The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  He had no sooner left the bridge than the radio officer stuck his head out of the radio room. ‘Titan’s just been on,’ he reported to his captain. ‘There’s a small squadron of helicopters coming over fast and low from the south-east.’

  ~ * ~

  The others in the isolation ward had settled into a relaxed routine now that they knew there was no immediate danger. They looked upon it as a week’s welcome if unexpected holiday. To a man they were very pleased to be off duty and out of their watch responsibilities. It was really only Richard who found the place so irritatingly restrictive, but he was not the sort of leader who insisted on special treatment and although he was quite capable of exerting a great deal of pressure on Asha whenever it seemed to him that she was keeping them under observation for too long, he was in the end prepared to remain in her charge until she declared that he was fully fit for duty. There was, as he observed with some bitterness, no sense in keeping a doctor and diagnosing yourself. Just the way he said it put his listeners in mind of dogs and barking.

  He came into his makeshift command headquarters cum ping-pong room almost at a run. He wanted to get through to Colin first and discuss his thoughts about the solidity of the iceberg. He also wanted to go through the records which John had made of their Geiger counter readings on their last visit to the berg, on the day he had found Henri LeFever and regained his memory. He was still worrying at a half-formed plan to try and use the movement of the berg when it rolled somehow to break off the irradiated section of the ice, if that was possible. Lost in thought, he crossed to his desk and began to sort through the papers there, looking for the pages full of John’s neat script and careful drawings.

  Behind him, outside and away towards the bow of Manhattan, a small section of ice cliff broke free and slid into the roaring sea. The noise it made covered the sound of five helicopters touching down on the high ice three hundred metres up and five kilometres west.

  Thank God the ships had moved out from under the overhangs, Richard thought, pausing in his search and listening to the thunder of ice and water in conflict. The constant rain of meltwater was being more regularly supplemented by chunks of sheer cliff face now. They would really have been in trouble if the large sections of ice had started to collapse directly onto the decks, or, heaven forfend, the bridgehouses themselves. It would have been as dangerous as being hit by high-powered missiles.

  ~ * ~

  They touched down in diamond formation and all the men were out in moments, lined up and ready for final briefing. Gogol walked slowly to the front and looked over the expectant ranks. ‘What these people in their gigantic ships are being asked to do is very dangerous and almost impossible,’ he began. The dreamlike state which excitement, the promise of action and the massive dose of morphine engendered held him firmly in its grip. ‘The iceberg they are towing is too large for adequate control. Their ships are too puny to dictate its course by more than a degree or so. The waters through which they are sailing are shallow and fanged with coral; the channel they have chosen is deep but narrow and hard to follow. The slightest error or deviation will completely upset their pathetic plans. How easy it would be for an accident to happen. How almost inevitably must disaster strike!’

  He looked at them, remembering how his voice used to boom and rumble like sonorous thunder at a time like this. He almost imagined that it could do so again; that it was doing so again.

  ‘We are that disaster! We are the force of the storm which will turn them one degree to the north. We are the wind and the waves which will drive die ice onto the reefs and wedge it there to melt and run away.’

  He listened, imagining he could hear his ringing words echo away westwards on the wind. That it should have come to this, he thought. That it should have come to this for him of all men.

  ‘What we will do is this,’ he said. ‘The four helicopters detailed will place themselves where their armaments can cover the ships either individually or in pairs. The fifth, my command helicopter, will deposit on each ship a commando of half a dozen men who will seize the bridge and take the captain hostage. Then we will take over the engine rooms and hold the engineers so that we can dictate both course and propulsion. There will be no resistance under the guns of the Hinds. We will not even need to round up the crews. They will be helpless without their officers to guide them. And, once we are in place, we will order the change in course required. Before the end of the day, the iceberg will be wedged immovably on the coral reefs which reach out south and west from the shores close by here. When the iceberg is thus disposed of, we will return to our helicopters and vanish. No one will ever know who we are or why we did what we did. But I know, and I will tell you.’

  He leaned forward, narrow-eyed, intense. ‘It is for Russia we do this! Make no mistake, our orders come directly from Moscow and we cannot hesitate. This iceberg which they call Manhattan must never arrive in Mau. If it does, the damage to our beloved country will be incalculable. There may even be a civil war! Imagine it: Moscow itself reduced to another Sarajevo! Our parents, brothers, wives and children reduced to destitution. Starvation. Death. It will happen if this iceberg comes safely to Mawanga harbour. It must be destroyed, and it is we who will destroy it, for the glory of our country and no matter what the cost!’

  ~ * ~

  John Higgins was actually on the bridge of Niobe when it happened, close beside the helmsman looking forward down the deck. And so he got perhaps the best view of all. He never knew exactly where the helicopter appeared from. It was just there, suddenly, its cockpit windows dead level with his eyes, a matter of metres in front of him, its rotors beating the air apparently only millimetres up. The shock - the sound - was overpowering.

  Ropes cascaded out of the side and men slid down them. Men in uniform, armed to the teeth. ‘My God,’ he whispered, and drew in his breath to order a general distress signal. Then he saw how many air-to-surface missiles were pointing directly at him. And, for die first time in his life, he felt faint. Every bullet-shaped warhead etched itself indelibly on his consciousness and he heard someone swearing very loudly and extremely obscenely. It could well have been himself.

  The helicopter jerked up and away abruptly, as though it had been hooked like a fish, and John swung round and tensed to sprint across to the radio room, just as the three-man commando came in through the door.

  Silence.

  Stillness.

  Then, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ said a deep voice in slow, heavily accented English. ‘May I introduce you to our weapons? This is what is called in the West the 5.45mm AKS-74 assault rifle. It can fire its full magazine of bullets in very much less than a tenth of a second with a muzzle velocity in excess of 870 metres per second over a range of about 500 metres. My colleague over there who has just incapacitated your communications equipment is holding the 7.62mm SVD rifle which is deadly at more than 1500 metres. And this is the RGD-5 hand grenade. For your further information, the men in the engine room with the engineering officers are similarly armed. Now, are there any questions so far?’

  ~ * ~

  With very slight variations, this was what happened to all of them. Hardly surprisingly, the abrupt appearance of a heavily armed Hind-D helicopter hovering within scant metres of the bridge clear-view while soldiers abseiled out of it onto the deck stopped everyone dead in their tracks. No one managed to contact any of the others and within a very short time each ship had had its main radio equipment destroyed and was cut off from the rest of the convoy, with a group of heavily armed, quietly courteous soldiers on the bridge and in the engine room only too ready to explain both their own arms and those on the helicopters currently aimed unerringly at each bridgehouse. Only with Katya Borodin and her crew was there any threat of trouble at first for they reacted particularly violently to being pirated by their own compatriots, but it was obvious that the invading soldiers knew that they were going to be dealing with Russian officers and crew and after a while they calmed things down. So all the s
oldiers were in their allotted places and all the messages of confirmation had been radioed up to the command helicopter on the ice, and the next stage of the iceberg’s destruction could begin.

  Gogol had positioned his helicopter in the logical place: exactly in the middle of Manhattan, equidistant from the four other helicopters which were stationed on the cliff edges closest to the ships they were threatening, available to back any one of them up. The communications were clear, and it was easy enough to pass out orders either individually on the prearranged closed channels or generally on the open frequency. But between giving the orders, hearing that they were being obeyed, and seeing the result, there was a long wait. And during that time, with the tension sending adrenaline fizzing through his system, adding its weight to the morphine overdose, the general began to talk.

  To the stunned young Captain Illych Kizel he described that night at Chernobyl and its aftermath. How, still ignorant of what the radiation was doing to him, he oversaw the digging up and crating of the black glass he had created. He relived the long train ride north to the coast and the loading of the Leonid Brezhnev. He described the horror with which the loss of that good ship had been welcomed in some rarefied political circles and his own feelings of sadness as his body had finally begun to show him what must have happened to the men and women on the freighter far out in the Arctic Ocean. He described, for the first time in his life and the last, exactly what was wrong with him and what the doctors at the institute had done to try and control it. How he had entered periods of remission for long enough to give evidence at the inquiry, then been forced to take early retirement, with nothing left to do but count the days of his consumption from within.

  Then came the chance of coming to Africa and getting back into the swing of things, working with his beloved tanks again. And the sudden shock, the horror, of discovering that, entombed in the iceberg on its way to Mau, the irradiated contents of the lost ship were returning to haunt him. That Chernobyl was forcing its way back into his life.

  ‘It is here,’ he said. ‘Somewhere below us. They are certain of it. They have found evidence. They have found pieces of the glass, the glass which no one in the world outside Russia must ever know about. The black glass which even now could destroy our international standing and bring us to the edge of the abyss. The glass I made, on that terrible, terrible night.’

  He pulled himself up, surprised to discover that the weight of the story had bowed him down until he was almost on his knees beside the open side of the helicopter. The act of straightening brought sweat to his white lips and he crunched up another morphine tablet before he raised the helicopter’s handset to his lips and said on the open channel, ‘We are not moving off line quickly enough. Tell the two lead ships to steer north as hard as they can.’

  ~ * ~

  It was Wally Gough who first alerted Richard, coming into the ping-pong room at a dead run, his face alive with excitement, yelling, ‘Have you seen that helicopter, sir? My God, I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life! I think it’s actually flying backwards in front of the bridge.’

  Richard had been deep in concentrated calculations and, because his room was closer to the cliff than to the sea, he had not even heard the helicopter. As soon as he realised that the excited boy was not engaged in some kind of joke he was on his feet and following him out into the corridor. They arrived just in time to see six heavily armed soldiers pounding up the stairs towards the navigation bridge. Richard ran back to his makeshift office and grabbed his walkie-talkie. By the grace of God he had it on channel twelve, an open channel to the radio room, and he knew exactly what it meant when the signal suddenly went silent.

  He swung round, stunned by the speed of events, just as Wally came back in through the door behind him. All the boy’s excited elation had been replaced by sick fear. ‘They’ve destroyed the main radio,’ said Richard without thinking. ‘My God, they’ve cut us off!’

  Wally stopped dead, as though he had been hit. He sank into a nearby chair and it was a mark of his shock that he did not ask permission first. ‘What is it?’ he asked faintly. ‘What do you think is going on, sir?’

  ‘We’re being hijacked! Well, I’m damned.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Well, offhand I’d say that either someone doesn’t want Manhattan to arrive at Mawanga, or they want it to arrive somewhere else.’

  ‘But there’s nowhere else on the west coast of Africa that could take anything this big.’

  ‘Quite right, my boy. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ As he was speaking, Richard was punching in the contact number for the engine room, but the number just rang and rang without answer. ‘Damn! They’ve beaten me to it,’ he said. He took in a deep breath. ‘So, they control the bridge and the engine room on Psyche. . .’

  A matter of moments proved that they controlled the bridge and engine room on each of the other ships too, and Richard, with the enormity of the situation suddenly breaking through even his massive self-control, hurled the useless walkie-talkie across the room. No sooner had he done so than it began to whine with an incoming signal. Wally scuttled across the room and snatched it up, handing it back to Richard at once, behaving exactly as though it was alive and repulsive. He was too scared even to press RECEIVE and answer it.

  Richard had no such qualms. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is that you, Captain Mariner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God. It’s the forecastle head line watch here, sir. The bridge is full of soldiers, sir. Came out of that bloody great helicopter, down onto the deck on ropes like the Royal Tournament. They seem to have the captain and everyone up there under armed guard. What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Wait!’ said Richard, his voice suddenly full of hope. ‘Wait and I’ll get back to you.’

  It took a little longer to establish that while he could not communicate with any of his captains or chief engineers, he could communicate with all of his line watches, for the line watch on each ship had been equipped with a wide-band high-powered walkie-talkie to accompany the bright yellow line-cutters.

  His eyes went narrow with thought as he tried to calculate the likelihood that the invaders, whoever they were, understood about the lines up onto the ice or the manner in which they could be cut. Whether they had considered that they could be cut at all. It seemed most unlikely to him.

  And so, while Gogol told Captain Illych Kizel the story of what they were here to do, Richard discussed with the men on the forecastles and the poops how he would go about foiling whatever might be planned by their paramilitary invaders.

  ‘Right!’ said Richard, with mounting satisfaction when he had completed the first briefing. ‘I still don’t know who these pirate bastards are, but if they’ve got me by the nose, then I’ve got them by the balls. And I can cut them off if I have to!’

  ‘But surely we need to know who they are and what they have in mind before we can do anything!’

  ‘Right you are, Wally. But how can we find it out?’

  ‘Scan all the channels on your walkie-talkie?’

  ‘It’s pre-set. Switched from channel to channel by buttons. I’d be lucky to switch in to any waveband they’re communicating on. No, we’ll have to come up with something better.’

  He switched through all the channels available on his walkie-talkie handset, listing them as he did so: ‘Radio room - dead; engine room - dead; line watches, Titan; line watches, Niobe...’ and so on. There were twelve channels available, and after ten his voice was growing bored. But on channel eleven, the radio hissed and he stopped his litany. ‘That’s the bridge,’ he half whispered. ‘The channel to die bridge is still functioning.’ He fell silent, thinking rapidly.

  Then, ‘Look, do you remember the layout of the bridge? I’m thinking particularly of the panel immediately beneath the clear-view, just to the left of the helm.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a microphone on a stalk there.’

  ‘That’s right! Now, just at the base o
f that there’s a button. Remember it?’

  ‘Yup!’ Caught up in the excitement of passing this strange test, Wally really wasn’t thinking this through or he would have been much less enthusiastic much earlier on.

  ‘Well, if I could get you onto the bridge, could you switch that button without being noticed? Could you open that channel so that I can hear what is happening on the bridge?’

  ‘What?’ Wally paled again.