Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers Page 9

  ‘Christ, they have probably all had it by now. We'd be throwing it all away for a bunch of frozen stiffs.’

  ‘There is no telling how far off course they are, those sets have a range of a hundred miles.’

  ‘La Mouette will waltz away with it.’

  ‘We could pick them up later - after we put a line on Golden Adventurer.’

  Nick straightened slowly and took the cheroot out of his mouth. He looked across at David Allen and spoke levelly, without change of expression.

  ‘Number One, will you please instruct your junior officers in the rule of the sea.’

  David Allen was silent for a moment, then he answered softly ‘The preservation of human life at sea takes precedent over all other considerations.’

  ‘Very well, Mr. Allen,’ Nick nodded. ‘Alter 80° to port and maintain a homing course on the emergency transmission.’

  He turned away to his cabin. He could control his anger until he was alone, and then he turned and crashed his fist into the panel above his desk.

  Out on the navigation bridge behind him nobody spoke nor moved for fully thirty seconds, then the Third Officer protested weakly.

  ‘But we are so close!’

  David Allen roused himself, and spoke angrily to the helmsman.

  ‘New course 045° magnetic.’

  And as Warlock heeled to the change, he flung the armful of clothing bitterly on to the chart-table and went to stand beside the Trog.

  ‘Corrections for course to intercept?’ he asked.

  ‘Bring her on to 050°,’ the Trog instructed, and then cackled without mirth. ‘First you call him an ice-water pisser - now you squeal like a baby because he answers a Mayday.’

  And David Allen was silent as the Warlock turned away into the fog, every revolution of her big variable-pitch propellers carrying her directly away from her prize, and La Mouette's triumphant transmissions taunted them as the Frenchman raced across the last of the open water that separated her from Cape Alarm, bargaining furiously with the owners in London.

  The fog seemed so thick that it could be chopped into chunks like cheese. From the bridge it was not possible to see Warlock's tall bows. Nick groped his way into it like a blind man in an unfamiliar room, and all around him the ice pressed closely.

  They were in the area of huge tabular icebergs again. The echoes of the great ice islands flared green and malevolently on the radar screen and the awful smell and taste of the ice was on every breath they drew.

  ‘Radio Officer?’ Nick asked tensely, without taking his eyes from the swirling fog curtains ahead.

  ‘Still no contact,’ the Trog answered, and Nick shuffled on his feet. The fog had mesmerized him, and he felt the shift of vertigo in his head. For a moment he had the illusion that his ship was listing heavily to one side, almost as though it were a space vehicle. He forcibly rejected the hallucination and stared fixedly ahead, tensing himself for the first green loom of ice through the fog.

  ‘No contact for nearly an hour now,’ David muttered beside him.

  ‘Either the battery on the DF has run down, or they have snagged ice and sunk-,’ volunteered the Third Officer, raising his voice just enough for Nick to hear.

  ‘-or else their transmitter is blanketed by an iceberg,’ Nick finished for him, and there was silence on the bridge for another ten minutes, except for the quietly requested changes of course that kept Warlock zigzagging between the unseen but omnipresent icebergs.

  ‘All right,’ Nick made the decision at last. ‘We'll have to accept that the raft has floundered and break off the search.’ And there was a stir of reawakening interest and enthusiasm. ‘Pilot, new course to Golden Adventurer, please, and we'll increase to fifty per cent power.’

  ‘We could still beat the frog.’ Again speculation and rising hope buoyed the young officers. ‘She could run into ice and have to reduce –‘ They wished misfortune on La Mouette and her Captain, and even the ship beneath Nick's feet seemed to regain its lightness and vibrancy as she turned back for a last desperate run for the prize.

  ‘All right, David,’ Nick spoke quietly. ‘One thing is certain now, we aren't going to reach the prize ahead of Levoisin. So we are going to play our ace now –‘ he was about to elaborate, when the Trog's voice squeaked with excitement.

  ‘New contact, on 121½,’ he cried, and the dismay on the bridge was a tangible thing.

  ‘Christ!’ said the Third Officer. ‘Why won't they just lie down and die!’

  ‘The transmission was blanked by that big berg north of us,’ the Trog guessed. ‘They are close now. It won't take long.’

  ‘Just long enough to make certain we miss the prize.’

  The berg was so big that it formed its own weather system about it, causing eddies and currents of both air and water, enough to stir the fog.

  The fog opened like a theatre curtain, and directly ahead there was a heart-stopping vista of green and blue ice, with darker strata of glacial mud banding cliffs which disappeared into the higher layers of fog above as though reaching to the very heavens. The sea had carved majestic arches of ice and deep caverns from the foot of the cliff.

  ‘There they are!’

  Nick snatched the binoculars from the canvas bin and focused on the dark specks that stood out so clearly against the backdrop of glowing ice.

  ‘No,’ he grunted. Fifty emperor penguins formed a bunch on one of the flat floes, big black birds s nearly as tall as a man's shoulder; even in the lens, they were deceptively humanoid.

  Warlock passed them closely, and with sudden fright they dropped on to their bellies and used their stubby wings to skid themselves across the floe, and drop into the still and steaming waters below the cliff. The floe eddied and swung on the disturbance of Warlock's passing.

  Warlock nosed on through solid standing banks of fog and into abrupt holes of clear air where the mirages and optical illusions of Antarctica's flawed air maddened them with their inconsistencies, turning flocks of penguins into herds of elephants or bands of waving men, and placing in their path phantom rocks and bergs which disappeared again swiftly as they approached.

  The emergency transmissions from the raft faded and silenced, then beeped again loudly into the silence of the bridge, and seconds later were silent again.

  ‘God damn them,’David swore quietly and bitterly, his cheeks pink with frustration.’ Where the hell are they? Why don't they put up a flare or a rocket?’ And nobody answered as another white fog monster enveloped the ship, muting all sound aboard her.

  ‘I'd like to try shaking them up with the horn, sir,’ he said, as Warlock burst once more into sparkling and blinding sunlight. Nick grunted acquiescence without lowering his binoculars.

  David reached up for the red-painted foghorn handle above his head, and the deep booming blast of sound, the characteristic voice of an ocean-going salvage tug, reverberated through the fog, seeming to make it quiver with the volume of the sound. The echoes came crashing back off the ice cliffs of the bergs like the thunder of the skies.

  Samantha held the solid-fuel. stove in her lap using the detachable fibreglass lid of the locker as a tray. She was heating half a pint of water in the Aluminium pannikin, balancing carefully against the wallowing motion of the raft.

  The blue flame of the stove lit the dim cavern of plastic and radiated a feeble glow of warmth insufficient to sustain life. They were dying already.

  Gavin Stewart held his wife's head against his chest, and bowed his own silver head over it. She had been dead for nearly two hours now, and her body had already cooled, the face peaceful and waxen.

  Samantha could not bear to look across at them, she crouched over the stove and dropped a cube of beef into the water, stirring it slowly and blinking against the tears of penetrating cold. She felt thin watery mucus run down her nostrils and it required an effort to lift her arm and wipe it away on her sleeve. The beef tea was only a little above blood warmth, but she could not waste time and fuel on heating it furthe
r.

  The metal pannikin passed slowly from mittened hand to numbed and clumsy hand. They slurped the warm liquid and passed it on reluctantly, though there were some who had neither the strength nor the interest to take it.

  ‘Come on, Mrs. Goldberg,’ Samantha whispered painfully. The cold seemed to have closed her throat, and the foul air under the canopy made her head ache with grinding, throbbing pain. ‘You must drink!’ Samantha touched the woman's face, and cut herself off. The flesh had a puttylike texture and was cooling swiftly. It took long minutes for the shock to pass, then carefully Samantha pulled the hood of the old woman's parka down over her face. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. They were all, too far sunk into lethargy.

  ‘Here,’ whispered Samantha to the man beside her - and she pressed the pannikin into his hands, folding his stiff fingers around the metal to make certain he had hold of it. ‘Drink it before it cools.’

  The air around her seemed to tremble suddenly with a great burst of sound, like the bellow of a dying bull, or the rumble of cannon balls across the roof of the sky. For long moments, Samantha thought her mind was playing tricks with her, and only when it came again did she raise her head.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered. ‘They've come. It's going to be all right. They've come to save us.’

  She crawled to the locker, slowly and stiffly as an old woman.

  ‘They've come. It's all right, gang, it's going to be all right,’ she mumbled, and she lit the globe on her life-jacket. In its pale glow, she found the packet of phosphorus flares.

  ‘Come on now, gang. Let's hear it for Number 16.’ She tried to rouse them as she struggled with the fastenings of the canopy. ‘One more cheer,’ she whispered, but they were still and unresponsive, and as she fumbled her way out into the freezing fog, the tears that ran down her cheeks were not from the cold.

  She looked up uncomprehendingly, it seemed that from the sky around her tumbled gigantic cascades of ice, sheer sheets of translucent menacing green ice. It took her moments to realize that the life raft had drifted in close beneath the precipitous lee of a tabular berg. She felt tiny and inconsequential beneath that ponderous mountain of brittle glassy ice.

  For what seemed an eternity, she stood, with her face lifted, staring upwards -.then again the air resonated with the deep gut-shaking bellow of the siren. It filled the swirling fog-banks with solid sound that struck the cliff of ice above her and shattered into booming echoes, that bounded from wall to wall and rang through the icy caverns and crevices that split the surface of the great berg.

  Samantha held aloft one of the phosphorus flares, and it required all the strength of her frozen arm to rip the igniter tab. The flare spluttered and streamed acrid white smoke, then burst into the dazzling crimson fire that denotes distress at sea. She stood like a tiny statue of liberty, holding the flare aloft in one hand and peering with streaming eyes into the sullen fog-banks.

  Again the animal bellow of the siren boomed through the milky, frosted air; it was so close that it shook Samantha's body the way the wind moves the wheat on the hillside, then it went on to collide solidly with the cliff of ice that hung above her.

  The working of sea and wind, and the natural erosion of changing temperatures had set tremendous forces at work within the glittering body of the berg. Those forces had found a weak point, a vertical fault line, that ran like an axe-stroke from the flattened tableland of the summit, five hundred feet down to the moulded bottom of the berg far below the surface.

  The booming sound waves of Warlock's horn found a sympathetic resonance with the body of the mountain that set the ice on each side of the fault vibrating in different frequencies.

  Then the fault sheared, with a brittle cracking explosion of glass bursting under pressure, and the fault opened. One hundred million tons of ice began to move as it broke away from the mother berg. The block of ice that the berg calved was in itself a mountain, a slab of solid ice twice the size of Saint Paul's cathedral - and as it swung out and twisted free, new pressures and forces came into play within it, finding smaller faults and flaws so that ice burst within ice and tore itself apart, as though dynamited with tons of high explosive.

  The air itself was filled with hurtling ice, some pieces the size of a locomotive and others as small and as sharp and as deadly as steel swords; and below this plunging toppling mass, the tiny yellow plastic raft bobbed helplessly.

  ‘There,’ called Nick. ‘On the starboard beam. The phosphorus distress flare lit the fog-banks internally with a fiery cherry red and threw grotesque patterns of light against the belly of lurking cloud. David Allen blew one last triumphant blast on the siren.

  ‘New heading 150°,’ Nick told the helmsman and Warlock came around handily, and almost instantly burst from the enveloping bank of fog into another arena of open air.

  Half a mile away, the life-raft bobbed like a fat yellow toad beneath a glassy green wall of ice. The top of the iceberg was lost in the fog high above, and the tiny human figure that stood erect on the raft and held aloft the brilliant crimson flare was an insignificant speck in this vast wilderness of fog and sea and ice. .

  ‘Prepare to pick up survivors, David,’ said Nick, and the mate hurried away while Nick moved to the wing of the bridge from where he could watch the rescue.

  Suddenly Nick stopped and lifted his head in bewilderment. For a moment he thought it was gunfire, then the explosive crackling of sound changed to a rending shriek as of the tearing of living fibre when a giant redwood tree is falling to the axes. The volume of sound mounted into a rumbling roar, the unmistakeable roar of a mountain in avalanche.

  ‘Good Christ!’ whispered Nick, as he saw the cliff of ice begin to change shape. Slowly sagging outwards, it seemed to fold down upon itself. Faster and still faster it fell, and the hissing splinters of bursting ice formed a dense swirling cloud, while the cliff leaned further and further beyond its point of equilibrium and at last collapsed and lifted pressure waves from the green waters that raced out one behind the other, flinging Warlock's bows high as she rode them and then nosed down into the troughs between.

  Since Nick's oath, nobody had spoken on the bridge.

  They clutched for balance at the nearest support and stared in awe at that incredible display of careless might, while the water still churned and creamed with the disturbance and pieces of broken jagged ice, some the size of a country house, bobbed to the surface and revolved slowly, finding their balance as they swirled and bumped against each other.

  ‘Closer,’ snapped Nick. ‘Get as close as you can.’

  Of the yellow life-raft there was no longer any sign. Jagged shards of ice had ripped open its fragile skin and the grinding, tumbling lumps had trodden it and its pitiful human cargo deep beneath the surface.

  ‘Closer,’ urged Nick. If by a miracle anybody had survived that avalanche, then they had four minutes left of life, and Nick pushed Warlock into the still rolling and broiling mass of broken ice - pushing it open with ice strengthened bows.

  Nick flung open the bridge doors beside him and stepped out into the freezing air of the open wing. He ignored the cold, buoyed up by new anger and frustration. He had paid the highest price to make this rescue, he had given up his chance at Golden Adventurer for the lives of a handful of strangers, and now at this last moment, they had been snatched away from him. His sacrifice had been in vain, and the terrible waste of it all appalled him. Because there was no other outlet for his feelings, he let waves of anger sweep over him and he shouted at David Allen's little group on the fore-deck.

  ‘Keep your eyes open. I want those people!’

  Red caught his eye, a flash of vivid red, seen through the green water, becoming brighter and more hectic as it rose to the surface.

  ‘Both engines half astern,’ he screamed. And Warlock stopped dead as the twin propellers changed pitch and bit into the water, pulling her up in less than her own length.

  In a small open area of green water the red object broke out.
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  Nick saw a human head in a red anorak hood, supported by the thick inflated life-jacket. The head was thrown back, exposing a face as white and glistening with wetness as the deadly ice that surrounded it. The face was that of a young boy, smooth and beardless, and quite incredibly beautiful.

  ‘Get him!’ Nick yelled, and at the sound of his voice the eyes in that beautiful face opened. Nick saw they were a musty green and unnaturally large in the, glistening pale oval framed by the crimson hood.

  David Allen was racing back, carrying life-ring and line.

  ‘Hurry. God damn you.’ The boy was still alive, and Nick wanted him. He wanted him as fiercely as he had wanted anything in his life, he wanted at least this one young life in return for all he had sacrificed. He saw that the boy was watching him. ‘Come on, David,’ he shouted.

  ‘Here!’ called David, bracing himself at the ship's rail and he threw the life-ring. He threw it with an expert round arm motion that sent it skimming forty feet to where the hooded head bobbed on the agitated water. He threw it so accurately that it hit the bobbing figure a glancing blow on the shoulder and then plopped into the water alongside, almost nudging the boy.

  ‘Grab it!’ yelled Nick. ‘Grab hold!’ The face turned slowly, and the boy lifted a gloved hand clear of the surface, but the movement was uncoordinated.

  ‘There. It's right next to you,’ David encouraged. ‘Grab it, man!’

  The boy had been in the water for almost two minutes already, he had lost control of his body and limbs, he made two inconclusive movements with the raised hand, one actually bumped the ring but he could not hold it and slowly the life-ring bobbed away from him.

  ‘You bloody idiot,’ stormed Nick. ‘Grab it,’ And those huge green eyes turned back to him, looking up at him with the total resignation of defeat, one stiff arm still raised - almost a farewell salute.

  Nick did not realize what he was going to do until he had shrugged off his coat and kicked away his shoes; then he realized that if he stopped to think about it, he would not go.