The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  *

  Ann Cable lowered the binoculars as soon as the two black figures were gone. No sooner had she done so than Henri joined her at the rail. ‘I was never so glad of anything,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I realised it was you coming back from the dead with them.’

  ‘They saved my life, Henri. I was dead.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  She explained to him what she could remember of the conversations the three of them had had during last night and this morning. The Rosses were marine glaciologists. Experts in the formation and movements of sea ice, including icebergs. Colin was the ice man; Kate was the expert in all the life forms which inhabited the ice and the water surrounding it. They worked in the field for a whole range of business and academic enterprises, as well as for a government or two. They had a camp on the far side of the berg from which they had been charting its condition and progress ever since it had been swept out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Davis Strait. It was one of the biggest icebergs to enter the North Atlantic this century, they had told her; and it was their current project to estimate whether or not it would be feasible to ride it down into the shipping lanes and then control its movement further south. Both Colin and Kate were enthusiastic exponents of the proposition that icebergs might, some day in the future, be moved across the oceans and delivered to drought-stricken areas; they represented hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water, all of it ice-cold.

  ‘They’ve both done work at the South Pole too,’ Ann concluded. ‘At first it seemed that moving bergs up into the South Atlantic might be better — much less shipping, apparently, and far less land. But the winds are too powerful. You’d have to pull a berg three or four times round the world while you were getting it up from the Antarctic to South Georgia, say, or New Zealand.’ Her voice tailed away and the pair of them were silent, entranced by the vision.

  They stood on the poop through the rest of that long afternoon and watched as the articulated blade roots were painstakingly connected to the variable pitch mechanism. They joined in the cheering as the great brass blades varied their angles according to the dictates from the bridge. They saw the huge boss being rolled into position and lifted so that it could be screwed back over the giant thread at the end of the shaft. As the sun began to settle and the long silken twilight whispered into place, they watched in wonder as the turbine was started and the propeller was engaged. With all the care in the world, the propeller itself was tested. Everyone was aware that the system was designed to meet hundred of tons of water resistance; rotating the propeller in the air was extremely risky. Yet test it they did, and it turned.

  At 20:00 hours, a little before full dark, Ann and Henri were on the bridge with Robin and her watch officers. On the deck stood the four teams whose function it was to release the lines little by little so that Atropos could be eased down the slipway and into the water. There was an air of not very well-concealed jubilation. There had been no more major icequakes, though they had heard a distant rumbling on the way up from the deck. Everything seemed well in place for a second launching of the freighter. Robin was in radio contact with Clotho, or rather Harry Stone was relaying her messages to Bill Christian who was passing them to Richard, strangely remote on Atropos’s sister ship beyond the barrier to the south. But Robin was too full of her own concerns to enquire after her husband’s worries. Joe Edwards had driven the gantry on the forward deck and Errol had operated the stores crane, so it was inevitable that Sam Larkman should hold the con ready to steer Atropos out of danger as soon as she was in the water. Henri paced around the airy, spacious wheelhouse, every nerve alert, able only to see the teams at the split windlass on the fore deck. Timmins was in close contact with the men aft. Seconds stretched out unbearably. Robin at last bustled out of the radio room. ‘Ready?’ she snapped.

  ‘All ready, Captain,’ answered Timmins at once.

  ‘Right. Easy, all. Let’s go.’

  ‘Easy, all,’ said Timmins into his walkie-talkie, and the sound of motors clamoured on the perfect stillness of the air. Everyone on the bridge, everyone aboard, concentrated every bodily power, waiting for that first almost imperceptible movement down the icy slope towards freedom.

  It never came.

  Timmins’s conversations with the teams on the deck came to a halt. With a frown gathering upon her brow, Robin strode across to her first officer and lifted the walkie-talkie out of his nerveless fingers. ‘Capstan,’ she snapped. ‘Mr Hogg, is all slackened off there?’

  ‘All slackened off, Captain,’ came Hogg’s distinct reply.

  ‘Windlass. Chief, is it all slackened there too?’

  ‘Affirmative, Captain,’ came Lethbridge’s reply. ‘All slackened off and we’re still sitting here.’

  Robin stood silently with the walkie-talkie hissing in her numb fingers. It was Timmins who put their predicament into words. ‘We’re stuck!’ he said bitterly. ‘Stuck! We’re frozen into the fucking ice and we’re not going anywhere at all!’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Day Thirteen

  Monday, 31 May 20:00

  Richard stood on the ruined prow of Clotho facing north as the last light drained out of the day. Ahead of him, seemingly scant yards away, rose a wall of ice nearly fifteen metres high. Behind that wall, the ice gathered itself up in a long, continuous sweep until it attained a crest. Then it plunged away steeply into half a mile or so of low ridges. Beyond these lay he knew not what: the ice was too dangerous to allow further explorations, and the fog from the berg was sweeping over the barrier now, so that it was impossible to make out the northern reaches. He had tramped across every inch of the solid ice during the last two days but he could find absolutely no way through it either for his ship or for himself.

  His mind was not concentrated on the view, however, but upon a mental picture of what was going on beyond it. He was wound up so tight he felt as though he might explode. All through the day he had been fed snippets of news about the situation on Atropos. The survival of Ann Cable — he had seen tears in Nico’s eyes as the first officer reported it; the fitting of the propeller; the preparations to relaunch the ship. He was far past the point of praying that everything would go well. He had come down here, driven by some superstitious instinct, as though he could affect things by the force of his will, if he could only come close enough.

  As he stood and watched his mental picture of the activity on Atropos, the whole cliff seemed to jump out of focus and a small avalanche of loose debris thundered down into the restless gulf between the ship and the barrier. He slammed back to reality with such force it almost winded him. An overwhelming sound, so deep as to be a force of nature, a throbbing sensed with the soles of the feet and the back of the throat and the trembling of the tearful eyes rather than the ears rolled over him. He clutched at the twisted railing and held himself upright by sheer effort of will.

  The movement of the iceberg and the violence of its contact with the ice barrier were intensifying. His last direct contact with Robin had informed him of her concern about the icequakes she was experiencing on the berg itself but these were as nothing compared with what seemed to be happening to the barrier. It was because the ridge of ice was so much less massive than the berg itself, he supposed, that it seemed to be reacting to the collision so much more fiercely. He had spent the last day hoping that the southward pressure of the berg might cause the barrier to snap before Atropos was trapped and crushed, but instead, the barrier was beginning to show signs of moving slowly southward while the berg ground inexorably eastwards along its northern shore. And this was the situation guaranteed to do most damage to the ship and the beloved woman who commanded her.

  They had been lucky that the weather had been so calm during the last few days, but there was no doubt that it was deteriorating more rapidly now. Deteriorating in every way, he thought grimly. It was a mercy that he had agreed to be the communications centre, for there was an increasing amount of bad ne
ws he was filtering out of the information he was passing northwards. He had the detailed weather forecast which Robin had not had the time to collect from the widening circle of stations and ships around and to the north-west of them. It was bad and threatening to get worse. There was another storm about to boil over out of Hudson Bay and come thundering down to push the iceberg even harder southwards with gale- and storm-force winds from the north-west. That storm was due within twenty-four hours.

  His distress signals had at last roused some promise of aid. An icebreaker was on its way up from Boston, but it was a slow sailer and showed no real prospect of arriving much before the foul weather.

  The quality of the information coming in from Heritage House had dropped alarmingly since Sir William had been rushed into hospital. Inevitably. Helen Dufour was stuck in St Petersburg and there was no one with their finger as firmly on the pulse as the old man’s had been.

  He had been up since Audrey had called through from the twenty-four-hour desk at Crewfinders and put Maggie DaSilva on the line. That had been at midnight last night and he had spent the intervening hours agonising over whether or not to pass on the news to Robin. He knew that she would find it difficult to forgive him for his twenty hours of silence while her beloved father lay in intensive care without even the benefit of her prayers. She was a strong woman, an unflinching personality. In any other circumstance he would not have hesitated, but he felt she was simply under too much stress at the moment to have another care loaded onto her shoulders.

  Thinking of her in these terms brought a grim smile to his thin lips. It showed how tired and worried he was himself and how long it had been since they had been together. The vision of her as being frail, bowed down by worry and reliant on his manly protection was a romantic fiction of the most self-indulgent chauvinist kind. But the fact that he knew she was strong and utterly competent made no real difference. He still could not bring himself to break the news of Sir William’s heart attack to her. On the other hand, she would hear about it soon enough if Harry Stone ever got the leisure to tune one of his radios into any of the news services.

  The walkie-talkie in his pocket buzzed. He put the icy earpiece under his hood and answered. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m getting a message through from Atropos, Captain.’

  ‘Yes, Nico?’

  ‘They’re slackening off the shore lines now. They hope to be in the water in a few minutes.’

  ‘Is it Captain Mariner speaking?’

  ‘No. She’s on the bridge. Harry Stone’s relaying—’ There came a sudden, hissing silence.

  The last of the twilight was trembling on the edge of darkness. The sky was low and pale, like a sere sheet stretched up towards the Pole, billowing gently in a high northerly wind which didn’t seem to reach into the still air down here. It was too thin to be cloud. It was more like a skim of ice on the surface of a darkening pond. Richard looked up at it, his mind miles away, concentrating on the hissing silence on the radio link. The stillness was absolute. The chill seemed solid, gathered in as though the very air was freezing to glass around him. He had a sudden, ridiculous vision of the sister ships frozen together, like flies in amber, like mammoths in the permafrost, to be discovered in a block of solid, crystalline air sometime in the future. All of them, like the frozen corpses of Franklin’s ill-fated expedition through the Northwest Passage.

  His moment of black thought proved strangely prophetic. Nico’s voice came back almost at once. ‘It’s no good. It’s no good, Captain. Atropos is stuck fast. Frozen in the ice.’ Nico tried manfully to hide the shock and horror in his voice. He failed.

  Richard felt stunned and sickened. He walked across to the twisted rail and looked northwards. He moved slowly as though he was wading through deep water, mind racing, lost in thought. It was strange. He felt closer to Robin out here but he was of course further out of contact. Perhaps he was avoiding direct contact because of the news about her father. Distance was easier to handle than lies or evasions.

  He drove his fist onto the railing and the sound echoed strangely in the dull, dead air of the gathering night. He felt so helpless. He was by no means an indecisive man. He was used to making decisions and taking action. But everything seemed to be slipping away from him somehow. Nothing he did seemed to make things any better. Every hope that things would improve was just a prelude to things getting worse. He found himself thinking back to the drive from Cold Fell to Seascale less than a fortnight ago when Robin was just about to take over command of Clotho. He had felt helpless then; felt as though fate was working against him even before things had gone from bad to worse. But even then he could never have imagined how desperate things would become, and so quickly. He had lost his court case and stood to lose his company. He might well have lost his father-in-law, partner and friend, and now he stood to lose the last of what he cared about most deeply: his ships and his beloved wife. There seemed nothing left for him to look forward to except doom, disaster and death.

  He pressed the walkie-talkie to his lips. ‘I’m coming back up to —’ His voice died away. He frowned. He walked forward as far as the steepening cant of the deck would allow him to go.

  ‘Captain?’ came Nico’s voice urgently in his ear.

  He paid no attention to it; hardly heard it, in fact.

  ‘Richard?’

  The whole pale plane of the sky was behaving very strangely indeed. What new horror was this? Were those dark patterns clouds? Was this a storm coming unexpectedly and early? Were those pale patches some kind of electrical activity? What was going on here?

  ‘Richard?’

  It was vaguely familiar. What he could see; what it meant. As though in a dream he could feel himself cudgelling his brain, searching through the massive volume of knowledge he held in his capacious memory, seeking through everything he knew about dangerous conditions at sea.

  On the sky above his head a kind of picture was forming. The picture showed a bar of white, stretching from horizon to horizon on either hand. There was blackness above him but it had an edge, sharp and well defined against the white. It reached away on either hand before plunging in along a straight black line to a bright shape which seemed to stand like a star immediately above his head. As he looked further up towards the Pole, the edge of the blackness defined a contra-edge of whiteness. But it was not a blank whiteness, it seemed to be ridged and contoured like the underside of a great cloud lit from below at sunset. Except that this could not be happening. There were no clouds up there, only that pale skim of icy air. Even further towards the northern horizon, the ridged and shadowed white gave way to black again. Black which swooped in from the east, reached southwards towards him across that strange white roof, then ended abruptly as the white cut due north again. In the angle of this, lay another bright shape, the exact double of the one immediately above his head.

  ‘Richard! Captain!’ Nico came panting up. ‘Are you all right? When you didn’t answer, I —’ And his voice too trailed away mid-sentence. ‘What is it?’ he whispered, looking up.

  ‘It’s the ice blink. Ice blink! My God, I—’ Richard stood, straining his eyes to take in every detail of what was drawn across the sky. ‘How’s your memory for pictures, Nico?’

  ‘Is good.’

  ‘Right. Remember what you see up there because we’re going to try and draw it out in detail.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘It’s a chart!’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Ice blink. It’s a kind of mirage caused by the cold air and the light. Keep looking; it won’t last long. It’s an exact reflection of everything for ten miles or so ahead of us. The black is water. The white is ice. The ripples are pressure ridges, so pay particular attention to them. The bright shape above our head is Clotho. The bright shape over there is Atropos. God Almighty, she’s so close!’

  ‘Is upside down.’

  ‘I know. That’s why it’ll be difficult to remember accurately ... It’s fading.’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes. Is going very fast now.’

  ‘Right. We should be able to draw up a good chart, though. We can doublecheck scale against the last set of satellite pictures Bill Heritage faxed over. We can really get the problem measured up at last. God, I wish that icebreaker was nearer. Atropos looked so clear, so close. Did you see?’

  ‘Si, Capitan. Veni, vidi.’

  ‘Vici!’ Richard finished the Latin quotation and gave a bark of laughter. ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Julius Caesar’s famous observation seemed to give him new strength as they hurried along the deck.

  Richard erupted onto the bridge with Nico puffing in tow. Tearing off his cold-weather gear before the overwhelming warmth of the contrast with the frigid outside suffocated him, Richard strode across to the chart table and pulled out some plain white paper, size A3, and some pencils. ‘Come on, Nico,’ he ordered. ‘Get it down while it’s fresh in your mind. Bill!’ he called through to the radio shack without taking breath. ‘Get Atropos for me.’

  Side by side, the two of them began to sketch what they had seen on the sky above their heads. They had laid down a confident outline each before Bill called through.

  Richard hadn’t really expected to talk to Robin but she was there on the far end. ‘Are you going to go any further tonight?’ he asked, feeling himself filling with calm and supportiveness, supposing that that would be of most use to her now. He heard his voice becoming gentle, reliable. The very tone said, Lean on me.

  ‘I can’t. The ballast is frozen so I can’t move it. We’re going to try lifting the spare propeller. The weight of it rolled her over when we were working this afternoon. It may roll her free now before the crane breaks but I don’t hold any great hopes for it.’

  He strained to hear more detail. Did she sound tired? Depressed? Defeated?