s body cavity.

  ‘What did you say? Speak up.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You won’t like this bit then.’

  Penmarrick didn’t.

  But then his fierce distaste was swept to one side. The grey-pink sack of the stomach was revealed, and Jones’s nimble fingers were lifting the tube of the oesophagus into prominence. And the lump was much more obvious, though still concealed in the internal organs like a walnut in a sausage.

  A delicate movement of a very much smaller blade opened the stomach wall and the lump slid into view. It was at once obscene and wondrous, like the laying of some rare egg. Automatically, Penmarrick reached for die gleaming, obsidian jewel as it slid out of the pale flesh and into the dark-walled cavity below.

  ‘Don’t!’ snapped the professor.

  Penmarrick looked up, surprised by the urgency in the older man’s voice. He stepped back; his eyes still fixed on the strange contents of the dead man’s stomach. There were silvery specks deep within it. They gleamed like a galaxy of distant stars in the blackest of winter skies. He did not look away until the end of the Geiger counter was thrust rudely into his line of vision. Jones’s thumb moved and the machine screamed.

  Only when he switched the machine off could the tutting sound he was making be heard. He crossed to the case again and returned. He was holding, of all things, a card. A white, pasteboard business card with plain black letters and numbers etched upon it. ‘I want you to phone this number, please,’ said Jones formally. ‘You’ve done very well indeed, but we will be taking over now.’

  It was only when he was reciting the number to the camp’s telephone operator that Penmarrick’s eye strayed up to the words above it: THE DIRECTOR, ATOMIC WEAPONS RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT, ALDERMASTON.

  ~ * ~

  Halfway between Reading and Newbury, in the northernmost section of the county of Hampshire, just south of the River Kennet on the edge of a Roman road which has run north-west from Silchester for more than two thousand years, stands the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.

  At dawn the next morning, the ambulance carrying Professor James Jones sound asleep in the passenger seat and the four corpses in lead-lined coffins behind, turned south off the A4 onto the A340, crossed the river and slowed as it pulled up the gentle slope and approached the security gates of the establishment.

  Like the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough little more than thirty kilometres south-east along the long-buried Roman road, Aldermaston sits on sandy-soiled heathland with low pinetrees surrounding it, giving it a faintly Nordic atmosphere - as though both establishments had been designed to make the German scientists imported at the end of the Second World War feel at home in case, like Werner von Braun and his Peenemunde rocket team, they were tempted into going far further west.

  During the 1960s the high wire fence with which the establishment was surrounded had featured widely and regularly in a whole range of media as the British anti-nuclear lobby, under their peace signs so reminiscent of the incisions disfiguring the belly of the dead Sergeant Dundas, marched regularly down the A4 and demonstrated outside the main gate in the same way as, during the next decade, they demonstrated outside the United States Air Force base at Greenham Common. But the air base and the wire fence were redundant now, of course, because glasnost held sway. Even so, the guard at the gate examined the contents of the ambulance and the passes of the two men in the front of it as closely as he would have in the darkest days of the Cold War. The coffins, however, remained closed.

  Two hours later, the Director reached across his wide mahogany desk, offering a cup of coffee to Jones, and said, ‘You’ve no real idea what it is?’

  ‘No. It’s a crystal of some kind and it seems to have flecks of metal suspended within it. It is fearsomely radioactive. The sergeant’s face was burned so severely probably because he looked at it closely. His fingers and hand have even more severe burns. And the internal sections of his digestive system which came into closest contact with it have sustained quite considerable tissue damage.’

  ‘Quite so. And how did it come to be wedged inside the body?’

  ‘Well, he must have swallowed it.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. But where did he get it in order to ingest it in the manner you describe?’

  ‘Apparently somewhere on the iceberg which the United Nations is having towed to the west African state of Mau.’

  ‘How on earth could it come to be on - or in - an iceberg the mass of which is more than two million years old? Is there anything on record to indicate it might have fallen from outer space?’

  ‘Nothing at all, as far as I know,’ Jones answered, ‘though you must understand that I have yet to offer it for close analysis by men in that particular field of expertise. What I am reporting to you is the effect of a crystal of unknown substance and of unknown origin upon the body of a man noted for his fitness up to a week or so ago.’

  ‘Right. Have we reported to the people involved in the Mau project that what they are dealing with may be dangerous?’

  ‘No. That’s a decision which needs to be taken well above our heads, I’m afraid. I’ve recommended that we warn them that something is going on, especially because of the United Nations involvement, but as I say, it’s not my decision.’

  ‘I see. So you’ll be working in detail now, I imagine.’

  ‘Yes. I would like to start at once. I assume the rest of the teams are in place and ready to go?’

  ‘They are. We called them in last night and they’ve been waiting for you to get here.’

  Jones nodded once. ‘Roadworks,’ he said. ‘On the A390, the A30 and the M5. What can I tell you? You don’t even want to know about the M25.’

  ‘Right.’ The Director glanced at his watch. ‘Everything should be ready for you. Good luck.’

  ~ * ~

  By the end of the afternoon, there were specimens of tissue, fluid, bone, hair and nails from each of the corpses - several different specimens of each from Dundas - as well as samples of everything available from the mysterious skeletal woman. Slivers of the crystal itself were being analysed in various places throughout the establishment. Jones, having taken all the obvious samples and sent them for analysis, turned from the corpse of Dundas to the skeleton of the woman. The sergeant’s body was, apart from its unusual contents, absolutely unremarkable.

  Not so the woman’s body. Her teeth, for instance, were most unusual.

  At about tea time, Jones came out of the laboratory where he had been working, washed up and tapped the Director’s number into the internal phone system.

  ‘Yes?’ answered the Director at once, the speed of his reply giving a good idea of the importance attached to the work being done here.

  ‘I suppose it’s a silly question,’ Jones began, ‘but do we have a dental expert available who might be able to give us some help with what looks like Russian bridge work?’

  In earlier days, the answer to such a question would have been no, but in these post-glasnost times, thing were less simple. As it happened, there were men and women available on secondment from institutes in various parts of the old Russian Empire. Men and women to whom the vast majority of the establish
ment’s rooms were still off limits but who were regularly accepted into low security areas.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ answered the Director. ‘I’ll probably be able to get someone down to you by dinner time.’

  ~ * ~

  At seven thirty that evening, Pjotr Serbsky made his way down to the laboratory. The Russian was registered as a dental expert but in fact had far wider experience than that, experience which he was happy to offer to the security services of his country’s erstwhile enemies, especially as they were now his temporary hosts while he studied at their world-renowned teaching hospitals. Serbsky was in his early forties, with thick black hair and a square cut beard. He spoke English fluently and roguishly, with a twinkle in his pale eyes and a curl to his sensual lips. He was on the Director’s list of names because of the work he had done in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster - he was a recognised expert in the field of radioactivity as well as in Russian dentistry.

  His security clearance was high and the current security status of a soldier who had managed to poison himself on an iceberg under the aegis of the United Nations - of which Russia was a fully paid-up member - was low, so there was no problem about allowing him into the laboratory where Jones was working. He knew his subject too, and was able to give the professor a fairly detailed breakdown of the style and date of the dental work on the teeth of the blonde-haired cadaver.

  Shortly before midnight, Jones, much impressed by what the Russian knew about dentistry and aware of his work on post-radiation sickness, swept back the cover over Dundas’s stomach cavity which still contained the black glass fragment and said, ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what this is, do you?’

  Under the merciless light of the laboratory, the black glass nugget gleamed wickedly and Pjotr Serbsky regarded it with all the fascination of a bird eyeing a snake. His sensuous lips parted and his bright eyes shone.

  After a few moments he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have never seen anything like it before. I have no idea what it could be.’

  The good doctor was lying. He had seen something exactly like it before and he knew precisely what it was.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty

  Paul Chan wrestled himself out of the lift onto the 38th floor of the United Nations building with a difficulty compounded by one broken thigh, lightly bandaged, two crutches and an extremely large bunch of flowers already bedraggled through the ministrations of the security guards downstairs. But Paul was a man in love, and it would have taken more than discomfort, discourtesy and the destruction of his posy to slow him down. He was upset about the chocolates, though; the guards had insisted on X-raying them to check for arms and explosives, and Paul really didn’t fancy giving his delicious Inga irradiated chocolates. He had left them at the security desk.

  In the eyes of Western men, even those in her native Dresden, Bonn or Frankfurt, Dr Inga Kroll was a dumpy hausfrau, unremarkable and unappetising. Paul, however, was an Eastern man of militantly Oriental aesthetic and his eyes saw her differently. To him her hair was a golden wonder. Braided - he had yet to see it down - it seemed like gleaming, intricately woven wires of the most beautiful of metals. Her high cheekbones and narrow, slightly sloping eyes held all the allure of an odalisque. When her bright blue irises caught the light and flared like sapphire behind thick, dark lashes, he found it difficult to breathe. Her short nose, full mouth and square chin simply completed the plump, almost Chinese beauty of her features.

  Her short neck and square shoulders served as the most natural introduction to the deep perfection of her bosom. No matter what she wore, be her collars never so severe and her jackets never so tightly buttoned, he always descried - or believed that he did so -the most tempting hint of a cleavage there. And even when her clothes achieved pinnacles of modest conservatism, she was one of those women whose breasts had the facility of moving independently of the rest of her body, swaying and bobbing with hypnotising grace.

  Her strong, thick arms ended in unexpectedly long and artistic hands which she seemed to know were her best feature and which she kept manicured and bejewelled to perfection. She had the most delicious habit, Paul had noticed, of putting her hands on her hips in an unconsciously Teutonic gesture which emphasised the breadth of her pelvis and the surprisingly narrow confines of her waist. Paul adored her hips. They were so square, so full. They supported a bottom which to his eyes could only be described as majestic and were in turn supported by thighs which - even though he had to imagine them - echoed this perfection, he was sure. Her calves, ankles and feet completed neatly the mental picture the love-smitten doctor carried with him down the corridor towards her office.

  She had been the first thing he had seen upon returning to consciousness after the operation to pin the shattered bone of his thigh together. She had popped into the hospital with a get well card from the Mau team because it was on her way home. She had stayed to talk to the increasingly alert Paul, however, because there had been no real reason for her to rush away. And that talk, at first general, had rapidly become personal. Both of them had revealed a great deal about themselves - perhaps because they were such utter strangers in such an unusually intimate situation; perhaps because each of them, for one reason or another, had had their defences down. She found New York lonely and alien, as did he on his rare visits here. She had no real social life, no friends and certainly no partner. She earned good money and did not need a flat mate. The closest she came to socialising was when she went out with people from work, and they all had firm relationships and families. She had considered joining the music societies, the dinner clubs; she had even thought of cruising the singles bars but in the end she had been put off by fear of the sort of man she might meet there. So she went out rarely in the evening - she had stopped going to the cinema and neither Broadway nor the Met could tempt her as they once had done. She went home late and stayed there until she left early for work. She ordered in - usually junk food -watched the news channels to keep up with international finance, when it was reported, read the foreign sections of the newspapers she had delivered and the volumes of economic theory she purchased through her TV ordering service, and slept alone. She lived for her work, because that was all she had.

  Evening visits to Paul’s bedside became regular events. Even had there been no spark of attraction between them, it would have been a pleasant change for her. But there was no way she could have failed to observe the effect she had on him right from the start and by the end of the week, when he had been released, it was taken for granted that their relationship would continue.

  But Paul had been housebound until now, and the tenor of her visits had changed. On his territory - even though ‘his territory’ was currently an impersonal, rarely-used UN flat downtown - she had been shy and defensive. He was uncertain whether this was because she did not return his obvious regard or because she did and could not trust herself to reveal the fact.

  He had come out into the world today with the express intention of finding out. He had come out earlier than his doctor advised, motivated by his need to know and supported by luck as well as crutches. He had managed to book a table at the only local restaurant she had spoken of with approbation - Kampung, blessedly serving Malay cuisine - and was making what, in his long-gone teenage years, would have been his big move.

  ~ * ~

  Inga glanced up from her work as he staggered through her office door and her long eyes widened with surprise. The door slammed back against the wall on his left. His right crutch pushed a padded chair back from the jamb so that it threatened to topple a small table nearby. Her square face blushed a vivid red, seemingly deepened by her fair hair and her usual pallor. She did not blush prettily. A red tide rose up her neck from her high collar and flooded out to the tips of her ears before vanishing under the golden helmet of her braids. He gave her his most insouciant grin and hopped forward, thrusting the bedraggled flowers towards her.

  ‘How did you get up here?’ she demanded breat
hlessly, half rising, her eyes checking her desk top for sensitive material. Her accent, miraculously soft Germanic, reminded him of a Brahms lullaby, but her tone was cold.

  He refused to be put off this early in his campaign. ‘I work for the UN too,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Why—’

  ‘I’m inviting you to dinner.’ He took another hop forward, still holding the flowers out to her. ‘I’ve booked a table for eight o’clock. Please say yes.’

  At the mention of the hour she automatically glanced at her watch. ‘But it’s only five now!’

  ‘I thought you might want to change. I didn’t know.’

  She paused, obviously calculating. The door banged shut behind him and the little table decided not to fall after all. Such romance as he had wished into the moment was rapidly seeping away. He looked around the neat, Spartan room for somewhere to put the flowers she seemed reluctant to take. There was a tall ornamental vase on a windowsill further to the right and he turned to cross towards it. At once, the crutch currently bearing his weight slipped out of control. He hopped once and his automatic systems cut in, trying desperately to protect his injured leg. The flowers sailed lazily through the air and the second crutch hit the carpet. It had held him erect for just long enough to complete one full turn so that when he lost his balance at last he fell back into the soft safety of the chair by the door. The table went west, scattering magazines all over the floor. The chair legs creaked dangerously but held firm and he sat safely, a still point in a whirl of cascading magazines, fluttering papers and flying flowers.