by Peter Tonkin
‘Good. I’ve been thinking. I’m not going to keep much of a bridge watch tonight, but I’ll get Harry Stone to go through the airwaves with a fine-toothed comb. I want a close eye kept on that storm.’
‘We’ll be doing that. Let him get some rest. It’ll be a hard day tomorrow no matter what —’
‘No. He’s got to stay on duty anyway, even if just to be here if you come through suddenly. He’s my watch for the night and I might as well make full use of him. Even tied up like this, I insist that at least one officer keeps watch at all times. We still don’t know what’s really going on with these Green War people. Tonight it’s Harry’s turn. Even if he just listens to the BBC World News it’ll be better than nothing.’
There was a silence so absolute that she thought the signal between the sister ships had been broken somehow. Then Richard came on again and he sounded incredibly tired, as though he had aged a century a second since they last talked. As soon as she heard the change in his tone she knew he had been hiding something bad from her.
‘Robin. Darling. I’m afraid I have some other news. I wouldn’t have worried you with it but Harry’s bound to hear about it if he gets a news station and ... Well, it’s about your father. Bill’s in hospital, I’m afraid, and he’s asked me to tell you ...’
*
Colin Ross could make do with four hours’ sleep and Kate was used to him getting up in the middle of the night. This was especially true when they were wintering north or south of sixty degrees, as they had been recently; the nights could last for months. It was no great surprise to her, therefore, when she awoke at four in the morning to see him hunched over his work table examining the dead auk.
She dozed off again.
They had a large hut, like the winter quarters of Inuit, the Eskimo people they knew so well. It was just big enough for the two of them to live and work in, but small and light enough to be easily transportable. It was strong enough to withstand the worst the high Arctic could throw at it, but flexible enough to bend with changing conditions. It was filled with high-tech aids, but nothing too bulky or complex to be packed up and moved quickly. This was a drift ice station designed for thinnish ice. It was an efficient living and working environment but it had no permanence about it at all. If the section of the iceberg it was pitched on broke free and floated away, they would, in theory, be able to pack up, move out and get themselves back to the main berg within the daylight hours, and still have enough time to re-erect the hut and cook dinner for themselves. It was something they had never had to do — and never wanted to do. But, for all its impermanence, it was home to Kate. She loved it and she loved sharing it with Colin.
Except that Robin Mariner had found time to show her photographs of the most enchanting twins ... As she drifted off, Kate wondered whether Robin had shown the picture to Colin. He was much more baby-minded than she was.
‘Kate! Kate! Wake up.’ Colin was shaking her and she was indeed waking up very quickly indeed.
‘What is it?’
‘You have to look at this. I can’t make head or tail of it. Come along. I’m only a humble glaciologist. I think I need a biologist for this.’
‘Is it that damned bird?’
‘Well, yes and no.’
The inside of the hut was surprisingly warm. She was sleeping in a baggy old jogging outfit so she simply swept her hair back, stepped into the broken-backed trainers she used as slippers and slopped across to his work bench. The dead auk was pinned out in his meticulous manner, like a dissection in a biology exam. Under the lights it gleamed unnaturally brightly — all blacks and pinks, blues and reds. She wasn’t really ready for this at this time in the morning. Its little chest was as wide as its wings and the stomach bag had been lifted out and opened by its side. The contents of the stomach consisted of three-quarters of a surprisingly large fish — some kind of whiting by the look of things though it was difficult to be sure without a head to examine. The fish had been as efficiently autopsied as the bird. It too was open and it was obvious that the head would have been placed above the ragged ribs, if there had been one. She guessed some other bird had stolen it. Beside the half filleted fish lay another stomach and a partially-presented package of stomach contents. Brightly coloured gelatine pill cases; glistening white powder, looking like wet salt. A small but solid ball of putty-like material perhaps the same size as a chilli bean, with something pale pink inserted into it. As Kate looked closer, her stomach sinking, Colin fastidiously used the point of his scalpel to turn the putty ball towards the lights. There was no doubt about it: the pink thing embedded in it was the end of someone’s finger.
*
Henri LeFever jumped as though he had heard Kate Ross’s cry of distress across seven silent miles of ice. Apart from Harry Stone in the radio shack, Henri was the only person left awake aboard. He knew this because he had just finished checking. He had watched Robin go up to the shack and come down again in tears. He had seen her go into her cabin and he had listened outside the door while she sobbed herself to sleep. Then he had prowled the corridors, happy that Ann was too tired to seek him out. He had listened as she too had sunk into restless, mumbling sleep. He was desperately tired himself, but he had to finish the job. He had to get rid of the rest of it now so that no one would ever know for certain how close he and Jeanne had come this time to destroying the sister ships. So that he could be free to carry on her war in another place at another time. Her Green War.
The thought of her haunted him. At times he thought she haunted him. He never doubted that she was dead. They had selected her hiding place very carefully. He had been back in Canada, waiting aboard Atropos, when she must have gone aboard the British ship, and he knew she would have hidden in the crane cab on the gantry, as agreed. It had taxed all his self-control to the very edge of madness not to show the cataclysmic reaction he had felt when he had seen the whole gantry whirled away to destruction, and something deep within him had told him she was gone too. She began to inhabit his dreams immediately and he knew he often woke up with her name on his lips. He was half convinced she had saved him on the berg by guiding him to the ice fall and giving him the courage to slide down it to safety.
But he was so tired. He felt so lost and alone that at times he suspected he was going mad. He wasn’t sure what was real any more. He didn’t really care, except that the thought of her still drove him, that and the knowledge that she would want him to fight on. Atropos looked as though she was lost in any case so he could stop worrying about her. Days after Clotho was due to have blown up in Sept Isles she was still afloat on the far side of the ice barrier, so Jeanne had not set the explosives there as planned either. The plan had been so elegant. Jeanne had been so beautiful. Well, they were both gone now. Tears filled his bright blue eyes.
He did not have the expertise to set the bomb. That had always been her job. That was why their plan had turned upon getting her across from Clotho to Atropos when the ships passed each other off Cape Farewell. Everything he had done aboard this ship had been designed to enable his wife to reach that rendezvous on time — in spite of the delays, the weather, the drug-addicted captain, the drug-dealing officers and the mutinous crew. And the increasingly inquisitive Ann Cable. The demonstrations and the unexpected delay in sailing had slowed them down. The storm conditions had moved them along faster than anticipated, however, and they had soon more than made up the lost time. The damage to the engine had been done to slow them down again but it had gone further than he had expected, and he had found himself undoing his work by nursing the engineers back to health so that the ship could be moved again.
The death of Reynolds had arisen from the near certainty that he must have seen something of the detonators Henri had concealed within that cable conduit. But he had moved almost everything out of there now, along with the Semtex which Captain Black had discovered in the swimming pool. He should have chucked the old man’s body over the side along with the drugs and the bomb-making equipment. If ther
e was no bomb-maker, there would be no bomb. The Semtex was expensive and increasingly hard to come by, but it was an unnecessary risk to his security to keep it aboard. He had been going to dispose of the blocks hidden in the empty swimming pool when he had found the old captain frozen in among them. Trying to hide his body had revealed the Wide Boy’s stash of drugs.
Like Richard Mariner — though Henri had no way of knowing this fact — he believed all his good luck was gone and only bad luck was left. How else could one explain what he had been forced to do? Chopping off the captain’s fingers so that he could relieve him of the explosives he was holding so tightly had been even more disturbing than disposing of the Wide Boy. And even when he did get rid of the drugs and the first part of the explosives, it had poisoned the fish all around the boat and the dead fish poisoned the birds!
But now he had to get rid of all the rest. This idea of setting fires along the sides of the ship looked like a long shot to him but, in spite of the fact that Jeanne had told him how safe it was until properly detonated, he still feared that the rest of the explosives would go off by accident as an unexpected part of the captain’s plan in the morning. Especially as the cable conduit where they were now hidden ran along the line where the metal would get the hottest. Jeanne and he had been happy to think of these carriers of filth soiling their own nests in Sept Isles and Seascale when explosive retribution finally came, but to allow the canisters of nuclear waste to be blown open and then dropped into the ocean here was out of the question. Jeanne would certainly haunt him to his grave if he allowed such a thing. And she would be right to do so, for it would be a betrayal of their love even more faithless than if he had slept with Ann Cable.
This thought was further emphasised in his mind ten minutes later by the letters. Jeanne’s letters, safely sealed in a waterproof container, were the first thing he saw when he opened the cable conduit, the last of his hiding places. Here he kept the small things. The timers, the detonators, the letters. He would never know about her final letter to him, her final declaration of her love, but he had many others which traced the history of their passionate, deadly relationship since the first time they had met up in the tundra of north Quebec where he had been hunting and she had been on an exercise with the US Army. At first he had thought she was an American man. Only later had he discovered the truth: that she was French Canadian-born like him and, in spite of her deadly training, a sensitive, compassionate, passionate woman.
The letters were all that were left of her now. It would break his heart to destroy them, but he knew all too well that as things stood they were just one more proof of his guilt. One more way in which the snoopers with whom he was surrounded might find the truth and slow him down; maybe even stop him altogether. No. Like the rest of this stuff, they would go over the side and only the fish would read them through to the end of time. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes. He felt them trickling chilly down his face. Better that the fish should read them than Ann Cable. He remembered all too clearly what she had said about having a suspicious mind and the impact her words had had on him. From that moment in Don Taylor’s cabin he had been watching her.
Of all the ways he had thought of to control what the reporter thought and did, only two seemed feasible: to seduce her or to murder her. Murder seemed the most likely option if she came much closer. And he hoped it would be as neat and simple an affair as releasing the Wide Boy’s safety harness in the storm. But he doubted it would be quite as easy as that, somehow. That was why he had listened so assiduously outside her door until she had fallen asleep. Perhaps he should have killed her up on the ice. The thought had occurred to him, but Fate had intervened. Ah well, c’est la vie. Or, more correctly, c’est la guerre.
*
They set off just before first light and as they skied eastwards across the ice they saw the dawn come up. They saw it first from the top of a low ridge which nevertheless gave them a long view down a considerable slope, with the ice mountains distant on their left. What they saw was a wide horizon burning with incredible brightness in a long, thin line. The line seemed to stretch from the reaches of the barrier in the south to the Pole itself, hidden behind the mountains in the north. Below it, the ice appeared to be a simple shelf, grey more than white, with only the topmost crests of any irregularity catching fire from the light. Above it was solid blackness. Featureless, apparently utterly still, like a gallery of darkest coal. It had weight, oppressive power. It crushed down physically as well as mentally with tremendous force and even the giant figure of Colin Ross seemed bowed by the weight of it. Silently, they moved forward into that strange world, apparently inverted, where the sky was solid, heavy and dark, and the ground was light-flecked and bright, as though made of clouds.
As time went by, the narrow band of brightness became the merest crack in the gathering darkness, snuffed out beneath the awesome weight of the coal-face sky. Then it was as though they were skiing forward between two great surfaces closing together upon them like a narrowing gallery deep in a mine.
There was utter silence all around them. Even the thunderous grinding of the berg against the bather had paused. There was no wind yet, though the state of the sky made it all too plain there soon would be. There was no sense of calm, however. Neither figure hurrying so urgently forward was even slightly fooled by this brief armistice in the war of the elements. The atmosphere was electric, and would have been so even had they not been so concerned about the news they carried with them. Everyone had to be removed from Atropos at the earliest opportunity. They should go over the barrier for preference, but onto the berg if need be. Robin Mariner was going to need all the help she could get. That much would have been obvious even had the weather been clear and the forecast good. They had discussed at some length as they were preparing to come out which of the ships they should warn about what they had discovered. A moment’s thought made them realise that direct communication with Atropos might be overheard by whoever was involved with this and so might do more harm than good. They had promised to use Richard Mariner on Clotho as their first point of contact in any case. But when they had tried, it had proved frustratingly impossible to get through to Clotho at all, and so they had set out without warning anyone of their discovery or their intentions. Or of their fears.
As they topped the last crest and looked down on the ship, it seemed that they were already far too late. Right along her whole length Atropos was ablaze.
*
Sam Larkman had the hands of a wet nurse when it came to dealing with machinery. He had moved the propeller yesterday, when Atropos had rocked sideways under its weight, and he was in charge of it this morning when the ship was stuck fast. Errol was sitting beside him on the bench seat in the crane’s cab, the walkie-talkie pressed to his face, keeping up a constant dialogue with Robin on the bridge and the officers overseeing the long banks of flame. Sam was effectively working blind, by feel. The swan’s neck of the crane was extended fully and rotated to the port side so that it projected over the port railings. The falls were tight round the broken propeller, and stretching with the gathering stress of trying to lift it. Sam knew what was happening by the mystic way that forces could transfer news of themselves through inanimate objects. He could see nothing except the walls of smoke which were painted across the window pane in front of him.
‘It’s coming up,’ Sam told Errol.
‘Okay. No movement of the hull though.’
‘I know. I’ll hold it there. It’s maybe a metre up off the ice. I don’t want to go swinging it around any.’
‘Captain, Sam says the propeller’s about a metre off the ice,’ Errol reported into the walkie-talkie, then he was overcome by convulsive coughing as the acrid smoke began to seep into the cab.
On the bridge, Robin said, ‘Tell him to hold it there, Errol. It’s at its optimum position. Mr Hogg, how’re the port-side crew doing?’
‘Catch twenty-two, Captain,’ said Hogg’s voice lugubriously. ‘The more the fl
ames catch hold here, the more the ice melts and soaks the wood. It’s nowhere near as hot as we need it. Is the ballast melting at least?’
‘Chief?’ asked Robin, her voice tense with strain. ‘Any joy with the pumps? Is the ballast melting yet?’
‘Nothing yet, Captain. I daren’t go to full pressure, though. If they suck too hard on solid ice, they’ll just break down altogether.’
‘I know. We’ll just have to wait and hope.’
‘Captain? This is Walt Hogg.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s those people from yesterday. People called Ross.’
‘What about them?’
‘They’re just coming down the slipway now.’
‘Keep them there with you. There’s no way for them to come aboard at the moment until we move down the slope or until the fires die down.’
‘Yes, Captain. Oh. One other thing.’
‘Yes?’ She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice but she failed. The strain was really starting to get to her. ‘I don’t know if you’d noticed, Captain, but it’s snowing.’
*
Richard stood on the port bridge wing of Clotho looking north. Behind him, through the open door into the wheelhouse, he could hear Bill Christian’s courteous repetition, ‘No, I’m sorry the captain is too busy to speak to you just at the moment. No, I’m afraid it will be impossible for him to call you back. No, I’m afraid you cannot come aboard just at the moment. Yes, madam, I do know who you are and yes, I do realise you have come a long way and I do know how close you are but ...’
It had been going on since before first light. Richard was wild with frustration. What the good people of the press didn’t seem to realise just at the moment was that their overwhelming attempts to communicate with him were making it impossible for him to communicate with anyone else. With Robin, for instance. And he particularly wanted to talk to her. The binoculars crushed freezingly under the overhanging jut of his frowning brows showed him the distant column of smoke climbing up the still air in the distance. It was a thick column and would have been plain to see — for all that it was just a darker shade of grey than the rest of the scene before him — even had he not known exactly where to look. The press on Northern Lights had seen it too, with the result that the traffic Bill was having to deal with had redoubled.