The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ~ * ~

  Ann Cable spent most of that evening standing at her hospital window staring away to the west. The iceberg was still below the horizon but even so, it was making its presence felt in the western sky. The sun bled down behind it, sinking through shades of ruby and garnet to burnt red, magenta and damask. But, just as it settled out of her sight, the sun seemed to rise again, its light flooding up in a dazzling display across the undersides of those high clouds. Bands of burning brightness seemed to come rolling in towards the land as though some Biblical curse was being worked out. After she recovered from her first shiver of unreasoning dread, she stood entranced, watching the searchlight beams of crimson light leaping up from behind the horizon as though some huge volcano were active there and the western waves were all afire, not freezing under the influence of the island of ice which was causing the beautiful show.

  It had begun abruptly, but it faded slowly Ann watched every second of it, her face running with tears for the first time since Emily found her. It was as though she found some kind of healing catharsis in the extravagant, overwhelming beauty she was witnessing. As though she found strength in the knowledge that the cause of all this beauty was coming here to heal this broken land.

  She did not remember sleeping at all that night. The light show seemed to carry on almost to midnight, when it was augmented by a real firework display from the President’s residence. Perhaps she slept but she did not remember even sitting down. She was back at that window watching when the first light of dawn began to glimmer like the ash of pink roses on the air. There was hardly any light at all, just that exquisite, almost mauve mist and shadows pointing out to sea. And, out to sea, there the iceberg was. The long light ran like water down Mau’s dry valley; it spilled across the anchorage and ran away into the distance until it thundered silently up against a cliff of utter, absolute, heartstopping whiteness.

  Ann caught her breath and stood until she was faint with want of breath, simply stunned by the beauty.

  ‘I have to get this down on paper,’ she said aloud. She ran her hands down her face and they came away wet with tears. ‘Then I’ve got to find my camera bag and get those photographs processed. There’s some kind of prize somewhere in this, Ann, old girl. . .’

  ~ * ~

  During the next thirty-six hours as the iceberg was painstakingly pulled in across the south-running Guinea current and bedded infinitely carefully into the waiting arms of the anchorage, Ann Cable saw more than anyone else involved. With the kind of energy granted to very few people, she managed to put herself in every location where something important was going on. She had money, contacts, influence. She had a clear view of where she wanted to be and what - whom - she wanted to see. She had the drive of a door-to-door Bible salesman. She had the timing of a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi. She had the sort of luck Napoleon required in his generals. She was simply unstoppable.

  It was Ann who was in the reception camps as day broke properly, discussing with the dying what this solid water meant; exploring with villagers who had never in all their lives seen ice outside a freezer what one billion metric tonnes of the stuff would mean to them. It was Ann who rode with Emily to pick up Indira and who interviewed her in the bouncing jeep as they went out to the airport to await the Secretary General’s plane. It was she who took the opportunity of a slight delay to interview the acting President in a waiting room, both of them caught between relief and surprise to discover that the rest of the press corps were out at the mouth of the anchorage looking at the sight which Ann, hundreds of feet higher, had seen a couple of hours earlier. Of all the things she learned in the interview with the urbane, charming, acting President M’Diid, the most important of all was how irreplaceable was the view from her sickroom window.

  But, inevitably, as the Secretary General’s plane at last arrived, the rest of the pack arrived too and Ann swapped places with them. She stepped out onto the furthest point of the northern arm of die anchorage and discussed with Warren Cord the manner in which the lead tankers would sail along the outside of the harbour until they could hand down their unbreakable lines. How these would then be attached to whole series of the largest earthbound vehicles Ann had ever seen, and how these incredible earth movers would grind down the roads, replacing the power of the supertankers as best they could. Titan, she knew, would remain at the harbour mouth, acting as go-between for the drivers of the massive vehicles and the captains of the three ships nearly a hundred kilometres away, whose ships by that time would be working in full reverse, trying to slow the stately progress of the massive inertia of one billion tonnes of ice as it was grudgingly ameliorated from two knots to dead stop in the seventy-five kilometres of the anchorage itself.

  She was just about to go and interview the men waiting to start the massive pumps further down, which were designed to get rid of the overflow which would be trapped in the anchorage by the forward motion of the iceberg, when a Bell helicopter came thudding in from the west to settle beside Warren’s men. Yves Maille climbed out and Ann was in motion again. Even this early in the day the Frenchman was susceptible to charm. He never stood a chance. The helicopter was soon airborne again and heading back the way it had come.

  And that brought the only really bad shock she had in all that magical time: the sight of her dear friend Richard Mariner. She had seen him in a wide range of circumstances and few of them had been pleasant but she had never seen him like this. He was drained, depressed, almost desperate. She could feel the burden of responsibility weighing about him like a cowl of lead. She arrived on Titan quite blithe, looking forward to seeing him, but at once she realised that he was all too close to the state she had been in herself during the last two weeks. Moved by sympathy and empathy, she waded in at once, describing what she had found ashore. Wisely, she did not mention the range of dignitaries waiting to greet him and the abundance of dignities they were preparing to confer upon him. Instead she told him about the millions of desperate people she had seen in the reception camps. She regaled him, not with her adventures, but with the ruination of the land that she had crossed and how the water which he was bringing would restore so much for so many. Little by little as she lingered through the afternoon, she saw the magnesium spark rekindle in the eyes which reminded her so much of circles of sapphire. When Yves bustled up, concerned that the bow of the berg was sweeping into the rush of the southbound current, she surrendered, gave Richard the sort of kiss she normally reserved for Nico Niccolo, and left, pleased with the obvious good she had done. At the door to the lift she was stopped by a tall blonde woman who spoke with an Irish accent. ‘I don’t know how you did it,’ she said, ‘but thanks. Thanks a lot!’

  Ann charmed Yves into dropping her back at the city end of the anchorage and picked up a taxi easily. She was back at the hospital within minutes. She went up to her room and into the province of her less than happy doctors. Still fizzing with energy, she reluctantly agreed to remain in their care for another thirty-six hours but refused to remain in hospital for all that time. She had a variety of plans - but they had lingering fears about tick fever.

  They met halfway. She spent a quiet evening turning her impressions of the day into prose, pausing every now and then to take a look out of the window, all too vividly aware that the bow of the iceberg was moving ever closer to the outer markers of the harbour. At midnight her resolve broke; she crept out into the streets. The same taxi driver took her right down to the tip of the northern harbour wall, a round trip of a hundred and fifty kilometres and very expensive at that time of night. But worth it.

  Why had so few other people, so few so-called reporters, placed themselves here to watch, as a white cliff of ice came sailing into the harbour? There was a gentle, reverberating thunder as the keel a thousand metres below grazed the ridge which separated the tectonic basin from the Gulf of Guinea. The earth trembled - it did not quite shake. Ann knew that her hospital bed would have been disturbed by this same vibration and she would have t
ossed in her sleep, scared that the roof was coming in upon her. How much more satisfying it was to be out here, watching a wall of ice many times higher than the fabled White Cliffs of Dover which Richard had described and eventually shown to her. How glorious to stand on this balmy, moonlit evening watching history in the making. How simply good it was to be alive!

  ~ * ~

  Twenty-four hours later, Ann stood in her hospital room looking out of her window thinking the same thing, but this time she was not alone. She had described the view from her room to Warren Cord, but he could not be here: he was in charge of the gigantic tractors pulling the unbreakable lines in place of the supertankers Titan and Niobe. She had mentioned it to Indira Dyal and Mohammed Aziz but both of them were in the tight grip of social and political requirements. There was another reception, and this one included the Secretary General. They could not refuse. She had mentioned it also to Emily Karanga and she at least was here. Emily, ever practical, had brought a thermos full of strong black coffee and they stood at the window with fragrant cups of Blue Mountain steaming on the sill in front of them. Further away, seemingly just beyond the double-glazing, the sharp-edged cliff of ice was pushing itself inexorably into the heart of the city. It overhung the inner harbour wall by more than half a kilometre, sloping back through its hundred-metre height. It continued to move forward into place, though its movement was only appreciable if one looked away for ten minutes or so and then looked back.

  Side by side, awed by the achievement of the man they both knew and respected so well, they watched as the iceberg slid into place as slowly, as absolutely, as inevitably as the sunrise. They were on the twentieth floor, in the penthouse of the hospital, and so were just able to look down upon the flat surface but only as a child on tiptoe may look across a tabletop. The broad span of the berg threatened to overfill the triangle of the estuary and crush the very buildings aside. But no. At five minutes past midnight, a bass note seemed to sound throughout the city as the bow cut through the red mud of the dry River Mau and ground to a halt against the slope of black, basalt rock. For the first time since the Leonid Brezhnev blew it free of the Greenland glacier that gave it birth, the iceberg had come to rest in a safe haven.

  Gleaming in the moonlight, like a picture on a Christmas card, a fine dusting of ice crystals fell forward like snow into the broad cup of the first dry lake. The coffee in the cups upon the windowsill stirred slightly and rippled darkly as the women watched, entranced. The coffee stirred again, in a kind of gentle aftershock, and then there was utter, blissful silence. Ann reached forward impulsively. Unusually for a building in a tropical country, the windows in the hospital had adjustable double-glazing. She took the handles and slid back the inner sheet of glass. Then she loosened the outer casement and opened it wide. The air that flowed in was cold, and smelt of cucumbers.

  It gave both of the women who smelt it so much energy that they embraced in uncontrollable excitement.

  ‘Now,’ said Ann, bubbling over with energy, ‘I want you to take me back to where you found me in that irrigation ditch in the bush. In the morning will do, but you must take me soon. Or, at the very least, you must promise to tell me exactly where it is. I’ve got a bag hidden there with a camera and some pictures which are going to win me the Pulitzer Prize!’

  ~ * ~

  At four o’clock that morning, a tall man in a light trench coat came down the gangplank from Titan onto the dock of Mawanga harbour. There was only the most dilatory immigration check and no customs check at all. Even at this time in the morning, there was a taxi waiting.

  ‘Where to?’ asked the driver cheerily in English, correctly guessing the most likely nationality of his passenger.

  ‘To the airport,’ his fare ordered.

  ‘You’re choosing a bad time to leave,’ the driver said, still cheery.

  ‘No, there’s a flight at six to Paris and London,’ the fare corrected wearily.

  The battered old Mercedes eased itself along the town-bound road. The harbour lights reflected off the side of the iceberg so brightly that it might almost have been day, all the way back to the eastern outskirts of the city and the first reception camp for refugees. There it was still dark, and would stay dark for a while yet.

  ‘That’s not what I mean!’ said the driver with a laugh, settling into the easy drive along the deserted highway east. ‘It’s party time in Mawanga! The Secretary General of the United Nations is here. There are all sorts of important people here! Why, there’s going to be a festival nonstop until the first thousand tons of that iceberg are carried into the refugee camps. They say the men on board your ships are all going to get rewards. They say your captain is going to get the Medal of Honour! Don’t you want to be here to see that?’

  ‘See what?’ asked the passenger, who must have dozed a little during the driver’s impassioned speech.

  ‘Don’t you want to see your captain being awarded the Medal of Honour?’

  ‘No,’ answered the fare, ‘I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Well, hell,’ said the cabby, very surprised, ‘what do you want to do?’

  ‘I just want,’ said the fare, ‘to go home.’

  ~ * ~

  Authorities

  ‘Much has been written in recent years about the possibility of using icebergs as a freshwater source. (Small cubes of ice from the Greenland ice-sheet are already being sold to discerning Americans who like their Scotch to be diluted with pre-industrial ice!) On a vastly greater scale there are plans for towing tabular icebergs from the Ross Sea and other parts of the Antarctic pack-ice belt to areas where there is a desperate water shortage. There are plans to irrigate deserts of western Australia, Peru, Mexico, California and even the Middle East with water from giant bergs towed by tugs.’

  Brian John, The World of Ice, 1979

  ‘Plans to tow icebergs from the Arctic to solve Britain’s desperate water shortage have been rejected in a discussion document by the National Rivers Authority. . . “Towing icebergs to warmer waters should be feasible in other parched areas of the world but would be uneconomic and unworkable here,” Mr Jerry-Sherriff, the authority’s head of water resources, said yesterday. “Even after moving an iceberg, we would have to find somewhere to berth it, a way to control the rate of melting and collect the water. The environmental impact of a huge iceberg moored off the South Coast would be unimaginable.” ‘

  News story by Robert Bedlow, Daily Telegraph, summer 1992

  ‘HARMATTAN - a very dry wind blowing from the interior of Africa to the Atlantic in December, January and February that is said to cause human skin to peel off.’

  Robert Hendrickson, The Ocean Almanac, 1992

  ~ * ~

  Source Books

  John and Julie Batchelor, In Stanley’s Footsteps (Blandford 1990)

  Charles Berlitz, The Bermuda Triangle (Grafton 1975)

  Ray Bonds, The Illustrated Dictionary of MODERN AMERICAN WEAPONS and

  The Illustrated Dictionary of MODERN SOVIET WEAPONS (Salamander Books 1986)

  Chris Bonington and Robin Knox-Johnston, Sea, Ice and Rock (Hodder and

  Stoughton 1992)

  Richard Brown, Voyage of the Iceberg (Bodley Head 1983)

  de Marenches and Ockrent, The Evil Empire (Sidgwick and Jackson 1988)

  Frank Dodman, Observers SHIPS (Bloomsbury 1992)

  Gale and Hauser, CHERNOBYL The Final Warning (Hamish Hamilton 1988)

  Haynes and Bojkun, The Chernobyl Disaster (Hogarth Press 1988)

  Robert Hendrickson, The Ocean Almanac (BCA/Helicon 1992)

  Brian John, The World of Ice (Orbis 1979)

  Nicholas Luard, The Last Wilderness (Elm Tree 1981)

  Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (Fourth Estate 1991)

  William H MacLeish, The Gulf Stream (Abacus 1989)

  Peter Matthiessen, African Silences (HarperCollins 1991)

  William Millinship, FRONTLINE - The Women of the New Russia (Methuen

  1993)

&
nbsp; Dervla Murphy, Cameroon with Egbert (John Murray 1989)

  Shiva Naipaul, North of South (Andre Deutsch 1978)

  Conor Cruise O’Brien, To Katanga And Back (Hutchinson 1962)

  Douglas Phillips-Birt, Reflections in the Sea (Nautical Publishing Company

  1968)

  Piers Paul Read, ABLAZE - The Story of Chernobyl (Seeker & Warburg 1993)

  Reader’s Digest ‘Discovery’ series: The Frozen World; The Challenge of Africa;

  Secrets of the Sea (Aldus 1979)

  John Ridgway, Storm Passage (Hodder and Stoughton 1975)

  Rosenblum and Williamson, Squandering Eden (Bodley Head 1987)

  Ray Sanderson, Meteorology at Sea (Stanford Maritime 1984)

  J. M. Scott, Icebound (Gordon and Cremonesi 1977)

  Richard Snailham, A Giant among Rivers (Hutchinson 1976)

  Gerry Spiess, Alone against the Atlantic (Souvenir Press 1981)

  D. A. Taylor, Introduction to Marine Engineering (Butterworths 1985)

  Jenny Wood, Icebergs (Two-Can 1990)

  ~ * ~