Target 5 (25 page)

Grayson turned round and spoke very deliberately to the Russian. 'If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't be in this mess. If you don't like it, you'd better start hiking your way back to
Leningrad - because we're going south!'

He formed up his dogs and they moved off with Beau
mont in the lead. Within five minutes they were turning
through an angle of ninety degrees, heading south away
from the great belt of ice where the going would have been
so much easier. For over two hours they travelled across ice
littered with ravines and pressure walls they had to thread
their way through, then Beaumont called a brief halt. It was
Grayson who sent the signal on the prearranged wave
length, the signal Dawes was waiting for at Curtis Field.

'Oxygen . .. Strongbow ... Oxygen . . . Strongbow . . .'

He repeated the signal for five minutes before Curtis
acknowledged, which was too long because it might be long
enough for the Soviet monitors at North Pole 17 to take a
radio-direction fix. But the signal had to get through.
'Strongbow' informed Dawes that Michael Gorov had been picked up; 'Oxygen' told him that Beaumont was heading
south. Grayson telescoped the Redifon aerial back inside
the set and looked up at the sky.

'No Russian planes for two hours,' he said. 'And no
American planes either,' he added. 'Those pilots at Curtis
must have gone home for the winter. I hope to God the ice-
breaker
Elroy
hasn't gone home too . . .'

* * *

'. .
urgent you penetrate icefield for possible rendezvous. Maximum
risk must be accepted. Repeat. Must be accepted.'

Commander Alfred Schmidt, USN, captain of the 6,515-ton icebreaker
Elroy,
still didn't like the signal he had received from Washington three days earlier, and the more he thought about it the less he liked the last part of the signal. 'Maximum risk . . .' What the hell was a maximum risk in these waters? Did you decide that maybe you'd had enough when the ship was going down because it was overladen with ice, because it had just struck an iceberg? Schmidt, forty-three years old, five feet eight tall and very wide-shouldered, had thick dark hair and thick dark brows. His expression was invariably bleak, not to say grim. And he only smiled in moments of extreme danger, which was the origin of the toast seamen drank to when they had their last beers in a bar in Milwaukee, the
Elroy's
home port.

'Here's hopin' - no smilin' from the Cap'n till we hit port
again.'

'Care to take a look, sir?' Vance Carlson, the mate, stood
back from the radarscope and pulled up the collar of his
coat. The high bridge of the
Elroy
was heated but something
seemed to have gone wrong with the system. Perhaps the something was the Arctic conditions outside which were keeping a team of men permanently at work shovelling ice over the side, ice which seemed to form as rapidly as they
cast it into the floe-littered sea.

Commander Schmidt didn't care to take a look, but he
looked all the same. Three hours earlier when he had looked
down inside the rubber hood he had seen isolated blips showing on the scope, blips which were not ships, blips to
the north-west and north-east. He stared down as he
watched the sweep turning remorselessly round the greenish
glow inside the hood. No more isolated blips now; instead a
solid unbroken pattern of echoes filled the screen, congeal
ing into a wall-to-wall band.

'The barrier,' Carlson commented unnecessarily. 'Dead
ahead.'

Schmidt remembered the end of the signal again as he
continued staring down into the hood. The barrier. A solid
wall of icefield was stretched across his path and the
Elroy,
its engines beating heavily, its reinforced bow brushing
aside great floes of ice like matchsticks, was heading straight
for the dreaded wall which stretched from the coast of Spits
bergen to Greenland. The trouble was that Schmidt had to find a way in, a place where the icefield was barely above
sea level, a point where he could use the massive bows of the
ship to smash his way inside the ice. At least they had the
radar to show them what lay ahead. He prayed to God
there wouldn't be fog.

Two hours later the menace drifted off the icefield. Fog
trails like wisps of steam floated off the ice across the
Elroy's
path. Schmidt was standing close to the clear-vision panel
at the front of the bridge, looking down at the deck and
ahead alternately. Neither view enchanted him. The ice
on the fore-peak was piling up faster, the new team of men
was fighting a losing battle as they heaved it over the ice-coated rails where it toppled down on to more ice drifting
on the sea. The temperature was fifty below.

'Polar bears . . .'

At the starboard side of the bridge Carlson was looking at the top of the ice wall which was as high as the bridge itself
and no further away than a few cable-lengths. On the fore-deck below men glanced up at the wall above them; it was
like looking up the side of a building. In the moonlight three
yellowish blurs stared down at them, three polar bears at the
brink of the icefield attracted by the smell of the garbage the
cook had just emptied overboard.

The engines were dead slow, a regular, powerful throb
which reassured Schmidt: earlier they had been badly delayed in their dash back to the north because of engine
trouble. The view ahead did not reassure him at all. 'Vance, I think you'd better take a spell in the cage. We don't want
to miss our way in .. .'

There was reluctance in the voice which gave the order, a
reluctance certainly shared by the mate a few minutes later as he mounted the ice-sheathed ladder up the hundred-foot
mast leading to the observation cage. It wasn't the most
comfortable post on the
Elroy -
not in a temperature of
fifty below and not with fog coming up. The observation cage at the
Elroy's
masthead wasn't larger than two tele
phone kiosks and Carlson experienced his usual sense of
claustrophobia as he settled on the leather-topped stool. Thirty-two years old, the same age as Beaumont, Vance
Carlson had got married only one day before his ship left
Milwaukee. He had been counting the days of the voyage
home when the ship had turned round and headed back
to the icefield. Like the Captain, the mate did not love
Beaumont.

After a quick glance through his clear-vision panel
Carlson hitched the harness over his head, adjusted the
mike under his chin and checked with the bridge. 'In posi
tion, sir. There's a big berg dead ahead.'

'We've seen it ...' Schmidt's voice came up the wire.
'Any sign of an entry point?'

'None at all, sir. It's as solid as a mountain.'

'Keep looking,'

Carlson experienced a sense of claustrophobia inside the
cage; perversely he also experienced a sense of being horribly exposed. The walls which surrounded him, which he could reach out and touch with his extended elbows, were armour-glass, and their transparency made him feel, if this
were possible, even colder. On the bridge below the heating
wasn't totally effective; inside the observation cage it
seemed totally ineffective, as though it had lost itself on its
way up the mast.

One hundred feet above the deck, Carlson had an all-
round view. To port, to starboard, below. The
vessel seemed
to be hardly moving, the bow slamming into huge floes as
big as houses, cube-shaped floes which looked like sugar
lumps seen from the cage. The flock of cubes divided, slid
past either side of the ship, and beyond them the minor
monster loomed, its peak high above Carlson's head, apparently motionless as though anchored to the seabed. But
the berg wasn't anchored, it was drifting south, south
towards the
Elroy
while the ship steamed north.

Carlson clubbed his gloved hands together, leaned side
ways off his stool as he stared one way, then another. Above
where he sat the large radar wing revolved steadily, trans
mitting its warning echoes to the hooded scope on the
bridge. To starboard the ice wall slid past, the polar bears
long since vanished. Below the lozenge-shaped deck was so
laden with ice that from the cage it appeared to be a frag
ment broken away from the main icefield. Carlson pressed
the send-switch. 'Heavy fog coming up, sir. About a
quarter-mile away - dead ahead . . .'

Thirty minutes later Carlson was isolated. He couldn't see
a thing. He was also very cold. The numbness which had
begun in his feet and hands was spreading. To keep himself
alert he was standing up and the four walls of glass were frosted over, coated with a deadly white rime which was growing thicker by the minute. His only view was through the clear-vision panel, and when he peered through this he
saw only fog, creeping, ice-laden fog which had blotted out
the icefield. Even the deck was invisible and he might have
been inside the cabin of a plane in the night.

'You'd better come down, Carlson,' Schmidt ordered.

'I'll stay up a bit longer. It may clear.'

'Fifteen minutes. Then come down . ..'

Carlson pressed his face against the clear-vision panel and
the glass was freezing, like pressing into ice itself. He saw
nothing. A dense mass of moisture. Nothing more. The vessel
was almost stationary, moving at slow-slow speed with the
aid of the radar wing above Carlson's head, the metal eye which would throw back a warning echo when an iceberg
loomed dead ahead. But the mechanism wasn't foolproof under these conditions and on the bridge below DaSilva,
deputy mate and an experienced radar man, was staring
anxiously down at the scope, waiting for it to go wild, to ping-ping-ping - warning that something big was close to
the bows. The engines beat with a slow monotony while
Carlson, the loneliest man aboard, went on staring hyp
notically at the fog rolling inches from his face.

'Anything yet, Vance?'

'Nothing yet.'

In the cage Carlson had checked every window when he
saw a change in the fog ahead. He couldn't see anything
specific, but there was a change, a faint motion as though the vapour was affected by the merest of air currents. He stopped banging his gloves together, stood quite still with his face again pressed into the panel. Yes, there was something, something which was disturbing the fog like a giant spoon stirring it gently.

The warning ping on the scope came too late, too sud
denly, and afterwards Schmidt had to speak forcefully to
convince DaSilva that there was nothing he could have
done. Nothing. It was too quick. On the scope the sweep went round and abruptly there was a new image. DaSilva
raised his head, started shouting ...

Carlson probably never saw it coming. If he did it could only have been for a fraction of a second. The ice claw, the huge rampart projecting across the
Elroy's
path was eighty feet above the deck surface. It stretched out like a gigantic
arm, thrust out across the path of the
Elroy
as though trying
to hold it back. The ship steamed on, slowly. The claw came
over the bows, over the deck, and the masthead struck it. One shattering, shearing blow. They heard the crack on the bridge as DaSilva had his mouth open to shout a warning, a crack which sent terror into their brains. The masthead
was
sliced off, eighty feet above the deck. The cage, eighty-five
feet up, toppled with the severed mast. Sealed inside the
cage, Carlson went down with it. It hit the deck-rail,
eighty-five feet below, on the starboard side, smashed away
a section, went on down into the sea with Carlson inside it.
The severed head weighed five tons and went straight down,
taking Carlson and the radar wing with it, down into the
Arctic where the depth varies between nine and ten thou
sand feet. It can only be hoped that the mate was dead
before the sea burst in.