by Peter Tonkin
No sooner had the thought leaped into her mind than her walkie-talkie squawked. ‘Captain here,’ she answered at once.
‘Robin, it’s Ann. Have you seen the ice barrier?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s moved again. Look for yourself.’
With her tiny glimmer of hope dying stillborn in her breast, she walked down to the bow of her ship and looked beyond its black side, southwards across the ice.
There was no water visible any longer except that pouring from the black sky. The bay which had been at the foot of the slipway was gone and might never have existed. The ice of the barrier lay piled in pressure ridges across the whole horizon in front of her and she noticed inconsequentially that it was a different colour to the ice of the berg. And that fact, too, suddenly added to her disquiet, for she could see all too clearly that the last movement had closed in the hillsides which had formed the right arm of the bay. The hawsers which had held the hull so safely in place when she had reversed Atropos up the slipway all those weary hours ago now hung slackly on either hand, swinging in the grip of the driving, dangerous wind. One more movement like that and her command would be gripped between jaws of ice like a bone in the mouth of a rabid dog. And the thunder of the wind against the side of her streaming hood warned her that it was only a matter of time before that movement happened.
‘Damn you!’ she shouted at the ice, and it mockingly echoed her words of condemnation, making them a threat of its own: damn you! Damn you! DAMN YOU!
*
At first Henri thought the ghostly voice ringing in ice was damning him; his grip on reality was so loose now that he wouldn’t have been surprised if it really had been doing so. He could hardly believe what luck was doing to him now. The sequence of events which had forced him to ever more desperate action over the last few days seemed set to destroy him as relentlessly as the storm had destroyed Jeanne. How could he risk leaving the letters lying on the shoreline of the berg where Robin Mariner and the rest were busily digging? The drugs and the explosives might well be gone now, but there was no guarantee. They were all in dull-coloured bundles and would be difficult to tell from the rubble around them. The detonators, however, were in bright coloured packages, guaranteed to catch the eye in that dull grey wilderness, and it was in among the detonators that the letters would be lying. He simply could not take the risk. When he found them — if he did so — he would have to think of some excuse to rejoin the crew on Atropos.
The lead which had swallowed Timmins had closed and he crossed it without ever knowing that the dead first officer was floating just beneath him. He was, of course, making no real effort to look for the missing man and this fact added yet another little weight of guilt to his weary soul. So that when the ice cliff on his right, the last one, overlooking the beached hull of Atropos, called out to him that he was damned, he wasn’t much surprised.
He paused, looking down on the scene, trying to come to terms with the changes which had overtaken the situation even during his relatively short absence. The whole slipway seemed to have tilted away from him by several degrees — an effect enhanced by the fact that the ice cliff now sloped back at a slightly gentler incline and the over-hang was gone. As Colin Ross had said, the water of the bay had gone and the grey moraine which had been the shore line where he and the glaciologists had taken radioactivity readings was now part of the lower slope. The bow of the ship, which had been in apparently fathomless black water, now sat high and dry. Not absolutely dry, of course: the downpour was thickening almost to the intensity of a fog. Water was running everywhere, adding the sounds of a deluge to the roaring of the ice around him. There was no hope of him being able to see even the bright detonators from this distance. He would have to go right up to the ship. What he would do if anyone was watching from the bridge and came down to find out what he was up to he simply did not know. Kill them, almost certainly. It was too late now for anything else.
As he slid down the back of the ridge, the first clap of thunder echoed in the ice chambers beside him like the beginning of the end of the world.
*
Richard and Colin Ross stood side by side on the bridge of Clotho. Nico sat in the watchkeeper’s chair but he was neither on watch nor at ease. All three men were looking northwards in silence. Each one of them had a woman beyond the barrier; each one of them knew how great the danger was becoming. The only sounds in the great, broad wheelhouse were the driving of the rain and the swish of the wipers across the clearview. From their position they were able to see a vista created exclusively of deep and darkening grey. The chronometer above the wheel itself stood at 14:00 local time but it might as well have been after sunset. The sky was still the colour of coal, pressing down with terrible, absolute weight upon the dull, streaming shoulders of the granite berg. And the mountainous berg itself sat heavily on the slate breadth of the ice barrier which glittered and gleamed dangerously in what little light there was, like a deadly rock at the tide line, waiting to send the unwary foot slipping and sliding to its doom.
Everyone was in off the ice now, tucked up snugly aboard Northern Lights, all with so many hair-raising stories to tell that for once the radio was silent while the American media people avidly interviewed them instead of Richard. Only Colin Ross had come aboard Clotho, for he and Richard had communed at length over radio and walkie-talkie and the huge glaciologist knew that the captain was desperate to take further action while there was still time to influence events. He had only been on the bridge for the briefest moment, and his clothing was still dripping on the floor as he strove to take in the view which the added height of Clotho’s bridgehouse afforded him.
The silence was broken, not by any word from either of them, but by a column of dazzling brightness which connected the sky to the top of the distant ice mountains. Almost immediately, thunder boomed through the waiting Clotho. ‘That just shows you how close the berg actually is,’ mused Richard quietly. He had never lost the childhood habit of counting the seconds between lightning flash and thunder roll and the unexpectedly low number he had reached genuinely surprised him. ‘Is the barrier melting, do you think?’
‘Hardly,’ answered the glaciologist. ‘But it’s certainly getting narrower. The berg has pushed all the thinner outcrops to the north of the central ridge out of the way, that’s all.’ He looked down at the map Richard and Nico had drawn using the ice blink. ‘All of this has gone now, I’d say.’ His broad right hand, big as a bear’s paw in its mitten, swept across the whole of the northern plane. ‘The berg is hard up against the central ridge. The ridge itself has closed off the anchorage and the angle it’s sitting at seems to be closing the sides of the bay together. You’ll have lost your ship within the hour and if they don’t get off the berg soon, they’ll all be in very bad trouble.’
‘Do you want to go back and help them?’
‘I want to talk to Kate first. I’m not going to hang around here if they need me but I’m not going charging back across there without warning them.’
‘Bill,’ called Richard through into the radio room, ‘get Atropos for me, would you?’
But before his order could be carried out, the walkie-talkie on the arm of Nico’s chair buzzed. He picked it up and switched it on.
Ann Cable’s excited voice filled the room. ‘They’re still alive! My God, they’re still alive!’
‘Ann,’ said Nico, ‘is that you? Ann?’
Colin exchanged a look with Richard which was suddenly full of hope. In her excitement, the American reporter had contacted them by walkie-talkie instead of by radio. And it had worked. She had got through.
The ships were within walkie-talkie range of each other.
*
There was nothing there. Ross had sent him back for nothing! Henri raged among the ice blocks along the old shoreline and down along the slick, running slipway to what had once been a submarine ridge where the rain was gathering in pools and puddles which were already freezing over. Nothing!
He had been foolish to come. He was stupid to stay longer. There was no trace of anything incriminating, and the team of men and women working up on the rubble by the ship’s side showed no sign of coming down here at all. And if they didn’t, no one else would, that was for certain.
He would give up and go to join them. He would go back across the barrier and away to safety with them, and they would never know the truth. Unless he joined another crew and completed his mission, of course.
He turned and began to climb the slope towards the high bow of the ship. Walking up this way, he could see what they were doing up there quite clearly, for all that the impenetrable downpour still effectively hid him from their sight. The crane was still extended at its fullest reach and someone had reattached the fall. As Henri walked up towards the ship, he could see that the crane was being used to lift the propeller back from its position against Atropo’s side and, as it did so, the ice rubble was sliding back as well. The team involved in the rescue were all looking down into the gap which must slowly be opening between the black metal and the bright brass. Certainly, none of them was looking his way. Idly, Henri began to speculate, like a child playing hide and seek, how close he could creep up behind them before they realised he was there.
When he fell over he thought he had simply lost his footing; it was only when the whole slipway began to jump and heave beneath him that he realised what was going on. The sound overwhelmed him. It seemed to be much more terrible down here on the surface of the ice itself. He did not realise that the increased power of what he was hearing — though in fact the experience went well past anything he had ever thought of as hearing — was a combination of noise and echo. The submarine ledges of both barrier and berg which had been grinding against each other down the black fathoms beneath were tearing each other apart as the next great thunder squall powered into the north-west quarter of the berg. The berg heaved up and then thrust itself massively downwards and hard ice clapped thunderously against hard ice. The caves within the spine of the ice barrier took up the sound and doubled then redoubled it. This was a quake which made all the other movements so far seem little more than tremors. It was only the fact that all the loose ice on the cliff had already come down in the original avalanche that stopped Atropos being buried.
But Henri knew nothing about any of this. All he knew was that the ice of the slipway leaped up and smacked him in the face. Then he was drowning in a cacophony of sound so overpowering that he could not catch his breath. Literally. Every time he tried to breathe back in the breath which the first impact had knocked out of him, the overpowering throbbing which was moving through the air caught in his throat and lungs and the shaking became so terrible that it seemed to him that his very heart would be broken loose within him.
But at last the agony began to ease. The icequake was passing. Water washed up around him and he hurled himself up onto his knees with wild, mad strength, only to remain there as though he was praying.
As, indeed, he may have been. For Atropos was grinding down the slipway towards him like doom, and gathering speed as she moved.
*
Sam Larkman’s magic hands tickled the controls of the crane’s lifting mechanism. The propeller lifted back fractionally, opening a slim black mouth between the side of the ship and the bright, bent brass blade. Robin danced on the sliding, settling slope of ice and called, ‘Hold it, Sam!’ into her walkie-talkie.
In the sudden silence, someone deep and distant called, ‘Light! I see light!’ And the words came from the bottom of that black pit.
‘Ann,’ said Robin into the cold little handset, ‘there’s someone still alive down there. Tell Clotho we have survivors.’ She snapped off the radio and flung herself down on her knees. ‘Walt?’ she bellowed, and Walter Hogg’s disbelieving voice came back up at her.
‘Captain?’
‘Hang on for a moment. We’ll soon have you out. How many are there down there?’
‘Three. The whole team. There’s a kind of a cave. We —’
‘Any of you hurt?’
‘Few bruises ...’
‘Okay. We’ll try and open things up a bit more then we’ll send down a rope.’
Robin looked up at Kate. Thank God she wouldn’t be needed after all. Not as a doctor at any rate. They would still need a guide across the barrier though. ‘We need a rope, maybe a ladder,’ Robin snapped and Kate automatically sprang to obey, but in fact Robin was talking to Don Taylor. The two of them went off together, however, leaving Robin and Joe Edwards side by side on the top of the ice fall.
Robin put her walkie-talkie to her lips again. ‘Right, Sam, let’s try that again. Very, very gently.’
The fall creaked and the propeller blade stirred once again. The ice blocks began to tumble back, the majority of them falling at an angle dictated by the slope down towards the cliff and the slope of the slipway down towards where the sea had been.
Robin moved round to the up-slope section of the jumbled pile, looking for a new position of vantage. The action saved her life.
Suddenly all hell was let loose and her world was brought as close to destruction as was Henri LeFever’s. Her pain was less than his because she was further from the echoing cliffs of the ice barrier. But he was on solid ground and she was on a tumbling jumble of rock-hard boulders. Her feet flew out from under her and she felt herself tumbling backwards. She had fallen down the long staircase at Cold Fell on the night of her twelfth birthday and now, of all times, she remembered her father saying to her, ‘If that happens again, roll yourself up into a ball. Much the safest thing.’
It had seemed good advice then. It seemed good advice now. Her last conscious thought for an unknown length of time was that she should get her knees up by her nose and hug them for all she was worth.
She came to lying flat on her back on a lumpy pile of ice with the cliffs on her left looking down the slipway. In front of her, towering over her but thankfully leaning back away from her, was the propeller.
She sat up so suddenly that she slid a little down the slope towards the dazed, dazzled bunch of men she had stayed here to save. They were looking around themselves with about as much intelligence as a bunch of lice on a suddenly upturned log.
The ice beside her moved and she jumped. But it was only Joe. ‘It swung round, Captain. The propeller fell back and swung right round.’ He moved his shaking hands to show something moving through ninety degrees like an opening door. She looked up, and saw with simple wonderment that there was smoke pouring from the underside of Sam Larkman’s crane. Distantly, she hoped that he and Errol weren’t getting roasted up there. Then she looked back at Joe Edwards.
He was screaming words so loudly that the veins were knotting on his forehead below the grey crew cut. And she could only just hear him.
She looked right, awed by understanding. What he had described to her could only have taken place under one set of conditions.
It could only have happened if Atropos had moved. And, judging from the overwhelming rumbling sound that was going on around them, the ship was moving still.
*
‘She’s moving. My God, she’s moving!’ There was absolute, utter terror in Ann Cable’s voice and it was reflected in the expressions of horror on the faces of the three men aboard Clotho, who were listening to her.
‘Ann! Who else is on there with you? Who else is aboard?’
‘No one. I’m on my —’
The walkie-talkie went dead.
Clotho’s bridge was no longer a silent place and there was more than the echo of Ann’s words disturbing the atmosphere. The ice wall in front of the ship was going wild. Although all of them had had proofs aplenty of its solidity, as they looked at it now they might well have been forgiven for doubting their experiences or their memories. For the whole barrier seemed to be twisting as though the entire length of its great grey flank was the back of a great grey serpent. The grinding thunder was shot through with sharp reports as though there was lightning crac
kling down all around them. For the first time in many days, the battered ship was stirring as waves rolled beneath her keel. The flat plain of ice at whose heart she lay like a dagger point seemed to be rippling. Everything they could see, hear and feel was in violent, terrifying motion.
Colin looked down at Richard, but he was paying no attention to his guest; he was on the telephone to the chief engineer and his hand on the engine room telegraph was emphasising his words as he screamed over the thunderous sounds, ‘FULL ASTERN. FULL ASTERN. FULL ASTERN!’
*
The hawsers on Atropos’s port quarter had gone, along with their anchorage points in the avalanche. The two remaining on her starboard had been slackened by the movement of the right-hand reach of the ice. So it was that she gained so much speed on her slide down the slipway before they tightened once again. They pulled her round to the starboard until the single, thread-thin fall from Sam Larkman’s crane, anchored still to the great weight of the propeller, snagged in spite of the fact that he had hit the release button before he and Errol abandoned the cab, and managed to bring her up short. But not for any great length of time.
Robin was in action most quickly. It was the frayed end of the broken hawser hanging from Atropos’s port quarter which prompted her, because it swung in from the black overhang of the poop which was suddenly right above her, moved by a momentum which the still hull no longer possessed, and nearly took her head off.
‘Quick!’ she bellowed, with the full power of her quarterdeck voice. ‘Get aboard! GET ABOARD!’
Ann’s estimation that she was alone aboard was mercifully inaccurate, because even as Robin gave her bellowed command, Don Taylor thrust his head over the railing far, far above and shouted, ‘Look out below!’
Even as his words reached her, so did the reason for shouting them: the end of the spare Jacob’s ladder.
She caught it at once and yelled to the others, ‘Get aboard!’
Joe was quickest to obey and she stood back to let him pass, still holding the bottom rung. ‘HOGG! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! MOVE!’ The ladder, as sensitive as a fishing line, joined her left hand to the deck of her command and warned her all too vividly that Atropos was not sitting quite as still as she seemed to be.