The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Richard looked at it for a minute, then he walked out of the cold store and gently closed the door. Moments later he was on the bridge, trying not to look too closely at the exhausted faces there. ‘Bill,’ he said to the radio officer, ‘get me Heritage Mariner in London. I must speak to Sir William. Most urgent. When I’ve talked to him, I’ll want to talk to my wife.’ He looked grimly around the room. ‘Then I’m afraid we’re in for a busy night, gentlemen. We must go through this ship again in microscopic detail. Jamie Curtis was murdered with a Bowie knife. That woman from the poster has definitely been aboard this ship and even if she’s no longer here, you can bet your life she’s left a bomb behind.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Day Eleven

  Saturday, 29 May 08:00

  The sense of freedom was overpowering. Robin had not realised how oppressive the atmosphere on Atropos was becoming. The exhilaration of being off the ship was so intense that it more than overcame the fatigue of a late and sleepless night. And the morning was utterly glorious. Clear and quite calm, for all that a little wind kept gusting insistently into her face and threatening to refrigerate her nose. The sea itself was as playfully restless as the air — not enough movement to disturb the purposeful thrust of the lifeboat as it explored westwards along the northern edge of the ice barrier, but more than enough to break up the thin ice which had formed overnight. With the low ice cliffs to the port and thin ice rubbing against the starboard quarter and breaking into wide white circles like enchanted lily pads, the lifeboat seemed to be sailing through fairyland. It was travelling with a serious purpose, however.

  Richard’s exploration eastwards yesterday evening had showed conclusively that there was no real chance of rescue from that direction. No real hope of rescue at all, unless they could find a break in the ice barrier to the west. But Robin’s westward exploration, following in the footsteps of some of her Viking heroes, was more than a search for rescue. She had every intention of carrying out the plan she had first mentioned to Ann Cable all those fraught hours ago. She was looking for any formation in the ice which might be used as a slipway. Ideally she wanted a shelving beach which slid down to the waterline but remained well supported beneath the surface with a depth of ice strong enough to take some of Atropos’s weight. Fully laden, too. She was prepared to move the cargo around, but she did not want to unload the ship and then load it up again. That process, independently of the time taken to repair the propeller, would use up more than a day. Fixing the propeller, if it could be done, or replacing it, if that could be done, was bound to take at least forty-eight hours. And something told her that three full days was more time than she actually had to play with.

  The atmosphere of gloom which the brilliance of the morning had begun to dispel returned. She could not shake off the feeling that there was something out there. Something even more threatening than the problems which she already knew about. Was it the thing — the force, the entity — that kept the collision alarm ringing so mysteriously while registering on none of the other instruments? Could there possibly be something out there solid and threatening enough to alarm the automatic system, yet hardly visible to the weather satellites and too insubstantial to show up as a contact on the radar bowl itself? Or was it just some formless feeling of doom engendered by the situation she found herself in? She was in command of a ship which was incapable of going anywhere faster than dockside manoeuvring speed. A ship overcrowded with two crews and trapped beyond immediate help. A ship with one dead man lost and another dead man aboard, whose condition made it clear, in spite of the lack of anything tangible from her interviews last night, that there was something sinister and illegal going on. A ship laden with potentially dangerous cargo which had a hidden fortune in drugs somewhere in the work or accommodation areas and which was also under threat of destruction by terrorists who may well have placed a bomb aboard.

  Part of her earlier sense of relief arose simply from the fact that she was no longer close to such a disturbingly explosive situation. But she knew well enough that she would have to face it and sort it out. She was no shirker and the thought of running away had not occurred to her. If the terrorist threat was real and they were all destined to go the way of poor old Dan Williams, then so be it. She would be working her hardest to find a way out for everybody right up to the moment of detonation. But she had no vision of ultimate failure. She was nobody’s martyr. Right at the foundation of her character, she was utterly confident of her ability to get Atropos and all aboard her safely back to port.

  Distant gunshots brought her back to reality with a start. Her hand tightened on the tiller and the boat veered to grind quietly along the crystalline verticals, showering the others with feathery ice crystals.

  ‘That sounded like gunfire,’ said Ann.

  ‘Difficult to tell out here, miss,’ said Sam Larkman. ‘Could have been ice cracking. I bet there’s quite a sea-full of floes up north of here. Out beyond that fog barrier.’ He nodded towards the north-western horizon, his movements, as always, bird-like and precise.

  ‘Didn’t know you was a man of the frozen north, Sam,’ said Joe Edwards, ribbing his companion with gentle friendship.

  ‘Yeah, he’s a proper what d’you call it — Nanook,’ supplied Errol, cheerfully joining in the joke, though the big Afro-Caribbean was feeling the cold more than the rest of them and had been quietly reserved so far.

  ‘I don’t know,’ supplied LeFever. ‘I’ve been north, in Canada. Up around Hudson Bay. I guess I’ve heard most of the sounds ice can make.’

  ‘So?’ asked Sam who, unlike the rest of the crew, seemed to hold the big North American in scant regard. ‘So that still sounded like a —’

  A flock of seabirds exploded into the sky low above them in full flight, screaming and beating panicked wings. Robin jumped again and once more the forward quarter of the boat ground along the electric-green glow of the vertical ice wall. The sound it made was lost in the thunder of wings and the madness of the calling. There must have been several hundred, a mixture of species, sizes and sounds. But not of colours: they were all black and white. From the elegant length of the arctic terns to the comical puffin-like plumpness of the little auks, the screaming of the skuas to the keening of the kittiwakes, it was utterly overpowering. All the more so because these were the first living things they had seen in over a week. As suddenly as they had come, they were gone, leaving the crew of the lifeboat bewildered and disorientated.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ asked Ann, her voice sounding far away in ears still ringing.

  ‘From the ice barrier?’ suggested Errol.

  ‘No,’ said Sam decisively. ‘They came from the north, not the south.’

  ‘Then how did they get so close?’ asked Errol, his round eyes darting everywhere, as though their return might be something to be feared.

  ‘Out of the mist,’ said Robin. ‘Haven’t you noticed how it’s been creeping down on us?’

  ‘That’s not so strange,’ said Joe, in his slow, considered way. He screwed up his wise, lined face as though he was squinting — a sign that he was thinking. ‘These sort of conditions, up here. All it takes is a warm current in the air or the water.’

  ‘Or something very cold,’ added LeFever. ‘But you’re right, Joe. A mist is not so unusual in calm weather up here and that sound must have been ice cracking, not gunfire.’

  ‘We’d better get on then,’ said Robin. ‘Our compass may not be too accurate up this near the Pole. I can navigate along the ice barrier if I have to, but I don’t really want to get caught up in too thick a fog. And besides ...’ She let it trail off. None of the others seemed to notice the last bit of her speech so she just let it lie. This mist was very solid, very dark. It was more than some warm wind or some cold current. It was the outskirts, she suspected, of the black smoke which had been bearing down on them out of the north-west. Unlike LeFever, she had never been in the far north, but she had read and studied the writings of men who had. And, although sh
e couldn’t pin it down, she knew that black smoke meant something up here in polar and near-polar latitudes. Oddly enough, she was more worried about that than about sounds which resembled gunfire and flocks of birds which appeared and disappeared like magic.

  The morning progressed without further incident. The mist remained between them and the northern horizon on the right hand. Robin kept a weather eye upon it but it seemed to be coming no closer, though it was hard to tell just how far away in fact it was. The eye was tempted into the heart of it and what seemed to be a surface, a beginning to the mist wall, more often than not turned out with further thought just to be that part where it thickened, deep behind the first ghostly fingers of it.

  Most of her concentration, however, was focused on her left. The cliffs of the ice barrier were becoming lower and lower the further west they went. After three-quarters of an hour, they came to a slight southward curve of ice shore. They rounded a low headland and seemed to have reached a wide, shelving bay. The ice on their left fell back as though it had been scooped out. The cliffs fell back also, though they were little higher than dunes at this point.

  The water in the little bay was strange and oily, oddly coloured. In front of them, at the heart of the curve, it was black as though the blue through which they had been pushing was a shallow which had suddenly sunk to abyssal depth. So absolute was the change of colour that it was unsettling. Uncharacteristically, Robin was almost nervous of allowing the lifeboat to cross that inky water, as though she feared it would be sucked down. Or pulled down by something monstrous hiding in the blackness. But it was really only a trick of the light, the pitch at the heart of the lagoon existing only in contrast to the colour around it. For here the ice shelved out below the surface and the brightness of the late morning light struck down to catch the increasingly submerged crystal and dance upon its dazzling facets in a rainbow made exclusively of blue and green. No white light here, all the reds and oranges and yellows gone to warmer climes of earlier or later hours. Here were only the greens, blues, indigoes and violets. The white thrust of the ice slid down like any beach until the washed silk of it was marked by the first wave of lightest aquamarine. Then stage by stage and shade by shade it sank, flanked by malachite and beryl, shadowed with lapis and turquoise, until the last pale fangs of it reached out, emerald, over depths of sapphire and cobalt and, immediately, jet black.

  ‘This looks like the place,’ said Ann.

  ‘Well worth checking out,’ agreed LeFever, and Robin nodded.

  It seemed impossible, but the lifeboat’s wake across that midnight pool was white and foaming. It spread out in a measured vee across the tranquil water until it disturbed the shaded gradations in the beaches to east and west.

  The slope before them seemed so gentle that Robin risked running the lifeboat’s bow directly up onto it, and such was the momentum of the little craft that it slid well up the slope. Joe and LeFever were able to leap out easily onto dry ice and pull the boat up still further. All of them climbed out without getting their feet wet, and it was easy enough to drop the little anchor into a dry rivulet and leave the craft securely held.

  After her experience with Timmins and the ice cave, Robin was particularly wary of the ice. She looked first at the ‘ground’ beneath her feet, trying to make sure it was safe and solid. It certainly looked so; it resembled nothing more than the sort of icy slope she would spend hours perfecting as a child. Snow impacted and polished until it was white almost-ice, perfect for sliding and tobogganing at breakneck speeds. She almost expected the black rock of Cold Fell’s grounds to be just beneath the surface. Lost in these thoughts, she walked forward, unaware that the others had gone on ahead, much less wary than was she. After the sound of the birds, the relative quiet had returned. The wind was not strong enough to make much sound, though it was beginning to intensify now. The sea was too quiet even to make the floes clash or the waves roll, and, for all that it resembled a beach, the bay had no actual floor or bed to make the waves tumble into surf at the waterline. The quiet was utterly primeval in its intensity. Just the timeless whisper of wind over curved ice and the sibilance of wavelets not quite breaking as they slid up and down the frozen shore.

  The others had stopped walking once they reached the low crest of the ice dune, and they stood along the crestline, as black as the water in the heart of the lagoon, silhouetted against the rolling plain beyond. From water to ridge crest, the slope rose about ten feet in twenty yards, then, like white foam frozen in ripples at a cliff foot, it dipped the same amount in the same distance perhaps five times, then rose again, and rose and rose. It was not a particularly high cliff, no more than fifty feet, but it was sheer and solid and looked as impenetrable as the Beardmore Glacier, a world away to the south.

  ‘What d’you think, Captain?’ asked Sam, quietly. And it was fortunate that he had not raised his voice, for the dead-white surfaces a hundred yards away picked up his voice and echoed it, each repetition building on the sound until it reached an almost deafening pitch.

  The six of them looked at each other in surprise at first, and then in horror. The bay had looked quite promising to Robin. As long as the ice was solid, it seemed about right and the slope of the beach fine. Ideally she would have preferred something longer with steeper sides, perhaps even with a cliff nearer to one side to make anchorage of the beached vessel easier, but it would have done at a pinch. This strange echo, however, made it totally unsuitable.

  At last the echoes died. ‘Do you think that would happen with every noise?’ whispered Ann, glancing nervously at the cliff. She turned her face towards the ice on the word ‘every’ and the frozen facets picked it up.

  ‘Every ... Every ... EVERY ... EVERY ...’ said the ice, booming the whisper out until the sound pounded at them like fists.

  Robin gestured and they turned to walk back down to the boat. Once they were off the ridge, going back down the slope, she dared to try an answer. ‘It would have been okay. But we’re going to be pretty noisy, what with heaving and hauling and winching, not to mention hefting propellers about and cutting and hammering and welding. I’d hate to hear what that echo made of a couple of big hammers trying to straighten out a sheet of buckled copper.’

  ‘Or of a gunshot,’ added LeFever, clearly still worried about the sound.

  ‘It was the ice,’ insisted Sam. ‘Who would be firing guns up here? Where would anyone be to fire any guns?’

  ‘And what would they be firing at?’ demanded Joe, only to have this question answered immediately and unexpectedly.

  Three polar bears abruptly heaved themselves out of the water immediately beside the lifeboat and came pounding up the slope of the ice towards them. The bears were so close and the sight of them was so unexpected that perhaps shock added to the general perception, but they seemed to be massively huge. Their bodies, covered in slick ivory fur made as smooth as otter pelts by the moisture running off them, seemed incredibly muscular and powerful. Their heads were wide between the laid-back ears behind the black pools of the eyes, then they narrowed to long, almost snake-like faces with black-lipped mouths bristling with long, forward-reaching teeth.

  The group of humans exploded out of the way as the trio of deadly predators sped up the ice towards them. Robin lost her footing and tumbled onto her side, rolling over and over across the camber of the slope. On one roll, as her back bounced on the unforgiving ice, she was aware of a neck hollow, haunch and flank, of a surprisingly long leg and a huge foot padded with glistening fur and armed with huge black claws. She gasped with shock and was suffocated with the seaweed stench of rotting fish. Then the ice swung up to slap her in the face and the apparition was gone. The fear of being savaged was abruptly replaced by a horror of skidding off the edge of the ice shelf and plunging down into the black water, and she spread her arms and legs wide, grimly determined to stop herself rolling at least. This proved an effective way to stop sliding too and soon she was picking herself up and dusting off the ice crystals as
though she had been rolling in sand. The bears were gone and her companions were picking themselves up carefully and painfully, as though they had aged fifty years in a few seconds.

  ‘Everyone all right?’ she called softly. ‘Ann?’

  ‘Okay, Robin. All in one piece and shaking like a leaf.’

  ‘Henri?’

  ‘Fine. We were lucky.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Sam cheerfully. ‘Lucky that was a retreat and not a charge.’

  ‘Damn right,’ agreed Errol. ‘I thought I was going to end up like some fish supper.’

  ‘Where d’you think they came from?’ asked Joe, looking back up the slope towards the crest over which the panicked bears had vanished. All the others followed his gaze. Except for Robin, who was facing the opposite way and looking out to sea. And, in a voice trembling with awed revelation, she whispered an answer to his question: ‘There!’

  During the time they had been ashore, a subtle change had overcome the view to the north-west. In itself, it was no great change. The mist had thinned, the pale sky above had resolved itself a little more firmly. The wind had attained sufficient strength to pull away a cloud or two. And everything had changed. What had been a vague wall of insubstantial vapour joining the sky to the sea some indeterminable distance away had now attained form. Seemingly shifting shadows within it had attained substance. Bright beams of sunlight became surfaces. Cloud tops became mountain slopes. Insubstantiality had become reality and the incredible had happened.

  They stood, stricken by understanding, like observers unexpectedly finding themselves at the birth of a new continent, the discovery of a lost world.

  The fog was still there. A dirty-looking grey band of it stood on the surface of the sea perhaps five miles distant, hardly more. It rose for maybe a hundred feet into the air before it thinned and became transparent. Above it, rising out of it in silent majesty, was a cliff of ice. No mere ripple, like the echoing toy behind them, but an alpine cliff, the shoulder of a mountain. Above the cliff, a slope began, reaching up towards a ridge which cut across the blue sky like a razor. So sharp and absolute was the edge of that ridge that the white of it was black at the very top where it sliced the blue at the sky’s zenith. The slope swept up towards a peak jutting like a Himalayan rhinoceros horn, the first of a line of peaks reaching back into the table-topped body of the thing. Robin’s head began to ache as she fought to comprehend what she was seeing. Her eyes were striving without success to focus on the further reaches of that flat mountain top where it reached back and back and back beyond the power of her sight.