by Peter Tonkin
The cold was really starting to get inside Tom now. It was fogging up his brain and making that section of it still functioning fill with waves of agony from every single joint in his shaking body. He gritted his teeth. ‘No, it’s OK, Richard. We’ll fire it aboard.’
‘Right. Do that. Then just hang on. I’ll have a team of men from Psyche ready to come down there and get you off the instant we’re in position.’
‘Right. Understood.’
He didn’t bother switching off the machine, he just dropped it and watched it skitter down the steely curve of running ice. He staggered over to the second group, falling twice and arriving on his hands and knees, though they were only three hundred metres distant.
The great stern of the supertanker swung in towards them with nerve-stretching rapidity. Tom was torn between wanting them to hurry it up and extreme concern as to what would happen if they hit the ice too hard. As the rear of the ship, standing high because she was running only in ballast and augmented by five storeys of bridgehouse, closed towards the sheer cliffs, it created a wind tunnel which none of the men involved had counted upon; the mounting gusts of the squall rushing down upon them from the west were forced relentlessly into the narrow channel, increasing their speeds pitilessly towards hurricane strength.
‘FIRE!’ yelled Tom at last, not when ordered to, or even when he thought Psyche was in the correct position, just when he could take the power of the terrible gale no longer. The rocket whirled away down the wind. ‘Leave that!’ he ordered in a hoarse scream. ‘Get up to the back of the cave! Quickly!’
He led the way himself, making the last few metres up to the piled survival equipment on his hands and knees, his bright blue uniform beret long gone.
~ * ~
Richard realised how serious matters had become only when it was almost too late to do anything about it. It was the firing of the stern rocket line that alerted him, for neither he nor Psyche’s equipment, or her captain, the Guyanese Peter Walcott, had thought her in the correct position yet. Richard had been on the bridge, wrapped in deep concentration, completely unaware of what was happening other than that the helicopter had leaped off the foam-washed reef, certain only that the great ship was behaving very strangely and at a loss to explain exactly why.
The news of the fired line sent him out onto the bridge wing and into the unrelenting grip of the freak wind - a wind which only blew here and below, where Psyche’s instruments could not even tell of its existence. He ran back onto the bridge in a breathless burst of action. ‘Captain Walcott! Our movement is causing a severe intensification of the wind between our port side and the cliffs. It must be coming through force ten out there now. I would like to lower the port lifeboat at once and go after the men on the ice before they simply get blown away.’
‘Of course, Captain. Number One, take a team and help the captain. You watch yourself though. I know what hurricanes can do!’
The two officers ran down through the companionways as the captain’s voice broadcast orders around them. No sooner had they reached the correct deck than the lifeboat crew arrived beside them. Between urgent gasps for breath, Richard explained the situation and gave his orders. They all nodded various understanding and burst out into the tiny, vicious hurricane.
Richard was the only one really expecting it and he was the only one not literally staggered by the power of it. But the others soon fought their way into position and released the automatic davits of the lifeboat, allowing it to swing down and out. Richard and the first officer scrambled in unhandily through the top hatch as the solid vessel jerked viciously against its blocks and the winch hooks groaned to let it go. Two of the team followed them as quickly as they could while the last two held the tricing-in pendants and bowsing lines until Richard ordered them to let go. The winches whirred and clanked. The boat began to tumble out and down, the gravity brakes refusing to let the wind tear it free of the falls. One gust swung it in to batter against the buffers on the ship’s side and everyone aboard tumbled around like stones in a huge maraca. Then their wild ride stopped abruptly. The hull jerked into motion three more times, falling less than a metre each time, and then it stopped for good, its keel just kissing the surface of the water and the strong curve of its lower port side thumping against the steep shore of the ice.
~ * ~
Tom Snell had no idea that anyone would - could - be coming to his rescue. The moment he had got the second team crouching together enjoying some kind of protection from the bundle of survival equipment, he was off again, still on hands and knees, to check on Sergeant Dundas and his men. Well before he had suffered the full three hundred metres of wind-ravaged ice, he saw that Dundas had led the small contingent up to the only promise of shelter, the low back of the cave, and here they were huddled together, wedged between the curves of floor and roof, with their backs to the wild whirl of the wind.
It was only now that Tom remembered the glimpse he had had of the cobalt-throated caves less than a hundred metres further on along the ridge. He battered on Dundas’s numb back until he had the soldier’s full attention and then he began to lead the bedraggled little group down the slippery beach of ice. As they moved, the curve between floor and roof began to widen and the back wall along which they were moving rose from two metres to three in height, then four, five and six. The cliff was all but vertical above them by the time they reached the mouth of the nearest cave. They were on a tiny ledge now, a mere metre and a half of gently sloping ice, then a cliff lunging down into the sea at least as sheer as the one above their heads and five times its height in depth. The wind showed no sign of relenting and was doing its best to push them off, so they had no choice and, consequently, no hesitation.
Tom turned, thinking somewhere distantly, no doubt, that he should see his men in first, like a courteous host, but as soon as he faced the wind he knew with bone-deep certainty that to hesitate was to die. Leading from the front as always, therefore, he stepped through the portal first. He took one crouching step on safe, firm ice through a blessed calm of solid-walled windlessness, then a second round a sudden twist in the low, tunnel-like cave - just enough to take him beyond the immediate sight of the next man following. Then he took a third step into an abyss. He pitched forward and down so suddenly, he didn’t even have time to call out. The second man, as disorientated as his commanding officer by the sudden windless silence, took the same steps and met the same fate. As did the third.
The fourth and last man was Sergeant Dundas and he was just that little bit more hesitant. He went through the doorway and hesitated. ‘Major?’ he called.
Silence. Still air here. The storm immediately behind. The roaring of wind and water. ‘Major Snell? Harry? Jock?’
No reply.
With every sense on the alert, with every hair on his long, Lowland body erect, Sergeant Dougie Dundas lay on his belly and slid forward over the slick ice. He came to a twist in the low tubular passageway and eased himself round it. Light came through the walls, a green light, surprisingly gloomy. God in heaven it was even coming up through the floor! Light enough to show him the walls of the tunnel for a metre or two ahead as he eased himself round the corner. Suddenly, atavistically, he was very worried indeed. He hesitated, in two minds whether to stretch out his hands and run the risk of having them grabbed by whatever horror had gulped down his CO and his squaddies, or to go round the corner head first and come face to face with it. Never a man to do things by halves, he pushed his face round first and head-butted the roof with a glancing blow as the tunnel vanished downwards like a wormhole a metre wide into an apparently bottomless black pit.
‘Jesus Christ!’ screamed the sergeant, overwhelmed with as much horror as if he had met the Loch Ness monster face to face. The sinister throat of the tunnel bubbled and hissed at him and it took only a moment to realise that it was full of water. Black, seething, restless water which he knew well enough from the rivers of his childhood. Rivers in full, deadly spate, which would suck in th
e unwary like liquid quicksand and gulp them away to their doom in a second. Water was doing in here what the wild wind was doing outside. Enraptured, like a child touching the picture of a monster, caught between horror and fascination, he reached his right hand down to touch the quick black liquid. It was a long stretch down a one-metre slope to reach the braided surface with his fingertips. Halfway down, something gleamed and caught the sergeant’s eye.
On a ridge of ice halfway down the slope there appeared to be a pile of large, rough crystals. As though in the grip of a vision or a drug-induced dream, the sergeant reached down and took the largest of the crystals. He brought it to his face. It looked like glass. Surely it was far too big to be a diamond. And it was dark, almost black. Was it full of tiny metallic flakes? He looked down at the rest of the little pile. Were they glowing? It seemed as likely as anything else going on around him. Without taking his eyes off the black water, he slid the first of the crystals into his sodden blouson jacket, then reached downwards again, inconsequentially thinking of chocolate.
His fingers had no more than brushed the topmost of the strangely gleaming pile when a broad hand burst up out of the rushing blackness and fastened round his wrist. He screamed and hauled back, fighting to get away. An arm came up out of the water and the pale threat of a face. Dundas, screaming at the top of his lungs, backed wildly out into the mouth of the cave, fighting with all his strength to break that deathly grip, certain that this was some kind of monster escaped from a nightmare buried deep in his subconscious. Only terror such as this could have given him the strength to move backwards.
Only the grasp of a drowning man on a straw of flesh and blood would have kept that iron grip unbroken as the terrified sergeant pulled him back.
They were still locked together when Richard and the men from the lifeboat arrived moments later to rescue them.
It was only when they were back in the warmth of Psyche’s little treatment room that they were able to break Tom Snell’s grip.
~ * ~
Chapter Fifteen
Yves Maille was the diving expert and only the foulest of luck would have taken him so far away when he was needed so badly. The French deep-sea explorer had no interest at all in the berthing of big ships and, quite correctly, had assumed that everyone else would be intimately involved in the operation. He had therefore taken the opportunity presented by the arrival of the two ships to do some of the work he had been brought aboard to do.
Before dawn, the Frenchman had headed off in the largest inflatable, together with the small team of seamen he was training to assist him in his work. With an absent-mindedness worthy of the most stereotyped of professors, he had taken no radio with him and so was impossible to contact now that an emergency had arisen. Nor had he bothered to inform the watch officer when he was leaving, so they didn’t know exactly when he had gone. All they knew was that he was somewhere on the ocean ahead - on rather than in, because he had not taken any diving gear - aboard a vessel capable of twenty knots, taking readings of sky and sea.
Richard didn’t want to wait any longer for him to return. He knew that inaction would only make a bad situation turn sour on them, and he wanted to press ahead. And, as far as he could see, they had no real reason to wait any longer. There were three others near at hand who could do the job perfectly well.
Richard had learned how to scuba dive in the Seychelles. Bob Stark had learned at his family’s summer home in Hyannis Port. Katya Borodin had learned at a Komosol dacha on the Black Sea. All three routinely kept their qualifications up to date, though none of them had ever, in their wildest dreams, supposed they would be called to dive down into the cavernous heart of an iceberg.
Tom Snell and Dougie Dundas were in the care of Asha Higgins MD who had helicoptered over from Niobe, which was under the command of her husband John; she was ensconced with the comatose men in Psyche’s sickbay. Psyche herself was snugly in place with the grey squall wind running outside round her southern-facing starboard flank and the grey surf thundering under her counter. John Higgins in Niobe was in technical command of the fleet as the six. mighty ships beat the following seas with their massive propellers, fighting to bring Manhattan’s huge, inertia-shackled bulk up to a speed in excess of ten knots.
Psyche’s great black bow reared above and abaft the little group now as they stood on the dull ice in the blessed wind shadow, considering the blast-widened opening to the ice cave and wondering what they would find down below.
No survivors, that was for store.
It was four hours since the accident - the quickest it had been possible to arrange things safely and sensibly. Neither Tom nor his sergeant had made much sense in the interim, but a quick inspection of the little cave had told its own story, especially to the wise eyes of Colin Ross. It was the big glaciologist who had overseen the engineers of Tom’s command as they blasted open the cave mouth to reveal the braided, sibilant rush of the water. It was he who would now be in charge of the group on the ice while the divers went down after the bodies below. Bob and Katya would be diving first, with Richard as reserve and back-up. The divers would be tethered to long lines as there was no knowing what conditions would be like down there. All of the divers wore bulky one-size dry suits routinely kept aboard Heritage Mariner tankers for small jobs over the side. The water temperature would be exactly at zero degrees Celsius and even a wet suit would be little protection in that temperature. And the dives would be short. Kate Ross, second only to die statuesque, red-headed Asha Higgins in medical qualifications, was there to make sure of that, and in case of the unexpected. Psyche’s lifeboat, loaded with emergency equipment, dry clothes and hot liquids, rode immediately at hand.
At last there was nothing left to say or do other than to get wet. Katya and Bob crossed to the sinister black hole in the ice, pulling again at their safety harnesses and testing their regulators, their long, braided orange polyester safety lines trailing like tails in their wake. Together they sat on the edge of the ice, putting their feet into the obsidian rush of the rogue current with all too obvious reluctance. In concert, already working in unconscious mirror image, as though they had been diving as a team for years, they settled their full face masks, flashed their heavy duty, underwater torches, and checked the tightness of their light equipment belts. Then they gave each other a swift glance and offered Richard and Colin a thumbs-up to show that they were ready.
Colin depressed the SEND button on the walkie-talkie he held tuned to the wavelength of the tiny transmitter-receivers in the divers’ headgear. ‘Katya, can you hear me? Over.’
Her head bobbed. ‘Yesss,’ came her reply, distorted by the machine already.
‘Bob, can you hear me?’
‘Yesss.’
‘And can you hear each other?’
‘Yesss.’
‘Loud and clear.’
‘Lines tight,’ ordered Richard quietly. ‘Ready all.’ He glanced back to where the three teams of mixed soldiers and seamen stood beside the tripods they had hammered into the ice. At the top of each tripod hung a block and tackle through which the line was fed. Behind each tripod stood the three men who would let the line out grudgingly - and be prepared to gather it in swiftly - as occasion required.
Richard tapped Katya on the shoulder and she rolled forward into the water. Her team staggered as the current took her, and then began to pay out line.
‘Wait!’ snapped Colin to the men. ‘Katya. What can you see?’
There was a short pause as she orientated herself and looked around, then her voice came strongly through the hissing of the open channel. ‘Tunnel. Narrow upstream, widening downstream. There is light here. Is not too cold.’ She paused, then added, ‘The roof of the tunnel is uneven. There are holes in it, from air bubbles I guess. Big enough to be handholds. It would be possible to pull oneself along for a little way, even against the current, I think.’
Richard’s eyes met Colin’s. So that was how the quick-thinking Tom Snell had managed to sa
ve himself. They had been wondering.
‘Right. We’re going to pay out more line and put Bob in behind you. Good luck.’
Richard crossed to Bob, his eyes straying constantly to the quivering tension of Katya’s orange line which was already eating into the rim of the ice hole as her team continued to pay it out.
At Colin’s nod, Richard hit his old friend on the shoulder and the black water swallowed the American. Both the divers were important to the project, but the order of their going had been dictated by the difficulty of replacing them if anything went wrong.
When Bob had vanished, Richard stood looking down into the hole, lost in thought. The triangular edge of his headgear bit across his forehead and squashed his cheeks together. TTie face mask dangled on his upper chest, the top of it pressing up under his chin. The suit was bulky and uncomfortable around him, but he noticed none of this. Colin was listening to what Bob could make out of the tunnel and of Katya ahead. How warm he felt the water was. How quickly he wished to catch up with his Russian colleague. But Richard noticed little of that, too.
He crouched down, as though fascinated by the hissing surface of the water, staring into the heart of it like a seer of old looking for the future in a magic bowl. What would they find down there? he wondered. What was hiding down there waiting to be found?