The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘The keels are important,’ Richard persisted. ‘They give the berg even more stability than it had before . . .’

  ‘Which was not one hell of a lot, as it turned out. Be fair—’

  Richard’s hand slammed down onto the table. ‘Bob! I will not be held responsible because I couldn’t dictate the exact movements of a billion-tonne iceberg in the middle of an airborne invasion by armed soldiers! Now for Christ’s sake, let it rest.’

  The American looked stunned. He literally gaped at his old friend, then he swept the cow’s lick of gold hair out of his bright eyes. ‘God, Richard, I didn’t mean . . . Jesus . . . I’m sorry.’

  Richard took a great, racking breath. ‘No,’ he said more quietly. ‘I’m sorry. I know you didn’t mean anything. It’s just that. . . Well, let’s get on.’

  He turned back to the diagram on the wall.

  All his friends exchanged glances. They all tended to regard him as a man of steel, especially those who knew him best and longest, and his outburst had shocked them. Not so much the outburst, perhaps, but the depth of the strain it revealed. This was Richard at his grimmest, with all of his cheery self-confidence gone and all his breezy self-assurance buried under the dogged, joyless need to get a dirty job done. The joy had gone out of the work for all of them, but they still had their contract to fulfil, and a difficult job to do with absolute precision; for each of the forty men and women dead in this venture so far, one hundred thousand more stood to die.

  ‘The keels will keep the berg stable and ensure that it continues to move in an absolutely straight line. It is our job, of course, to ensure that the straight line it is following takes it in through the opening of Mawanga harbour. Also, and this is equally important, we have to ensure she is still moving fast enough to reach all the way down the full length of the anchorage but that the way comes off her completely before she smashes into the mouth of the River Mau and rides up into the middle of the city itself. I understand there are hundreds of thousands of insurance claims ready to go if there is the slightest evidence of any property damage at all.’

  ‘And almost all of the residents of Mawanga city have taken to the hills,’ supplied John, who had been listening to Mawanga Radio earlier that morning. ‘Except for reporters and disaster freaks.’

  ‘Welcome to Mawanga!’ said Bob, with bitter irony. And this time Richard at least gave a grunt of wry laughter.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Welcome to Mawanga!’ said a distant but familiar voice not quite lost among the babble of official greeting. Indira Dyal looked past the welcoming faces of the reception committee and caught the eye of Emily Karanga. She raised her hand and swept forward, leaving Mohammed Aziz to deal with polite officialdom.

  Emily and Warren Cord were standing on the tarmac apron, just off the wide red carpet laid out to conduct the Executive Assistant and the Chef de Cabinet from their aeroplane to their official car. There was some talk that the Secretary General himself would be here tomorrow in order to welcome the iceberg on its arrival in two days’ time, but in the meantime the leaders of the Mau Club were getting the full treatment.

  ‘I’ll rely on Mohammed to represent us at as many official functions as possible,’ said the elegant Indian woman decisively. ‘I want you two to show me what’s really going on here.’

  That was all she had time to say before she was swept back into the line of minor government dignitaries desperate to get their faces in the papers and on the television screen.

  Emily and Warren walked back towards the car they were sharing. ‘That’s our Indira,’ observed the American. ‘You decided what you’re going to show her?’

  ‘Everything I can. And what she can’t see for herself I’ll get witnesses to describe to her.’

  ‘Ann Cable?’

  ‘If she’s well enough. I’m just on my way over to see her now. Can I drop you?’

  ‘Yeah. Shoot on past the hospital for a kilometre. Drop me at the docks. We’ve still got to get the harbour mouth fixed up.’

  ‘Is it being particularly difficult?’

  ‘I don’t know. No one’s ever tried to make a door that will open wide enough to let in a billion tonne iceberg and then close it right up behind it.’

  ‘I see your problem.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘No matter how you look at it, the problem will be time,’ said Warren Cord to the chief engineer.

  The tall black man nodded in agreement, his eyes narrow as he checked across the opening of the anchorage again. He was a man who placed absolute reliance on accurate drawings - then came out to check them at the site as often as he could. The two of them were standing on the westernmost edge of the northern arm of land. A slight wind gusted over the bull’s horns of the anchorage mouth, carrying the United Nations man’s words away southwards across the twenty kilometres of restless water.

  ‘I mean,’ persisted the American, ‘you’re dealing with an opening here which is almost as wide as the Straits of Gibraltar. It’s only just going to be wide enough to let the sucker in, but once it is in, then you’ve got to close it off. Build a barrage, or a dam or something like that before the iceberg melts and starts leaking fresh water back out again.

  ‘I’ve looked into all that very carefully and—’

  ‘You don’t have a shallow base to build up from because the iceberg is a thousand metres deep and that’s at least how deep the harbour mouth has to be.’

  ‘And is. We know all this, Warren.’

  ‘I know! I’m just thinking out loud, for heaven’s sake.’

  The black civil engineer gave a bark of laughter as he realised what Warren was really up to. ‘You are practising for press interviews! Are you going to be seen around town with the devastating Dr Dyal, then, my friend? You will need to move fast to get her away from Aziz!’

  ~ * ~

  Wearing an outfit of khaki bush gear instead of her usual stately sari, Dr Indira Dyal was almost impossible to recognise. Those heads which turned, and there were a good few, were turned not by fame but by the sight of two such striking women riding together in an open-topped jeep out through the shantytown towards the reception camps. Only the small truck of armed guards behind them gave any hint of their true political importance. But the guards were tense and watchful - it was little more than a week since their leader General of Police Nimrod Chala had been assassinated. The country still simmered on the edge of civil war, but the dead leader had left a power vacuum. Many of the men who so smilingly greeted Dr Dyal at the airport were scheming to fill the vacuum themselves, but General Moses M’Diid was best placed to take advantage, for the army stood behind him as firmly as the police had stood behind their leader. Moses was especially well placed now because his younger brother Aaron was currently acting head of state. As soon as the matter of the water was sorted out, there would be elections. And Nimrod Chala was no longer there to fight them or disrupt them or seize power and make them redundant.

  Emily was one of those drivers who liked to divide their concentration between control and conversation. With her right hand on the wheel, she gestured extravagantly with her left. With her eyes firmly on the road ahead - which was coming towards them at more than thirty miles an hour - her tongue was in animated overdrive.

  ‘You will see. Millions of them, helpless and hopeless. Only now is the true horror of what has been happening upcountry beginning to emerge. Ann Cable has agreed to see you tomorrow if she feels strong enough and she will give you a taste of the overall picture. But I can show you a thousand - a million - examples of individual suffering. In a way it is fortunate that they are all here. At least when the iceberg arrives we will only have to get the water a couple of kilometres up here to them. And, when they are stronger, they can help us move more and more of it. The food aid has been tremendous, but it is the water which will set us free. Even if it only gets these people back on their feet, it will have been worthwhile, but I’m sure there will be enough to get the irrigation system working aga
in.’ Her shining eyes left the road and swung across to look at the Indian woman. The hope they contained was so intense, Indira seemed to feel it on her skin like sunlight.

  ‘There’s almost as much water there as in Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam! All fresh and clear! It will bring my country back to life, I know it!’

  ~ * ~

  On the last day before the serious ship-handling began, they split the new area of exposed ice into sections and scanned them as fully as they could for radioactivity. The process was as laborious and difficult to achieve as had been the sweep across the now submerged island which John had organised. But Richard was willing to use all the crews he had, a team which was effectively 150 strong. And they found nothing. Insofar as they were able, they examined the surface of the ice in detail from the new wide shoreline at the back to the low cliffs at the front, which still formed a rough forecastle head. The new Bell had arrived and all that day the helicopter plied back and forth transporting, checking, guarding and carrying back. It was little enough cause for celebration, but it would serve. Richard asked his captains to give their crews a ‘well done’ party and he himself joined in the swing of things in Titan’s wardroom, playing the genial host overseeing a breathtaking feast with a range of courses carefully selected to guarantee that everyone enjoyed themselves to the full. And he led the festivities at the dance afterwards, though women were in short supply and they had to rely on the ship’s ancient audio-tape collection.

  ‘I don’t know how he does it,’ said Sally Bell to Wally Gough as he ran breathlessly up to her just before she broke up the party by going up onto her watch. ‘He’s not what you’d call mercurial, but he was so down yesterday and he’s on such good form tonight.’

  Wally looked at his captain with some speculation. It had never occurred to the youthful cadet that there was more under the surface than appeared at first glance. With childlike simplicity, he had assumed that if the captain seemed cheerful then he must be so. And most of the crew seemed to share his thoughts, for as the night wore on, so the morale aboard Titan - and aboard the other ships too - began to rise back up to its usual level.

  Richard felt it; he was hoping for it and looking out for it. The sacrifice of one fine ship and so many men was worthwhile only if the whole enterprise was worthwhile. And independently of the intrinsic worth of what they were trying to do, it would only be fully worthwhile if the next two days passed off without a hitch.

  Oh, how he was tempted to go to his charts again and look through the figures ready for the morning. But he would not dream of doing so. Here came young Wally Gough, tipsy with excitement from having talked Sally Bell into dancing with him on her way up to the bridge.

  ‘Wow!’ said the cadet breathlessly. ‘That was better than navigation lessons!’

  ~ * ~

  It was as though they were standing side by side, looking out through the same clearview into the first glimmer of dawn together, but in fact Richard and John were ten kilometres apart, with their ships on parallel courses, swinging the head of the iceberg round onto the due easterly straight line which would take them over the bar and into Mawanga harbour in thirty-six hours’ time. Each had a walkie-talkie and as they dictated the increasingly minute course changes to their helmsmen, they kept in contact with each other, checking, discussing, adapting. Both were using the satnav system to place themselves exactly on the surface of the earth and each was checking the other’s readings.

  As the sun came up over the horizon, Sally Bell hurried out onto the bridge wing with her sextant and Richard briefly found himself talking to Steve Bollom as John did the same. The reading they achieved agreed exactly with the readings from the satnavs and the commanders felt more relaxed about placing absolute reliance on the machines as they charted, almost metre by metre, the progress of the ships towards their destination.

  As soon as it was light, Yves Maille appeared on Titan’s bridge, and Richard nodded at once, knowing what the Frenchman wanted and happy to let him take it. Ten minutes after that silent nod, the Bell helicopter lifted off the main deck and skimmed away at wavetop level.

  All day it plied back and forth, covering and re-covering the increasingly narrow band of water between the lead ship and their destination. It hovered low, dropping markers and watching them drift. Colleagues from the shore came out in boats and fed the Frenchman readings of temperature, salinity, current.

  Especially current.

  The weather was calm. Noon and afternoon ticked by without the slightest stir of wind. The waves swept in from behind the iceberg and, as its guardians moved it more slowly and more slowly still, the waves swept past it in majestic green series, moving shore-wards and showing it the way. Until, just at the point where Yves hovered most anxiously and his colleagues bobbed and puttered in their boats, little more than fifty metres out from the tips of the bull’s horns, the waves began to break up unaccountably and what had been a regular corrugation became instead a restless, cross-hatched mess of sharp-sided, triangular waves.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Of course, we never even considered actually closing the outer end of the anchorage after we got the iceberg into it. That would have been like building the Aswan Dam, under water, in a matter of days. A little difficult, even for the United Nations, I think you’ll agree!’

  Warren Cord had got his press conference and he was enjoying it. All of the UN personnel in place had assembled for an early evening reception at the residence of the President. Present were the senior staff like Indira and Mohammed Aziz; the Mau Club representatives like Emily and Warren himself; aid workers, diplomatic staff, UNICEF reps, Save the Children men and women. During the last month more than a hundred people had arrived and there were many more on the way. The Secretary General was due tomorrow; but so was the iceberg itself and it seemed more sensible to hold the reception now. And, with a view to the proposed elections, acting President Aaron M’Diid had allowed the proceedings to begin with a press call. It was a little unexpected and the others were unprepared and not too happy about it, but Warren was ready for this and he was not a man to pass up such a heaven-sent opportunity.

  ‘Now I don’t want to bore the good folks out there, but the idea is this. As you know, there’s quite a current flowing in the ocean off Mau. It’s the southern end of the Guinea current and it runs south along the coast here, down towards the Congo. The flow is fast, it doesn’t vary much, and it comes right in along the coast. And, most especially, it comes across the mouth of Mawanga harbour.

  ‘Now, if you’re careful and make allowances, you can get a ship in and out easily, and we reckon the same will be true of the iceberg. We’ll wedge the whole thing in the harbour and be ready to pump out any salt water it displaces. The berg is so big that to begin with, it will block the entrance itself, like a great frozen cork. What will happen next of course is that the iceberg will begin to melt. I’m speculating here, but what we think will occur under these circumstances is this: as the clear water flows back along the anchorage, filling it with a lake of fresh water, it will come up against what is effectively a wall of salt water flowing south. The temperatures and specific gravities will be very different. The two sorts of water won’t mix too readily, and we reckon that, as long as we control the level of the meltwater in the anchorage carefully, the good old Guinea current will keep most of it bottled up for us. And, just in case there’s any miscalculation here, we’ll have our biggest pumps positioned up that end to pump the fresh water free.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘In fact,’ enlarged Emily Karanga later that night, ‘we’re hoping that most of the pure water will be transported over the ridge of rock at the mouth of the River Mau. The ridge that keeps the sea water from flowing further up into the dry valley. In fact, it is the first of a series of ridges which has created a sequence of dried-up lakes along the course of the river itself. If we can use the fresh water to fill these lakes, we will have the equivalent of a series of small dams, each holding back a self-c
ontained reservoir of more than a million tonnes of water and refilling the irrigation system my father put in place shortly before his assassination. And we can continue to refill each reservoir as it goes dry until all the ice has gone. Even to melt it all into water will take some time! And I mean, while the ice is hard, we can cut it up and carry it up there in trucks! Think of it!

  ‘Political ambitions? Oh no. I couldn’t say. Yes, I know my father is remembered ... revered , . . But, well, let’s just get the water back into the land and the first seed corn planted. Let’s just get every refugee back to his own home farm. Let’s just get all these poor, sick people strong and well again. Then it will be time to talk about politics!’