The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ~ * ~

  Asha’s journey to Psyche was less of a problem than John had imagined it would be. The situation was resolved by Yves Maille, not through any miracle of meteorology but simply because he could not take satisfactory readings on Titan’s, bridge. So, having been given direct orders from First Officer Sally Bell to provide readings, he went down onto the main deck.

  Inside the bulkhead door at the starboard end of the lateral A deck corridor, he adjusted the bulky clothing he had donned to protect himself against the sand. Several men were detailed to help him should he demand it, but the one in attendance was now simply required to close the door behind him and then to await his return. The intrepid Frenchman was going to brave the vicious sandstorm in order to check the readings of the instruments he kept on the ship’s distant forecastle head. These instruments were important not just because they were even more sensitive than Titan’s own, but because they were the only ones at deck level. All the others were located atop the bridgehouse more than twenty metres above.

  Yves adjusted his goggles and pulled the filter tighter across his nose and mouth. He nodded once to his assistant and threw open the door. He stepped out with his eyes tight closed in expectation of inundation by whirling sand. He heard the door slam shut behind him. He had taken half a dozen stumbling steps before he realised he was walking in calm, still air. He opened his eyes and blinked. It was clear air too. From the sandswept deck, up through less than ten metres to a claustrophobically close, thick, sand-drizzling sky, there was a band of utterly still air. He ran to the side of the deck and skidded through miniature dunes to catch the safety rail and look down at the strange, sullen sea. It, too, seemed quite calm. Then he turned, thunderstruck, and looked around himself, consciously noting every detail he could discern for the exhaustive report he was going to write to the Geographical Societies in Paris, London and the United States.

  The meteorological explanation for what was happening was simple enough, but it had never occurred to any of them, not even to Yves himself, that the forces they were dealing with were so enormous that the microclimates they were capable of creating could be hundreds of square kilometres in area. The harmattan, blowing north from the Sahara, was a cold desert wind, generated by the pressure of the air. It was relatively warm in comparison with the air around the iceberg, however; and that air was further chilled by contact with the ice and with the surface of the water all around Manhattan which had been itself chilled by runoff from the great berg. This had the unforeseen but almost inevitable result of forming a cushion of cold clear air some thirty metres high over which the sand-laden harmattan rode as though over a low hill. To the officers and men on the navigation bridges of the ships, the southerly wind, made impenetrable by the weight of sand it was carrying, seemed to be reaching from the wave tops upward for a thousand metres sheer, but down here on the weather deck, Yves alone could see that things were very different indeed and an utterly unexpected calm held sway.

  The effect of being out in that calm was very disturbing. As he looked down the length of the deck, along the wide but terrifyingly shallow band of clear air, he could almost feel the weight of the sand above his head and he found himself crouching as though it was solid rock about to crush him like a mountainous press. But to compare it to rock was misleading, for the stratum a mere seven metres above his head was in frantic, liquid motion. To watch it was to feel reality being torn into inversion until one became almost like a watcher entranced above a silt-laden river in full spate. But in the place of cold spray rising, cold sand drizzled down, lightly, to land like a tawny cloak on everything around until the deck and the billows below it were barely distinguishable.

  ~ * ~

  Asha, too, felt that they were moving through a long low cave as she and four crewmen from Titan powered the little inflatable west across Manhattan’s mighty bow and then due north towards Psyche. They were moving northward at twenty knots towards a goal which was moving south to meet them at ten knots. They were travelling through still air, but even allowing for the southerly current, they still had the ship in sight in little more than an hour.

  ‘There’s Psycho now,’ said one of the seamen quietly. None of them had wanted to come. Asha hardly heard and certainly missed the fact that he had mispronounced the name. The low brown roof of the wildly rushing sky seemed to join the rough wall of the sand-streaming flank of the iceberg and spread out into the dark, flat stillness of the water as though they were coming to the back of the dreary cave now, and the atmosphere of this strange meeting drizzled down on them with all the insidious penetration of the sand itself. Just as the fine grains crept with chilly silence down into every strand of hair and every fold of flesh and clothing, no matter how intimate, so the atmosphere crept into every corner of their minds and crouched there coldly, like shadow. And everywhere, just above them, the wind raved and the whirling sand hissed and the upper galleries of the ice boomed and grumbled and thundered.

  If anything, the atmosphere darkened as they climbed up the accommodation ladder onto Psyche’s weather deck, and Asha was whirled back in her mind across the years to her honeymoon and a desperate, doomed freighter called Napoli with a mutinous crew and a deadly cargo destined for the coldest deeps of the Western Ocean. She shivered, for she knew how dangerous things could get on a ship which felt like this one did. The men she had brought with her suddenly grouped themselves round her like a bodyguard. Abruptly she realised that several trained medical assistants had been overlooked in favour of these four whose greatest qualification seemed to be their size. They fell in around her, two in front and two behind, as they hurried up to the A deck bulkhead door and then along the corridor to the lift.

  Captain Walcott was tall, distinguished and very worried looking. ‘We’ve got two more,’ he said at once. ‘Not as bad yet, but even so . . . We’ve isolated them all, of course, from each other and from the rest of us.’ His voice was deep, lilting, and every bit as concerned as the expression on his lined, dark face. He took a deep breath, as though inflating himself, rounding his chest and squaring his shoulders. ‘We don’t know whether or not it’s contagious. We’re counting on you to tell us, Doctor.’ His dark eyes swept round the wide, shadowy bridge, and the atmosphere, like the light, thickened sinisterly for a moment.

  John had described Lamia’s symptoms in as much detail as he had at his command and Asha thought she had built up a fairly accurate mental picture of how the man would look. Even so, what she saw as she lifted the bandages off him made her catch her breath with shock. The Greek seaman lay quiet, his eyes open but distant, heavily sedated. ‘I’ll just bring my bag over,’ she said soothingly. ‘I’ve got some ointment which will ease this at once.’

  She opened her bag and pretended to be rummaging for medicine but in fact she switched on Kate Ross’s Geiger counter which she had hidden in there. Then, holding her breath, she brought the whole thing over and actually placed it on the bed beside the drugged man.

  Nothing. The little machine gave no reaction at all. A weight lifted off her shoulders and she began to breathe again. One less thing for John to worry about, apparently, but a new puzzle for her to solve. It was one which occupied her mind as she treated and re-bandaged Lamia’s wounds, but she found no solution to it. There was nothing in the blisters themselves which offered any explanation, and the patient himself was too far gone to answer any of the questions she was burning to ask him. At last she was finished with him, and it was time to go and see the others, each of whom was in a separate room. ‘Hello!’ she called, and one of her minders from Titan came in at once.

  ‘Where are the others?’ she asked. ‘I need to see them, and to talk to them in some detail.’

  But before she could either see them or speak to them, the sickbay phone buzzed and she lifted it at once. It was Peter Walcott. ‘I don’t know whether this is good news or bad,’ he said crisply, his tone making her suspect that he was in fact quite relieved, ‘but Captain Odate has just
reported men on Kraken with similar symptoms. So it’s not just Psyche’s problem. It’s something bigger.’

  She found herself nodding, thinking, if it’s not this ship then the next logical culprit must be Manhattan; the two ships that had reported trouble were the closest to it, after all.

  But Peter Walcott was still speaking.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

  ‘I said that the wind has moderated suddenly. Lifted, actually, gone back up several hundred metres. Captain Higgins has called for Kraken’s helicopter with Tom Snell and his engineers. He said to tell you that he’s taking a team of men up onto the ice. Something about looking for more Russian corpses like that blonde woman.’

  Asha went cold with simple terror. She wanted to scream a warning, to order John to avoid the berg until she knew more about what was affecting the sick men’s skin in this horrific way. Even if it was not radioactivity, it was still something that Manhattan was doing. Something horrible; something dangerous. But she would only be screaming at Peter Walcott, and he would never pass the message on to John. Even if he did, John would never listen. She took a deep breath. ‘I see,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ added Peter, as though this was an afterthought, as from his point of view it probably was, ‘he said to tell you he’s taking Kate and Colin Ross and Captain Mariner as well.’

  ~ * ~

  Kraken’s Westland dropped Tom Snell and his men off on the highest northernmost shoulder of the ice and then skipped low over the tawny sea to pick up the contingents from Titan and Niobe. John had called for Richard to be included in Titan’s specially selected team in the hope of jogging his memory. He suspected that Asha would have ordered that the sick man should remain in bed, knowing that this was the surest way to restore his mind. On the other hand, she had said Richard was physically one hundred per cent, and dying to get out and about, so, in her absence, there seemed no harm in bringing him along. If his mental processes were as acute as she had said they were, he would be an asset to them whether he knew who he was or not.

  As John climbed into the helicopter’s big square body, his eyes eagerly sought out the tall frame of his friend, half convinced that the sight of the ships would have restored everything. Failing that, perhaps the shock of being back aboard a helicopter so soon after the accident would jog something back into place. Like Asha, he caught his breath at the almost luminous quality of Richard’s gaze. The bright blue eyes seemed to be alight but there was no flicker of recognition, no wide smile of welcome when their eyes met, and John sat, a little deflated, in the seat opposite.

  ‘I’m not sure that this is such a good idea,’ said Kate Ross severely.

  ‘Is he likely to do himself any harm?’ John sounded defensive in his own ears.

  ‘No,’ her own tone moderated in the face of his. ‘At least, not if we keep an eye on him. We don’t know whether he understands about the dangers of the situation we’re going into.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ said Richard, making them all jump.

  ‘OK, old chap,’ answered John at once. ‘But we only have your word for that and we don’t know how much you actually remember.’

  ‘I remember about falling off bloody great lumps of ice.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose that sort of knowledge runs pretty deep. Do you remember what one of these is?’

  Richard’s cocky self-assurance slipped a little. ‘Telephone?’

  ‘You remember about portable telephones?’ John was stunned. Even Kate was looking surprised, and Colin’s eyebrows were just distinguishable from his hairline.

  But Richard was shaking his head. ‘Asha answered one hanging on the wall by my bed. I asked what it was and she told me.’ He looked at John. ‘Do you know Asha?’

  This was deeply unsettling. Perhaps it had been a bad idea after all. ‘I’m married to her. Asha is my wife.’

  ‘So you’re John!’

  ‘That’s right. Captain John Higgins. Ring any bells?’

  Richard pushed his cheeks out slightly and shook his head. He looked mildly regretful but not particularly worried.

  ‘And you don’t know what this is?’

  ‘Not if it isn’t a telephone.’

  ‘Right. It’s what we call a Geiger counter. Do you remember anything about radioactivity?’

  Again, Richard blew his cheeks out and shook his head. John took a deep breath and began to explain. They were going up to the furthest extreme of the exposed section of Manhattan and walking south to the bow section; he had a nice long chopper ride to explain to his old friend just what was going on here.

  ~ * ~

  Tom Snell had his men with him on a high point looking northward towards the barely visible shapes of Ajax and Achilles. They had not been idle while waiting for the helicopter and its passengers; they had already surveyed the immediate area. There were six engineers, a closed unit, who could be relied upon to discuss nothing with the crews of the ships they were on. A unit, moreover, which very much wanted to discover what had happened to their sergeant.

  With Richard and the Rosses from Titan had come Yves Maille. John had brought Steve Bollom with him, trusting Sally to be senior officer in command of the two lead ships while his own extremely competent second officer guided Niobe on a steady course through a calm sea. Other than an unforeseen accident on the ice, only the unexpected return of the harmattan would make things difficult and the French weather expert was confident that he would see it coming early enough for them to get the helicopter back out. And even if that went wrong, they had scaling ropes and two tight-packed inflatables which would be more than enough to get them back to the ships. In this position, Kraken and Psyche would be the closest; when they got up to the bow section, then the lead ships would be their safest haven.

  It felt unnatural to John to be taking command while Richard was with him, but only for the first few moments, then he simply got on with the job. His old friend was quite obviously not fit to command a rowing boat at the moment. But Richard had caught on quickly enough to the way Geiger counters functioned and to the fact that they must maintain the fiction that they were here looking for more mysterious Russian corpses.

  ‘We’ll split up into two groups,’ ordered John. ‘I’ll take the seamen with me, and perhaps subdivide again if conditions warrant it. My second group would be led by you, Colin. Tom, you take your unit and do the same if need be. We’ll go down the starboard side, you take the port. Colin here has two rough maps of the section above water, but we don’t know how accurate they are after the last couple of days’ weather. Over to you, Colin.’

  As Colin Ross began to talk about elementary ice safety, the group of men and one woman looked glumly down the length of dirty, slushy berg. The island in front of them was still much the same size as the island of Manhattan. It was pear-shaped, with the long point facing south. On either hand of them, the ice reached towards fifteen kilometres in width. Here it seemed largely flat, but it was much more hilly in the middle, especially in the widest sections just aft of Psyche and Kraken in their anchorage positions three hundred metres below the mean surface level.

  They were looking at a long, hard, dirty day’s work. Only the fact that they were due to spread out and check the ice’s surface with the Geiger counters for unexpected extremes of radiation made the proposed action at all realistic. If they had actually been looking for bodies, the task would have been hopeless. ‘Above all, keep an eye on each other,’ Colin concluded, the rumble of his voice easily carrying over die quiet tinkling of water which surrounded them like spring-time in the Alps. ‘The ice is beginning to perish. God alone knows what fissures, caves and crevasses will open up now. If we were at either Pole in these conditions, I’d be inclined to stay put and radio for help. It will be very dangerous, so take care.’

  There was nothing more to be said and they moved off.

  ~ * ~

  Within the hour, John was forced to face the fact that the task they were all engaged in was well-nigh impossible. T
he ice island was almost as big as his native Isle of Man, and true Manx people never travelled from one end of the island to the other unless they could stay for the night. And no one in their right mind would dream of walking from Douglas to Ramsey unless it was for charity along the Millennium Way, perhaps. Searching the mountainous interior with a dozen companions armed only with Geiger counters and walkie-talkies would be considered the action of someone desperate or insane. It would be an utterly pointless waste of time here and now except that the Geiger counters might discover a source of radioactivity powerful enough to damage the crew of the ships at some range. And, of course, the main object of the exercise was actually to put the minds of the crews at rest by proving that there was nothing unnatural - or supernatural - on the ice at all.

  John found these depressing thoughts sweeping over him as he and Richard entered the first real hill valley between rounded swells of ice. Colin and Kate were away on the coastal side of the central icy outcrop and Steve Bollom and his team were just entering the foothills on the inward side of them, between the Rosses and himself. Each team was exploring a notional swathe of territory about two kilometres wide.