The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]
Page 32
Peter had worked for the United Nations for a long time, however. The association had made him a little cynical. He liked Richard Mariner, there was no way round that; liked him and respected him. But he was all too well aware that on the great stage of world politics, it was only too easy for even the most able to be broken by forces far beyond their control; Peter had seen it happen too often. And the tall English captain had all the open, boyish, almost naive confidence of a man riding hard for a very bad fall indeed.
Though, to be fair, the confidence had been wearing thin over the last few days. Ever since they had lost the current, in fact.
The whirl of cold water from the North Atlantic Drift had swept them east and south for more than a week until they had swung almost imperceptibly onto a due southerly course reaching down on an arc inside the Azores, and there, three days ago, it had dissipated. The movement of the water had ceased with surprising abruptness. According to Yves Maille it had simply tripped over the submarine heave of the Cape St Vincent ridge which reached up from the seabed like a range of mountains below them. That sounded plausible enough to the Guyanese captain who knew well enough how the undulations of the seabed could affect the currents flowing over them. Whatever the reason, they had awoken two mornings ago to find themselves pulling the increasingly inert bulk of Manhattan across water which was every bit as dead as the mysterious, skeletal woman in the cold store below.
‘They’ve loaded the bodies safely aboard and they’re just off.’ Richard strode onto the bridge wing so abruptly that Peter jumped.
‘That was an incredibly quick turnaround,’ he observed.
‘Well, in spite of everything, we’re still heading away from their base at more than ten knots,’ Richard said. ‘We’re at the limit of their range as it is. They’ll be lucky to make their scheduled refuelling stop in Corunna if we leave it any longer. The pilot didn’t even want to think of the paperwork involved in taking all those dead people for an unscheduled ride into Portugal looking for fuel. Can’t say I blame him.’
His last words were all but drowned by the surge of power as the helicopter lifted off. The two captains stood side by side in silence and watched it heave its bulk up into the blue sky with apparent effort and grinding slowness. It came level with the upper galleries of the ice cliff, laboured into the upper air, turning its blunt nose away towards Ajax and Achilles, sixty kilometres to the north, pulled itself wearily upward a few hundred metres more, and was abruptly snatched away, like a leaf in an autumn gale.
After the time and effort it had taken for the helicopter to achieve level flight, the speed of its departure was striking, and the brows of both captains folded into frowns of surprise tinged with concern. ‘There’s something going on up there,’ said Richard.
‘Big wind, by the look of things,’ agreed Peter, speaking with all the experience of a man who has faced hurricanes since childhood. His eyes narrowed and he found himself wondering whether the removal of the cursed corpses was in fact going to bring about a change in their luck after all.
Richard nodded once, decisively, and was in action immediately. ‘Strong southerly at about a thousand metres up. I’d better get back to Titan and get ready to sort it out if it comes down here. It’s time we made a determined effort to find the Canaries current in any case. I want us out of this dead water as soon as possible. Especially if we’ve got to deal with contrary winds.’
The frown remained on Richard’s face as he strode out of the bridge and crossed to the lift which would take him down to the weather deck, the helipad and his own helicopter. He was by no means as confident as he appeared. Things were not going to plan - if a vague desire to pick up the Canaries current as soon as the impulse of the North Atlantic Drift began to fail them over die Cape St Vincent ridge could be called a plan. He was very much aware that they would soon begin to fall behind schedule and that the ice was beginning to melt too quickly, a fact emphasised by the increasing tension on the long black lines as the anchorage points inevitably began to rise. He was also too well aware that the exhaustion which held them all in its grip meant that they were on the verge of drifting mentally as well as physically, losing impetus, like their massive charge, in the dead water between the two great currents they were supposed to be riding southwards. Now the threat of a contrary wind, a southerly which would be bound to be hot, seemed to crystallise all his misgivings.
Richard stepped into the lift car and punched the button marked ‘A’. As soon as the lift was in motion, he lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips and thumbed Titan’s wavelength. The black machine was not powerful enough to communicate with the distant ship from within the bowels of Psyche’s bridgehouse, however, and he had to wait until he stepped out into the still, heavy air on the main deck before he could raise Sally Bell on his own navigation bridge.
‘Any further word from Yves?’ he asked as soon as she answered his call.
‘Nothing new. He’s with me here, though. Want to speak to him?’
‘Yes. Put him on, please. Yves, I’m coming across in the chopper. Any thoughts about the current? Is it possible that I could see it if I get high enough? I mean, would it be obvious to the naked eye?’
‘Yes. That is an extremely good thought, Captain. I can see nothing from down here and there has been no variation in sea temperature for some kilometres ahead, so I have found nothing working at sea level. But you may be lucky enough to see a change in surface colour or wave formation if you can get high enough. And if you see nothing on your way over here, then perhaps I can borrow the helicopter and go south myself.’
‘Perhaps.’
Certainly, now that Psyche was free of her unwelcome cargo, the necessity of hopping from ship to ship should be reduced, freeing the helicopter for other duties. And the loss of the current suddenly gave added priority to Yves’ work. Perhaps this was the time to let him have the chopper. He had been asking for it for long enough. Ever since his untimely absence during Tom Snell’s crisis, in fact.
Richard crossed the deck from the port bulkhead door to the helicopter which crouched just beyond the range of the incessant drizzle from the melting ice. After he had signed off, just before he climbed aboard, he paused, looking up at the tall white slope. There was a haze high in the sky, but it hardly cut the power of the sunshine and certainly did not detract from its brightness. The brightness of the ice cliff was painful to look at, but Richard forced himself to look up steadfastly for the few seconds it took to establish that the upper galleries still looked absolutely solid - as far as could be seen. The thought of an avalanche thundering down onto the deck of Psyche or Kraken on the far side was another nightmare he wished to keep firmly in his dreams and out of their actual experience - together with his fear that the whole berg might turn upside down and pull them all to sudden destruction. This last was a worry which was growing little by little in all their minds as they began to pay out the two lines metre by metre as the iceberg rose out of the sea.
‘We’ll have a look at the ice cliff from close up,’ he ordered as he climbed aboard.
‘Yes, sir,’ answered Doug Buchanan. He reported in to the bridge and alerted Peter Walcott that Richard was aboard and they were just about to take off.
Richard strapped himself in and settled back into his seat, his mind checking through the list of immediate priorities. He would give the upper slopes a close visual check on this side and the far side. Merely looking at the ice would tell him little enough, but the fact that everyone would see him checking on their safety would do no harm to the morale on the two ships. Since they had withdrawn Colin and Kate Ross’s team from Manhattan, the massive berg seemed to have attained almost a threatening air in the estimation of the crews most closely associated with it. Richard knew this as well as Peter Walcott did and was concerned to boost morale on every possible occasion. The most effective way of brightening everyone up would be to find the Canaries current and renew that sense of urgency which had dissipated with the North Atlant
ic Drift nearly seventy-two hours ago. Once they had checked the ice, he would order Doug to fly them over to Titan and then he would get the pilot to take them straight up into the sky until he could see the sea for a hundred miles ahead. They had to find the Canaries current before nightfall. Before that mysterious wind which had whirled the RAF chopper away so rapidly at a thousand metres up came down to sea level and began to push them backwards along the course they had just sailed so laboriously.
~ * ~
The upper slopes of the ice cliffs revealed nothing of immediate importance, even after the closest possible inspection. They fell back at thirty degrees from the horizontal, flawlessly carved into the safest possible angle by Tom Snell and - so long ago now, it seemed - Paul Chan and their explosives. There were no obvious cracks or loose ice boulders, though the smooth white surfaces were beginning to surrender to the relentless power of the runoff and the featureless skim of water was being channelled into increasingly obvious river valleys. This gave Richard some pause and he lapsed into deep thought as the helicopter flew south towards his command. If the runoff began to carve deep valleys into the ice slopes, then there would soon come a time when the ridged sections between the slopes might begin to break free and fall off in dangerously solid chunks. He would have to set up a routine for checking the slopes on a regular basis.
His eyes remained busy as they ran low above the white shoulder of Manhattan for kilometre after kilometre. No matter how deep in thought he was, his gaze could hardly fail to register the fact that the whole berg was beginning to change shape, and not just because the increasing height above the water was revealing slopes of beach reaching out at the waterline to echo the slopes up here. He would have to get Colin to give a detailed estimate on the current and projected rate of water loss. Or, to be fair, an updated estimate. Colin had been feeding rough figures into the regular meetings every day. They had been accurate enough to form the basis of the paying out of the line on a twice-daily routine, but it looked as though they would need more detailed and accurate figures as soon as possible. They still had ten days’ hard sailing - a fortnight’s if they failed to find the current. How much water would they lose in that time? Without detailed figures, it would be impossible to make any kind of realistic estimate.
And of course they had to come up with more than a mere estimate. The Mau Club at the United Nations would begin to demand accurate figures soon; they needed to know exactly what size the berg would be when it reached the harbour at Mawanga, for it was going to be no mean feat to arrange for Manhattan’s reception. He had hardly begun to think about that yet - not that he needed to: they would arrange things at that end, he had no doubt. All he would have to do would be to get Manhattan there and then fit in with the plans they had made for it.
The ice below chopped into a point and he realised with something of a shock that they had skimmed above Colin’s old camp site without him having noticed. So much for the closeness of his inspection. The ice vanished as the white forecastle head disappeared behind them. The two tankers reached out hugely, their long hulls parallel, cutting through the dazzling blue water like long green swords. Richard reached down and picked up the binoculars which fitted beside the walkie-talkie at his side. ‘Take us up,’ he ordered. ‘And look out for that wind at a thousand metres.’
The helicopter swooped upwards, its motion translating itself into a sinking feeling in the pit of Richard’s stomach and a battering clatter of increased engine noise in his ears. He pressed the binoculars beneath the frowning ridge of his brows and began to sweep them from side to side, focusing on the horizon as it jumped near in the magnification, and then began to fall away again as they climbed steadily through the still air. At first there was nothing to see other than the bright blue of the water marked by the silvery ridges of the swell. The set of the sea was westerly, apparently coming in from America. The shoulders of the waves were bright and their faces dark, as though picking up shade from the Dark Continent towards which they were heading in regular series. He concentrated on looking due south, sweeping the binoculars a little eastwards and westwards. If he looked a little north of west, he knew, he would see the distant specks of the Azores beyond Doug’s profile. He felt that he could see so far that he should have been able to see Gibraltar or Morocco a little south of east on the opposite side. In fact all he could see was the featureless surface of the ocean to the south.
Except that... There, on the furthest edge of his vision, away down in the south-east. . . ‘Doug. Take her up a bit more, would you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The thunder of the motor intensified. ‘But watch out for the wind. . .’ Richard said the words automatically, his mind actually far distant as he concentrated with all his might on what he could see in the distance.
‘We’re nowhere near a thousand metres yet,’ Doug said calmly, but Richard was hardly listening.
Hope welled almost painfully within him. The regular series of waves was interrupted far to the south-east. The whole character of the water changed down there. The pattern of the waves was subsumed into a broad ribbon of brightness like a calm river flowing through the serried pattern of the swell. A river apparently kilometres wide, flowing southwards.
Richard reached down again and this time he lifted the walkie-talkie to his lips. He thumbed Niobe’s channel.
‘John?’
‘Here, Richard. What can I do for you?’
‘I think I can see the current. We’re only five hundred metres up, but I can see it quite clearly. It must be the better part of fifty kilometres south-east. If you come round a point or two we should pick it up by dark.’
‘We’ve just been too far west all along?’
‘Heaven knows. It probably wavers from side to side like the North Atlantic Drift did.’
‘But we can pick it up by dark?’
‘I’d guess so, but it’s impossible to be certain of the—’
The helicopter seemed to fly into a wall. Its nose lifted and it was swept backwards so rapidly that Richard lost the current, almost lost the horizon. He dropped the glasses and the walkie-talkie and grabbed the sides of his seat. The sky reared over him like a wave breaking and he bashed the back of his head on the seat.
‘Doug...’ He said the word in a tone of surprise, hardly more, as though what was happening was of mild interest.
But this was not the case. As Doug wrestled with the controls with all four limbs and extremities, swearing at first under his breath and then more loudly, the Bell tried to loop the loop backwards, and then settled for standing on its tail while moving northwards and seawards with incredible rapidity. Inside the cabin, the two men were hurled back in their seats as everything around them sprang bodily up and back though ninety degrees. Everything that had been vertical was now horizontal and everything that had been floor was now wall. It was as though they were trapped in an elevator which had fallen on its back and was dropping at an incredible rate.
Before Richard could even begin to assimilate what was happening, the helicopter toppled onto its right side like a felled tree, and Doug miraculously managed to swing it round so that the cabin returned towards level before putting the nose hard down and dropping the game little craft, barely under control, hard down towards Titan’s broad green deck. At once, they were in still air again, and it was as though the terrible power of the wind had been a kind of nightmare shared between the two men and the machine. As though, in fact, it had never actually happened.
Richard reached for the binoculars and the walkie-talkie, but could find neither of them, for the wild dance of the helicopter had been enough to send them irretrievably under his seat. The movement was enough to establish, however, that the muscles of his shoulders and neck had been torn as though by whiplash, and that the tight seat belt had bruised him painfully across the stomach. Automatically, not a little shocked, he loosened it.
‘Son of a bitch,’ said Doug. ‘I did not like that one little bit!’
‘Too fucking true,’ said the pilot. ‘That’s the closest I ever want to come to flying into a tidal wave. Christ knows what it’s done to the old girl...’
As though he was a gifted prophet - or at least in psychic contact with his machine - the engine died on his word. There was not an absolute silence, for the rotor continued to thud through the still air, but the sudden cessation of the pounding engine was utterly shocking. The continued whir of the rotor, though little louder than the thump of Richard’s heart, was enough to keep the helicopter steady and Doug continued to pilot the craft unerringly towards Titan, whose deck represented the nearest safe landing place.
Inconsequentially, Richard thought of surf, and was surprised to note that the sea was calm below them and the steady progress of the ships so measured that there were actually no waves breaking down there at all.