The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  As darkness fell, they pulled the great dull ruby mountain into the grip of the south-flowing current and began to make some serious headway against the northward pressure of the wind. John felt too tense to eat, so he stayed on the bridge through Pour Out and dinner, and was on hand to answer all the messages streaming in from the other ships and beyond. It was very late indeed when Bob Stark called in to say that it felt as though Ajax and Achilles were beginning to feel the benefit of the current and to advise a reciprocal diminution in revolutions which would, with the current’s help, maintain their mean speed at ten knots in spite of the contrary wind. John phoned the orders round to the watch officers. And the watch officers woke the captains. And the captains woke their chief engineers. And the reduction in revolutions was coordinated.

  It was after midnight before Asha got through from Titan’s sickroom. ‘No change, darling,’ she reported. ‘Richard’s still out cold. All the vital signs I can check on here seem fine.’ She hesitated. ‘Is there any way I can get him ashore if things don’t improve?’ Her voice was weary, guarded, full of worry.

  ‘Not with this wind, I’m afraid. No way we can get a chopper up until it moderates.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘We could put him in a boat, I suppose, if anyone could get one out to us.’

  ‘No. I’m better placed to help him than anyone except a hospital with brain-scanning equipment. But it’s not good to be out for so long.’

  ‘We’ll see how he is in the morning. Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing. I love you, Captain.’

  ‘I love you too, Doctor.’

  This was die last of the calls on the walkie-talkie from the various ships, but it was not the last call of the night. Hardly had John switched the little machine off and returned it to its accustomed resting place on the console than the automatic incoming light lit up to warn him there was someone trying to raise the ship on the big radio. He walked through into the radio shack and switched the equipment to manual.

  ‘Titan here, Captain speaking. Over.’

  ‘It’s Sally Bell here, John.’

  ‘Sally! What on earth . . .’

  ‘. . . sorry, John, I didn’t catch all of that. I’m relaying an incoming call to you. It’s supposed to be for Richard, but. . .’

  ‘Hello, Sally? Yes? Sally?’ He flicked from TRANSMIT to RECEIVE and back again, then settled on RECEIVE.

  The set crackled fiercely, and John wished bitterly that he had woken up his radio operator. But then the big speaker sprang into life again and a new voice came across the air waves.

  ‘Hello? Is that Captain John Higgins aboard Niobe? Are you receiving me? Over?’

  ‘Yes. This is Captain Higgins. I am receiving you loud and clear, over.’

  ‘Thank goodness. Now I want you to listen very carefully, Captain. My name is James Jones and I’m speaking to you from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston ...’

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lamia Lykiardropolous shivered uncontrollably as he crawled across the ice. He was a hot-blooded man from a warm Mediterranean country and of all the things he hated most, cold ranked the highest. Of all the deaths which were most terrible, freezing to death was the worst. And yet he knew that he was dying here. The knowledge seemed to exist outside him, as though his mind was trapped in some other body. The body of a man marooned on eternal ice freezing slowly and horribly to death.

  He looked up and narrowed his eyes against the awful glare. All he could see was an infinity of whiteness stretching in an unvarying plain to the horizon, formless, featureless, freezing. The agony in his hands made him look down with a cry. Where in God’s name were his gloves? Not on his hands, that was for sure. The white fingers were distinguishable from the white ice only because their flesh was blue and the nails were black with frostbite. And because they were edged in a bright red outline of frozen blood. He must have been resting here on all fours on the ice for a little while, gathering his strength. But he could not remember stopping. He could barely remember leaving the ship, for that matter. It was as though time had just begun. Here. Now.

  He tried to move and the tearing sensation as another layer of skin ripped away from his palm to remain frozen in place shuddered up his arm until his heart fluttered as though it would fail at once. He looked back. Sure enough, there were ghostly handprints in the ice behind him where his skin had torn off layer by layer to remain frozen in place on the glacial surface of the ice. And there was more: a long red trail as though he was dragging a brightly-slimed slug along behind him. He knew what that meant, and it was important. But he just could not remember. Sobbing quietly, he looked up.

  The wind came in from the white knife edge of the horizon. It was full of tiny, razor-sharp spicules of pure ice. They acted in concert, seeming to form one huge knife which was slowly flensing the flesh off his cheekbones. In his mind’s eye he could see the white flakes of flesh whirling back in the grip of the wind to go whispering like snow across the unforgiving ice behind him. Whimpering, he crawled on into the terrifying blast. Tears flooded out of his tortured eyes to freeze at once, setting his eyelids open to the blast, solidifying like super-glue.

  How long he had been out here, crawling across the ice, he no longer knew. All that registered with him were the twin facts that his hands were being consumed by frostbite and his face was being flayed by the gale. What drove him on he had no idea. Where it was driving him to and why it was keeping him moving likewise had long since failed to register. All he knew was that he was freezing to death here and now because the cold from the terrible ice was burning through the skinless, frozen flesh of his hands and the fleshless, skeletal horror of his face.

  But then in the far distance, his tortured gaze made out a black shape. Something with colour and form, something utterly out of place in this inhuman, alien environment. It was what he had been looking for, he suddenly knew. This was hope. This was life - or the chance of it. He altered the angle of his snail-slow progress and began to crawl towards the black beacon standing steady in the face of the blast. Determinedly, doggedly, he crawled, tearing himself forward. The hope within him engendered by this sign of life in the frozen wilderness was almost as agonising as the pain of the frostbite. He looked up: it was still there. Tears of relief flooded -and froze as swiftly as the tears of hopeless self-pity had done. His eyes stretched agonisingly wide and he felt the eyeballs beginning to freeze as well. The cold stabbed up his optical nerves and it seemed that his brain began to set solid too.

  He began to crawl even more quickly, reduced to near insanity by the power of hope.

  He could see it now, a low construction of wood and hide. The weight of the ice was beginning to make his eyelids tear away from the horror of his face. The handprints on the naked ice were no longer made of pale skin but of bright flesh. The bones were beginning to show through on his palms and fingers. The agony was indescribable.

  He rammed into the flimsy wooden door with the top of his head and continued to crawl for a moment, unaware that he was no longer moving forward. But then the new situation slowly registered in the icebound cells of his brain and he stopped trying to crawl and began trying to pull himself up. Of course he could not move his hands for almost all of their musculature lay behind him, frozen into the ice. The wood of the door was as slick and cold as the ice and the last shreds of flesh tore off the bone of his fingertips as he scrabbled hopelessly to pull himself up.

  The door was in the wind shadow of the rest of the simple construction, so Lamia could at least look upwards - for as long as he could bear the agony of his tearing eyelids, frozen wide as they were. What he could see was a cliff of wood halfway up. It was a simple door latch. Hardly more than a metre above his head, it stuck out tantalisingly, begging to be caught, lifted and pulled.

  This is very stupid!

  The thought entered his head as though someone else had thought it - or whispered it - cl
ose by.

  Stand up!

  He began to obey. It was impossible that he should have the strength and yet he actually began to pull himself onto his feet, reaching up unerringly for the latch.

  But as soon as he put weight on his left leg, he felt the shattered bones grating across each other and a thunderbolt of agony crashed up the left side of his torso, hurling him bodily down onto the ice with such power that he was knocked insensible.

  And he sprang immediately awake.

  It was an unutterably vivid transition, as though the act of falling had smashed him from one state of existence into another. As though it had not been a dream at all, but another level of genuine experience. Lamia remembered every detail of the excruciating nightmare, every lancing needle of agony in every nerve of his hands and face. He remembered it so completely that he still seemed to feel it now, even in the safe, warm, dark fug of his berth deep in Psyche’s crews’ quarters.

  ‘Lamia!’ a voice whispered urgently, and the burly Greek jumped, for it was very much like the voice from his dream. ‘Lamia! Are you all right?’

  Only on the repetition did Lamia recognise the voice of his crony and berth mate August Lebrun, a weasel-like ex-smuggler from Marseilles.

  ‘Of course! Why do you ask?’

  ‘I heard you cry out. I thought perhaps you were having a nightmare.’

  ‘Such things are for children. What is the time?’

  ‘I am not sure. Sometime in the graveyard watch.’

  The two men chatted in their less than perfect English, the lingua franca of the sea, already falling into severe disuse as Britannia no longer ruled so many of the waves. Time passed, and Lamia’s heartrate began to ease. He stared upward in the darkness, his eyes seeing nothingness but his mind still full of the image of a door latch for ever far beyond his reach. It was soon clear to him that the terror of the nightmare had filled his body with so much adrenaline that further sleep would be out of the question, even had he dared return to it.

  It was at about 6 a.m. that Lamia ordered Lebrun to switch on the light so that he could replace the haunting vision of that mocking door latch with the gaudy pictures of very much more easily attainable women which he kept pasted on the walls round his bunk. Lebrun did as he was told and Lamia was dazzled by the cabin light as he had been blinded by the brightness of his dream. He slitted his eyes against the light, then as his eyes adjusted he lay for a little longer, waiting for the memory of the agony in his fingers and face to fade.

  After a while, the pain in his cheeks eased to a simple itching and, with his eyes fixed upon the gleaming orbs of a model’s naked buttocks, he moved his right hand for the first time since he had woken, and scratched his cheek.

  His mind was blank, save for that part of it which was lazily exploring the carnal possibilities offered by the naked model, so it took him a moment to realise that something was wrong. It was a question of feeling, to begin with. It felt as though he was wearing gloves and a face mask. The scratching failed to ease the itch in his cheek. He folded his fingers into a fist and scrubbed at his cheek with a little more energy. The effect hardly varied. He felt an unsettling sensation as though there were loose surfaces between the skin of his fingers and that of his jowl. Loose, silky surfaces which slid about independently of the movements of his hand and head.

  He lifted his hand until the fat fingers swam into the space between his eyes and the bright pink curves of the model’s buttocks. He refocused his eyes almost lazily. And for a moment wondered whether he was wearing gloves. Had he come to bed with a pair of white gloves on his hands after all? He thought back, trying to cut through the fog of forgetfulness engendered by the alcohol which he usually consumed between coming off watch and coming to bed. No. There was no possibility that he had put on gloves before retiring.

  He brought the oddly coloured appendage closer to his face and looked at it more closely. His stomach twisted and vomit burned at the back of his throat. He shuddered with shock and the nightmare threatened to wash through into the solid reality of the cabin. His palm was covered in patterns of tiny blisters which spread into bubbles over his fingertips. He slowly turned the hand through one hundred and eighty degrees until he could see the back of it. Here the skin was completely detached and hung in wrinkles weighted by lymph, like a series of yellow balloons full of water.

  Lamia jerked his left hand up. The back of it brushed against the blanket in such a way that it arrived in a warm rain of liquid as the blisters on it burst. Lamia screamed and this time there was nothing of dreams in the nightmare vividness of his horror. He sat up with such violent motion that he tore the muscles of his beach-ball belly. ‘Lebrun!’ he yelled and the Frenchman rolled over into full wakefulness and, horrifically, also shouted out with fear.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Merde, Lamia.’

  ‘What...’ The Greek seaman’s voice cracked as this long drawn out word spiralled towards a panicked scream.

  Lebrun rolled out of his berth and crossed to the small chest of drawers built in against the far wall. Three strides took him to it. A wild wrench tore the mirror off the top of it. Three strides brought him back, holding the reflecting square in front of his chest.

  Lamia’s narrow eyes fastened with sick horror on the wavering image. He jerked back, his whole body reacting with revulsion against what he had glimpsed. He was, in common with many Mediterranean men, more vain about his appearance than the appearance itself seemed to warrant. He considered his round, heavy-jowled face with its oily, dark-hued skin and glistening, tight-curled hair irresistible even to such visions of beauty as adorned the walls round his berth. But his vanity was destroyed by what he saw in the mirror.

  It was not that the flesh itself was swollen - this might almost have been preferable. It was that the skin seemed to have been pulled off the underlying structures and inflated into puffy yellow balloons all over its surface. The forehead was grotesquely swollen and the eyes beneath it puffy and narrow. The squat nose was all but lost in a soggy ivory bubble and the pale grey jowls sagged as though they belonged to some kind of hound. His mouth, too, was puffed out and his chins were doubled, trebled into pendant, trembling fullness. Only where he had scratched his cheek was the skin flat, hanging in shreds off his face and glistening where the lymph had burst from the broken blisters.

  ~ * ~

  John lay, wakeful even at 6 a.m., with his arms folded on his pillow behind his head, sensing the stirring of his command all around himself as she plunged unhappily through the unvarying headwind, thinking of the responsibility he now bore for the other five ships and their mysterious icy charge, wondering how Asha was caring for Richard, and wishing there was someone to care for him now. The longstanding joke in Heritage Mariner that John Higgins was ‘Little John’ to Richard Mariner’s Robin Hood was not a jibe against his stocky size or a wry comment about his undoubted intellectual stature; it was a comment about the relationship he had always had with Richard. But John did not feel like the definitive right-hand man now. The burden of his extra responsibilities weighed heavily upon him. It had been massive enough even before Professor Jones had phoned through from Aldermaston to warn him that the iceberg which it was costing so much in effort, ingenuity and lost life to move across the ocean might well be contaminated with a mysterious form of radioactivity.

  ‘Watch out for any signs,’ the professor had suggested.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Signs of radiation sickness. Nausea, diarrhoea, bleeding gums. Sores around the nose and mouth. Hair loss. Lassitude. Blisters.’

  John had closed his eyes. As a first officer he had been trained to treat most shipboard illnesses, any number of which could show some or all of these symptoms, from toothache via scurvy and food poisoning to terminal malingering. Not to mention the self-inflicted varieties which arose out of sniffing, smoking or injecting illegal substances or over-indulging in any of the more legal ones. ‘Professor,’ h
e had said, hearing his voice taking on the overtones of one addressing a clinical idiot, ‘have you any idea of the number of things which might generate those symptoms?’

  The professor’s tone had remained surprisingly understanding. ‘Yes. But I’m afraid I can’t give you any further guidance. If I were you I would send some men onto the iceberg with Geiger counters and see whether you can locate the source of the radiation. But I have no idea what the thing Sergeant Dundas swallowed was, or where it could have come from. I don’t know whether you would be looking for lots of little bits of black glass or one enormous piece. God, I hope it’s not in one big piece. But no, it can’t be; you’d all be as badly off as the sergeant if there was one big bit of it.’

  ‘That would depend on the size of the bit, I suppose,’ John had snapped.