The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  The helicopter was angled downwards and there was no doubt that even though it had stalled, and even though there was no sign of the engine restarting, Doug had it under control.

  ‘I’m going to put her down on the forecastle head,’ he said, psychic again, as though reading Richard’s mind.

  Richard nodded, his mind still distant, wondering whether he was still in shock. He had hardly heard Doug’s words, reassuring and poignantly welcome though they were, because of the persistent roaring. Of course, he thought, there was no surf, it was simply the shock of the near-disaster making the blood pound in his ears.

  No sooner did he realise this than the thought vanished as the blunt point of Titan’s forecastle head swung into view close below them. Richard’s eyes narrowed as he automatically began to estimate which would be the safest point to touch down. The supertanker’s forecastle head was a rough, slightly bow-sided triangle sixty metres wide at its base and forty metres deep from the point. The forecastle head was an idea more than a fact for there was no raised section, merely a narrowing of the flat deck. But in any event there was no way of putting the helicopter down on the forecastle head itself for the big green triangle was too full of equipment. There were two huge anchor winches, not to mention a range of vents and tank tops. Furthermore, a solid little mast stood right in the middle of it.

  Doug could see the danger as clearly as his passenger, and he lifted the Bell’s nose a little to skip back beyond the complex of deck furniture and set down on a square of uncluttered deck beside the long sheaf of pipes which reached down the centre of the ship. The rotors continued to turn, moved by the momentum which had brought them safely this far, but the undercarriage settled solidly as the weight of the machine met the green steel deck. Richard unloosened the seat belt and turned to Doug. ‘Well. . .’ he began.

  The roaring broke over them then. It was not the thunder of the shock in Richard’s ears at all. It was the sound of the wind which had followed them down the last five hundred metres to sea level. The wind swept across the forecastle head and plucked the helicopter off the deck once more.

  ‘Jump!’ yelled Doug as he began to wrestle with the controls.

  Richard swung the door wide and leaned to one side. The seat belt was loose and it fell back to allow him the movement he needed. He half stepped, half fell out onto the deck. The steel was moving past at considerable speed and Richard hit hard. He rolled sideways, trying to minimise the damage which the unforgiving steel was all at once trying to do to him, only to be brought up short when the back of his head came into violent contact with the raised edge of a hatch cover.

  He never saw the Bell, with Doug Buchanan still wrestling fruitlessly with the controls, collide with the top of the mid-deck Sampson post, explode into flames and whirl away downwind into the suddenly stormy sea.

  The last wreckage from the blazing helicopter had fallen, hissing wildly, into the choppy sea, before the first crew-member was on his knees by Richard’s side. This was Cadet Wally Gough, currently on deck duty. He arrived in a flurry of sand which would have graced a seaside beach and crashed onto his knees beside the inert figure of die commanding officer which lay, as though crucified, face-up to the thick brown sand-filled sky.

  Wally was studying for his First Aid certificate in his spare time, however, and he knew just what to do. He checked around for near and present danger but there was none. The helicopter had taken its debris far away out to sea. Apart from the Captain’s lifeless body there was nothing of it left.

  First, Wally gripped the big man by his shoulders and shook him gently. ‘Captain! Captain, can you hear me?’ he shouted at the top of his lungs. His voice was snatched away by the power of the wind and hurled after the blazing wreckage of the helicopter. Richard Mariner made no response at all.

  Working by the book, Wally eased the great grey-templed head back until the square jaw fell and he could check that the Captain’s tongue was not blocking his airway. Shocked, increasingly terrified, the boy leaned forward until his chilled cheek was a couple of centimetres above Richard’s lips and his wide-eyed gaze reached down the great barrel of his chest. There was no sign of breath and no stir of breathing - although the wind interfered with both sensation and vision. The clothing billowed massively but Wally had no doubt that the Captain’s chest remained still.

  It was with a rapidly sinking heart, therefore, that he placed his chilled fingers against the cool flesh of the Captain’s neck and began checking for a pulse. He could find no sign of life at all and he shouted out loud as the full shock hit him. With trembling fingers he reached for the dead man’s collar. Only rigid self-control kept Wally from tearing the buttons wide, for he knew how dangerous such a movement could be if the Captain was still alive but his neck or spine was injured. But even in the hollow of his throat the terrified cadet could feel no pulse. No pulse at all.

  When he looked up, he was horrified to find himself utterly alone. It had never occurred to the young cadet, only on his second voyage, that the deck of a supertanker could be so lonely - that the bridge house could be so far away.

  He took a deep breath and choked upon a mouthful of airborne sand. Then, fighting to control his breathing, his heart-rate and his panic, he lifted Captain Mariner’s left arm and laid it on the deck above his head, angled away from his face. He took the massive right arm, folded it across the barrel chest until the back of the hand was by the left cheek and the palm was facing out. He raised the right leg until it was bent with the knee pointing upwards and he carefully rolled the body onto its side so that it lay - uselessly, pointlessly, but by the book - in the Recovery Position.

  Then he pounded off towards the distant bridge looking for help. Or, more precisely, looking for Sally Bell, First Officer and ship’s medical officer.

  She was on the bridge, seemingly unaware of the full horror of the accident, going through a series of checks over the phone with the Chief Engineer designed to ensure that the impact of the helicopter against the Sampson post had not damaged the fabric of the ship.

  Wally looked wildly around the shocked faces on the bridge around him. ‘Number One, the Captain’s on the deck,’ he babbled. ‘I saw him fall out of the ‘copter as it went over the side but I think the impact has killed him. I can’t see any respiration and I can’t find any pulse!’

  Sally Bell lowered the phone. ‘What?’ she snapped. ‘Where is the Captain?’

  ‘He’s on the main deck by the Sampson post but I can’t find any signs of life.’

  ‘Tell the Radio Officer to contact Dr Higgins at once,’ Sally ordered, though it was not clear exactly who she was talking to. ‘Tell her to get over here as fast as ever she can. Tell her it looks like Captain Mariner is dead.’

  Then she was gone out into the sudden sandstorm on the deck to see the truth for herself.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Nineteen

  The RAF helicopter skimmed in on fuel vapour and a prayer on the back of the evening wind. Porthleven heaved up lazily out of Mount’s Bay below and the B3304 unwound like a grey ribbon across the mile or two of Cornwall leading up to Helston town. They followed it, passing low over the sleepy, gloaming-shaded countryside, before falling away to the right towards their final destination. The pilot had picked up air traffic control at the naval air base at Culdrose away over the Scillies and they guided him down onto the pad as the last of the light died away.

  The chopper was met on the pad by an ambulance. The four yellow body bags were lifted reverently out, loaded and transported at once to the camp’s medical facility. Here they were placed in cold drawers where they remained through the night because the helicopter had arrived well after sunset, the duty medical officer was out at a formal dinner in Falmouth, and there was apparently no real need for haste in spite of the mystery surrounding the death of one and the very existence of another.

  The camp’s senior medical officer was the first one to see them in the morning, for he arrived, full of a tradition
al English breakfast as dispensed by the mess, at the same time as his orderlies so that he was there right from the undoing of the first zip. Bodies taken from the sea were commonplace enough here, for the big Sea Kings squatting on the concrete apron outside were all too often called for air-sea rescue work in the Channel and the Western Approaches. Bodies discovered on icebergs had a certain amount of novelty, but not enough to arouse much interest in the blue-uniformed breast of Captain Edward Penmarrick MD. The body of Sergeant Dundas, however, was more intriguing, he thought as he glanced up from the medical notes which had arrived with the bodies. Two of the bags were open now, and the still, marble-pale faces of the drowned soldiers lay open for the first time since they had been bagged up on Psyche. Penmarrick glanced down again, wondering if either man was this Dundas, but there was no immediate evidence of the discolouration noted by the doctor. What was the name? Higgins. Asha Higgins.

  Now, what on earth was a woman with a Middle Eastern name doing as doctor on a tanker towing an iceberg? Sidetracked by the speculation for an instant, he didn’t notice the sound of the last zippers coming undone. When he glanced up at last, his gaze flicked over the featureless skull-face of the skeletal woman to the profile of the last corpse.

  He went cold. His breath departed in a gasp as though he had been hit in the stomach. He gulped in enough air to fuel a word or two.

  ‘Get out,’ he ordered. ‘Clear the room at once!’

  The two medical orderlies looked up at their normally easygoing chief and hesitated. ‘OUT!’ he rasped. ‘Get next door and wait.’

  They went and he lingered for a moment himself, looking across the three cold corpses to the one that was obviously not so cold. There was a telephone hanging on the wall behind him. He lifted the handset.

  ‘Security,’ he requested.

  He was through before he had blinked twice, though shock was slowing time around him now as the details of Dundas’s radiation-ravaged countenance were beginning to burn themselves into his stunned mind. He was far away from speculating how and why as yet.

  ‘Security here.’

  ‘I need two armed guards over at the medical facility now, please.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And tell them to bring a Geiger counter.’

  An infinitesimal pause, then, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Transfer me back to the operator.’

  ‘Sir.’ The word was cut short as the order was obeyed, and the operator’s voice returned, echoing the monosyllable.

  The doctor hesitated for another instant, his mind racing. But, other than speculation, there was little to think about. The procedures had been laid down in the sixties as to the correct reaction to this sort of thing both in wartime and in peacetime. The standing orders were clear. It might be some kind of exercise, he thought. But even if it was, he still had a clear duty to perform.

  ‘Get me the Ministry of Defence,’ he ordered.

  ~ * ~

  The man from the MoD arrived twelve hours later. He was a rumpled, dyspeptic little man called Jones, with thin hair and thick glasses. Penmarrick had heard of him; he was a professor of forensic medicine with an international reputation. On the one hand, the captain was confused that the MoD’s reaction had been so slow; on the other, he was impressed by the stature of the man they had sent, if not by his personality. Professor Jones did not drive. He had had to take the intercity express train from London to Exeter. At Exeter he had been forced onto the local service through Teignmouth, Newton Abbot, Totnes, Plymouth, Liskeard, St Austell and Truro. Four dilatory hours, he complained bitterly, on a second-class ticket in old-fashioned, uncomfortable carriages without the luxury of either a refreshment car or a toilet. This bloody corpse had better be worth all the inconvenience and discomfort.

  Penmarrick picked him up at Penryn British Rail station, carried his little leather case to the car and drove him down to Culdrose himself. In the interim, the whole naval air station had been put on alert - heavily irradiated corpses were by no means as run-of-the-mill as drowned ones - and Penmarrick was eager to make a detailed report of what he had done in the length of time it had taken for the expert to arrive. He was, perhaps, a little over-anxious, because his reaction to Sergeant Dundas’s body had been exactly by the book - which had not stopped it spoiling the camp commander’s day and putting the doctor’s general popularity seriously at risk.

  But the professor wanted no reports or self-justification. He would see what had been done for himself and would make up his own mind as to the procedures they would follow then. He was in any case here to perform an autopsy, not to comment on naval security procedures. The only thing about the navy which did attract his attention, however, was die quality of the camp mess and his chance of a decent dinner after this thing was all over.

  Penmarrick had formed no high opinion of his grumbling visitor by the time he pulled up at the security barrier on the main gate. Whether the professor was interested in naval security or not, he was quick enough to produce his security pass and gave the soldier’s crisp salute a curt nod.

  He treated the camp commander with a grudging courtesy, but made it plain that he wished to get on with his business rather than exchange social chit-chat. The doctor felt his popularity plunging lower with each rude professorial monosyllable.

  Professor Jones’s pale blue eyes were busy about the arrangements which Penmarrick had made inside the medical facility as well, though the beleaguered doctor hardly knew what to make of the raised eyebrow which greeted the sight of armed security guards in white anti-radiation suits. ‘If they need those, then we’ll need them too,’ he prompted, as the two of them stood outside the door. ‘It’ll make things difficult, but we’ll manage. You’ll assist me.’

  So, thought Penmarrick, some of the details of his rudely-dismissed report had sunk in after all - the Geiger counter readings, for instance. At least the professor hadn’t actually questioned anything he had done so far.

  It took them ten minutes to kit up and for the professor to place a cassette in the little tape recorder he proposed to carry with him, along with the battered leather case. Then they went in. Professor Jones placed his case on the floor and approached each body with the Geiger counter first, tutting to himself as the readings rose. Naturally enough, he spent the longest time checking out Sergeant Dundas. But he kept returning to the nameless, skeletal woman too. The doctor watched him, grudgingly impressed by the transformation which action seemed to bring to the professor. The little man’s movements were suddenly precise and economical. His concentration impressively absolute. To and fro he went between the corpses which lay on the tables like strange aliens half emerged from yellow plastic cocoons. At last he switched the machine off and turned to Penmarrick.

  ‘You were right,’ he conceded. ‘This is very strange. Your sergeant here is certainly the primary source. The other two men have been irradiated secondarily, and only slightly. There’s something else about the woman, though. Something I don’t understand. Still, time for a closer look...’

  He placed his case on a worktop on the far side of the room and stood the tape recorder against it, out of range of interference from the radioactivity being emitted from the corpses, and switched it on. In a loud voice, he intoned the date and time, their names and the names, as far as they knew them, of the people they were examining.

  Side by side, they lifted the bodies and pulled the bags out from beneath them. Then, slowly, carefully, working as a team, they pulled off the corpses’ clothes. The outer clothing came quite easily, but they needed to cut the underwear away. Professor Jones opened his case to reveal that he had brought his own equipment with him: enough knives and scissors to dissect a deceased army. He used a pair of scissors with blades like a hummingbird’s beak rendered in steel. It was a filthy, deeply unpleasant job and Penmarrick was grateful for the body suit - though it was designed to protect him against radiation, not liquid putrefaction. The uncut clothes went into one bag. The ruined underclothes
into another. The rags from the woman’s skeleton into a third.

  Jones began with a careful visual inspection of all four, talking in a loud voice so that his description of what he was looking at reached his tape recorder. Then he moved from observation to exploration. He began with Sergeant Dundas. A careful series of probes and pressings resulted in a sudden, surprised grunt. ‘What do you make of this?’

  Penmarrick crossed and pushed his fingers into the cavity beneath Dundas’s skeletal sternum. The protective gloves deadened the feel of his fingertips, of course, but even so he easily felt a hard protuberance at the junction of oesophagus and stomach.

  ‘Any thoughts?’ asked Jones.

  ‘Could be anything. . .’

  ‘Not likely to be a sandwich, though, is it? Bit of pork pie?’

  ‘Well...’ Penmarrick was swept back to his days as a junior houseman under the tutelage of a particularly cantankerous surgeon.

  ‘Quite right, though; quite right. It is likely to be something carcinogenic.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘But there’s only one way to be sure, isn’t there?’