The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Chernobyl, perhaps,’ Richard temporised. In the near distance there was the sort of scream, long and unending, that had echoed over the freezing ocean for hours after Titanic had sunk. Richard’s scalp prickled. Peter continued to speak passionately, as though he had heard nothing of the dreadful sound.

  ‘Well, maybe. Or Tomsk Seven. They’re probably all that’s stopping all sorts of people falling over themselves to buy it all in.’

  They walked on in silence for a moment. The screaming died away. The wind shouted in the Sampson posts suddenly and Peter exploded again.

  ‘And finally, if we pull this off, establish that there is a market, then think about it: in the northern hemisphere, the greatest number of naturally occurring icebergs is in the Davis Strait, but the greatest concentration of ice is in the Arctic Ocean and who has the longest Arctic shoreline? Who could just sail up there and start blowing chunks of the stuff off and shipping it out through the Norwegian Sea or the Bering Strait? No, apart from the United Nations, I’d say the Russians probably have the most to play for.’

  As they talked, they had been walking up the four hundred metres of Psyche’s length and apparently into a different, more sinister, world. The ice was no closer to the ship here than it had been at the stern, but it seemed to be so. All the comforting presence of nearby humanity which had cast its protective mantle over the little poop was missing here. Even the throb and shudder of the motor was a distant indiscernible thing. There was no hiss or thunder of surf. There was the ice, and it cast a terrible, terrifying spell.

  The four men on the watch had not bothered to build a shelter. They huddled away on the starboard rail of the forecastle head, close enough to see the winch, which they had illuminated with a stand of electric lanterns, but as far away as they could reasonably get from the ice. The wind thundered down the deck and swirled the constant waterfall away forward, but the friction this caused with the cliffs sucked the water inwards as well, as though Manhattan wished to reclaim what it had lost. The battering of the wind along the open deck, its hollow whimpering and hissing among the long sheaves of pipes and around the deck furniture came to its natural conclusion in the wavering, unremitting howl it made as it played against the straining black rope. Across the long, taut line it sobbed and screamed with the voice of a creature in unnamable torment. It was the voice, said the crew, of the woman with the long white hair, calling them from below.

  But the ice made noises of its own. The open mouth of the cavern which had gulped down the soldiers gibbered and chuckled with the kind of lunatic intensity that the dangerously insane in horror films use. Behind and below the chilling sound, the ice rumbled, thundered and roared. It spat, hissed and cracked. There was never any pattern to the sound, nothing that the imagination could comprehend and deal with. The rumbling of air movement within the caverns of the ice seemed independent of the blowing of the wind. And indeed maybe it was, here, Richard thought. But who knew what winds were stirring fifty kilometres behind them, pushing their own dark forces through the ice, preparing to explode out of the cliffs in avalanches when least expected. Who knew what black currents from the icy depths where night-time was perpetual nine hundred metres below were being forced at incalculable speeds through the narrow honeycombs of tunnels into whirlpools, lakes or oceans entombed? Was it the manic gibber of the water which was to be most feared, or the sibilant, almost silent, surging hiss of great force fighting to break free into the thunderous glory of destruction? What was the sound they were to listen for particularly, the most dangerous sound of all? He had better check with Colin, who had warned him of the danger. He had better check with Colin soon, though he doubted that even the great knowledge locked in the glaciologist’s astounding memory would supply exactly the sound that an iceberg could be expected to make in the instant before it reared out of the water and toppled over like a white whale breaching. A white whale weighing more than a billion tonnes.

  As Peter Walcott talked to the quiet group, Richard found himself lured across the broad green deck by the mesmeric power of the ice. He could never go so close on Titan, had never stood so solidly under the spell of it. He was a sensitive, imaginative man. He was fascinated, not only by the aura of naked danger which the iceberg seemed to emanate, but by his own atavistic, visceral reaction to it. Both Robin and their friend Ann Cable had been up on the ice. Ann had been lost up there, alone with a murderous terrorist and lucky to survive. It was this man, the deadly Henri LeFever who was still up there, somewhere, frozen into the ice. Ann and Robin had both described to Richard at length and in detail how the ice had affected them, and yet he had never imagined that it could actually be so powerful, so sinister, so overwhelming.

  He was still standing there, lost in thought, when die relief watch arrived and Peter came over to touch him on the shoulder. ‘The relief line watch brought a message,’ he said. ‘Dr Higgins would like to see us. I don’t think it’s good news.’

  ~ * ~

  Dougie Dundas stared wide-eyed at the ceiling but he would never see it again. Between his cracked and darkened lips, the point of his tongue protruded far enough to show that it was swollen with cherry-dark sores. The skin on his yellow, black-jowled face was sickly yellow except that the bridge of his nose, cheekbone and forehead on the right side were more darkly discoloured. His chest was uncovered, and the light, antiseptic bandage did little to hide the open sores and blisters on his chest. His hands had been folded but the bandages had leaked a little so that fluid from the splits in the skin on his fingers formed a pool at the base of his still breastbone. He had lost weight in the days of his illness and, slim to begin with, now looked skeletal.

  ‘Still no idea?’ asked Richard.

  ‘No idea at all,’ admitted Asha wearily. ‘But whatever it was, he never stood a chance.’

  ‘He’d a wife and child in Glasgow,’ said Tom Snell quietly. ‘They’re his next of kin. There’s no record about parents.’

  The four of them stood in silence, looking through the glass wall section into the clinical brightness of the isolation room. ‘What are we going to do now?’ asked Peter. ‘We can’t just leave him there, can we?’

  ‘No,’ said Asha. ‘He’ll have to be bagged up and go down into cold storage with the other three.’

  ‘I’ll look for some volunteers ...’ Peter’s doubtful tone said it all. He could look. He wouldn’t find any.

  ‘No,’ said Tom quietly. ‘If you bag him, Asha, I’ll move him.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ said Richard. ‘It’ll take two to do it properly, even if we wheel him down on a stretcher. Asha, will the bag be germ proof?’

  ‘Yes. Wait here. I won’t be long.’ She opened a door leading into the vestibule of the isolation room, climbed into her protective clothing, pulled on a new pair of gloves and a mask and went in.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ said Richard quietly. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. What on earth could it be?’

  The other two shook their heads in sad incomprehension, then they turned away until Asha had completed the task of washing the corpse in disinfectant and placing it expertly in a bag of yellow plastic which was so thick as to be almost opaque. She wheeled the corpse into the little vestibule and closed the door into the isolation room. She pulled off her protective clothing, binned it and opened the door.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘The best I can do. I really can’t think of an organism which could break out of the regime we’ve had in place over the last few days. And, in any case, no one else has shown any symptoms. Unless exhaustion is a symptom,’ she added. ‘Plenty of people are exhibiting that one.’

  ‘When Tom and I have put Sergeant Dundas safely away,’ said Richard gently, ‘we’ll give you a lift back to Niobe and John. You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.’

  Asha gave him a grin of thanks, but shook her head. ‘No, thanks, Richard love. I’d better kip down here. I have to run checks on the rest of Psyche’s crew for the next few days in c
ase anyone shows symptoms like poor Dougie’s there. If we do have any kind of infection spread, then I’ll want to know at the earliest moment. And I’ll have to keep monitoring you, Tom. It might conceivably have been something in the ice cave itself, some organism, infection... The ice is, what, twenty thousand years old. There could be anything in there. I know it sounds fanciful, but face it: four men went in there together and you’re the only one left alive.’

  Nobody spoke during the ride down with the late Dougie Dundas. Asha seemed to have come to the end of her tether; she looked at the floor as she followed the two quiet men wheeling the stretcher along the corridors from the medical rooms to the cold storage which was a clinically isolated section of the galley’s main cold storage facility. They positioned the trolley carefully between the tables which now carried more yellow plastic body bags than even the most accident-prone voyage usually supplied.

  Dougie slid off the trolley with a weary sigh, as though the plastic wrapping was speaking for him. With Richard at his head and Tom at his feet, the sergeant, his body as light as that of a child, settled onto the table top beside the body of the mysterious blonde woman who was only marginally more skeletal than himself. They placed him tenderly, reverently in place, but even so, as though still wanting the last word even now, Dougie settled further after they had laid him down. Romantic to the last, he shifted slightly towards the supine woman he shared the table with and seemed in this slightest of movements to nudge her. The yellow plastic which had been wrapped round her parted, showing rough edges where it had been half cut, half sawn open. Out of the wound, her white hair tumbled, matted, thick and stinking. It had weight enough to jerk her head round after it and, from her neck, something clattered onto the floor.

  Richard, who was nearest, automatically bent and picked it up, holding it up to the light, wondering in shocked surprise how the corpse of a woman discovered on an iceberg at the top of the world could be wearing an ornament which seemed to be made of ebony wood and feathers.

  But then Tom Snell was standing by his side speaking in a low, tense monotone. ‘We’d better warn Captain Walcott to tighten up security in here. We don’t want any more of that superstitious filth. And I don’t want it coming anywhere near my men.’

  He snatched it out of Richard’s fingers and showed it to Asha, explaining in a voice shaking with rage, ‘Just look at this, would you? It’s a juju charm. Some kind of magic against the dead!’ He swung round to face the stunned pair still standing, looking as though they didn’t understand a word that he was saying. ‘Juju!’ he repeated fiercely, crushing the black trinket in his massive fist. ‘Voodoo! Black magic! Christ! You’d think we were in the middle of the fucking jungle already!’

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sight of the tank, coming on top of all the other sights to which she had been subject that day, should have finished Ann Cable but it did not. She should have fainted dead away on the spot as she had already done earlier. She should have run away screaming, as she had been so close to doing at the very moment when she saw it, but she did not. The new crisis, in spite of introducing an air of unreality into the situation, sobered her up like a slap in the face is said to do with an hysteric. There was no doubt that the tank was real, though. No doubt of that at all. It sat there, squatting silently as the sound of the last falling tree echoed across the wide dry river bed of the Blood until it whispered away into the forest shadows of Congo Libre on the far bank. Its grey sides glittered all too solidly in the gleam of the jungle moon. A scent of hot metal seemed to come from it, of oil and cordite and burning, though these may have been the smells from the burned out wreckage of Harry Parkinson’s askari truck. What came from it most clearly, unmistakably, was the sharp mechanical whine as the turrent swung round to bring the gun to bear on them.

  The sound, carrying clear and sinister on the still African air, galvanised them all into action at once. Three people with but one mind, they ran for the Land Rover and leaped into its stuffy interior. Harry released the brake, hit the motor and, because they were facing the dry river bed, drove straight down into it at breakneck speed. The bank fell away steeply, but the wreckage of the askaris’ burned out truck had carved a slope for them; they got down because of that and also by the grace of God. They made so much noise and kicked up so much dust that it took Ann a moment to realise when she looked back that the tank had fired a round to land exactly where they had been standing when they first saw it. ‘Quick!’ she screamed. ‘They’ve opened fire!’

  Harry wrestled the bucking vehicle round in as tight an arc as it would manage and they thundered off up the dry river bed, bounding from parched rut to smooth river boulder in a storm of protesting tyres and complaining suspension. Something solid battered its way along the vehicle’s underside and Robert yelled, ‘Watch your axles!’

  The second shell erupted in the dry mud exactly behind them. Harry swung the screaming vehicle into the first river bend and out of the tank’s direct line of sight. ‘They’ll come after us,’ yelled Ann. ‘They have to!’ She scrabbled in the rubbish on the back seat for her camera. She was a reporter. She would die reporting this.

  ‘Either that or they have friends they can send!’ yelled Robert. ‘Harry, can you get this thing up out of here?’

  ‘Half a mile,’ yelled Harry. ‘There’s another old elephant track. Tight squeeze. Too narrow for tanks.’

  The river bed immediately on their left exploded into a column of earth. The force made the Land Rover leap sideways. A burning wind ripped the canvas with the ease of a leopard’s claws and threw Ann across the back seat. Robert’s window cracked and struggled to come in - only the fact that it was half open saved him. The force whirled by him and the windscreen trembled.

  ‘Lobbed it over on spec., canny buggers,’ yelled Harry impenetrably. ‘Look back behind us, would you, love? They hit my rearview with that if nothing else.

  Ann pulled herself breathlessly round in her seat, held on tight with one hand only, tried to put the smell of burned hair out of her mind, squinted through the viewfinder of the camera and concentrated on the deceptively peaceful scene behind.

  The wide bed of the river lay clear and quiet under the full, low moon with the forest standing in Stygian clouds on either side, like smoke that had rolled into place on either bank and then, magically, stopped. There was a distant promise of flat veldt with steep-sided hillocks in the V behind the overlap of forested banks in die distance, and above the shimmering hillocks shone extravagant pearl-bright stars.

  The tank swung into view, sitting like a steel toad in the middle of the river bed, grinding forwards along their tracks. She pressed the button, praying that there was light enough. It clicked and whirred twice before she spoke.

  ‘Here it comes!’ she yelled. Harry swung the wheel hard left.

  ‘What I would like to do . . .’ he bellowed at the top of his voice. The wheels hit a log about the same size as an adult crocodile and the Land Rover’s bonnet slammed up into the air and down again. Harry wrestled with the steering until the shoulder seam of his bush jacket split open with the strain. ‘What I would like to do is lead this bugger up to the bank that’s holding the lake in place. Trick him into putting a shell through that!’

  The log the size of a crocodile, still dancing from their passage, vanished in another column of black power. This one had a bright yellow and white heart, though. And, for the first time, a voice. A flat bellow which drowned out the click and whir of the camera photographing it.

  ‘The lake’d come down here like a tidal wave and drown the buggers if I could do that!’

  Harry had the wheel on hard right lock now and the Land Rover was screaming at full speed for the precipitous black bank.

  ‘Could you do that?’ yelled Ann hopefully.

  ‘Not in a thousand years. Pure bloody fantasy, I’m afraid.’

  The barrel of the tank’s gun was pointing directly at them; then, as it was obvious they
would have to sheer away from the high bank side, it swung one degree to the left. Ann framed it and pushed the button, holding it down as the shutter clicked and the motor whirred. A puff of smoke belched out of it, glowing with a greenish luminescence which was actually very pretty indeed. ‘Incoming!’ yelled Ann, and wondered inconsequentially where she had heard the word used like that. She pulled her eye away from the camera and looked back over her shoulder between the men in the front.

  The black bank parted in front of them and the Land Rover’s square bonnet lifted again - lifted and kept on lifting. Ann hadn’t thought the engine could make any more noise but suddenly Harry was kicking at the pedals and shifting the gears. The huge motor screamed and howled. Ann was thrown backwards by the vehicle’s wild movement up the sheer slope and then forwards by the explosion of the bank almost beneath their left rear wheel. She bashed herself in the face with the camera. Dust and chunks of earth roared past, collected the canvas roofing and tore it away like tissue. She found herself suddenly looking up at open sky where there had been dusty cloth an instant earlier. There was a strange tearing sensation at her breast. She registered it without any understanding of what it might mean. Then she was jolted back down onto the seat to discover that the metal backrest was twisted and hot. The air smelt of burning leather and the seat was covered in clods of dried mud which burned her through her jeans. She rocked forwards and the tearing sensation returned. Her whole chest moved strangely and for a terrifying instant she thought she must have been wounded after all. But then the Rover jolted again and her breasts bounced and she realised she had only burst the catches on her sport bra and broken her straps.