by Peter Tonkin
‘Come north,’ he ordered. ‘Go to three hundred and forty degrees. We’ll try for Spitsbergen.’
The helmsman obediently swung the helm, further and further over. His gaze was fixed on the binnacle and his open Uzbek face gathered into a frown of concern as the printed card sat immobile. For the first time in ninety-six hours, the heading was changed. And the act revealed that the compass wasn’t working either.
~ * ~
They were utterly lost by then. Blind, deaf, dumb and dying. Hundreds of kilometres north of where they thought they were, hundreds of kilometres further west. Had the radar been working, it would have shown the coastal ice, perhaps the coast, towards which they were heading. Had the radio been working, the frustrated radio officer would have been able to talk to his colleagues at the nearest land-based radio station in Scoresby Sound, Greenland, which was slightly south and west of them, not very distant at all.
Since changing course at the captain’s last conscious order to gather the wind beneath their skirts, they had been forced to maintain a steady ten knots to keep steerageway. But the wind and current had pushed them westwards, latterly north-westwards, at more than twelve knots and they had covered in excess of eighteen hundred kilometres. During that time they had come south of Bear Island and west of Spitsbergen. They had passed north of Jan Mayen Island yesterday and now, did they but know it, the forbidding wastes of King Frederick VIII Land on the north-west of Greenland, with its mountainous ice-capped cliffs and towering glacier outthrusts, was all that awaited them, a little more than twelve hours’ sailing dead ahead. It was a mark of the damage done to the ship’s normally reliable equipment by the radiation leaking from the forward hold that something as massive as Greenland could remain so utterly invisible.
Captain Borodin continued unknowingly north-westwards, believing he was going one hundred and twenty degrees further to the south, pushing forward much more rapidly than he imagined possible. Had he been well and alert, things would have been very different, but of course he was neither. Had Tatiana Bulgakov been more experienced and less exhausted, she might have seen the danger. Had Sholokov not been consumed by the deadly cargo, he might have pulled the captain up and changed the heading or the orders to the engine room.
But because no one knew what the strange black glass actually was, where it had come from or what it could do, none of these things happened.
Leonid Brezhnev, laden with hundreds of tons of explosives and the result of General Gogol’s wild attempt to avoid a meltdown at Chernobyl, was heading for disaster at what in calm conditions would have been full speed ahead.
~ * ~
Borodin held on until mid-afternoon, but it was obvious that his strength was all but gone by the time Tatiana’s first eight to four watch was over. Although fast sickening herself, she had him taken to bed then checked on the sick. At six she grabbed an hour’s sleep and at seven she forced herself to eat something. By eight she was back on the bridge, relieving the exhausted third officer who could at least sleep without having to worry about the sick crew. She slumped in the watchkeeper’s chair, feeling the food in her stomach begin to rise in revolt. She tasted iron whenever she swallowed and knew her gums were beginning to bleed like everyone else’s. She gritted her teeth and the sound that the roots of her molars made moving loosely in the gums beneath her cheekbones and ears was more than she could stand. She clutched her right fist to her trembling lips and fled.
The helmsman peered through the driving rain but he could see no distance ahead at all. He couldn’t even see the length of the weather deck. The noise of the storm drowned out everything else, even the sound of surf against cliffs. The set of the sea was coming in from behind them so that there was little enough to tell the sensitive fingers on the wheel that the ship was entering a deep, cliff-bound bay. There was no one in the forecastle head and the radar was utterly blind.
So, in the end, no one aboard appreciated what happened at all.
The bay had a wide mouth and a deep, deep floor. In fact it was a wide sweep of cliff-walled shore only made into a bay by the inexorable thrust of the glacier debouching out into the stormy sea.
The glacier was more than twenty miles across and it was this fact that had allowed it to push such a massive tongue of ice out for so many miles into the northernmost waters of the Denmark Strait. It had propelled itself, millimetre by millimetre, out into the water for millennia and now it was ripe to break free. The stormy conditions had cleared away the protective shield of shore ice that it normally wore, and the blind ship was running swiftly into the groin that the glacier made with the mountainous wall of the shore. Under normal circumstances, the outthrust of the ice would have broken off in smaller pieces, cracked laterally across as it was. But the Leonid Brezhnev negated all that. Millions of years of painstaking physical geography were nullified in the instant of its contact.
The coastline lay at an angle along an axis from south-east to north-west. The glacier protruded at right angles, like an arrow from a bow, aiming up towards the Pole. Of all the cracks that ran across it, the greatest was parallel to the coastal cliffs at the very point the ice oozed out of the timeless rock.
It was exactly here, at half past eight that stormy evening early in June 1988, that the ship Leonid Brezhnev, laden with hundreds of tons of explosives and carrying just enough sweating dynamite to act as the perfect impact detonator - as well as nearly a hundred tons of rough glass impregnated with the core of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor - struck at full speed ahead.
She was not as strong as she had been. Her sides were growing thin and her lateral bulkheads weak. Her bow rode up into the fissure by the shore, a valley nearly a hundred metres high and some kilometres in length but only a couple of metres wide. At once the pressure of the ice stopped the forward movement of the forecastle, but the rest of the ship, and everything it was carrying, continued at thirteen knots. The ammunition smashed through onto the glass from Chernobyl and the warheads came through on top of that. The reactors from the decommissioned submarines came through onto the warheads and brought the crates of sweating dynamite along with them. In a process as logical as a theorem by Pythagoras, the length of the ship concertinaed as the thin, rusty sides tried unavailingly to absorb the impact. The last and heaviest units that she had been carrying broke free as the engines, complete with their massive, old-fashioned boilers, blasted through on top of the sweating dynamite.
It took less than a minute for Leonid Brezhnev to tear herself to pieces but that was like an eternity compared with the instantaneous totality of the devastating explosion which followed the impact of the boilers on the dynamite. There was no way to calculate the force unleashed by the hell’s brew of explosives which suddenly found themselves on top of each other and all going up at once. How many cities it would have destroyed, how many small countries it might have devastated, how many states, republics or counties it might have laid waste cannot be counted.
But it did have enough force to crack the antediluvian tongue of ice. It had sufficient power to send that crack snaking along the valley from side to side of the glacier. It had exactly the impact needed to launch into the Arctic Ocean the largest iceberg that had ever been seen there.
~ * ~
The power of the storm took the iceberg at once and as it could not push the monster westwards, drove it north. With debris from Leonid Brezhnev and her cargo blasted deep into her flank like shot embedded in the side of an elephant, the iceberg crashed up into the pack ice at the top of the world.
Through that first brief summer she drifted, undiscovered by mankind, away into the Angara Basin north of Spitsbergen, and in the sudden autumn froze in place like an alp adrift in the midst of the slowly spinning continent of ice. Through that first winter she stood, three hundred metres of her reaching up into the sky, nearly nine hundred metres of her reaching down into the black depths which are so cold that only the weight of the ice above keeps them liquid. Through summers and winters the berg
drifted round the Pole. It took her one complete year to grate across the Harris Ridge, but once she had done so she moved more quickly. By the time she wintered in the Beaufort Sea, there was a community thriving around her: on the deep reaches beneath the surface, she had grown weeds as though she was made of rock, and shrimp and krill came to feed on the weed. Cod came to feed on the shrimp, and seal to feed on the cod. As the summer released her to drift past Prince Patrick Island, so the Arctic birds also came to feed on the cod, and foxes came to feed on the birds and polar bears to feed on the foxes and the seals. But no man saw her. Not then. Not the next summer when she drifted majestically past the wildernesses of Ellesmere Island and back at last towards her birthplace. And now so many years had passed that no one remembered the good ship Leonid Brezhnev, and even the memory of Chernobyl was beginning to fade.
Just as a storm had condemned her to spend five years in the frozen wastes of the far north, so it was a storm which released her. She had never pushed deeply into the pack, but had instead inhabited the edges, following a narrow track along the top of the world where the waters were deep enough to accommodate her massive depth. The slow, unstoppable grinding against ridges and outcrops had shaped her into a long teardrop fifteen kilometres wide and one hundred in length. The bulk of her lay beneath the water but an outcrop, three hundred metres high and eight kilometres wide, stood along the first fifty kilometres of her length. A hook of ice stood out from her side, however, spoiling the symmetry of her shape, and causing her to spin slowly as she moved.
The storm came down from the north in the very middle of that summer and caught the berg as she hesitated at the mouth of the Greenland Sea. For the first time since her violent birth, she moved south. Spinning slowly, she followed the deep-water channels down through the summer-shattered pack ice past Jan Mayen and into the Denmark Strait. Spinning slowly, she followed the dictates of the current and sailed south in the gathering autumn towards Cape Farewell. For the first time since the lookouts of Leonid Brezhnev had seen too little of her too late, men looked upon her. From planes and boats, even from the shore, they looked in wonder. But they saw nothing of her true potential for good or bad. Not these men. Not yet.
By the time winter closed in across the Davis Strait, she was drifting north again, but this time ice and a maze of islands stood between her and the Pole. North she ran, however, until the sea froze solid enough to stop her up in Baffin Bay on the edge of the North Water.
Spring released her into the grip of a new current which pulled her, like a great bird migrating out of season, south.
And men and women came to her at last. Men and women who understood what a wonder she really was. Colin Ross the glaciologist came with his wife Kate, a glacio-biologist, to study the unique environment she created simply by existing. Robin Mariner came with her ship Atropos to effect urgent repairs. Richard Mariner came in the sister ship Clotho to find Robin. He found her and they took their ships home.
And then he came back.
~ * ~
MANHATTAN
THE DAVIS STRAIGHT, NOW
I’ll take Manhattan,
The Bronx and Staten
Island too…
Lorenz Hart (slightly adapted)
~ * ~
Chapter Five
Deep-sea research vessel Antelope’s Bell UH-1H Iroquois helicopter skimmed along the surface of the restless sea like a lost dragonfly. Steel-grey waves reached hungrily for its sleek little fuselage and tumbled back roaring in thunderous frustration. The spray they spat up fell thickly on the windscreen and the wipers had a hard job keeping it clear. The storm wind had calmed temporarily between squalls, but there was still very little time to make the transfer. The apparently frail little craft was nose down, tail up, dashing wildly through the murk above the Davis Strait.
Richard Mariner, sitting in the left-hand seat, squinted through the roiling overcast dead ahead, but his eyes were defeated by the low cloud and the spray.
‘Can you see it yet?’ called Colin Ross from just behind, the stentorian bellow of his voice all but lost in the clatter of rotors and the thunder of great waters.
‘Not a sign.’
‘It never ceases to amaze me that something that big can be so hard to see at times.’
‘It’s there,’ supplied the pilot, his eyes busy on the instruments. ‘Dead ahead. Couple of miles.’ An incoming radio signal crackled in his headphones and he stopped talking to his passengers for a moment. He stopped talking to them; he did not stop thinking about them.
The pilot, Sam Jenkins, was an old hand and by no means easily impressed and yet the two men he was carrying seemed head and shoulders above the common run of passengers, even the sort of passengers who needed to be ferried between deep-sea research vessels and ice islands in the furthest reaches of the North Atlantic.
Head and shoulders above the rest both literally and figuratively. Both were unusually tall men. Richard Mariner stood well over six feet four in his stockinged feet and Colin Ross topped him by an inch or two. Neither man stooped, as is common with extremely tall people; instead they both walked with an upright vigour and went about all physical activities as though they were twenty years younger than they actually were. The pilot didn’t know either man intimately enough to be certain of their ages, but both were public figures and it was general knowledge that they were at the late forties-early fifties line.
As far as the pilot was aware, each of his passengers was an outstanding man in his field. Colin Ross was a world-class scientist. He and his wife Kate had been on the shortlist for a Nobel Prize a year or so ago for their ground-breaking work on glaciation and the Arctic environment. There was nothing the pair of them did not know about ice and the way it behaved in large masses on land or - as in this case - at sea. Or, for that matter, about any lichen, moss, plant, animal, fish or mammal associated with it.
Richard Mariner was a different kettle of fish. He was the last of the independent shipping men in Britain. He owned and ran Heritage Mariner, a company which had dominated the shipping world since the fifties. He owned and ran a fleet of supertankers transporting oil between the Gulf and Europe, out to the Far East, in to the States. He owned and ran the two great nuclear waste transporters Atropos and Clotho which carried waste product for safe reprocessing between North America and Europe - and, the talk was, his were the only such ships which would be allowed to pick up the incredibly lucrative Russian nuclear disposal market too. Heritage Mariner were also into leisure boating and were responsible for the Katapult series of multihulls - the Rolls-Royce of the boating world. And because he was a sailor as much as a pilot, the man at the controls knew that Heritage Mariner had a subsection perhaps more famous than the mother company, an offshoot which was Richard Mariner’s personal creation and ultimate achievement. This was Crewfinders, the most famous and efficient crew-finding agency in the world. A legendary organisation whose unmatched reputation was based upon their promise to replace any crew member on any ship anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours. The pilot wondered whether they dealt with marine helicopter men. He must remember to ask; he wouldn’t mind going on the Crewfinders books himself if they would have him. He wouldn’t mind working for Richard Mariner at all, in fact, and he was a notoriously hard man to please.
‘Message received. Out,’ he said. Just as he did so, the first gust of the next squall hit the helicopter and the little Huey dived closer to the hungry waves. The pilot turned the dive into a swoop and the turned-up nose came up into the stormy air again, frustrating the waves anew.
‘They say they’re just about to push the button over there,’ the pilot yelled to Richard Mariner as soon as he had the helicopter steady.
‘We’d better hurry then.’
‘What?’ yelled Colin Ross, for the brief conversation had been lost beneath the battering of the squally wind.
‘They’re just about to detonate the explosives,’ yelled Richard in reply.
‘Hell. I want
to see that!’
‘I’ve told Sam here to hurry.’
Son of a bitch, thought the pilot, he knows my name!
The instant the thought entered Sam’s head, the full squall hit and, as it did so, the wind which accompanied it snatched away the overcast ahead and the first of the ice cliffs towered above them, tall, sheer and startlingly close.
‘There it is!’ yelled Richard. It was some months since he had last seen it and he was stunned anew by the scale of the thing. It was incredible that something this big could exist up here. It was as though the incalculable weight of it should have unbalanced the world.
Colin had been living on it for nearly a year now, on and off. He was more blasé.