The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Yes. And where it was located. I understand the actual iceberg is more than a hundred kilometres long.’

  ‘It was when we set sail. It may be smaller now. But yes, it is still extremely large. More than a billion cubic metres volume, as far as we can calculate. Only ten per cent of it above water.’

  ‘Well, you’d better search as much of it as you can as soon as possible.’

  ‘Any ideas what I should tell my men? “We’re just going to check this iceberg we’re all tethered to with unbreakable ropes because we think it may be radioactive?” ‘ He paused and then asked, ‘Are you familiar with the term mutiny, Professor?’

  Jones had given a dry laugh. ‘I recognise that you have a problem of communication, Captain. I’m just trying to establish clearly that that is not the only problem you have. I can offer a little advice, however. One of the bodies you sent to us, that of the woman with blonde hair, was Russian. At least, she had Russian dental work, of a type routinely performed in Moscow during the early 1980s, I understand, though I don’t know how one can tell. You might like to use that as an excuse for a more detailed examination of your . . . ah ... cargo.’

  ‘I’ll take it under advisement. Thank you, Professor. Would you please give me a number where I can contact you if we have any more news from this end . . . Thank you. Good night.’

  In fact he had not taken it under advisement at all. He had told no one of the professor’s news, preferring to brood darkly all night, sleepless, increasingly perplexed and worried, missing Asha bitterly and wishing to God he could at least talk to Richard Mariner.

  This last wish had been more than compounded by the fact that his last act before retiring had been to contact Robin, Richard’s wife, and tell her of his condition. It was a chore he had been dreading and one which, frankly, he had been hoping to delegate to Asha, who was one of Robin’s closest friends. But in the end he had seen all too clearly that it was just one more of his duties as acting commander. He would have done the same for the merest stranger; how could he do less for his closest friend? But it had been hard. He had got her out of bed and in the background he could hear that he had also disturbed the twins who howled dismally. He could see Robin quite clearly in his mind’s eye and could interpret every dull tone of devastated shock into a facial expression. When she took the walkabout phone downstairs to get away from the noise her children were making, he could imagine all too clearly the rooms through which she was moving, alone in the dark. He had visited Ashenden often enough to see in his mind’s eye the route she would be following through the great, chilly, cavernous, empty old house. He knew from the whispers of background sound just before they broke connection that she had ended up standing by the French windows looking out over the lawns to the tall white cliffs overlooking the busy Channel; the wife of a seafaring man going through every sea wife’s worst nightmare.

  In the dark of his own cabin afterwards it had taken more time than he would have wished to clear that poignant image from his mind and return it to consideration of Professor Jones’s far more pressing information. What was he to look for among the crew? Lassitude. Incontinence. Bleeding gums. Radiation sickness.

  He was still deep in these thoughts when the phone beside his bed shrilled and the measured tones of Peter Walcott, each precise syllable telling of the exercise of the most iron self-control, informed him that one of Psyche’s crew seemed to have contracted a strange, disfiguring skin disease.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Like nothing I’ve ever seen, John. His skin seems to be coming off in great blisters.’

  Blisters, thought John. Oh God. Professor Jones had warned him about blisters.

  ‘All over his body?’

  ‘No. Just on his hands and face.’

  ‘Isolate him. Check the rest of the crew for similar symptoms.’

  ‘Done and being done. It’s the ice, isn’t it? There’s something wrong with Manhattan.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God. You can’t voice speculation like that in front of your crew, man!’ He took a deep breath, aware that his shock had made him step over the mark with the UN captain. He moderated his tone. ‘No, we don’t know if it’s anything to do with Manhattan. But I’ll send Dr Higgins over at once.’

  ‘Isn’t she looking after Captain Mariner?’

  ‘Yes. But this sounds more important.’

  ‘Yes, I agree - for the time being at any rate.’

  ‘What is the atmosphere on Psyche like?’

  ‘She’s called Psycho quite openly by her crew now. That should tell you.’

  ‘But you and your officers are well in control?’

  ‘Yes,’ snapped Peter.

  ‘Good. I’ll get the doctor across to your man as soon as possible, then. After she reports back to me with probable cause and recommended treatment, we’ll get everyone to work on sorting this mess out.’

  ‘Right. I’ll keep in touch.’

  ‘OK. But I’ll be moving out of Niobe across to Titan for the morning at least. Leaving at once, in fact.’

  ‘Weather permitting,’ observed Peter, but John had hung up before the phrase was completed. The weather was the least of his problems, he thought.

  He thought again when he arrived on the bridge. Steve Bollom, his square, reliable first officer, was there. He should have been in bed hours ago but John knew better than to mention it. Mentioning anything was going to be quite a trick, in fact, for the noise of the wind was a constant overpowering, reverberating roar, as though the bridgehouse was trapped beneath a waterfall. There was, too, just the faintest, most sinister, hint of a sandblast whisper, which only seemed so quiet because the wind was so loud.

  ‘I was just going to call down to you,’ shouted Steve, pulling a hand the size of a spade back over his steel-grey hair. ‘It looks as though this mess is getting worse.’

  John’s eyes narrowed as he strode over to the clearview. ‘It’s difficult to tell,’ he observed in a throat-tearing bellow.

  ‘Right!’ agreed Steve. ‘But it’s past dawn now and we should be able to see more than this.’

  ‘You mean we should be able to see something.’

  ‘Yes. Something like a deck, Sampson posts, forecastle head. Sea, sky ...’

  ‘I agree. What’s the mean wind speed?’

  ‘Last recorded two hours ago at about sixty knots due south. Steady. Not a gust or a fluke. It hasn’t veered a point in two full watches, just got steadily stronger. It’s as though it’s coming out of a fire hose. Then when we tried for a five o’clock reading we found the anemometer had seized. It’s solid. Full of sand. Nothing we can do.’

  John looked into the whirling murk immediately in front of his nose as though the glass itself was full of wildly dancing dots and the darkness beyond was solid. He checked with his watch and then doublechecked with the ship’s chronometer immediately above his head. It was well past dawn. Where was the bloody daylight?

  ‘I’ll tell you what we can do,’ he said grimly. ‘We can make that idle Frenchman earn his keep.’ He strode across to the pilot’s chair and picked up the walkie-talkie beside it. ‘Hello, Titan?’ he barked.

  ‘Titan here, Sally Bell speaking. Is that you, Captain Higgins?’

  ‘Yes. Buzz down to Yves Maille, would you, and tell him I need a detailed weather prophecy as soon as humanly possible.’

  ‘I called him up at six, John. He’ll give us a detailed report within the hour.’

  ‘Good. I want to come over to you at the earliest opportunity and I want to send Asha back to Psyche.’

  ‘OK. I’ll pass that on to Yves. Any problem there?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when I see you. In the meantime, how’s your captain?’

  ‘No obvious change. Asha checked in ten minutes ago. She hasn’t done more than a visual check yet so he may be sleeping rather than out cold. We’ll know more soon and I’ll update you at once.’

  S
ally Bell broke off contact and John called through to Psyche again.

  ‘Captain Walcott here.’

  ‘This is John Higgins again. Any more news on that man of yours?’

  ‘No. We’re still checking through the rest of the crew but no one else has shown any symptoms yet.’

  ‘Good. I understand what you meant when you said “weather permitting” just now. I’ll get the doctor over to you as soon as possible, but obviously we’ll have to wait for things to moderate.’

  ‘OK, but you’d better pray for things to moderate soon. When I said my officers and I had things screwed down tight here I may have been being a little over-optimistic.’

  Peter broke contact and it was all John could do to keep his shoulders square. Never had the weight of responsibility seemed so heavy. Never had the forces of nature seemed so set on keeping that weight so unremittingly and crushingly in place.

  Suddenly he found that from the bottom of his soul he was praying that Richard Mariner would wake up now, right this instant and resume the burden of command.

  ~ * ~

  Asha leant back against the wall nearest to Richard’s bed head and looked down at her friend. He was heavily bandaged, more heavily bandaged than was absolutely necessary, perhaps, but she had been deeply worried yesterday and had reacted with more than usual concern.

  He was wearing a hospital gown - not a very dignified garment but the only practical one under the circumstances. He lay on his back atop the pale green counterpane - she had kept the temperature in the little medical room high enough to make any covering of bedclothes redundant. He lay absolutely still and, but for the slow rise and fall of his massive chest and the placing of his arms at his sides, he might have been laid out for burial. The first bandage was wrapped round his left ankle, though the sharp-boned joint was little more than grazed. The same was probably true of his knees and elbows, all of which were bound up in thick white gauze as though they were actually broken. In the absence of an X-ray machine, only Richard could tell her whether there was any real damage there. And he could only do that when he woke up and could tell her in detail what he could feel. The last bandage was the most important in that regard; it was wrapped round his head as neatly as a Sikh’s turban.

  Where to start? she wondered. The damage - slight enough, perhaps - to his knee joints was complicated by the fact that they were actually held together by steel pins courtesy of a terrorist bomb. She smiled fondly, remembering the stories he had told of how the pins had more than once tripped off the security sensors at law courts and airports. That was Richard, she thought; a story for every occasion. Only he could have contrived to turn a terrorist outrage which had so nearly destroyed him into an amusing after-dinner story.

  But there had been no such stories about the state of his chest. The massive, star-shaped entry and exit wounds which marred the pale barrel curve of his right lower thorax, just beneath the swell of his pectoral muscle, had come as a stunning surprise to her. Even the medical notes in his personal file had been sketchy. He joked about his involvement in the Gulf War, occasionally held up the middle finger of his right hand to display the missing top joint, giving the impression that this was all the damage he had sustained; but there was never a mention of the wounds in his chest which, it seemed, had been severe enough to interfere with his circulation and make his pulses so difficult to find.

  Well, that was the logical place to start. Find the pulse and check that. Then the blood pressure. Then the joints themselves. Check for freedom of movement and look for any reaction to the pain. If there was any discomfort, with luck it would wake him up.

  She was aware of John’s concerns, and the weight of the responsibility he now carried. She did not share her husband’s worries about his adequacy to meet those responsibilities, however. She had seen him in a bemusing range of situations during the years of their courtship and marriage, and she had never seen him in a situation he could not cope with. Even wounded - with a bullet wound similar to though thankfully much smaller than the wound on Richard’s chest - John had still been able to command and sail a supertanker almost single-handed. He was simply the steadiest, most reliable man she had ever known and she could see him now in her mind’s eye, meeting each new problem with an increasingly squared jaw, holding his face as though he was still chewing on the stem of his beloved pipe. But the pipe had remained unlit for years and she had talked him into putting it away now. He had amiably acquiesced to her wish, though he missed it, she knew. Under pressure he would still reach for it and his expression would remind her irresistibly of pictures she had seen depicting the typically English faces of pilots in the Battle of Britain. He was a Manxman and the son of Manx-Irish parents; he was a seafarer and the son of a seafarer, so why he should remind her of young fighter pilots, she had no idea. But there was something about those narrowed eyes and that squared jaw that always reminded her of those intrepid young heroes ready and heartbreakingly eager to do battle against the Hun on high. Her eyes flooded with tears and she burned to throw her arms round him; to try and stiffen his resolve - or to lighten his load.

  ‘Penny for them.’

  The rusty, gruff voice was so unfamiliar, so unexpected, that she glanced across at the door, expecting to see one of Titan’s crewmen. Nobody was there and she looked down at the bed again.

  Richard’s eyes made her catch her breath, as they always did. She had forgotten how blue they were, how dazzlingly bright, like magnesium flares ignited behind thin panes of sapphire, their colour all the more striking for the contrast with the thick black lashes.

  ‘Richard! Oh, thank God . . .’ She ran to his bedside, as impulsive as a teenager, her whole body flooding with relief. ‘How are you?’

  He looked at her, his face immobile. Then the faintest of frowns gathered between the perfectly sculpted black wings of brows. Something moved in the depths of those hypnotic eyes. What was it? Confusion? Fear? That deep, rumbling voice came again, though he hardly seemed to move his lips at all. ‘The question, my dear, is not so much how I am,’ he grated, ‘but who I am.’

  ~ * ~

  John Higgins stood, thunderstruck, with the walkie-talkie crushed to his ear. ‘Amnesia?’ He simply couldn’t believe what Asha was telling him.

  ‘ ‘Fraid so, love. Total. Classic case.’

  ‘But when will he get his memory back? I mean—’

  ‘No way to tell, darling, I’m sorry.’

  ‘But I thought most amnesia was psychological!’

  ‘This is physiological, John; no doubt of that as far as I can see. Bash on the back of the head. Big bump. Complete memory loss. One, two, three; QED.’

  ‘Anything else? I mean, how is he otherwise?’

  ‘No. Nothing else at all. He’s one hundred per cent otherwise. I’ve done a complete series of tests. Everything else is AOK. Couple of Band Aids and some tincture of arnica for the bruises. He’s up and about already, looking for something to do. I’m having the devil of a job keeping him here in the sickbay.’

  ‘So it shouldn’t be long before—’

  ‘No idea, darling, I really haven’t. Sorry I can’t be more help, but you’re still in charge of the whole shooting match. I’ll keep you up to date.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, my love. If Richard’s OK, then I’ve another job for you, an urgent one.’

  ‘What is it?’ Her voice picked up the tension in his own.

  ‘No idea, but it’s really having quite a negative impact over on Psyche. One of their crew men seems to have picked up some kind of. . . infection.’

  ‘Infection?’ She knew how devastating an uncontrolled infection could be in the enclosed environment of a ship at sea.

  John glanced around the bridge, looking for somewhere to continue the conversation in private. At last he walked into the captain’s day room behind the chart room and hoped that his navigating officers would assume he was just passing some private endearments to his wife.

&
nbsp; ‘What sort of infection?’ she was asking. ‘Can you describe the symptoms?’

  He did so, his voice unconsciously dropping to little more than a whisper as he did so.

  Then, checking that the dayroom door was tightly closed behind him, he unburdened the leaden weight of the news that Professor Jones had passed to him little more than eight hours earlier.

  ‘Radiation poisoning?’ Her distant voice rose several decibels. Thank God she was in the sickbay, he thought, alone except for the man who could no longer remember that he was Richard Mariner. ‘I’ll get right over and check. But how on earth I can do it without using a Geiger counter or letting this Lamia person or his friends catch on to what I’m doing, I just do not know!’

  ‘Your first problem is going to be getting over there,’ he said, walking back out into the howling, hissing bedlam of the bridge. As he broke contact, he noted that the light at least was beginning to break through the sandstorm. It was more than an hour late, but at least the day was beginning.