Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (11 page)

‘
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 ef
fort 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
ti
me and fuel on heating it
further.

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.

‘C
ome 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.
‘D
rink 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 chan
g
ing
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 cr
im
son fl
ar
e 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.