The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Look. It won’t be dangerous if you’re careful. I’ll work out a way to get you up there without making the guards suspicious. All you need to do is stand beside the helmsman, then turn round clumsily and it’s done!’

  ‘Well. . .’

  ‘If I can get you onto the bridge with no danger at all?’

  ‘Well. . .’

  There was nothing more that Richard could think of to say.

  ‘Well, all right.’

  Richard nodded once and went through into the sickbay. Lamia and his cronies were sitting watching a video as though nothing going on aboard the ship was anything to do with any of them. Richard strode across and snapped the set off. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I want a fight. A big fight. A noisy fight. I don’t care what gets broken and I will enhance the pay of anyone who joins in.’

  The men looked at him in stunned disbelief.

  Asha came rushing out of her office, making it plain that she had heard every word he had said. ‘Richard! Have you taken leave of your senses?’

  ‘Sorry, Asha. Needs must when the Devil drives. Come on, you lot. I want it big and noisy and destructive. A bottle of Scotch to the man who throws the first punch! Move!’

  They pulled themselves to their feet, looking around, dazed with surprise.

  ‘Two bottles. Any liquor of your choice. A crate of spirits to the last man standing!’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked the giant Haitian Duvalier.

  ‘Yes, I am. You play your cards right, you can end up with fourteen bottles of your favourite drink!’

  ‘I’m a rum-drinking man.’

  ‘Of course you are. Appleton Gold?’

  The punch Duvalier threw chucked one of his slower-thinking colleagues right across the room.

  ‘You get me Gold,’ yelled the massive Haitian over the sudden pandemonium, ‘and you can call me Doc.’

  He ducked as a chair tumbled past his bullet head and exploded through the screen of the video. The whole lot went backwards noisily and landed on Lamia’s foot. The Greek howled and Richard winced. It looked as though he would be responsible for some medical bills as well as for the mess bill.

  ‘Go!’ he yelled at Wally. ‘Big fight in the sickbay! Go and report to the captain at once!’

  By the time Peter Walcott and a paramilitary guard arrived, the fight had been resolved, Duvalier was due to receive an awful lot of Appleton Gold, the medical bill was not going to be as high as feared and the isolation ward looked like a bomb had hit it. The soldier’s eyes swept coldly over the wreckage and Peter looked about in complete confusion, then they both left.

  Richard went back into the ping-pong room and switched his walkie-talkie to channel eleven. His hair stirring with tension as though he was watching a procession of ghosts, he listened to the handset hissing quietly.

  ‘Hssssssssssss. . . over there? I thought I saw something over by the iceberg. Oh. It’s a section of the cliff collapsing.’ The voice belonged to Wally.

  Richard took a deep breath. He really expected to hear a word of rage or accusation and a single shot. But there was nothing.

  ‘What are we heading, Captain?’ came the innocent, almost childlike question. Typical of a youthful, over-anxious cadet. They had them in every army and navy. No matter what nationality the invaders were, they would recognise the type.

  Wally had pulled it off.

  Richard drew a pad of blank paper towards him and started making detailed notes of the conversation on the bridge. As he did this, picking up the answers to Wally’s pointed questions then recording the information being fed out by the rest of the watch as the penny began to drop, and even picking up unconscious hints from the occasional words of the taciturn pirates in control, so he began to see the grand design. Began to realise precisely what was involved here. And he laid his plans accordingly.

  He did not move into action, however, until he heard that Titan and Niobe had been ordered hard north. Then he began to call the line watches, saying in a low voice, ‘Now listen. It looks as though we’re out of time. Here’s what I want you to do first. . .’

  ~ * ~

  Ten minutes later Richard went back into the sickbay. There was an atmosphere of ill-controlled surliness as the men grudgingly worked through the room, tidying the mess they had just made under the eye of Asha Higgins. He paused on the threshold for an instant. Then, ‘Doc,’ he said quietly, ‘you want to earn another crate of Appleton Gold?’

  The big man straightened up and a slow grin spread across his battered face. ‘Who’ve I got to kill?’ he asked.

  All the way up the stairs, Asha held Richard in animated, enraged discussion but on the C deck landing, one deck below the bridge, he stopped her. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know it’s dangerous. It may be irresponsible, juvenile, stupid and everything else. I know you and John have been through this before and were lucky not to be killed. But look at the alternative. These people are going to run Manhattan at full speed up onto the coral reefs off Nigeria. The damage will be incalculable, both to the wildlife and the coast. The coral will just crush back like polystyrene until the berg hits solid rock. Then there will be floods. Earthquakes, probably. You can probably kiss the islands goodbye - Sao Tome, Ferdinand Po; to Cameroon, to Guinea. And all those millions of poor souls in Mau won’t get their water either. Except that they won’t need it because they’ll all be dead. The impact of that mass of ice moving north-east at thirteen knots is going to smash the black cliff back a good ten centimetres, open up the tectonic fault line and tear their whole country apart!’

  While he talked, the men accompanying them had levered the lift doors open and they all stepped into die little car. The doors slid silently shut again.

  ‘Will you do it?’ he asked hoarsely.

  She hesitated for an instant. But she knew what he said was probably right. ‘Yes, all right,’ she said gracelessly. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ~ * ~

  Asha’s anger was still evident when she walked onto the bridge and the fact served her well. The four guards all glanced over towards her, but none moved to cover her for she was obviously alone. She strode across to Peter Walcott, spitting with obvious anger. ‘Well, you can take care of it this time. They’re all at it now and the whole isolation area is a total mess. I don’t want anything else to do with them and if I were you I’d put the whole lot of them under some kind of restraint!’

  Peter reacted with rage, as any captain would in the face of such a report, and was halfway to the door when he remembered the situation. He stopped and looked at the paramilitary leader. The soldier spat a couple of words of Russian and two of the guards began to move.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ snapped Asha. ‘I don’t want you getting any bullshit excuses from the ringleaders!’ and she led the little group out.

  She was so obviously in charge, lent authority by her rage, that they all followed quite meekly as she crossed to the lift and punched the button. When the lift came she stepped in and the others followed without a second thought.

  There was just enough room in the car for a man to stand behind each door panel and be invisible even when the door was wide. Asha and Peter stepped through to the back of the lift and the guards followed them in. By the time they had turned, Lamia and Doc Duvalier had grabbed the unsuspecting guards and wrestled them silently to the floor. The doors closed and the lift departed with no one any the wiser.

  By the time the doors opened on A deck to reveal the anxious faces of Richard and the men who had been waiting in the stairwell just in case, both the guards were unconscious and both the crewmen were armed.

  ‘Right,’ said Richard. ‘We go back up at once.’

  This time he went up, with Lamia and Doc Duvalier. ‘Can you use those things?’ he asked tensely, his mind racing, recoiling from the logic of the situation but unable to see any way out other than immediate confrontation.

  ‘I’ve done a bit,’ said Lamia cryptically. ‘Used these Kalashnikovs before.’

 
; ‘Trained with the Tonton Macaute,’ admitted Duvalier. ‘Used the AK-47, but never the 74.’

  ‘Well, put them on automatic and shoot to kill,’ said Richard. ‘Don’t give them any chance at all.’

  ‘Right,’ they both said at once. And Richard realised he would only have got an argument if he had ordered anything else.

  The three of them went in through the bridge door together. ‘DOWN!’ screamed Richard at the top of his voice.

  But his order was lost in the gunfire as his two henchmen opened up at once. Neither soldier even managed to turn, let alone bring his weapon to bear. Neither stood a chance. They were dead even before the watch on the bridge hit the floor, their chests and heads simply blown open. Richard stood for a moment, sickened. He had forgotten about the noise, the stench. The gut-deep, soul-deep revulsion.

  What was left of the two men was something from his worst nightmares and he could hardly bring himself to look at the wreckage as he wrestled the guns and grenades free. He had forgotten that blood and brains each have an individual smell when violently released from bodies. He had forgotten how vividly white teeth could be when blown free of their sockets in a mess of red slush; that eyes could still watch you even when they were white marbles blown free of ruptured sockets. He had forgotten that fists remain clenched while sphincters and anuses relax immediately after death. He had forgotten that the stress, the responsibility, the waste would make him immediately enraged.

  ‘Get down to the engine room now!’ he yelled. ‘That noise will have sent them insane down there!’

  But no. The two men in the engine room had simply assumed that some member of the crew had irritated one of the guards. They were absolutely stunned when four fully armed crew members appeared, their leader fearsomely badged with blood. They were tank men, brought over to run and maintain the big T-80s. They were engineers, not infantry. They had managed to win the trust of their mad general by shooting a few naked African girls, but facing up to guns in the hands of desperate men and certain death no matter what else transpired was something else again.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Right,’ said Richard, breathing deeply with some relief and then regretting it because of the sickening stench on the bridge. Even though they had removed the bodies and made some attempt to clear up the blood during the last quarter of an hour, the whole place still reeked disgustingly. ‘We have some kind of control here. The first thing we need to do is to check with the others and see how things are going with them. How long until you are supposed to report in?’

  The soldier to whom that final question was addressed stood with his trousers down and the full pouch of his scrotum resting on the eighteen inches of honed steel blade belonging to Doc Duvalier’s antique bowie knife. He was being very accurate indeed. ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  ‘OK.’ Richard breathed deeply twice and pressed the first channel button on his walkie-talkie. ‘Line watch on Titan, can you hear me?’

  ‘Captain Mariner? Line watch Titan here, sir. Captain Bell in command on the bridge, sir. All clear.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ snarled General Gogol looking at his watch. ‘Kraken is ninety seconds late.’

  The ships were supposed to report in to their leader once every half-hour. There were six ships, so Gogol should have been receiving one message every five minutes; a delay of even ninety seconds was significant. He began to beat his fist against the side of the command helicopter, one beat per second. But this did not summon the message he required from the tanker, and he was just about to dispatch Kraken’s guard helicopter to see what was going on when the radio leaped into life.

  ‘Yes?’ he snarled.

  The radio began to babble at him in breathless Russian. ‘Sergeant Suslov on Psyche here, General. The code word is Tomsk. We’ve just heard from Kraken. There’s something wrong with the communications, General. They can get us but they can’t get through to you. Can you check you radio, General? Things seem to be going. . .’ The transmission ended abruptly.

  Gogol looked down at the hissing radio. His gaunt face folded slowly into a frown. ‘Now what was that all about?’

  The tone in which the question was asked made Illych Kizel’s blood run cold. He could feel it all beginning to slip out of control. Starting with Gogol’s sanity. ‘That was not the correct procedure at all!’

  And even though the code word was correct, it didn’t sound at all like Sergeant Suslov either, thought Kizel; but he said nothing, fearing Gogol’s reaction.

  ‘Send the helicopters out,’ ordered the general at once. ‘I want things checked.’

  ‘Excuse me, but if we send them out now, General,’ countered Kizel gently, trying to disguise his desperation, ‘we may not have enough fuel to get back to base again. Even with the extra we picked up in Mawanga, things will be very tight.’

  Gogol paused. Thought. Took a morphine tablet. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait for the next set of reports to come in.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘The bridge is a mess,’ reported Kraken’s first officer. ‘Captain Odate is dead. He threw himself on a grenade. Saved most of the rest of us, though. The soldiers are all dead but everything is shot to pieces. I don’t know whether or not we have control.’

  Richard was not a trained battle commander but he had been in war situations and tight spots. He knew that the horror threatening to overcome him must be forced down at all costs or it would incapacitate him. But he could not remember whether or not the Japanese captain was married. Would he have to write to the man’s family? Had he been a Heritage Mariner captain, it would have merited a personal visit to break the news, even to Japan.

  His face when he swung round to his captive reflected all of his frustrated rage. The young man’s scrotum clenched automatically with fear and only Duvalier’s quick reactions saved him from castration. ‘When should Kraken be reporting in?’ snarled Richard, and the young soldier told him. Everything.

  ‘He suspects something,’ said Richard after the terrified boy had pretended to be the dead sergeant. ‘He has to. We’d better cut and run.’

  He meant it literally.

  He gave the order directly to the line watches. He could check what was happening on the bridges later - though quite frankly he did not want to at all. On his command, they each pulled down the handle on the side of the bright yellow disc which clasped the massive, unbreakable hawser attaching them to the ice.

  As soon as the red handles were pulled, bright laser beams, invisible within the bright casing, began to force themselves irresistibly and rapidly between the molecules of the black carbon fibre. The ropes fell back, pulling the cutters with them. The ropes connected to the iceberg had little elasticity, only that lent to them by the fact that the strands had been plaited round each other, and so they could hardly be said to have sprung back.

  At one moment the iceberg called Manhattan was tethered to six supertankers. The next it was free, running at thirteen knots, a little north of due east, while the tankers began to sail away.

  ~ * ~

  Kraken’s guardian helicopter, alerted by Gogol’s request for extra vigilance, noticed first. Such was the slowness of the whole proceeding, however, that it was not until the ship was pulling quite appreciably clear of the iceberg that they really believed their eyes. And by then it was too late. The situation was this. General Gogol’s last order had caused the two lead ships to turn north. The force exerted by these vessels was enough to swing the head of the iceberg round by four degrees, pulling it across the northern flow of the Guinea current and up out of the northernmost deep of the Guinea trench. Just as the ships cut themselves loose and the Hind guarding Kraken began to report in, the northernmost flank of Manhattan grazed the southernmost edge of the outwash of the River Niger.

  Far beneath the water, a cliff of solid ice swept up against a desert of submarine dunes. At first the soft silt yielded to the hard ice but all too soon Manhattan grazed up against the rock-solid lip
of the trench edge. The iceberg’s impetus was all to the north and east. The edge of the rock curved to the south. The sound of the glancing impact was overwhelming. The submarine cliff was smashed back and shattered. Cracks like bolts of lightning split the rock, racing northwards at the speed of sound.

  The iceberg rocked, tipping its flat top towards Nigeria. While the pilot was still talking into the handset of his radio, reporting to his general that Kraken seemed to be sailing away, a sort of earthquake overtook him and the whole surface of the ice seemed to heave beneath him. While he was still looking around in confusion, the helicopter simply tipped up and toppled slowly over the edge of the cliff. And, halfway through the report, screaming wordlessly as he fell, the soldier went with it.

  All the other helicopters stayed on the surface of the ice. They slid for a metre or two while the ice inclined northwards, but then they slowed to a stand. The incapacitating cacophony of sound began to echo sluggishly towards a kind of silence. The men picked themselves up, slowly dusted themselves off, and looked uncomprehendingly around. Then, one and all, with the exception of Illych Kizel, they reached for their handsets and began to report in.