The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  For Inga Kroll, the opposite was true. The last layer of gauze revealed a thigh almost as muscular as her own, covered in lightly furred ivory skin. Down the outside, from the hip nearly to the knee, ran a thin wound held closed by a combination of stitches and thin lateral bandages. The wound itself showed no sign of infection or any suggestion that their lovemaking had strained it in any way. But the flesh all round it, in a long rectangle, straight-edged and square, was red and irritated, almost as if it had been burned. And, strangest of all, down the middle of the red-burned rectangle of skin ran a series of white blisters. Some had burst, some had been cut open by the surgery so that the sinuous line they might have made was no longer continuous but was pitted with raw wounds which were obviously the source of Paul’s discomfort. But there was a pattern which was still quite clear. Shockingly so.

  The strange white blisters spelt out several letters in mirror-writing. In Cyrillic, Russian, writing. She could read it with very little difficulty: ‘Leoni’.

  What did it mean? How could it have come to be there?

  Inga had heard a certain amount about the bizarre side effects of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it was part of her Soviet-inspired education in the East German city of Dresden. She was aware that some victims on the outskirts of the cities and on the slopes overlooking them had been found with the letters from the newspapers they had been reading at the moment of explosion burned into their faces. So she knew something about the ability of black on a white background to soak up far more radiation during nuclear explosion, but she knew nothing at all about any nuclear explosion that Paul could have been involved in, or any nuclear explosion that might have involved something with the word ‘Leoni’ written on it.

  But it was so striking, she thought she had better report it the next time she passed a message back to her masters in the one section of the STASI which was still operational, and they in turn would report it to their masters in Dzerzhinsky Street.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dr Asha Higgins had led a varied and exciting life. She had been born the elder of twin girls by less than five minutes, the daughter of a Kuwaiti prince. She had been brought up as a princess in an exclusive English boarding school. She had studied to be a doctor while her sister Fatima studied journalism. She had married and divorced one of Fatima’s friends, the journalist Giles Quartermaine. She had worked for many years as ship’s doctor with the Heritage Mariner organisation and met her second husband, John, when they had been kidnapped with his whole command, pirated by terrorists in the Gulf.

  But of all the things she had done and been expected to do during the last five years, this was by far the worst. She clipped on her safety line and heaved herself up out of the pitching little dinghy onto the Jacob’s ladder which swung and flapped up Titan’s massive side. Crossing a viciously choppy sea still foaming from the death of a blazing helicopter and its brave pilot and heaving herself up the better part of twenty metres of sheer black metal counted as nothing. Being called to certify the death of her husband’s closest friend, her own good friend and husband of her own closest friend was a bitter thing indeed. Wally Gough, the ship’s cadet, was there at the top of the ladder to haul Asha aboard and hand her the medical bag which had been pulled aboard separately. ‘Where is he?’ she yelled. And she did have to yell. Up here the wind was very nearly storm force and it was armed with lethal whips of sand. Even though Manhattan was far behind, she could hear the power of the harmattan in the superstructure, the wailing hiss of the sharp Saharan sand, and the massive booming bluster of the gale against the distant icy cliffs.

  ‘Down here!’ yelled Wally and, although they had told her it was too late, she ran down the deck to Richard’s inert body and the tall Irish first officer - captain now, if they were right about Richard - kneeling by his side. There was quite a crowd of crew men down here as well, all gathered anxiously, protectively, round Richard’s body.

  Asha shouldered through them roughly. Watching herself, studying her actions from that distance which shock can engender, she was surprised by the violence of her actions and at the same time recognised it as a reaction to the depth of her personal pain.

  Richard was lying on his back, facing up as though fascinated by the low hazy scud of sand clouds. At least his eyes were closed. That was fortunate because the sand was falling out of the wind at an incredible rate and already the long still body was being shrouded in miniature dunes. It was a trick of the wind, however - one which they would soon come to recognise as being typical of its vicious character - that the only part of the deck near the body innocent of sand was in the wind shadow of Richard’s head, where a thick pool of blood lay.

  ‘Has anyone moved him at all?’ bellowed Asha, thudding painfully onto her knees at his side.

  ‘Only as far as we needed, in order to check his pulse and perform the standard resuscitation,’ answered Sally. She was pumping powerfully on Richard’s chest. ‘Fifteen,’ she said, apparently apropos of nothing. Then she leaned over and breathed into Richard’s mouth.

  Asha began to check for herself while Sally continued to pump Richard’s chest, and her sensitive fingertips warned her that Sally might well be right. To be fair, she would have expected nothing else from a Heritage Mariner first officer - they were all fully trained to be acting medics. A doctor aboard was a luxury normally only granted to Prometheus, John’s usual command, the flagship of the fleet. Deep concentration and sensitive exploration of low-fluttering life forces was almost impossible here in the teeth of this foul, vicious wind, but Asha thought that, deep in the muscle-twined column of the neck, something was stirring in Richard after all. ‘We’re going to have to move him,’ she decided at last. ‘I need a stretcher here. Now!’

  A stretcher arrived surprisingly quickly and was slammed down onto the deck beside her as roughly as she had shouldered her way through the circle of onlookers. Sally and she were clearly not the only people aboard who held Richard Mariner in deep affection. But none of the roughness was apparent in the way they gathered Richard’s inert form, folding his arms carefully across the barrel of his chest and cradling his still-bleeding head, and lifted it aboard the sandy stretcher. Equally gently, they strapped him in place and packed pillows round his head and neck.

  Six men caught up the stretcher and ran it back up the deck with Asha, Wally and Sally in close pursuit. Skidding over the gathering sand dunes, they swung in through the bulkhead door into the A deck corridor. Still running at a trot, like a squad of marines, they went along the corridor until they reached the door to the ship’s sickbay. Here at last they stopped to let their commander and the doctor through first. Then they, too, entered and laid Richard’s body on the nearest of the beds. They stayed, anxiously, where they were until Asha ordered them out. Sally Bell’s eyebrow, raised when they hesitated, added irresistible weight to the command. Wally went with them, obviously regretfully.

  The two women began to unpack Richard’s head and neck with great care. The frame of the stretcher came easily apart and the metal tubes were pulled out of the fabric so that the injured - dead - man was left simply lying on the bed. Then Sally was called up onto the bridge once more, and Asha, desolate, continued on her own.

  Richard and she were old friends and she thought she knew every detail about him except those which were absolutely private between him and his wife Robin. She knew what had caused his aquiline nose to be broken slightly out of true. She knew why one of his fingers was shorter than the rest. She thought she knew the bulk of his medical history, but the moment she undid the buttons of his boiler suit and began to expose his upper thorax to the light, she stopped and reached for his medical notes once more. She had several pages to scan quickly, with frowning concentration, before she took the cold disc of her stethoscope and pressed it to the left side of his still chest. It was no wonder, she thought grimly, that his heartbeat was so hard to find. His right lower thorax was ridged with scar tissue. S
he moved the stethoscope up almost to his armpit, thrusting it mercilessly beneath the solid slab of his pectoral muscle.

  She did not clearly hear a heartbeat, but she did hear just the faintest whisper of respiration.

  Her long, golden, almond-shaped eyes flooded with tears of relief. She moved across the ravaged wasteland of that great barrel chest and yes, there at last, was a heartbeat. Slow and regular and blessedly strong. Automatically she crossed to her medical bag and began to get out the thermometer, the reflexometer, the blood-pressure gauge and all the other equipment she would need for the battery of tests she wanted to complete now that she knew there was a point in completing them. Then she stopped, turned and crossed to die telephone which hung on the wall by the door. She lifted the handset and dialled.

  ‘Bridge here,’ came Sally’s unmistakable tones at once.

  ‘He’s . . . he’s alive,’ said Asha.

  ~ * ~

  The news of Richard’s near death and current condition went round the little fleet like wildfire after that, and there were few aboard any of the ships who were not cheered to hear that their admiral had survived such a close brush with oblivion.

  Four of those who cared least, however, were the forecastle head line watch on Psyche. With the wind blowing so strong and so foul, they had perhaps the least enviable job of all and certainly felt themselves to be the most severely hard done by. The same wind that had whirled Titan’s helicopter to destruction had taken their new makeshift shelter and hurled it in rags and sticks back down the deck, leaving them as exposed as the little pigs in the fairy tale. The drizzling waterfall from the ice cliffs above them intensified at once, gathering the sand in the wind into a foul sludge which covered them and clung. Only at the outer edge of the forecastle head itself could the eternal drizzle be avoided and the men soon retired here to crouch and watch gloomily, their thoughts little short of mutiny, their ears assaulted by the banshee screaming of the wind in the haunted cave throats of the ice.

  The unvarying battering force of the cold dry wind, surging northwards in a river a thousand metres deep, battered across the vertical surfaces of the iceberg, making them tremble like great drumskins and sound a note too deep for hearing but one which could be felt like the onset of an earthquake. Every hole and imperfection in the ice from pocks the size of pin heads to caverns larger than cathedrals set up their own hollow booming resonances. Air which had been stirred to the occasional whisper by the movement of the water through the internal chambers of the ice mountains went snarling and thundering now. And water which had been held solid by that chill stillness began to melt and murmur deep within the glacial heart of Manhattan.

  The forecastle head watch pulled themselves grimly further and further out from the unutterably sinister sounds of the monster they were trying to control. Only one man, once in a while, according to the schedule agreed between the captains and Colin Ross, ran underneath the foul, sludgy waterfall and eased the howling black line which tightened again inexorably as the berg continued to rise up out of the water.

  The wind had come suddenly, unexpectedly. The worried weather man at Tamanrasset had contacted his colleagues with questions; no one had contacted ships with warnings. Even Yves Maille had failed to see what was happening ahead. The great desert wind had brought with it a whole range of problems and disasters. There was no real chance even for a sailor as widely experienced as John to take full account of what it was capable of doing. John, in any case, was suddenly submerged beneath a pile of procedural demands which arose out of his hopefully temporary assumption of Richard’s overall command while at the same time he tried to find the current Richard had been describing moments before the disaster. Sally Bell, likewise, had her work cut out for her. Captains Walcott and Odate had more than enough on their plates trying to ensure the safe passage of their ships under these new and dangerous conditions this near to their lethal charge. Bob Stark and Anna Borodin had to recalculate all their propulsion figures to meet the new situation. They were still in dead water, after all, and would not pick up the current until after dark even if John could find it under these conditions, and now they suddenly had an enormously powerful headwind pushing them unremittingly straight back along the way they had just come. Small wonder, then, that no one had any time to spare for the complaints of Psyche’s forecastle head line watch.

  The line watch was led by a Greek called Nikos Lykiardropolous who shipped aboard at Piraeus but who originated from Lamia. Lamia he was called, therefore. Lamia was a square man with thick, twisted arms and short, bowed legs. These, with his stooped back, overhanging brow and underhung jaw gave him a darkly simian appearance. With his solid ball of a belly protruding from beneath his scrawny, tubercular chest, he looked like a black-haired orangutan, a one-man argument in support of Darwin’s theories as to the origins of the species. He had massive, scarred hands, a temper soured by a decade of severe dyspepsia relieved by nothing but Keo brandy, and a reputation among his peers as a vicious, unforgiving fighter to whom the concept of Queensberry rules was as foreign as cheerful laughter.

  The others scurried under the filthy waterfall to ease the line as directed by the chart Lamia held, but he never did. Of all of them, he, the least careful of his personal appearance, was the only one who remained clean and dry. He slouched beside the starboard rail, turning his head into and out of the solid blast of the wind as dictated by his desire to roll, light and smoke a series of cigarettes unobserved by any officer. He more than most, therefore, stood erect, facing like a cut-rate figurehead into the full brunt of the wind, often when the others were huddled glumly round his legs, whenever he felt that the officers on watch might be observing him from the bridge. He was on the first officer’s discipline roster already and any further infringements of standing orders would result in the loss of several days’ pay. The time he spent like this was acutely and increasingly uncomfortable, and only the combination of extreme nicotine addiction and the threatened loss of earnings would have prompted him to do it at all.

  But do it he did, made intrepid by his weaknesses. And as he stood there, filling his lungs with the bitter smoke they craved, he was uniquely placed to observe, if not to appreciate, the gathering of the darkness. The sun was falling westwards through a sandstorm many thousands of metres high. As the great orb settled towards the western horizon, it slowly lost both power and heat; it seemed to shrink, collapse, and its blinding gold became a lurid carbuncular red. The scene was one of gathering threat. The starboard quadrant of the sky seemed to be running with slowly coagulating gore. Shadows gathered and fled as the sand clouds thickened and thinned above, and the crimson stain leaked down out of the air and spread across the sea like some dreadful curse from Biblical times.

  But if the starboard was filled with sanguine gloom, the port was even worse. The high flank of Manhattan, suddenly filthy and running with thin, sandy mud, took and darkened the thickest of the light beams until, horribly, the whole cliff acquired the dully gleaming aspect of a mountainous pile of offal awash with thickening, almost black clots of blood. Thick streams of the dark red foulness came pulsing downwards in titanic arterial rhythms as though Manhattan had been stabbed a hundred times and was slowly bleeding to death upon them, and the whole ship seemed to be sinking inevitably in an ocean of blood. The almost human howling of the wind across the hollows, caverns and caves took on an eerie, agonised, other-worldly nature, which even the unimaginative Lamia found almost impossible to endure.

  By sunset, Lamia had had enough and, quite ready for a confrontation with the first officer - or even with the captain if need be -he led the bedraggled, filthy watch into the red-caked bridgehouse. But there was no trouble. The watch officer nodded dully when they reported in and sent them down to shower. The line watch had seen and heard the most, but the weird, haunting atmosphere emanating from the strange, screaming, blood-red mountain beside them infected everybody aboard.

  ~ * ~

  John Higgins stood up on the
bridge of Niobe and looked forward into the thickening haze. He was a well-educated man of literary bent and his mind was full of images from Shakespeare’s Macbeth which threatened to distract him from the many demanding tasks with which he was being overcome. The first one was to calm Peter Walcott. ‘Yes,’ he was saying into the phone with an assurance he was far from feeling, ‘it is only to be expected. The weight of sand on the ice is bound to have slowed the rate at which the ice is rising. We will try and work out new tables as soon as possible. In the meantime, I suggest you try and ensure that the weight of sand on your decks does not begin to pull you down too fast either ... Yes. Of course, I will send you the information as soon as Colin has completed the calculations. And yes, I shall report Richard’s condition as soon as Asha gives me an update.’ He broke off, frowning, as his command shuddered suddenly. Dear God, what now? he wondered. ‘Yes, I guarantee it. As soon as I can,’ he snapped and broke contact. At once the handset was buzzing again. He pushed the button. ‘Wait!’ he snapped, and let the importunate machine drop to arm’s length. ‘Helm, what’s going on?’ he barked irately.

  ‘Swinging south-west, Captain,’ came his helmsman’s quiet voice. The answer was followed by the degrees through which they were now swinging, but John paid no more attention. Hope flooded his system, and a bubble of elation grew in him. He recognised the Ulster tones coming from the distant set and lifted it to his ear. ‘We’ve picked up the Canaries current!’ he and Sally Bell told each other at once, as excited as a couple of kids at the news.