by Peter Tonkin
No sooner had the realisation hit her with dizzying force than a huge pair of boots slammed onto the ice beside her. She looked up to see who was surefooted enough to jump down from the deck without slipping and recognised the massive frame of Henri LeFever. Round his waist was tied a rope which had held him erect when he landed. Above him at the rail hung a group of worried faces: Ann Cable, Errol, Sam and Joe.
LeFever reached down for her but she yelled at him, ‘No! Give me the rope. I’m going down there after Timmins.’
LeFever froze and his eyes narrowed, his mind was clearly racing, calculating the odds.
‘You’re too big,’ she pointed out breathlessly. ‘You would never fit through.’
But he had already seen that and was untying the rope. ‘What you need to do, Captain, is calculate how much he’s actually worth. He’s worth a couple of bruises and maybe a bad head cold.’ He leaned down and pulled her to her feet — she had already scrambled up to her knees. He supported her in a gentle but unshakeable grip as she tugged her gloves off with her teeth and held them in her mouth like a puppy while she secured the rope round her waist. ‘He isn’t worth a broken bone or anything worse.’
She thought he was being jocular but he wasn’t. He was advising her with absolutely calm calculation.
‘When you get down there you’ll want to take risks. Don’t. If you get too badly hurt to run the ship then we’re all in very bad trouble indeed. The only way we can rely on Captain Black, obviously, is if we find his stash of coke or whatever it is Reynolds supplied him with. There’s no way we can trust Timmins or Hogg if anything goes wrong down there. You’re all we’ve got, Captain. He’s maybe worth one hair of your head, as they say. But he’s not worth a hell of a lot more.’ His grip tightened. ‘You remember that, now.’
Aboard Atropos, the others kept a long loop of rope coming down to him independently of the half-tethered ship’s wave-driven motion, and he eased her down the slope with as much easy power as the cargo crane. Throwing dignity to the winds, she slid down the icy incline on her bottom as though she were a child too poor to afford a toboggan. When her feet dropped over the gleaming green edge she called, ‘Stop!’ so loudly that she gave herself a fright. She jerked to a halt and looked down. She had reason to be tense. She seemed to be sitting on a wedge of ancient glass, green and full of twisted planes, veins and bubbles. She could see through it only vaguely, enough to make out light and darkness, movement and vague shapes only at its thinnest edge underneath her knees. Under her hands, which were on either side of her hips, it was thick and dark, almost smoky. And, amazingly, it was dry. There was no sign of moisture on it.
Until, with unexpected ferocity, a combination of air and spray roared up past her at considerable pressure. Only LeFever’s iron grip kept her safe but neither the ice nor she was dry by the time it had passed. ‘Go,’ she bellowed when she had regained her breath, and he eased her forward until her buttocks were just sitting on the edge.
Then she was in, and he lowered her swiftly so that her hips, torso and head followed each other rapidly into the hole. As her shoulders went in, she twisted round so that she was hanging upright in the chamber, ready to look around herself as soon as her head came below the level of the roof.
It was as though she was inside a little dome of ice. The thinness of the crystal on either side of the crack let the light in untinted, but all around her the crystal coloured it to different hues so that even at its deep-sea darkest, it seemed to give off brightness. It was breathtakingly beautiful but she soon discovered that the chill rapidly eating into her bones was matched by an equal chill working its way out. This tomb of ice was utterly, inhumanly, terrifyingly alien. Life forms of any kind had no business in here, for this was death solidified. Its chill, petrified beauty was the negation of anything warm with pulsing life. And she remembered that of all the witches, goblins and monsters in the fairy tales which had filled her childhood, the Snow Queen had scared her the most.
Air hissed past her as though the place had whispered a curse, and green water snarled beneath her dangling feet.
The clear green boulders trundled along the floor like giant uneven balls of glass, and in among them was Timmins. He was just beginning to come round and his eyes were wide with more than panic. He had no idea she was just above him for he could no more hear her shouts than she could hear his screams. Wildly, fighting free of the deadly swirl of water and ice boulders, he managed to stagger to his feet and when he looked up — and not with any hope of salvation — she found herself staring into the face of a man who was looking hopelessly at death.
He was so utterly surprised that she should have come into this terrible place after him that something like madness fled across his dead-white countenance. The backwash slithered back from the dark bowels of the cave and he danced in it insanely, fighting to keep his feet, and when he looked up at her again there was a strange conflict of borderline sanity and terrifying hope in his washed-out, bulbous eyes. She had never seen it but she knew it: this was the look of the drowning man who would drag his rescuer down. She looked up. Why wasn’t LeFever lowering her more quickly? She saw that the rope was cutting deeply into the edge of the ice. But then something dark fell across the crystal roof and was forced down ruthlessly, lifting the rope out of the lethal rut.
As soon as the rope was free, she was lowered rapidly until she was standing opposite Timmins. While standing listening to Le Fever’s advice, she had in fact been tying two hitches into the rope — one for her waist and one for Timmins’s foot, but looking at him now, she knew he would never be able to do something as simple as putting his foot through a loop and holding on to her knees as they went up. So she untied the loop round her midriff and tied it round his. Two quick tugs and Timmins left the ground. As his knees came level with her face, she stepped onto the loop at the rope’s end and hung on for dear life.
When her head hit the ice roof, it shattered around her and tumbled like stained glass. Her shoulders and hips were scored by blunt but bruising claws as she was jerked bodily up over the bulk of the fender which had stopped the rope from snagging. The force of the motion flung her head backwards and forwards several times, and then her forehead hit the ice with stunning force. The last thing she knew was that LeFever had tossed Timmins to one side and was reaching down for her.
*
When she woke up she was warm but she hurt all over. She moved and discovered she was tucked up in bed. She felt silk beneath her fingers and realised she was wearing a nightdress. A head and shoulders swam into view. Ann Cable was sitting on the bedside, lamplight gleaming on her hair. Robin’s head rose fractionally off her pillow and her ears savoured the sound of alternators throbbing purposefully, supplying her ship with electricity; with light and warmth and hot food. Everything else could wait. Even Richard. Ann said something, but Robin didn’t hear. The lullaby of the alternators sent her back to sleep at once.
18 - Day Nine
Thursday, 27 May 19:30
The top floor of Heritage House on Leadenhall Street in the City of London was split into two halves. In one half, the twenty-four-hour secretarial staff of Crewfinders kept tabs on every officer, man and woman who worked for that great agency, placing them on Heritage Mariner ships as a matter of routine and also maintaining their traditional function of being able to replace any crew member from the captain to the third assistant chef within twenty-four hours, on any ship, belonging to any company, anywhere in the world.
In the other half was the nerve centre of Heritage Mariner Shipping itself. One complete wall displayed a map of the world. The huge display was electronically illuminated and contained information on the disposition of every Heritage Mariner ship anywhere in the world. As the room was nearly twenty feet tall and this wall was the better part of fifty feet long, the map easily filled 450 square feet, and it contained a great deal of information.
Against another wall stood an antique bookcase containing in serried blue ranks e
very volume of the Admiralty Pilot with all the updates; and at least one copy of every other publication that Sir William and Richard’s combined century or so of seagoing experience had found to be useful, interesting or amusing. It was a very big bookcase indeed, and a set of library ladders stood beside it on castors in case anyone wanted to consult a book on an upper shelf. Below it, thrusting out too far to balance aesthetically, was a chart chest containing every modern Admiralty Chart and a scarcely legal collection of increasingly elderly ones — they really should have been destroyed each time a replacement was published — going back to 1800 and, for some seas, even earlier than that. In a mahogany magazine rack which had graced one of the chambers in the original Lloyds building was a set of weekly and monthly publications all on the same theme, from Lloyds’ List to Boating World.
Opposite the bookcase and at right angles to the huge map was a wall which seemed to have been recently transferred down from a space shuttle. Here were screens and displays, keyboards, dials, meters and gauges, printers and scanners. It was a massive IBM computer system constantly in contact with its equivalents in New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo and, more recently, Archangel and Murmansk. It could reach hundreds more at the touch of a button via the telephone modem. There were ten telephones, five of them constantly manned by secretaries, but so many lines out that it had its own international switchboard and a mini exchange in the cellar below, beside all the company records. On the roof was a transceiver and satellite monitoring system so sophisticated that it had been installed by some of the same men who had worked on the roof of Century House, the new headquarters of the British Secret Service.
The final wall was wood-panelled round a tall, ornate doorway flanked with mock Doric columns and a triangular lintel inspired by the Acropolis. To the right of this door, which opened into the passage from the Crewfinders office, the panelling was a fitting background for a series of paintings, all, in keeping with the room, on nautical themes.
On the left of the door was a picture window, placed there by a combination of 1940s architecture and a German thousand-pound bomb dropped during the Blitz. The window looked south across Fenchurch Street and East Cheap. On the right as you looked out lay the Monument and the span of London Bridge; ahead, Billingsgate and the Custom House; to the left lay the Tower of London and, beyond it, Tower Bridge. The backdrop to all these was the dark flow of the River Thames. The window was so designed that the central section could be raised to give access to a tiny balcony outside from where a keen-eyed observer could see everything from Shadwell and the distant tower of Canary Wharf in the east to the great dome of St Paul’s in the west, and over the south bank halfway to the Old Kent Road. Churchill himself had once remarked that there was very little worth looking at in London which could not be observed most satisfactorily from Bill Heritage’s balcony.
None of the men in that room on this particular spring evening was at all interested in the view, least of all Richard Mariner. Sir William had brought back from Harcourt Gibbons’ funeral his old friend Sir Justin Bulwyr-Lytton. Or, more correctly, Sir Justin had, for reasons of his own, attached himself to Sir William and stayed with him relentlessly through the afternoon. Now Sir William and Sir Justin were seated opposite each other on the pair of leather chesterfields on each side of the low antique table, each man nursing a drink. But Richard could not settle. He was caught between two crises, still strung out on adrenaline from the court case, and he could not bring himself to sit down.
At least the conclusion of the case had finally liberated him to go to Robin’s aid; but now that he could do so, there was nowhere for him to go. Clad in a dark pinstripe City suit, he strode up and down the room from the map wall to the communications consoles, brushing past the chesterfields and kicking up the corner of a priceless Persian carpet. The last reported positions of Clotho and Atropos were marked in the southern section of the Labrador Sea, one behind the other, as reported when last contact was made. But these positions were more than twenty-four hours out of date now because the last contact had been made yesterday, and he knew that there was something badly wrong. In these waters, in those conditions, with ships in that state, no news was bad news.
He was helpless without direct contact with one of the sister ships. The cloud cover was too heavy to be penetrated by the keenest-eyed satellite and while the pyrotechnics of yesterday’s spectacular solar flare might well have sent astronomers into transports of ecstasy, it did nothing for men and women struggling to communicate over half the world. There was no news of the ships from any of the transmitters on the west coast of Greenland or the east coast of Labrador. The only news from Newfoundland was that even the fishing boats were avoiding the ice-clogged banks. The Labrador Sea from the Davis Strait in the north to Belle Isle in the south and across to Kap Farvel in the east was a no-go area for shipping and a black hole for communications.
The only thing that anyone seemed to be certain of was that part of the great barrier of ice which normally bearded the chin of southern Greenland had broken off and the better part of a thousand square miles of ice, most of it a hundred feet thick, was in the same place as his ships.
‘I’ve got to get out there,’ he said, not for the first time, fighting to keep his voice level.
‘But where are you going to go, my boy?’ asked Sir William. ‘Be practical. Until we know where they are exactly, then you’re better off here.’
‘But —’
‘But nothing. You’re exhausted. You’re under enormous stress. You’re not thinking clearly. If you go, what will happen? You’ll end up either in Federiksdal in Greenland because it’s fairly ice-free at the moment or you’ll have to go to New York or somewhere and wait there.’
‘I’d go to Gander. It’s closer.’
‘Even in Newfoundland, you’d just be sitting around waiting for news. Wait here, Richard. Really, I—’
‘He’s making sense, old chap,’ interposed Sir Justin quietly. The weight of their combined opinion gave Richard pause for thought. The two men had been school friends together between the world wars. They had been in the navy together fighting the Nazi and Japanese imperial fleets. Bill and Bull had been a maritime legend lasting from 1939 to 1945. Then Sir William had left the navy to set up his first shipping company and Justin Bulwyr-Lytton had joined the Diplomatic Corps. He had returned to his maritime interests after retirement, however, becoming adviser to the International Maritime Bureau, specialising in Middle Eastern terrorism in the eighties before Saddam Hussein turned the Gulf on its head. Now he advised the unofficial INTERPOL of the sea on terrorism in general. Few men had more contacts in the widest range of relevant organisations — official, clandestine and just plain illegal — than he did. And no one in the country knew more about terrorism than he did.
‘You’re right,’ admitted Richard at last. ‘I’d be silly to leave home base. I’ve got everything I need for quick action here. If I’m anywhere else in the world at all when word comes in I’ll be lucky to be able to move. But if I’m here, then I can use my own facilities.’ He glanced at the Greek-inspired door through to the adjacent office. ‘Crewfinders will deliver me anywhere in the world faster than anyone else could hope to do. And that includes the middle of the Labrador Sea.’
Sir William patted his son-in-law on the shoulder in a way that only Richard’s real father would ever have dared to do. ‘That’s better, Richard. You’re talking sense now.’ He paused, lost in thought for a moment, then he stirred himself as a new thought occurred to him. ‘Well now,’ he began, but one of the secretaries interrupted him quietly.
‘Excuse me, Sir William. I have a call incoming for Sir Justin.’
Bulwyr-Lytton put down his black rum and pulled himself up out of the burgundy leather chesterfield. ‘Let this rest until I find out what this call’s all about,’ he requested gently. ‘Richard, why not break the habit of a lifetime? Have a drink, man, and settle down.’
That was asking too much
, but Richard at least forced himself to perch on the leather arm of his father-in-law’s sofa and flip impatiently through the latest Western Ocean weather reports to see if there was anything he might have missed.
Sir Justin talked on the phone for a moment, unconsciously pulling at the white point of his naval whisker beard. Then he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s a friend of mine. He’s faxing something over to me. What’s the number here, Bill?’
Sir William told him, and the old naval commander passed it on to his mysterious ‘friend’. Richard looked up, distracted from the weather reports, intrigued in spite of himself. What was old Bull up to? For the first time it struck him that Sir Justin was behaving rather strangely. Richard’s eyes met the old commander’s square on and it was as though Bulwyr-Lytton suddenly read his suspicious thoughts. ‘It’ll be here in a minute,’ he said blandly. ‘My friend says it’s not just for my attention. He says you should take a copy as well. But it’s for me to pass on to my people at the International Maritime Bureau, of course. It’s apparently the sort of thing we might need to know about in our unceasing efforts to keep the seven seas safe from wrongdoers of all sorts. And something you need to see too. I don’t know what it is, but he doesn’t think you’ll like it.’
‘Bull, what on earth are you talking about?’ asked Sir William, looking between the other two, suddenly aware that their gazes had locked and held. ‘What is going on here?’
‘It all blew up in New York this morning,’ said Sir Justin. ‘I heard about it at ten, just as I was on my way to Harcourt’s farewell do. It came out in the first editions of some of the papers there. No one knows how it got circulated so widely. Looks as though there was quite an organisation involved. And that’s very worrying. Very worrying indeed.’