The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Get in the helicopter. General,’ Kizel was yelling.

  The Hind stood still but was rocking on its suspension at the end of the little trenches carved by its undercarriage. Gogol sat beside it, looking upwards. The Hind had been facing eastwards along the length of the iceberg towards its forecastle head. The helicopter had slid sideways and the general had been fortunate not to be crushed beneath it as it moved. The handset of his radio dangled out of the open side and the radio itself shrilled with incoming messages.

  ‘Get in the helicopter, General. We have to lift off at once!’

  Gogol looked across at Kizel and his lip curled. ‘There is no need to panic, Illych, the movement has stopped!’

  Kizel almost danced with impatience. ‘No it has not, General. Think! If the iceberg tilts one way and stops, then that is only a pause before it tilts the other way! It is obvious. It is a simple law of physics.’

  The general looked up, uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Did you never play with boats in your bath? What goes one way rocks back the other way too!’ Kizel’s throat tore as he yelled. And as he yelled, he realised that the sounds he was making were vanishing. Being eaten. Swallowed. Swept under. Drowned beyond rescue in the rising tide of thunder which could mean only one thing.

  He ran forward, surprised - horrified - to realise that he was already running up a slight slope.

  Slight, but steepening.

  The Hind hesitated on the very edge of motion, trembling at the top of the little trenches, ready to slide back down.

  Illych Kizel caught up the body of his general officer and, too preoccupied to be surprised by the lightness of his burden, climbed into the helicopter with Gogol in his arms. No sooner were they inside the square space of the fuselage than he felt the Hind begin to slide away under him. He dropped the general at once and began to fight his way up the bucking length of the helicopter. He was vaguely aware that Gogol was following him but at some distance. Then he forgot about his commanding officer and threw himself into his seat. The horizon was already looking seriously out of true to his eyes, but that was nothing to the way it looked on the instruments in front of him. And it continued to tilt further and further over in a slow, majestic surge as he fought to get the engine started.

  Gogol arrived, dumping himself in the co-pilot’s seat and raising a long, clumsy tube into plain sight. ‘Another Grail missile,’ he said. ‘Like the one we used on Chala. Get me to one of those bastard tankers and I’ll light a big enough fire to call down all of your heat-seeking missiles!’

  Kizel nodded, but he wasn’t really paying much attention. He was going through the shortest pre-flight of his flying life. The tanks were half empty and the gas was not too keen on pushing itself up into tubes at this odd angle. The engine coughed and snarled. The rotors surged into motion then slowed as the motor failed to catch. The Hind reached the end of its little trenches and hesitated, apparently unwilling to go up over the rough, sandy snow.

  The sound of the rolling iceberg was of a thunderstorm in an echo chamber with a recording of a military barrage at full volume behind it on the biggest speakers in the world. Kizel was crying because of the pain in his ears. And yet even that seemed secondary to the agony in his chest. The very air that he breathed was vibrating so hard it threatened to tear his lung linings loose. His heart was actually being massaged by the throbbing in the shaking air. He could feel his brain trembling in his skull and his sight began to fail as the smallest blood vessels behind his eyes ruptured and began to spray threads of blood across his vision.

  ~ * ~

  A fully-laden Hind-D helicopter weighs in excess of 25,000 kilograms. There were four left on the upper surface of Manhattan, and so 100,000 kilos, nearly a quarter of a million pounds, was sliding down the slope adding weight and inertia to the slow, inexorable tilt of the ice. Compared with the mass of the whole thing, of course, this weight was less than nothing. But the balance of the iceberg was so questionable, its reaction to brushing the lip of the submarine cliff so intense, the destabilising effect of being cut loose and slowing down suddenly so cataclysmic that the extra weight of the helicopters was more than enough to turn it over.

  With a kind of languorous majesty, it heaved and tipped, throwing its sand-marked upper surfaces southwards and pulling its submarine foundations up into the heaving air. It was so massive that the physics of its movement caused enormous disturbance of the sea which heaved up into great waves speeding south. Only the quick-thinking and desperate orders of Richard Mariner turned the ships in time so that at least they were riding stern on to the swell. Psyche was nearly drowned by spray and her whole bridgehouse was discovered, later, to have moved one clear metre forward down her deck. Nevertheless, she survived.

  Titan and Niobe, running away to the east, were battered but unbowed. Ajax and Achilles in harness to the west likewise escaped.

  Exactly what happened to Kraken, however, no one ever knew.

  As the iceberg rolled, it rose up in the water as though the sideways motion was causing it to leap into the air for joy. It hurled itself upwards far faster than the slow ocean could ever move to fill in the unutterable, abysmal vacancies it left behind it. For the instants of its unimaginable arousal, it literally tore a hole in nature. And the tanker was simply gulped down. Running north and east for safety though she was, she never stood a chance, for the movement of something as gigantic as Manhattan caused even the winds to move, and the same forces that piled up the sea on one side into great waves and made a Grand Canyon in the ocean on the other acted on the air as well. The hurricane storm to the south which threw the spray so hard at Psyche’s upper works that her funnel was hurled over her forecastle head and away across the sea in front of her, simply, on the northern side of the rolling berg, sucked Kraken like a feather into the hole in the Gulf of Guinea made by a billion tonnes of solid water in violent motion, and swallowed a quarter of a million ton supertanker as easily as it had swallowed the Hind helicopter a little earlier.

  ~ * ~

  Only the instruments told Kizel that the engine had caught. By the time it came to life, its sound was as nothing in the storm. He engaged the rotors once again and actually began to pray as the great span of die blades began to swing into its accustomed circle. He was extremely fortunate that Kraken’s guardian had already fallen off, for by the time he had his own craft under some kind of control it was plain that everything else on the surface was in violent motion down the slope which was all too rapidly steepening into a cliff. Even as he lifted off, he kept looking up that dirty white slope, expecting to see Kraken’s helicopter come tumbling down on top of him.

  The lurch as the cabin swung back down to a horizontal setting threatened to throw both men out of their seats, for neither was strapped in. Whereas it nearly knocked Kizel out, it served to wake Gogol up. By this time he had consumed so many of his morphine tablets that he was far removed from reality. The drug’s painkilling properties cocooned him from the agonies of noise and concussion which were threatening to incapacitate his pilot. He pulled himself up and looked around. If he was beyond pain, he was by no means beyond the reach of shock, and what he saw smashed into his consciousness like a right hook from a heavyweight champion. He had lost his command. That much seemed certain. And, for the first time in his life, he had failed in a mission. Increasingly wildly, he looked around die swinging cabin of the Hind as Kizel fought to bring it dancing out from under the rearing avalanche of the spinning iceberg.

  The same deft hands and feet which had made the Hind seem to fly backwards before Psyche’s bridgehouse and had jerked the craft away like a fish on a line fought to carry the bucking helicopter through the increasingly wild winds piling up under the lip of solid ice which was breaking down over them like a big surf. At last, the helicopter was indeed flying backwards and Kizel, a pilot of real genius, perhaps the greatest helicopter pilot in the Russian armed services, was bringing his craft back out of the jaws of hell to the first heart-s
topping promise of safety.

  ‘Yes!’ He tore his throat, screaming with, the wild, ecstatic combination of hope and elation, feeling his labouring craft beginning to come to life.

  He hauled her nose up as though he was a weightlifter at the outer edge of his strength. His eyes began to clear, for he had been flying by touch up until now, and he began to see, rising out of the billowing clouds of spray on which he seemed to be floating, more and more and more of the eternal iceberg rising up to meet him. The glass in front of him split across and began to leak inward at once. He screamed. The Hind screamed. Neither could be heard. He gained another gramme or two of strength. The metal of the control column began to twist out of shape in the force of his grip. His foot slid another millimetre down the slowly warping pedal. And by main force, the Hind continued to climb on the back of the hurricane wind, skipping backwards all the time and away from that massive leap of the ice which, far back behind the rising, rolling mountain, was gulping Kraken down and creating massive waves in the southern edge of the Bight.

  Kizel’s eyes were clouding up and out of focus; he was flying by touch again and just succumbing to the blessed belief that he was pulling free after all when he felt the fist of his commanding officer come pounding on his shoulder. His eyes leaped wide and he risked a quick, startled glance to his left.

  Gogol had gone utterly insane. His face was twisted with a wild, terrifying combination of stress and agony. He was yelling as loudly as he could through a throat no longer designed to accept volume, forcing air up out of lungs which no longer should have known how to breathe. He was doing to his cancer-corrupted body what Kizel was doing to the buckling frame of the Hind. He was screaming at the top of his voice and he was pounding on the pilot’s shoulder and gesturing wildly dead ahead and upwards.

  At first, still believing the man was mad with fear, Kizel thought Gogol was ordering him to get the helicopter up and away. He shook his head, frowned, shrugged the importunate man away. But Gogol would not be dismissed. He screamed until blood came boltering from his gaping mouth. He battered the pilot and gestured.

  At last Kizel looked upwards towards where the general was pointing. He never really believed what he saw but he saw it so clearly that he carried the sight to his grave. The crest of the frozen wave was etched against the bright blue sky so absolutely that the ice itself seemed dark. And, frozen into the line of that crest, was the forecastle of a ship. The steel sides were twisted; blast-damaged, burned, half-melted out of shape, but they were there. And they were unmistakable. There was part of a ship frozen into the ice.

  Abruptly, as though a spike of ice had been pushed down his throat, Kizel froze. He knew what ship this was. There could only be one. He glanced back across at Gogol. The general was slumped back in his seat now and he seemed to have grown a bright red beard.

  From that moment on, Illych Kizel saw things only in still pictures, as though the sun had become a massive strobe light. He saw the bows of the ship Leonid Brezhnev rear in silhouette against the sky. He saw the general leaning back in his seat coughing up more blood. He saw the cliff falling as the helicopter continued to rise at his implacable command. He saw the ship topple forward beneath the nose of the Hind. He saw Gogol, gesturing wildly, jerk forward as the frozen ship fell, and he understood. He saw the open front of the ship, its metal spread wide open by the force of some unimaginable explosion, its name still readable. Its identity and nationality still all too obvious. He saw Gogol jerking as his lifeblood burst out to run away down his chest and onto the heaving floor. But still the man would not give in. He should have been dead eight years earlier; he was not going to lie down now.

  The hand he laid on Illych Kizel’s shoulder was the merest feather now, but it had more force and command than all the battering which had rained down earlier. Both men were permanently deaf and yet the pointing of that quaking finger spoke more eloquently than the words of Chekov himself.

  The nose of the Hind dropped back down as Kizel aimed the whole machine at the tumbling bow of the ship. His face swung towards Gogol, stunned with confusion. All of their air-to-surface missiles were heat-seeking and he was pointing them at ice! But even as he looked at the general, so he saw him smashing the Grail anti-tank missile through the cracked windscreen in front of him. A hail of glass shards burst in over the pair of them. The wind grasped Kizel and tried to chuck him bodily out into the sea. The Hind’s head dropped, but not before Gogol had pulled the trigger on the Grail. The rocket fumes filled the cockpit, only to be snatched away again by the rabid wind. A section of the ice immediately below the frozen bows erupted and Kizel launched the first series of missiles.

  The whole side of the iceberg burst asunder. The shock wave hit the helicopter, causing it to fall the better part of fifty metres into the top of the mist.

  Kizel knew that his choice was very simple now. He could wrestle the dancing Hind up out of the mist again and fly away, leaving the job half done, or he could obey the last order of his general.

  He glanced across into the co-pilot’s seat. Gogol seemed to be asleep now, nursing the empty tube of the Grail’s launcher, but Kizel wasn’t fooled for a second. The decision was his and, thinking of the prediction at the end of the general’s story of civil war for Russia if the ship was ever discovered, he made it. The wall of white in front of him might have been made entirely of mist except that part of it was unnaturally bright. That was where his missiles were exploding in the solid ice. He pressed the button which launched the next flight and pushed the controls forward.

  The Hind came up just sufficiently to maintain level flight through the shock wave caused by the second wave of missiles. It would have fallen from the sky upon the impact of the third wave, but instead it flew directly into the cliff and blew the last signs of Leonid Brezhnev away into the heaving sea.

  ~ * ~

  HAVEN

  MAU

  I have desired to go

  Where springs not fail

  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

  And a few lilies blow.

  And I have asked to be

  Where no storms come,

  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb

  And out of the swing of the sea

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Heaven-Haven

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Psyche joined Ajax and Achilles at the westernmost end of the iceberg which could no longer really be called Manhattan. Titan and Niobe continued to take the lead at the eastern end, but where they had been anchored to an island with coastal cliffs three hundred metres high, the new tabular configuration of the berg meant that the cliffs now were little more than one hundred metres tall at their highest point and sloped back down to almost nothing at their lowest.

  Richard was back on Titan and fully in charge. He had been on Psyche for a while, up on the ice with the engineers re-establishing the line, on Ajax with Katya Borodin, trying to discover whether her crew had noticed anything in particular about the pirates. Everyone was now agreed that the helicopters had been Russian and the accents of even the English-speakers has been Russian, and that they had talked to each other in Russian. Their one, taciturn, prisoner was certainly Russian. He had prepared a preliminary report of the tragedy to send to the United Nations and faxed it out from Ajax. Then he had returned to Titan and started making the plans he was discussing now. No one had seen him sleep since the attack, and that had been over for seventy-two hours now - to the extent that it would ever be over for any of them.

  He was driving himself and his command as hard as he could as the days ticked by and Mawanga harbour came closer and closer. By mid-afternoon, more than three days after the iceberg had rolled over, the ships were re-anchored in their new positions and back up to full power, though they were now moving forward at the five knots of the Guinea current, effectively idling in still water only just in control, while Richard held his captains’ conference in the big office aboard Titan. His f
irst objective was to establish clearly the new position; then he needed to confirm the complex series of manoeuvres they would be performing during the next few days to bring the iceberg safely to port.

  ‘The whole thing has rolled right over and settled upside down,’ he was saying, referring to a carefully drawn scale diagram pinned to the wall behind him. ‘The top is flat and the bottom, deep below the surface of the ocean, is now uneven, with two keels which used to be the islands we could see above the surface. The forward keel, about fifty kilometres long, reaches nearly one thousand metres straight down. It combines the three hundred metres of cliff which stood above the waves with the nine hundred which reached down below. The rear keel is much smaller and represents the inverted remains of the little island at the back of the berg to which Ajax and Achilles have been tethered for the last month.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a way to wash the sand off,’ observed Bob Stark grimly, and his dark attempt at a little humour failed to ignite any response from the others. They were all exhausted. They were shocked and depressed by the loss of Kraken and her complement. They were still in clinical shock from the unexpected, violent nature of the mysterious attempt to wreck their mission. They were all still looking over their shoulders all the time, expecting another gang of armed men to drop out of the sky. Even the iceberg, now obviously in an utterly stable position, remained a source of wonderment and terror. All the ships were on the longest possible lines, and Richard was quite content that they should stay that way.