A Grue Of Ice

by Geoffrey Jenkins

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  We did not have to wait. The night was torn by a splendour of white light. The incandescent burst was man-made.

  Thorshammer had also seen what I had glimpsed. She had promised to use starshells.

  The great iceberg was in two dimensions. It must have been two or three miles long and a thousand feet high.

  From Antarctica's bridge it was strange and beautiful under the slowly-descending parachute of the starshell. Towards its left-hand extremity, as if superimposed forward of the main body of the tabular berg, was a gigantic anvil soaring nearly its entire height ; it seemed almost disembodied from the rest. Disembodied in colour, too : anchored for half a mile in a solid platform over which the sea spouted, it was deep green ; where the blade of the anvil flared it was yellow, almost amber at the summit. The island of ice embayed itself near the right-hand cliff and I could see in the ephemeral light a tiny lake of blue water, dominated by fluted, grooved cliffs on either side. The weather face of the stupendous berg was hard and clear ; the lee was blurred by a tumble of disintegrating spicules of ice, feathering their way on the gale.

  " My God!" exclaimed Upton. Then he remembered Thorshammer. "She'll see us! Turn away! Turn away!"

  " No," I retorted. " She's on the other side of the berg.

  It will block out anything this side."

  " She can't miss us with her radar," Upton said.

  Pirow disagreed. " That berg is breeding enough radar angels to fox anyone."

  " Radar angels?" he asked.

  " The ice, especially when it is disintegrating, produces all sorts of unaccountable echoes on a radar," he said. " We call them angels."

  The starshell was doused. Darkness clamped down.

  Helen was still next to me. " It is the sort of thing one remembers all one's life. I didn't know icebergs came so far north."

  " It was probably ten times that size off Cape Horn," I said.

  From the starboard wing of the bridge I stared astern. Of Thorshammer there was no sign, not even a funnel glow by which to pick her up in the blackness. I came back and shut the window.

  " Signal the catchers with the Aldis," I told Pirow. " Steer .

  . ." I checked in my mind—" steer one hundred degrees.

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  Eight knots." Helen was shivering. Sailhardy spun the wheel.

  My order had told him everything.

  " Steady as she goes."

  " Aye, aye, sir."

  Antarctica plunged southwards.

  " One hundred degrees," said Helen. " Destination?

  I looked deep into her eyes.

  " Bouvet Island."

  5. The Island that Never Was

  For three days Antarctica and the four catchers fought their way to the south through the storm. Now, on the fourth morning, the wind had dropped, but there was a tremendous swell running from the south-west. The heart of the gale had passed to the north and east, and was on its way to spread snow on the distant high plateaux of the South African mainland. I was on the bridge, and Sailhardy at the wheel. A growler stood out on the starboard bow. The four catchers formed a ragged rearguard to the factory ship. Nearest was Walter's Aurora. She seemed to ride better than the others.

  She stuck her bow, blunt and aggressive like a boxer's nose, into the swell. A tarpaulin masked the deadly purpose of the harpoon-gun forward. She sank down on our port beam as if kneeling to the plunging factory ship, and took it green up to the cluster of winches below the bridge. All I could see was her mast-head above the rollers. I watched the whip of the long flexible mast, which looked like an outsize fishing rod because of its cables to the harpoon. Water poured off her deck in triangular streams as she rose, channelled by the three-cornered bollards anchoring the whaling cables.

  The sea had changed from the clear blue of Tristan's waters to a dirty-threatening grey. The fleet was now well to the south of shipping routes and striking across the path of the Roaring Forties. The heavy top-hamper of the factory ship, the four massive gantries, the big bollards by the rails, and the heavy steel cables supporting the masts, were drenched in spray. A Wandering Albatross whose wing-span I guessed to be twelve feet, tipped the wind effortlessly from under his wings, and hung above the stern like a white boomerang. His presence copyrighted the South. Of the other three catchers, Chimay lay out to starboard, and Crozet and Kerguelen, 66

  further away, gave me on the bridge no more than an occasional glimpse of the thick winch wires and lashing blocks which reached almost to the height of their crow's-nests while they steamed beam-on to the seas.

  " Someone built that ship good," remarked Sailhardy.

  " Smith's Dock Co., Middlesbrough," I said absently. "

  They build the best."

  My mind was not on Aurora's seaworthiness, although professionally I admired the way the rounded bows of the catcher came up and their flare fought the sea. One moment her cruiser stern plunged so deep I wondered if it would ever come up again ; the next, she shook her whole fifteen-foot depth free in an explosion of spray. The wicked handles of the harpoon-gun stuck out of the weathered tarpaulin, like death in hand cuffs.

  I was worried: after the departure from Tristan and the fleet's successful evasion of Thorshammer, Upton had taken over command from me, despite his assurances before we had left the anchorage, with Bjerko playing stooge to him.

  He had immediately altered the course to one which was causing me the gravest concern. Upton had also been asking questions about the charts I had mentioned at our first meeting. At first his probings had been guarded, but now they were more open and persistent.

  The exhilaration of dodging Thorshammer had given way in my mind to gnawing fears about my complicity in Upton's schemes. Nor had those doubts been lessened by Pirow's smooth radio deception of the Norwegian warship and Upton's refusal to tell the other skippers except Walter that Thorshammer was hot on our trail. We were now striking the fringe of the wild seas where I would have to seek the other prong of The Albatross' Foot, and the sight of the great seas rolling up from the ice continent dampened my first flush of enthusiasm, despite the success of the Tristan escape. It seemed an almost impossible task to seek to find anything in an ocean as savage as this.

  My apprehension had not been helped by Sailhardy. Two

  days out from Tristan he had told me that the flensing crews spent their time playing cards 'tween decks, and that no attempt was being made to get the factory ship shipshape for the impending record catch. He maintained that Upton's interest in me centred on the old chart in my oilskin case, so that I had brought the chart up from my cabin to study through the long hours of watch at night. My own suspicions 67

  revolved round some part-knowledge Pirow and I might share from our wartime operations, and I thought Upton was aiming to dovetail the two interrelated pieces of knowledge held separately by Pirow and myself, once we got to Bouvet.

  Helen, too, remained a mystery to me. On the few occasions she had appeared on the bridge she had been even more distant and withdrawn than before. Her questions to me were, I felt, consciously professional regarding weather, but I had noticed a decided uneasiness in her as the fleet neared colder waters.

  Now, this morning, as I stood on the bridge shortly after sunrise, my doubts crystallised. I had gone below to my cabin during the night, and although I could not pin down anything specific, I felt it had been searched. I had the old chart on the bridge. The oilskin bag, which served as a chart-case, was almost as I had left it—but not quite. It was one of those indefinable things—an awareness, more than a fact, that it was not as I had left it.

  I pulled the folded square of parchment from the inner pocket of my thick reefer jacket. It crackled as I unfolded i t , t o s t u d y i t o n c e a g a i n t o t r y a n d f a t h o m U p t o n ' s objective.

  " For God's sake, Bruce!" Sailhardy exclaimed. " Put that damn thing away! What if Upton or Pirow come here?"

  " You're seeing shadows, Sailhardy," I said. " This old thing simply can't mean what
you think it might. Neither Upton nor Pirow will come to the bridge as early as this."

  " Take the wheel a moment," he said. While I did, he locked the bridge doors leading to Upton's cabin and the radio office.

  " We've been over this a score of times in the past three days," I said. " I'm damned if I can see what an old—and inaccurate—map of Bouvet Island in 1825 has to do with a so-called whaling expedition in 1961."

  The old parchment was intersected by wavy lines, with a

  shape like a Chinese maple leaf in the centre. Both margins were marked with tiny crosses. From the right-hand top corner, meandering irregularly towards the maple-leaf shape in the middle, was a line. Below the line and opposite one of the quaint marginal crosses which said 54 degrees South, were three dots, and a little further down another dot which was labelled " rock ". Is novelty had long since been lost upon me.

  The chart had come to me shortly after the war when the firm of Wetherbys had eventually folded up.

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  It was the log and track chart of the Wetherby sealer Sprightly, which had rediscovered Bouvet Island in 1825.

  Her master, Captain George Norris, had not only charted the island, but had also sketched it.

  " That's not all, and you know it," retorted Sailhardy. "

  And I think Upton guesses that too."

  " You mean Thompson Island?" I said derisively.

  " Yes," replied Sailhardy. " I mean just that—Thompson Island."

  My thoughts went back to the day upon empty day I had trailed up and down the great staircase at the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society near the Albert Hall in London. The days upon days spent sitting outside someone's office at the Admiralty, waiting to be fobbed off and sent to yet another office. The stale smell of the Greenland kayak on the Geographical Society staircase was synonymous in my mind with the endless questioning, my endless frustration, among the disbelieving experts. They did not want to believe, any more than the Admiralty wanted to believe, what I had seen.

  I wondered if my innermost reason for accepting Upton's offer to go to Bouvet had been less of a desire on my part to nail down The Albatross' Foot and more an attempt to vindicate myself. The Royal Geographical Society and the Admiralty had both said, leave it alone, leave it alone.

  When Captain Norris had rediscovered Bouvet Island, after it had been lost for nearly a century, he had also found something Bouvet had not: an island fifteen leagues, or forty-five miles, north-north-east of Bouvet. Captain Norris positioned it. His own original log lay open in front of me.

  Thompson Island had never been found again—officially.

  Captain Norris' discovery provoked the liveliest con-troversy for over a century and a quarter. Nations have lavished millions on ships specially equipped to find Thompson Island. Ahead of the field were the Norwegians, who specifically explored the seas round Bouvet in the late 1920s under the great Lars Christensen. The British R.R.S. Discovery searched—Thompson was not found. Before that German, American and French expeditions had likewise failed.

  Sailhardy took his eyes from the compass in front of him.

  It was fully a minute before he spoke. " You are the only living man to have seen Thompson Island."

  " Yes," I said. " But there's no need to dramatise it like 69

  that. I know I saw an island as we went into action against the Meteor. It was near Bouvet. No one will believe I sighted land. I was told the same thing as Captain Norris when Thompson could not be found again—either I had seen a big iceberg and mistaken it for land, or else it was simply water sky."

  " Yellowish reflected light over a big shelf of ice," murmured Sailhardy. " An Antarctic man like yourself doesn't make that sort of mistake."

  " No," I said. " If I were one of the catcher skippers, I would like to have used a very rude phrase to the armchair critics who rejected what I had to say. Curious . . they said almost the same to Captain Norris. The Admiralty said he'd seen a large iceberg, and the streaks which he described on the cliffs were simply barnacles."

  Sailhardy looked at me reproachfully. " You know the history of Thompson Island minutely, you know how great

  sailors from Sir James Clark Ross to Lars Christensen have searched for Thompson Island and failed, and yet you deliberately play it down in relation to Upton. It ranks with the island where Sir Francis Drake sheltered the Golden Hind off Cape Horn and which has never been seen again, as one of the greatest of sea mysteries."

  " The vital phrase is, in relation to Upton," I said. " He is neither a sailor nor an explorer."

  " No," replied Sailhardy. " He's got a flashy act as a modern-day buccaneer."

  " That's not all," I said. " Underneath he is ruthless!"

  " He's after Thompson Island," said Sailhardy doggedly.

  I shook my head. " If he'd wanted to discover Thompson Island, he would not have gone about it in this hole-and-corner way," I said. " A man in his position could telephone a London newspaper and say he was endowing a special expedition to search for the great ocean mystery, Thompson Island, etcetera, etcetera. There would be no lack of takers.

  You don't have to string a fleet of catchers along with you, anyway, to look for an island. One ship would do."

  " Keep that chart out of the way, that's all I ask," said the islander.

  " What possible value could Thompson Island have to Upton?" I went on. " I have seen it. It's simply the tip of an undersea mountain range jutting out into the worst seas in the world. There's nowhere like it anywhere. Gales, snow, ice, gigantic seas, day in, day out, year in, year out."

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  " He wants that log," said Sailhardy.

  " Take a look, I assure you there's nothing."

  He looked at me strangely. " You are the only living man to have seen Thompson Island. There are only three others in history. One of them was Captain Norris."

  I smiled at his earnestness. " One of the three was Francis Allen, an American sealer who started a line of islanders on Tristan—and you are of that line."

  Thompson Island was the Wetherbys', I told myself. It was the old John Wetherby's because his favourite captain had discovered it for him—and lost it to the world ; it was mine, the last of the Wetherbys, because, I had found it again after four generations, or very nearly, since it had slipped away into the ice and fog with the same spectre-like elusive-ness as it had done with Norris. Sailhardy was in it, too, and I could almost recall by heart the deposition made to the Franklin Institute by the man with whom Sailhardy's great-grandfather had sailed: " Captain Joseph Fuller, of New London, now (1904) lighthouse-keeper at Stonington, served in the United States Navy during the Civil War and afterwards repeatedly went sealing and sea elephant hunting in the Antarctic—in 1893, in the Francis Allen, he saw Bouvet Island, and he saw Thompson Island bearing about north-east from Bouvet but he could not land on either on account of the ice, wind and fog." Joseph Fuller named his ship Francis Allen after his friend and mate Francis Allen. Only I had seen Thompson since.

  Sailhardy went tense. His keen ears had heard someone coming. He jerked his head at the wheel. " Take it!" he hissed. " Give me that damn thing!" Before I could object, he folded the log of the Sprightly and thrust it inside his windbreaker.

  With equal swiftness, he unlocked the doors.

  He was just in time. Upton came through. He looked curiously at me. " Are you the quartermaster as well as the captain, Bruce?"

  I shrugged. " We may need two men at the wheel, the way we're going."

  Something was eating into him. He was morose, pre-

  occupied. " What the hell do you mean?"

  " This fleet is putting its nose into trouble—big trouble,"

  I replied. Sailhardy took the wheel again.

  " If you mean you're afraid of one little fisheries protection destroyer . . ."

  " I'm afraid of the biggest destroyer there is—ice," I said.

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  " I must know where Thorshammer is, and what course she
is steering. Our course is dead wrong. I want to get to the north."

  Upton's face went pink. " You'll stay on this course, and keep out of the way of the Thorshammer. Pirow's last D/F

  bearing on her showed we were steering diverging courses.

  We should be out of range of her seaplane."

  " Pirow's bearing was two days ago," I said. " Anything could have happened since."

  Upton picked up the bridge phone. " Carl! Bridge! At once. Bring Bjerko with you." He came back to me. " So you're frightened of a little weather—the great Captain Wetherby?"

  " Yes, I am," I replied, "—when I am steering directly into the heart of the atmospheric machine which provides the energy for the storms of the Roaring Forties."

  " Nonsense!" snapped Upton. " Walter agrees with me

  —it will be stormy, but you are well used to that."

  " Listen," I said. " I originally set course, after we had given Thorshammer the slip at Tristan, to approach Bouvet from the north. Pirow got his D/F bearings on Thorshammer. I wanted to stay just beyond radar range, but you put her on this course in order to approach Bouvet from the south and west. I say it is suicide."

  " Thorshammer has a seaplane," retorted Upton. " Don't forget that."

  " I'd like to see anyone take off in the kind of storm we've had," I replied. " Thorshammer's only got an old HE 114 for searching—Pirow heard that over the air. Its radius is not much more than a hundred and fifty miles anyway."

  Pirow and the gauche Captain Bjerko came to the bridge.

  " Carl," said Upton, " have you got a bearing on Thorshammer?"

  Pirow shook his head. " This part of the world is hell for radio. Thirty years ago Lars Christensen found that Bouvet was a radio ' dead-spot ', as we call it. I can't get any good signals from Thorshammer."

  Upton was edgy. " You mean, you can't get enough of her sending for a D/F bearing?"

  Pirow's lip curled. " I can get a bearing if a ship sends eleven letters. I proved it to the German Decryption Service."

  " So you don't know what course Thorshammer is steering?" "

  No."

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  I tried to cash in on Upton's nervous uncertainty. " Even this big factory ship isn't good enough to stand up to what we're heading for."