A Grue Of Ice

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  Upton's face was alive. " Land! Thompson Island!"

  Helen turned her face away.

  " If it is the Meteor's base, I will know it," said Pirow. "

  You can't mistake the entrance and the headland."

  Walter screwed up his eyes, but the albatross was now

  out of sight. " That would be the way to go, sure, but how? There'

  s no wind and we're too weak to row."

  " Get up to the tiller, Wetherby," said Upton.

  " There is no way on her ..." I began.

  " There will be," he replied. " I'm going to row!" Without waiting, he went forward and returned with the bag he had salvaged from the factory ship. He filled the syringe carefully. We watched, fascinated. With Walter helping, he heaved up one of the big oars into position in the thole. Gripping the oar with his right hand, he took the hypodermic in his left and thrust the point into the muscles of his right. Quickly he changed hands and repeated the strange performance.

  " What the hell . . . ?" I said.

  " Caffeine," he said shortly. " Now get up to the tiller." "

  This is not the time to start giving yourself fancy drugs." He did not take his eyes off my face, but sat at the oar,

  clamping and unclamping his fingers. Then he did not seem to be able to open them any more.

  He grinned. " I'm going to row this boat to Thompson Island. Caffeine paralyses the muscles. I can't take my hands off the oars. They're going to stay there until we reach Thompson Island. Steer!"

  " Over there—where the albatross went?"

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  " Yes I "

  I clambered stiffly up to the tiller seat. The boat felt lop-sided with one oar, but I brought her head round towards the dark patch. The sun came up and turned the vast amphi-theatre of ice into a breathing panorama. The sea was blue-green and calm, and my eyes could scarcely tolerate the whiteness of the barrier. We were heading away from the nearest cliffs, which rose to full view, in the direction of a belt of fog which completely blanked off the eastern and southern shores of the barrier. The seal pup sported about the boat with a Tristan Knocker in his mouth.

  Pirow and Walter cooked more food, and Walter took a short trick at another oar but soon gave it up. Helen brought me some hot food and had some herself, but she

  looked deathly pale. Upton's stroke became weaker and weaker. Suddenly I felt a strong thrust underneath the boat.

  It took us quickly into the belt of fog, before I realised that the boat was in the grip of a powerful current. I felt the warmth first, and then the wetness of the fog. Upton, dragging the oar which he could not unclench, was hidden from view ; the fog was so thick that Helen, only a few feet away, became a murky outline. The current swept the boat on and on.

  Once Helen called to me in a frightened, disembodied voice to ask where we were going. The warmth was as unexpected as the darkness. I reached down cautiously and tested the water with my ungloved hand ; it too was warm, compared

  with the normal icy seas of the Southern Ocean.

  We broke out of the fog.

  Thompson Island lay before our eyes.

  I identified it immediately: the low, level east point like a Blue Whale's snout was unmistakable. I had seen it with my own eyes and I had studied Captain Norris' sketches of it.

  The entrance sloped away abruptly and to the west was the point Norris had called Dalrymple Head. But it was upon neither of these that our eyes fixed in wonder and awe, it was upon the giant glacier which capped—to use Norris' own words—

  the island like a nightmare caul. The strange colour made one automatically think of it as evil. It rose up two thousand feet sheer, its foot in the inner anchorage, which was still out of sight. It had none of the opaque whiteness and soft undertones of blue and green of the floating ice-continent which encircled the island and had aroused our wonder earlier : the caul was bottle-green and translucent to such a degree that one could see huge trapped boulders deep inside, its 201

  heart ; there was a tracery of white in a group about half-way up which looked as if it might have been the entombed skeletons of half a dozen Blue Whales. The baleful green gave it an inherent quality of malice, heightened by my realisation that the anchorage entrance of ragged basalt and pumice cliffs resembled the open jaws of a serpent. There was no sign of ice or snow on them. By contrast, the caul towered in arch-angelic glory and stretched away out of sight to the south.

  Upton, hampered by the oar, gazed speechlessly. His voice was thick when he gestured at the cliffs flanking the entrance. "

  Caesium! Caesium!"

  Striated and grooved with white, like the stripes on a zebra's flank, were the veins of priceless ore.

  I had never seen Upton so moved. The gaunt face was

  radiant under its patina of stubble, argyria and fatigue. "

  Mine!" he exclaimed. " All mine!"

  The strong current swept us in towards the point like driftwood.

  Pirow was smiling. The sight of Thompson Island had

  restored his morale. " The fleet is waiting for you, Herr Kapitan!"

  I turned to look at him. The boat was swept round the headland into a long fjord.

  " See!" he said.

  Canted against the northern bank of the anchorage was

  a liner. I did not need to see her name. That Clyde-built silhouette was as familiar to me as London Bridge. For months I had studied it—the streamlined funnel set further aft than was usual during the war, and the peculiar derricks forward. The liner's picture had hung in the chartroom of H.M.S. Scott. The liner's last agonised signal, outward bound to Melbourne in 1942, was fresh in my mind:

  " QQQ—QQQ—QQQ-45° South, 10° West—liner Kyle of Lochalsh—am being attacked by unknown ship."

  Before my eyes, in Thompson Island's harbour, lay the Kyle of Lochalsh.

  A little further down the fjord, half-beached, was the tanker Grönland. Rommel never knew that Kohler had won one of the Afrika Korp's battles in the frozen fastnesses of the Southern Ocean. The loss of fifteen thousand tons of aviation spirit and diesel oil she was carrying to the Middle East had reduced still further Britain's hold there. Gronland had vanished while under my charge. The tanker's heavy feeder 202

  hoses were still over the side. I saw now the source of Kohler's apparently unlimited supplies of fuel.

  Another of Kohler's victims was tied up alongside the Grönland, a Liberty ship whose deck cargo of tanks and lorries looked absurdly new in the bright light inside the fjord.

  She too had disappeared without trace far to the south of the Cape of Good Hope.

  They were my ships and Kohler's ships in the fjord.

  I shared neither Upton's elation nor Pirow's satisfaction, and my thoughts were reflected by the pain in Helen's eyes.

  The natural harbour would, I foresaw, be a perfect staging-post for aircraft travelling from Cape Town to Sydney via the South Pole, and a strategic base of the first order for flying patrol over the vital sea route round the Cape. But I felt a surge of despair at the sight of the caesium veins.

  Upton's personal battle had ended in triumph, but the world's struggle over this hidden island of incalculable wealth would end in chaos. Yet, I told myself as we were drawn further in to the fjord, Helen and I alone were still the repository of the secret of the island's position. I eyed Upton. If I could get hold of the Schmeisser .. .

  There were a score of other ships scattered about the anchorage. Some of the names I could read, others not.

  The beautiful Danish training sailing ship Kobenhavn was there: her disappearance in the Southern Ocean without trace before the war with a crew of sixty cadets had been a sea mystery as deep as the loss of the Marie Celeste. Near the Kobenhavn was the Berwick, one of the great teak fliers which had broken all records from Calcutta to London in the 1860s. A big iron-sided windjammer was broken in half across a reef. In addition, stacked like fragments of corpses in a mortuary, were ships' masts, teak and oaken timbers, figureheads, stanc
hions, cabin doors, big old-fashioned teak binnacles with Kelvin compasses and oil sidelights ; broken oars, harness casks, whole deck-houses ; a long mainyard pointed skywards as if it had been dropped from a plane, the footropes and gaskets still in position.

  Overwhelmed by the sight, I steered automatically for the far end of the fjord, where I could see jets of steam in the rocks, spurting from some underground volcanic source.

  The glacier was more impressive close up: where the tongue of the ice entered the water it was sharp, not smooth and rounded as one would expect from the wash and weathering 203

  of the current. It would be warm where the steam jets were, I told myself, and all of us needed warmth. Upton did not speak, but stared like a man in a dream at the caesium seams as we slid along with the current.

  Pirow waved as we passed the Gröniand. "Look, Herr Kapitan—it was you in H.M.S. Scott that made us slip those hoses and get away to sea so quickly."

  The Man with the Immaculate Hand. The fine ships were

  as much his victims as Kohler's.

  I brought the whaleboat into the shallows, sliding to a standstill against a rough beach of basalt and pumice. A jet of steam blew from a fissure in the rocks twenty feet above our heads. I seemed to be choking with warmth, and I pulled off my gloves. I jumped uncertainly over the side to secure the boat. As I felt land under my sea-boots, a wave of emotion and weakness almost overcame me. I threw a bight of rope round a rock to moor the boat. A tiny springtail—the wingless fly of Antarctica—settled on my hand. I had thought never to see a land creature again.

  I picked Helen up and carried her ashore, bringing the sleeping-bag for her to lie on. I had to assist Sailhardy.

  " Walter!" said Upton. " Bring me some hot water and see if we can get my hands loose." The palms must have been raw from the rowing, but he seemed oblivious of pain. " Take the Schmeisser, you bloody fool—I don't want Wetherby to get hold of it at this stage." His eyes were hard. " You won't be as lucky this time, Wetherby. The oil will have unfrozen by now in the gun."

  Pirow clambered out too, and stood next to me. He looked down the fjord. " Liebe Gott!" he said huskily. " It is good to be back!" There was pride, arrogance and a touch of triumph in his ashen face.

  The undamaged state of the ships—Kohler's victims--puzzled me. There had never been any hint from Kohler's signals in the German war records that he had used Thompson Island as his base. It was clear that Kohler had kept Pirow in the dark as to the name and position of this Southern Ocean base. The German sea fox had done the same to his own Oberkommado der Marine. In two years he had sent the High Command only half a dozen short messages listing his amazing successes. He, like Pirow, believed that while you kept off the air while raiding, you lived.

  " Did you send boarding parties and bring the ships in afterwards?" I asked Pirow.

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  He shook his head. " The Herr Kapitan Kohler was a sailor like yourself. He used what the Southern Ocean gave him. Why risk the Meteor in action when your ships would come to him here in the fjord?"

  " What do you mean?"

  " The current," replied The Man with the Immaculate Hand. " It is deep and powerful—you want to see what happens to a ship in its grip. It is no ordinary current, Herr Kapitan—you see the vessels it has brought in from the ocean to this graveyard."

  " A current is not that powerful."

  " No, Herr Kapitan, it is not. Further out it is a strong current which will bring a derelict in and all the sort of stuff you see here. But near Thompson Island it becomes a killer. It sweeps in past the entrance on the side of the fjord where we are now, and then . . . Look!" He pointed at the foot of the glacier. There was a great swirling eddy. "

  It seems to nosedive there. We lost a boat's crew trying to investigate it closely. On the other side of the fjord the counter-current is weak by comparison. The Herr Kapitan had his anchorage there, and he always entered the fjord on the counter-current side."

  " You mean, you just sat here . .."

  He held out his hands. " The ships came because I signalled them. Sometimes it was a fake distress call, sometimes . . ."

  he grinned—" an order from the officer commanding the South Shetlands Naval Force—you, in other words, Herr Kapitan Wetherby. It was merely necessary to bring them into the fog-belt, where the current becomes so powerful, and it did the rest. It brought them in like lambs to the slaughter."

  " The Kyle of Lochalsh was armed with six-inch guns," I said.

  He nodded across the fjord. " You have- not noticed Meteor's gun emplacement over there. We unshipped one of our 5.9 inch guns and mounted it—on that side so that we could cover the enemy as he was swept along this side of the fjord. We had every inch of the fjord taped for ranges. Resistance would have been suicide."

  I was filled with foreboding listening to Pirow's boasting.

  The weapons and victims of our war seemed so insignificant beside the potential in the rock seams above our heads.

  Walter was massaging Upton's hands with warm water. I

  carried Helen to the stream of warm, sulphur-smelling water where it cut through the pumice on its way to the fjord.

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  I shifted some lumps of pumice to make a support for her back.

  " What is my father going to do now?" she asked. My own anxiety was reflected in her voice.

  " He talked about ships—and here they are," I said. "

  But you can't sail away without a crew in any of them, even assuming that they are in any shape after all these years."

  " Listen!" she said.

  Pirow was talking animatedly. We were slightly higher than the boat where the stream began up the slope. " The Herr Kapitan Kohler thought the 5.9-inch gun in the emplacement was better technically than those Harwood had at the Battle of the River Plate," he enthused. " But Kohler always marvelled at the English rate of fire. That gun is automatic on the ranges—every inch of the fjord is tabulated. You simply can't miss."

  Upton got his hands free. He gave them a quick glance and then turned to Walter. " Could you load a gun like that?"

  Pirow interrupted. " There is no need to pick up the shells.

  There is a hoist which brings them right to the breech."

  " Christ!" said Walter. " All this sounds as if you're planning a war."

  " I've got my island, and I've got the means to defend it," went on Upton, stretching himself.

  " There's a big magazine under the gun," went on Pirow. "

  When Meteor put to sea, a gun crew was left behind—

  except the last time, in order to engage H.M.S. Scott. There are probably some small-arms, too."

  " Bruce!" whispered Helen. " It gets worse, not better.

  You must get to the radio and signal Thorsharnmer. I'm desperately afraid of what he is up to."

  Sailhardy came slowly over to us. " Did you hear, Bruce?" "

  Yes."

  " Will that gun be of any use after all this time?"

  Hope started into Helen's face. Sailhardy did not wait for my reply. " It must have a film of rust inside the barrel. If Upton tries to fire it, he'll blow himself to pieces."

  I shook my head. " If the gun had been on this side of the fjord, the warm side, I might have been hopeful. There aren't any warm springs over there. The temperature is polar near the glacier. Things don't rust in the dry Antarctic cold.

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  Just after the war the Americans found a shotgun at least fifty years old in a camp by the Ross Sea. The barrel was still bur-nished bright."

  Upton, Walter and Pirow came ashore and walked stiffly along the beach, Upton flexing his fingers.

  " Bruce!" said Helen eagerly. " Here is your moment!

  Look, they're all three wrapped up in what they're saying.

  The radio is in the boat. Signal Thorshammer!"

  " Be quick, boy!" Sailhardy exclaimed. " Watch that gun, for God's sake! I'll shout if they turn!"

  I raced, stumbling on the rough pumi
ce, to the whaleboat. I threw myself under the decking to get at the radio. I clicked over the switch. There was still some power left in the batteries. I fiddled for a moment with the tuning dials and took the first frequency which dropped into my mind-24 metres—

  Raider's frequency.

  " Dot-dot-dot—dash-dash-dash—dot-dot-dot!—SOS! SOS!

  I flicked over the receiving switch, holding one earpiece against my head and listening with my other ear for the tell-tale crunch of boots on the shingle.

  I cast round desperately. I wasn't a skilled operator like Pirow and probably the signal was weak. I must get through to Thorshammer, give our position, and warn her about the current and the gun.

  In my anxiety, my war-time code signal came to me.

  It was all I could think of.

  "GBXZ," I tapped.

  No reply, I switched frantically to the 18-metre band. "

  GBXZ—to all British warships."

  I clicked over. The reply was loud and clear.

  "DR. DR—am coming to your aid. Keep transmitting for D IF bearing. VKYI."

  "Thorshammer! Beware . .. life-raft . . ."

  I missed Sailhardy's shout. It was Walter who tore at me, sending the headphones spinning. Pirow was there too, clutching at me as if I had outraged his precious radio.

  Walter pulled me half out of the cubbyhole on to the gratings. I thrust him aside. He wasn't that strong yet.

  " He got off a message and the key is locked!" exclaimed Pirow. " God alone knows what he's said."

  Upton stood by the boat. " Have you switched it off?"

  Pirow nodded. He turned to me. " What did you say to the destroyer?"

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  " The hell with you," I retorted. "Anyway, Thorshammer is coming for you. She's got the bearing now she's been asking for so often."

  " Get in there," Upton told Pirow. " See what Thorshammer is saying. Call it out while we watch Wetherby."

  In a moment Pirow called. " I can't understand. She's saying GBXZ '. That is the British war-time code—' to all British warships'. And now—' Da—coming to your assistance '."