The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  Five more minutes of thunderous flight brought them to the first shantytown outskirts of the city, hardly distinguishable from the refugee camps. A great six-lane highway sprang into existence apparently out of nowhere. Immediately, the black slope on their right fell away and the rest of the city became clearly visible ahead as it rolled down to the sea, all laid out in squares and blocks of city districts. Only the great red scar of the dry river bed, widening out into the sea-sparkling grey of the massive port, gave an impression of a design beyond the square designs of men. Gogol sat up stiffly, his eyes busy down among the desolate encampments of the destitute. ‘There!’ he said.

  Captain Kizel nodded once. He touched his throat mike again. ‘Execute manoeuvre number two on my mark . . . Now!’

  The helicopters reformed into a diamond with Gogol’s machine at its head and swung down to their left. Below, at the line of convergence between the camps and the shanties a great square of open ground suddenly appeared. The sounds from Kizel’s headphones reached a piercing shrillness. The words ‘illegal use of airspace’, ‘invasion’ and ‘act of war’ could be heard as the officials in the control tower immediately below suddenly realised where the unidentified invaders on their radar were heading for. But the occupants of the control tower need not have worried. The diamond of Hinds swept across the buildings, over the hangars and across to the far side of the field where they settled into a high-wired compound. Here the aviation fuel reserved for the exclusive use of Nimrod Chala’s Black Hawks was stored. It was usually kept under guard, but the guards had run away as soon as it seemed likely to them that the helicopters would attack.

  No sooner were the Hinds on the ground than their occupants were out and forming two groups, both busy. One group ran out to set up a defensive perimeter. The other group broke into the storage facility and began loading fuel into the Hinds, filling main tanks and long-range auxiliary tanks to overflowing as quickly as they could.

  As soon as Illych Kizel had calculated a realistic work rate he crossed to General Gogol. ‘It will take twenty minutes, just as we calculated.’

  ‘Is there enough?’

  ‘Yes, General. It is just as you said - he sent die extra fuel from the bush landing strip back here before he burned it. Well, all he could load into the trucks he had with him, at any rate.’

  ‘All except the petrol that the man Parkinson had hidden away. That was such a good trap. I could have had them all then. If only...’

  He stopped abruptly. The morphine was making him talk too much. The morphine mixed with die adrenaline being pumped out by those few glands in his irradiated body which still worked adequately.

  ‘General!’ One of die perimeter guards was hurrying across towards him.

  ‘Yes?’

  The man handed him a pair of field glasses and gestured across at the main gate.

  Gogol pressed the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. ‘Ah, there he is. Right on time.’

  In through the main gate came Nimrod Chala’s armoured command reconnaissance vehicle. It was the latest of the series, adapted to carry the new generation 14.5mm KPVT turret and the coaxial 7.62mm PKT machine-gun. Gogol knew it well; it was the type of vehicle that had been his headquarters in every tank battle he had commanded. He knew this particular vehicle well, too, for Chala had showed him over it more than once and he had noted all the details he could. Such details as the command radio frequency, for instance.

  Gogol lowered the binoculars and walked across to his helicopter. He switched the radio to the correct frequency, put the earphones to his ear and pressed SEND on the handset.

  ‘Chala?’ he barked. ‘Please put General Chala on.’ He spoke English.

  ‘Who is this?’ The voice of the ACRV’s radio operator answered in the same language.

  ‘This is General Valerii Gogol. Put General Chala on now.’

  There was the sound of whispering, the movement of large bodies in a constricted place, the passage of a radio handset from hand to hand.

  ‘Gogol! What is going on?’ General Chala was a man of bulk and significant physical impact, but he had a high, child-like voice.

  ‘Just a little misunderstanding, my friend.’ Gogol lifted his thumb and said to Captain Kizel, ‘Illych, tell me what the vehicle’s movements are.’

  ‘Gogol? What was that?’

  ‘Why did your Black Hawk helicopter attack us without warning, Nimrod?’

  ‘The vehicle is still approaching, General.’

  ‘It did not! It had orders simply to investigate—’

  ‘It launched something at us. Looked like a Hellfire missile to me.’

  ‘But that’s impossible . . .’

  ‘It’s still coming in, General, less than fifteen hundred metres now.’

  ‘That’s what it looked like, Nimrod. I’m sorry but I guess we might have overreacted a little . . .’

  ‘But what are you doing here, Gogol? Stop the vehicle. Do you hear me, driver? I do not understand what you are doing here, Gogol.’

  ‘He’s stopped now, General. Sideways on, a thousand metres out.’

  ‘Fool,’ said Gogol, wearily.

  He dropped the handset and reached into the belly of the helicopter.

  ‘Gogol?’ came Nimrod Chala’s voice from the radio, rising from a treble to a petulant whine. ‘Can you hear me?’

  Gogol walked to the perimeter and looked across the flat airfield to the vehicle. As Kizel had said, it was sitting sideways on. The turret was pointing straight ahead, covering the southern edge of the field as though the real danger lay in the withered palm trees there. It was in the middle of the roadway connecting the compound with the main gate and thus Gogol was able to look at it over the low barrier which crossed the black tarmac at the perimeter line.

  ‘Valerii?’ whined Chala, ‘I don’t understand ... What...’

  With a little movement climaxing in a guttural grunt, Gogol swung the SA-7 Grail anti-tank missile onto his shoulder. It was the latest version, brought in with the T-80 main battle tanks. It had a 2.5 kg high-explosive head in a smooth fragmentation armour-piercing warhead with both graze and impact fuses. It had an accurate range of five thousand metres and it moved faster than sound. With the apparently casual fluidity of total, long practised control, Gogol swung the missile onto target and pressed the firing mechanism.

  ‘What...’ screamed Nimrod Chala at the moment the missile was launched. The word was only half out of the Hind’s radio when the command vehicle erupted in a ball of shocking yellow flame, its iron sides seeming to stretch out and burst like an overfilled balloon. The turret spun lazily up into the air and turned on its axis, still pointing the wrong way. The thunder of Chala’s passing rolled over the compound, then there was only the hissing of the vacant channel on the radio and the slurp of fuel gushing into thirsty tanks.

  ~ * ~

  The sound of helicopters jerked Ann Cable out of a nightmare and out of her hospital bed both at once. Although she was still swollen, stiff and sore and her long body was bound up in the tangle of sheets and hospital gown which resulted from her nightmare, she was standing at her window before she was properly awake. The window was wide and right in the middle of the topmost floor of the tallest tower in downtown Mawanga. It looked westwards across the last of the city before the sea began. It had been modelled on St Thomas’s, the great teaching hospital in London, and was built upon the bank of the river. But where the Thames was a couple of hundred metres wide, the Mau was a couple of kilometres. And where the Thames was full, the Mau was dry.

  As Ann looked down on the desolation of dry mud which split the dying city apart, she saw a diamond-shaped formation of helicopters sweep past. They were large machines, but they were flying low, following the river bed at zero metres. They were so low, in fact, that the stunned woman could look down on them as they hurled past the hospital tower. So fast were they moving, any glimpse she might have caught of General Gogol in the front of the lead helicopter must su
rely have been subliminal. Helicopters were associated with such disturbing events in her still shaken mind that she watched the desert-coloured diamond as though it was some kind of repulsive thing, the head of a rattlesnake.

  As the machines vanished behind the billowing smoke of their exhausts into the silver-grey shimmer which joined the sky to the sea and the thudding rumbling of their engines faded, her eyes refocused on the faint reflection of her face in the double-glazing of the window. It had white skin now, for the black colour of smoke, soot and mud had been gently washed away during the last week. But her nose was still slightly misshapen from her fall, and her lips and eyes still swollen from the bites of the mosquitoes and all the other nameless blood suckers of the bush. Her hair clustered round the unnatural moon-shape of her face in dark, fire-curled ringlets. If her parents had still been alive, they would never have recognised her, even now. In another week or so she would either be well enough to get on with her life or she would be deep in the grip of tick fever. At the moment she didn’t really care which alternative turned out to be true.

  The door behind her opened and she shifted her desolate gaze to see the reflection of Emily Karanga standing there. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Ann took a deep breath and turned stiffly but with a smile. ‘Much better, thanks,’ she lied heroically.

  ~ * ~

  Gogol looked lazily down. He was not a sailor and had never much liked the sea, but he found the simple scale of Mawanga harbour impressive. The dry river split the seaward side of the city like the wound from a giant axe. A great ridge of mud-covered rock kept the sea out of die dry bed, but the silt from a million and more years of flow still stretched out like a pair of bull’s horns seventy-five kilometres long and five wide astride the almost bottomless, fault-floored bay of the anchorage. Only where the horns of land all but joined again, at their tips far out in the Gulf of Guinea, did the sea bed begin to rise once more, into another ridge which broke the force of the waves and made the fifteen-kilometre width of water as calm as a pond.

  Down the middle of each horn ran a busy roadway and dotted along these were warehouses, storage facilities and factories. On either side of the pair of horns were docks but only on the outside were there ships. The whole great bay of the anchorage was empty, still, waiting. Along the horns, crouching on the insides above the still surface of the water between the docks and the buildings was a series of massive free-standing pumps capable of moving millions of litres an hour. They were in place but untended. For most of their length, the great low ridges of land were deserted. At the very tips of the horns, however, was a bustle of men and machines so active that Captain Kizel automatically jerked his stick back so that the formation of Hind helicopters jumped bodily over the entrance to the empty, expectant anchorage.

  ~ * ~

  General Warren Cord, US Army (Rtd), explosives expert and UN representative, looked up as the helicopters roared overhead and frowned. Now just what in hell’s name were five big Soviet gunships doing racing around at zero metres out here? Automatically, he checked around himself, but there was nothing else to see in the sky. There wasn’t all that much to see in the sea, either, come to that. Certainly not since all the local tankers had pulled out and sailed west to offload the first consignment of water. There was a lot to see on the land around him, however, for he and his men were busily involved in the most dangerous part of the reception being prepared for the iceberg. The plan looked simple enough on paper, but getting it to work in practice was going to be something else again. Thank the Lord they still had a good few days to get everything in place and properly primed. He turned back to the engineers and the other explosives experts and forgot about the helicopters.

  ~ * ~

  Out over the Gulf of Guinea, the Hinds went to a heading a couple of degrees north of due west and swung into line-abreast formation. With their noses low and their throttles wide, they roared out over the wavetops at 250 kph. After ninety minutes they hopped over a flotilla of heavy-laden freighters. ‘We’re on the right heading,’ observed Kizel. ‘That’s encouraging.’

  Gogol leaned back into the depths of the helicopter’s seat. It was not comfortable as such things go and would never have been given space on a Western passenger plane, but it was the most comfortable seat Gogol had occupied in his life. He relaxed, and let exhaustion wash over him. Nothing could go wrong now until they reached the iceberg itself. ‘Wake me in two hours, Illych,’ he ordered and surrendered to the Greek god whose name was shared with the drug he used so much.

  An instant later, he was blinking himself awake, his body one long agonising ache. Only the intensity of the pain told him that he had been asleep for hours and needed another morphine pill at once. Even before he orientated himself properly, he had reached into his breast pocket and pulled the pill box out. He crunched the unutterably bitter pill into powder and swallowed convulsively, knowing that this was the quickest way to get it into his system and disrupt the all too efficient communication between the pain centres in his brain and the nerve filaments reaching into the excruciating carcinomas with which his body was filled. Unusually, he took a second, even before the soothing warmth of the first had spread through him. Then he counted to a hundred, slowly, and opened his eyes.

  The iceberg was coming up over the horizon now. They were approaching it low and bow on. He had expected it to be white but it was dirty, almost the same colour as his desert-camouflaged helicopters. He had expected it to tower magnificently like an alp. Even from this angle, it seemed to be squat and low. It was only when he registered that the long black water beetles around it were in fact laden supertankers that he really got to grips with the scale of the thing. And it made him catch his breath. He thought back to the anchorage at Mawanga harbour, all that grey area of still water between the bull’s horns of land. This would just fit inside there; just and no more, like a key into a lock. He began to get a sense of its size then, of its weight and latent power. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to cross die harbour even at full speed.

  ~ * ~

  Richard Mariner was on the bridge of Psyche beside Peter Walcott, overseeing the final grudging loosening of the lines to let the fully laden ship settle into her new relationship with the iceberg. Everyone aboard was tense - some of them were terrified, if the truth be known - for it was becoming increasingly obvious that Manhattan was growing unstable.

  ‘It’s going to be a close-run thing,’ Colin Ross had said last night, and Richard had been forced to agree with him. But their options were severely limited. There was no action they could take which would cause the berg to roll safely. Or to stop it rolling once it began to move. Sometimes it seemed that all that was holding it upright was the speed at which it was moving forward, as though it was some kind of gargantuan bicycle. They couldn’t just cut and run, for they had a responsibility at the very least to try and influence the direction of the roll and direct the resulting waves away from the nearest coasts. They couldn’t just stand by and allow the iceberg to flood the nearest land to the north and east. They had held it up and kept it under their sway, more or less, for twenty-eight days so far. They had moved it further and faster than anyone had ever believed possible - except the men and women whose vision had started the experiment in the first place. They were mere days out from their destination and they could not let it all slip away now.

  But they were going to have to cut themselves free soon, reverse their courses, re-anchor themselves to the rear section, and sail west as hard as they could for as long as their ships would stand the strain, trying to slow the giant down. And, according to Colin’s figures, even if the berg remained stable now, it would almost certainly tip over as it slowed. That was the backbone of their contingency plan. They proposed to slow the berg and test its stability over the next thirty-six hours. Then they were due to swing it round onto a more southerly heading, in preparation for running it directly into the mouth of Mawanga harbour. They reckoned - he and Colin and the mathem
aticians in the United Nations - that this would be the best time to tip it over if they could, rolling it south-westwards so that the waves it caused would run away harmlessly out to sea.

  Well, that was out of their control at the moment. Right now Richard was like the skipper of a small ship watching for the arrival of a storm. There were limits as to what he could do other than to batten down, head for a safe haven, and prepare to ride it out if it hit. They had made all the preparations they could. They knew what their objectives were, short term, medium term and long term. They all had a clear set of orders which would cover everything that could conceivably go wrong. They would just have to get on with things and hope for the best.

  ‘Right,’ he said to Peter Walcott. ‘That’s it, I think. The line watches fore and aft can tie off on that.’ He raised the walkie-talkie to his lips and issued the orders. It was as though they could all feel Psyche begin to settle contentedly and take up the full strain once more.

  ‘Well done, all of you,’ said Richard, for this had been a long, complex, stressful job. He looked around the bridge. All the watch officers were nodding to themselves; he hoped it was with approval. ‘I’ll go back down to the isolation ward now,’ he continued a little ruefully. ‘The doctor wants me to keep reporting in for observation for a while. Apparently she’s preparing a paper on the effects of the harmattan.’ He paused. A chuckle ran round the bridge. Good, he thought. Things aboard Psyche were getting lighter at last. He turned back to Peter. The late morning light caught the ointment with which his hands and face were still covered and made them gleam. Unconsciously he rubbed a still itchy area of his wrist against his leg, leaving a smear of yellow on the white cotton of the boiler suit he was wearing. On his way out through the door, he turned back and added, ‘When everything has settled down, we’ll start to reduce speed. See what happens then.’