I made a lightning decision. " Lay the whaleboat alongside, Sailhardy! Come with me!"
Another shell screamed across the fjord from Upton's gun and burst on the old liner's superstructure. Thorshammer's twin Bofors, situated aft the steel latticed emergency conning position, chattered ineffectually. They couldn't bear on Upton's gun, and it showed what a sorry state her fire-control was in. Sailhardy laid the boat alongside the landward side of the destroyer. I scrambled over the low bulwarks. She had taken a frightful beating. There seemed to be bodies everywhere. The bridge was a shambles. Sailhardy passed me Helen's limp body. I guessed right that the wardroom had been turned into an emergency casualty station. I pushed past the orderlies and wounded men and put Helen down on the wardroom table, which was serving as an operating table. I did not wait for the doctor's astonished outburst. I pointed silently to the row of bullet-holes in her shoulder. He began to swear angrily, but I turned and raced back to Sailhardy on deck.
An officer was standing behind the forward turret, shouting.
Half his uniform jacket seemed to have been burned off his shoulders and his cap was gone. Dazed men dragged themselves towards what seemed to be the only orderly mustering-point on the ship, while others helped and half supported the wounded towards the wardroom companionway from which I had emerged. Thorshammer was afire aft, but the worst damage was above our heads on the bridge and fire-control.
No one took any notice of Sailhardy and me, except a young sub-lieutenant who stood on the steel wing of the emergency conning position towards the stern and shouted at us as we squeezed through a narrow opening between it and a deck boiler-room ventilator.
" Torpedoes . . ." I started to say to Sailhardy, but he pulled me forcibly to the deck as another shell came towards the stricken destroyer. It was a trifle high, however, and plunged through the twisted wreckage of the radar scanner, 216
bursting prematurely above the old liner. Her steel sides rang like a bell.
We sprinted for the quadruple torpedo-tubes on the port side facing across the fjord. Together we swung round the sawn-off snouts. The islander sighted them on the gun emplacement.
" Belay there!" I ordered.
He looked at me, astonished.
" Bring them to bear ten degrees astern—on the glacier," I added.
" Bruce . ."
The thunder of the great barrage of ice drowned the noise of the next 5.9-inch shell. The glacier-caul had started to split. The translucent bottle-green suddenly became pocked with white, like a car's windscreen shattering. Thousands of tons of ice started to move—but would they move quickly or far enough to stop Upton's murderous fire, I asked myself.
The answer lay under Sailhardy's hand.
" Bearing ten degrees astern," he said. " Target bears.
Glacier head bears—steady 1 "
" Fire one!" I ordered.
Sailhardy threw over the tipping lever. The sharp slap of the firing charge was lost in the thunder of the ice-barrage. The sibilant cylinder of death slipped into the water.
" Fire two!"
No need to tell Sailhardy to spread them to case the entire head of the glacier.
" Fire three!"
Then, " Fire four!"
No concussion reached us as the warheads burst against
the glacier head, the thunder of the ice swamping all sound.
Four columns of water rose like spouts from a Blue Whale in tribute to the islander's marksmanship. The glacier, now disintegrating, had clamped itself between two separate land masses, although Norris' sketches had shown only one.
Fissures ran up the ice cliffs like a boarding party, frosted white leaping to the summit of the green glacier. The ice wavered, hung, wavered, and then thousands of tons crashed down on to the gun emplacement.
I left Sailhardy looking at the debacle. I skirted the forward gun turret, from which the crew had emerged and were gazing in awe-struck silence at the opposite shore. The officer in charge seized me by the hand and started to exclaim 217
in Norwegian, gesturing towards the glacier head and the torpedo-tubes. I shook myself free of his congratulations and made my way to the crowded wardroom.
Helen was lying on the table, her eyes closed. The surgeon put the finishing touches to the bandages round her shoulder and armpit.
" Is she .
?" I started to say.
She smiled and opened her eyes at the sound of my voice.
The doctor smiled. " Not too serious—nothing vital has been touched," he said in English. " She has been very lucky indeed. It's a new one on me to have to attend a woman who has been shot up."
As I spoke to the doctor a man in uniform came over from a bunk. His head was in bandages and his left arm in a sling. " Why have the four-five stopped firing? Did that sonofabitch knock out the forward turret too? Why has everything stopped?"
I saw his rings of rank. " Captain Olstad?"
" Yes!" he snapped. " Who the hell are you? What is happening on deck?"
The doctor taped down the last of Helen's bandages. I picked her up to carry her to a bunk.
" It's quite a story, which I think you should hear," I said. " Don't worry, there won't be any more shells from the gun across the fjord."
The young sub-lieutenant I had seen on the emergency conning position clattered down the companionway, saluted, and spoke rapidly in Norwegian to Olstad, indicating me.
I put Helen down gently, but she clung to me. Olstad came and sat at the foot of the bunk. Helen propped herself against my shoulder.
" Who are you"' he demanded. " How do you and another civilian understand about firing torpedoes?"
I told him who I was. " The other civilian, as you call him, was once the finest torpedo-man afloat."
" Bruce," said Helen. " My father . . ." She looked round the crowded wardroom, overheated now by the steam tubes
which ran round it and the crowd of men who lay, sat or stood waiting their turn with the doctor. A boy minus a hand sobbed hysterically and a seaman, hideously burnt about the eyes, screamed through the morphia which had been hastily administered.
" Oh God!" she exclaimed. "These are the living, but 218
how many are dead? Bruce darling, why is the gun silent?
What . . . ?"
" The glacier started to topple on to the emplacement," I said. " To stop the slaughter here, I hastened it with four torpedoes."
She hid her face.
Olstad said savagely: " Who were the murderers who crippled my ship and killed my men without provocation?
In God's name, why was it done—it is not war I "
" Have you ever heard of Thompson Island?" I asked. Olstad's face reflected his incredulity. "Thompson Island! You mean .
. . ?"
" Exactly," I said. " This is Thompson Island. The man who opened fire on you had an obsession about it."
I told him how Upton had come to Tristan and had implicated me in his schemes when he found out I had Norris'
chart. Olstad's face went hard when I told him how Walter had shot down the seaplane, and how The Man with the Immaculate Hand had strung him along with the faked signals. While I spoke, the doctor and his orderlies dressed, bandaged and drugged the wounded, who were laid on mattresses on the floor. Olstad nodded in silent wonder when I explained the mystery of The Albatross' Foot and how it had caused the break-up of the glacier across the fjord. He looked keenly at me when I said I had sighted Thompson Island during the war, and shook his head over the rejection by the Admiralty and the Royal Society of my discovery of light refraction and its bearing on the true position of Thompson Island.
Sailhardy came in and his face lighted to see Helen sitting up.
Olstad looked from Sailhardy to me in unconcealed admiration. " We Norwegians have always loved a voyage into the unknown. We have preserved the Kon Tiki raft in a museum. If ever another boat deserves to be kept, it is your whaleboat. I find it hard to believe that anyone could have made a trip like that in
an open boat in such a storm and survived. With your permission, I would like to take the whaleboat back to Norway with me. To-morrow we must have a ceremony in honour of Thompson Island. We
will hoist flags and fire guns."
I made my decision. " Captain Olstad: there is a function which you as captain are empowered to perform. I ask that it should have priority over any ceremonial."
219
The Norwegian looked surprised at my tone. " The safety of my ship and the welfare of my crew is my first considera-tion, I am afraid, Captain Wetherby. Any request must be subsidiary to that. Thorshammer is a job for a dockyard. It will take months to make her seaworthy. Here I am, stuck in an unknown harbour, thousands of miles from anywhere...."
" You have overlooked the four catchers," I replied. "
Signal them to come here. I'll give you the position. Warn them to approach from the south-east, like Kohler used to do, otherwise they'll be in trouble at the entrance to the fjord.
You can leave a skeleton crew to look after Thorshammer while the catchers take us to Cape Town. You can arrange assistance from there."
" That is excellent," he said. He grinned suddenly. " It is going to take a hell of a lot of explaining, though. What is your request, Captain Wetherby?"
I took Helen's hand in mine. " You are entitled to perform a marriage service, are you not?"
Olstad's face broke into a boyish grin. " By heavens, Captain ! —you and this lady?"
Helen's eyes were luminous as Parry's Arc. At my words, she sat upright, the sea-leopard coat falling from her wounded shoulder, leaving it and her neck bare.
Olstad shook us both by the hand. " This will be good for Thompson Island! A wedding to mark its rediscovery!
It will be good for the morale of my crew, too. There is still some sad work to be done burying those poor lads lying on deck."
A massive peal of thunder, more distant now, shook the ship as the ice-barrage continued to the south of the island.
Olstad's face went tense, but relaxed when he realised it was not gunfire. " I would like to hear about your trip in your own words," he said to Sailhardy.
I interrupted wryly, " What he really wanted was to sail from Bouvet to Cape Town."
" The hardship, the storm . . ." Olstad started to say.
Then he shrugged. " Upton must have been mad rather than obsessed to have done all this merely in order to discover one useless little island."
A cold stab went through me remembering the veins of caesium ore. Something of what I was thinking must have been in the minds of Helen and Sailhardy, too. They both watched me as I stayed silent. Who, I asked myself, except Upton with his highly specialised knowledge shared by per-220
haps four other scientists in Sweden and Cambridge, could identify the veins for what they were—pollucite, Upton had called it—the bearers of the world's most priceless metal?
Who among ordinary scientists was capable of placing pollucite and caesium? If we kept silent, who would know—I myself had seen a score of islands in the Southern Ocean streaked white from other causes. The savage current and perpetual fog-belt made access itself to Thompson Island hazardous into the bargain. Once the first flush of its rediscovery had passed, would Thompson Island not sink back into oblivion again—provided the secret of the caesium were kept?
" Useless?" I echoed.
Olstad shrugged again. " Perhaps it has some value as a harbour for whalers, but what else, with the risks? Bouvet is close, but few catchers use its anchorage."
I was about to say something about global strategy, the importance of the Cape of Good Hope sea route, and flights over the South Pole, but I saw the look in Helen's eyes.
" Yes," I said slowly. " Thompson Island seems to have only a certain limited value as a whalers' harbour."
Sailhardy inclined his head as if listening to the distant ice.
Helen reached up and touched my arm. " Old John
Wetherby would have liked it that way," she said.
221
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