by Peter Tonkin
Ann Cable, pale as a ghost, was waiting at the top of the ladder when at last Robin scrambled over the rail onto Atropos’s poop. She paused for a moment beside Ann. ‘We won’t be sitting still for long,’ she said. ‘The others will be loosening the hawsers when I tell them. You stay in charge of the ladder here. We may need it later so I don’t want to lose it. If it snags on anything, though, you just pull this line and it will go over the side.’
Ann nodded dumbly and Robin rushed up onto her bridge. The ship was still trembling on the very edge of stasis when she got up there and started calculating the odds. That last movement of the ice had opened the bay in front of them only a little. Across the whole prospect in front of her, there still stood that mocking cliff of ice which was the backbone of the barrier. If she told the crewmen at the stern to loosen the hawsers, she would only run her command down into that solid wall of dirty grey. If she didn’t issue the order, the jaws, of ice already holding onto the sides of Atropos would crush the life out of her the next time the iceberg stirred.
In a frenzy of desperation she looked back at that solid, unforgiving, immovable cliff of ice, and at the second she did so, the very centre of it, exactly in front of her, immediately before the sleek head of Atropos’s forecastle though a mile and more distant from it, exploded into a column of fire.
The waves of power from that explosion, washing over Atropos as inevitably as waves on the open ocean, rattled the windows, shook the superstructure, and started the ship’s wild slide again.
*
Ann Cable stood rigidly on the poop deck. She was still trying to come to terms with the depths of terror she had plumbed when she believed she had been on the sliding ship alone. She was a strong woman, and basically self-reliant, and yet, at the bottom of that pit of despair, with the deck trembling terrifyingly beneath her feet and the cold angularity of the walkie-talkie pressed to her lips hard enough to bring blood into her mouth, the fact that she had been talking to Nico really made a difference. Only Don Taylor’s utterly unexpected arrival at the door of the radio room had made her break contact and ever since she had done so, she had regretted it. Standing on the poop deck of Atropos, feeling her straining to be gone down the slipway no matter what might await her at the bottom of it, made Ann all too well aware that she had not been playing fair with her gentle, witty, understanding, genuinely macho Neapolitan lover. Son of a bitch, she thought. How I miss the son of a bitch.
She felt the deck begin to stir beneath her feet. She heard a distant rumble of thunder and looked up at the low, black sky.
And Atropos was in motion.
It was slow to begin with, a kind of gathering of inertia as she began to grind down the slope again. Ann was held rigid by the lingering power of the shock of her terror, distanced from the current scene, which might well have terrified her even more.
As the foot of the ladder swept past the pile of ice blocks behind the sprawl of the propeller which was no longer attached to the fall from Sam’s crane, it jerked and she looked down over the edge of the poop. Someone was climbing upwards.
At first she had no idea who it was. The hood of the cold-weather gear hid the face absolutely from her sight. She frowned, wondering whether this was some kind of hallucination brought on by the terror she had felt.
But then the figure looked up, and it was Henri.
She ran to the rail, the better to look down at him. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he safely aboard one of the other ships?
What was going on?
He was near the top of the ladder when he looked up and saw her there. He grinned, and the flash of his teeth turned her knees to water.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she called down to him.
‘I’ve brought you a present,’ he called exultantly. ‘See. It’s cognac. The best: Hennessy.’
That one word brought it all into focus for her, suddenly and utterly unexpectedly. Hennessy.
That was the name of the terrorist woman who worked for La Guerre Verte. Joan Hennessy.
She had seen the poster and all the information which had come in from Heritage House. It had seemed to her that Joan Hennessy was a New York Irish name — belonging to someone like O’Brien.
But now she understood.
Cognac Hennessy. It was a French name, belonging to someone who was French Canadian, perhaps. And the given name, Joan. Like Joan of Arc, it would be Jeanne in French. Jeanne. Sounding, in oddly accented French Canadian, so much like John.
She was jerked back to that cave in the iceberg’s mountains when he had mumbled the name in his sleep and she had wondered if he was gay. It was as simple, as unavoidable, as that.
She looked down. He saw the accusation in her eyes. She saw the admission of guilt in his.
At once he started climbing again with feverish, febrile speed. She stood there as though turned to stone, watching him as he swarmed up towards her. Her mind was a whirl of revelation. Of the two people closest to her aboard, she had trusted the wrong one and suspected the wrong one. Robin would never do anything underhand, she realised; not with Nico, not with anyone. And Henri had never done anything honest. She thought of his attempt at seduction, of her childish suspicions about his sexual orientation. How stupid she had been. How he must have laughed at her. Well, he wasn’t laughing now.
And she pulled the line Robin had shown her with all the strength at her command and let the ladder fall free.
*
‘FULL AHEAD, FLANK SPEED!’ Richard was under such stress that his voice rose beyond a shout again. Clotho had just swept out of the lead into the open sea beside the Northern Lights. Her reverse thrust was cancelled and, even as she swept backwards, stern wave foaming under her counter, so the blades of the great propeller were reversed to drive her forward once again. Richard watched narrow-eyed as the knot meter began to click up out of reverse. He had every intention of throwing his vessel as hard as he could against the central ridge of the ice barrier. The Maier-form icebreaker bow lifted as the great Rolls-Royce engines thundered up to full power. The edge of the ice swept away in front of the ship as she reversed out of the lead, then hesitated and began to race back towards the ship as the course went back on itself.
Colin and Richard both rocked onto the balls of their feet as Clotho’s momentum also reversed. She seemed to hover for an instant, the water heaving behind her like a big surf behind a surfboard. Colin actually took a step forward as though the deck were on a steeper slant than it was.
Clotho gathered way into the black water of the lead. Richard took the helm himself and held the line as the vessel began to speed up the mile’s length between the floating fields of ice. The pair of RB211 turbine engines delivered so much power that the freighter took off more quickly than a speedboat. She came majestically up to full speed, the knot meter in the bridgehouse clicking relentlessly through twenty knots, twenty-five and thirty.
‘We’re going to hit very hard indeed,’ Richard warned as the ice skimmed past on either side. He wasn’t speaking particularly loudly, but his words carried across the wheelhouse as though he had been shouting at full voice.
It seemed to him in those moments as he prepared to throw it all away that he had nothing important left to lose. His company was effectively lost. His personal possessions were tied up with the finances of the lost company. The only things he cared about were lost: his ships. The only people, too, apart from his children: his father-in-law in intensive care and his beloved wife trapped at death’s door. Posterity would write him off as just another self-destructive failure. But, in the final analysis, at least he would be going out with a bang, not a whimper.
Running his ship at full speed up against the ice ridge seemed to be a futile gesture, but any gesture would be better than none. It was self-indulgent, as any borderline suicide always was. But it was worth making, he calculated. It would be remembered, and perhaps the reason for making it, and even the love which had caused it, would be remembered too.
> Clotho was moving at thirty-five knots when she hit the ice. Her bow was riding high and it lifted out of the water and rode across the narrow area of flat ice which lay before the fifty-foot cliff.
The ruined forecastle head was still moving at full speed when it hit the solid ice.
The water in the first hold was frozen and the weight of it was hurled forward by the impact, to tear through the front of the ship. It weighed several hundred tons and it was travelling at nearly forty miles an hour. Likewise, the men on the bridge and in the engine room were hurled hither and yon, tumbling about the place like puppets. And that was lucky, especially for the men up on the bridge.
The ice from the hold and the ice from the cliff came together with tremendous force. And sandwiched between them was Jeanne Hennessy’s bomb. The bomb had been designed by the explosives expert to spread its power as widely as possible. The effect of the ice from the hold, however, was to force the whole power of the bomb forwards into the ice ridge. A huge column of ice exploded up and out, to the sides and over the barrier. Massive shock waves from the explosion sped at light speed through the ice barrier and were, if anything, amplified in the echoing caves beyond the crest.
The impact of the ship and the bomb came together just as the full force of the berg was pushing back, with the power of the thunder squall behind it, and the effect was devastating. The backbone of the ice barrier was broken as completely as a neck severed by the headsman’s axe. At once the westward section of the barrier began to swing southwards, borne against the breast of the triumphant iceberg. The eastern section of the barrier, still gripped by the northward pressure of that offspring of the Gulf Stream, began to swing back up towards the coast of Greenland which had given it birth.
And while Clotho, her forward quarter blown to smithereens, rolled sideways onto the solid section of the ice barrier over which her ruined bow had lifted her, so Atropos her sister thundered down off the edge of the icy slipway into the clear deep water of the North Atlantic Ocean, into the channel opened up for her through the cold heart of the barrier, relaunched, reborn, resurrected after all.
37 - Independence Day
Sunday, 4 July 12:00
The consultant had completed his round of the private rooms and Bill Heritage had decided it was time he got organised for when the youngsters came to pick him up. All he had to do, really, was to dress himself and then finish packing his weekend case with the basic necessities and the hospital treats he had been surrounded by during the last weeks since his heart by-pass operation.
He could have called for one of the private nurses to do it for him with no more than the press of a bedside button. But he retained the independence of mind traditional in men late of the navy. He could do his own darning; he had done his own ironing on more occasions than he cared to remember; he was more than capable of doing his own packing. As soon as he had managed to get his trousers on.
He was a very lucky man, they informed him. He was lucky that Maggie DaSilva had known what to do and had done it so quickly; that the studio had maintained such an expert and well-equipped first aid team; that the ambulance had arrived so quickly; that he had suffered no brain damage during the attack; that it was possible to repair the damage short term; that it had proved possible to correct it so effectively long term.
He didn’t feel all that lucky; perhaps that was why they made a point of emphasising his good fortune to him so often.
He felt that he had let Robin and Richard down; that he had let Heritage Mariner down; that he had let Helen down; and, in the final analysis, that he had let himself down.
If he wasn’t retired, then he ought to be. How could anyone trust the running of a major company to a man who got out of breath while buttoning up his trousers? He shrugged his braces over the shoulders of his pyjama jacket with more than accustomed resignation and reached for the cashmere polo-necked pullover he preferred to wear on Sundays after he had been to church. His hair surrendered to the flats of his palms; he would brush it later.
He crossed to the window on the sill of which were piled a collection of papers, books and magazines. He paused before he collected the pile together, looking downwards, struck as always by the view. The Thames flowed by as brown as toffee, seeming to wash the wall beneath his feet. On his right hand, the span of Westminster Bridge stepped across the river. If he looked up, his face and that of Big Ben seemed to be about level and not very far apart.
The riverside balconies of the Palace of Westminster stood out over the dark water opposite and his room was high enough for him to gaze down on them, remembering functions he had attended there with friends and colleagues in both Houses of Parliament, the Commons and the Lords.
He looked down to gather up the pile of printed matter and was struck again by the picture of an exploding ship and the headline which accompanied it: TERRORIST BOMB SAVES SISTER SHIPS.
It was an old paper, the better part of a month out of date, but it was the first thing he had been conscious of seeing when he had come out of the anaesthetic after his operation, and he knew he would keep it for ever.
He would probably keep all of them which day by day had given the world the story of how the bomb in the bows of Clotho had exploded on impact with the ice barrier and so released Atropos from the lethal clutches of the iceberg. How Clotho, apparently fatally damaged, had remained wedged on the ice with her bows clear of the water until simple repairs could be effected and then how Atropos had towed her sister ship to Frederiksdal in Greenland, the nearest safe port.
It was a story which seemed to have caught the popular imagination on both sides of the Atlantic, and in among the correspondence which accompanied the printed matter was a letter from Ann Cable informing him that he could expect a typescript of her new book The Sister Ships, based on her experiences aboard Atropos, to confirm his part in the whole adventure.
There was the gentlest tapping on his door and he swung round to see Helen Dufour standing there. The tall woman swept across the room towards him and he enfolded her in a huge bear hug. Usually she complained that he crushed the life out of her, her Provençal chic being something which did not react well to his bluff northern gallantries. This morning she answered his grip with possessive fierceness and indeed it was he who broke away first. His ribs were still a little tender after the rough treatment they had received during his operation.
‘How did it go?’ he asked gruffly.
‘St Petersburg? Fine. It’s all sewn up. When we have the ships, they will have the cargo. The same as Archangel and Murmansk.’
‘You’ve been working so hard, my darling.’
‘We all have. But the worst is over now. Things started looking up when the insurers agreed that Clotho’s damage definitely came from a terrorist bomb and they would meet the salvage and repair bills in full. The Russian deal is just icing on the cake now. I think we can all take a well-earned holiday.’
Another knock came at the door and there was Maggie DaSilva partially obscured behind a massive bunch of flowers.
‘Matron says you’re going home,’ she said accusingly. ‘What shall I do with these?’
Sir William smiled at her, as indulgent as a father with a favourite daughter. ‘We’ll think of something,’ he rumbled. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure? You’ve never struck me as a Sunday morning girl.’
‘I’m only up this early because I haven’t been to bed yet,’ she countered. ‘I’ve been out on the town with the most gorgeous New York attorney. I think he’s trying to tempt me into going West with him.’
‘Well, you think it through carefully,’ warned Sir William and the kindly concern in his tone elicited a wide grin from her.
‘Oddly enough, I didn’t come for paternal advice,’ she purred. ‘I have a little news for you. Apparently the word has gone out forcefully, even in the Big Apple. The people who killed the Italians outside the TV studio have said that no one will be allowed to profit from the Napoli affair. Anyone else who goes ambula
nce-chasing like the late Vito Gordino can expect to meet the same fate as he did. So that just leaves the US government. And they will only take action if our appeal fails; and if Napoli proves to be doing damage within their legitimate area of jurisdiction. Either way, Heritage Mariner is off the hook for the time being.’
He nodded at her, a lump in his throat forbidding speech.
Into the silence which lay between them came the sound of approaching mayhem. Maggie put the flowers down. ‘If that’s who I think it is then I’m off,’ she said. ‘You pay me handsome fees and Richard buys me stunning dinners, but nothing will induce me to play with the twins when I’ve had no sleep for thirty-six hours.’ And she was gone like a sorceress leaving only a whiff of Obsession.
‘Did you see Maggie?’ asked Helen an instant later as Robin struggled through the door swinging William by his reins.
‘Maggie DaSilva? No. Has she been in already ...’ The Obsession hit her nostrils. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see what you mean. No, we haven’t seen her. Is she avoiding us?’
‘She’s avoiding some of you,’ said the French woman dryly.
Mary burst in next, seemingly dragging Richard by main force. ‘All ready?’ he asked. ‘Whew! What’s that smell? Helen?’
‘No,’ chided Robin lovingly. ‘Helen’s a Chanel girl, like me. That’s Maggie.’
‘Is it? What did she want so early?’
‘She wanted to tell me some good news,’ said Sir William. ‘I’ll tell you more about it on the way home.’
‘Great,’ said Richard. ‘Mary, sit down. Sit! Good girl. Now, let me get that suitcase.’
‘Helen says we can all take a holiday,’ said Sir William, gathering together his bits and pieces. ‘And Maggie’s news means we do have the breathing space, if we want it. I think you two should get away.’