Target 5 (36 page)

It was horrible on deck - horrible and dangerous where
groups of men, all the crew which could be spared, fought
to heave the ice overboard in time, and as they fought the black frost hovering all round them added more layers to overwhelm them. They couldn't see - except by the glim
mers of light from bulkhead lamps smeared and half-
obscured by the molasses-like frost encrusted on the glass.
They couldn't stand upright - because the deck was per
manently canted over to port by the great weight of ice they
desperately tried to shift. They could hardly breathe -
because when they took in breath they took in air which
had crystallized to liquid ice, air which it was no cliche to
say was as heavy as lead.

Frozen with the terrible cold, their clothes weighed down
by ice crystals, they used picks and axes and hammers and
shovels to smash at, break up, lever up and heave over
board the tonnage which was killing them. The sound of the slow-beating engines was almost muffled by the hacking,
smashing, cracking noises. And the unquiet sea heaved the vessel up and down, made their impossible task infinitely more dangerous as, caught off balance, they grabbed for lifelines sheathed in ice. It had been going on for twenty-four hours.

Beyond the plunging bows the sea hissed and rolled in the
searchlight, and in the beam, looking down from the high bridge, Schmidt saw ice descending in mid-air, black ice. 'It's beating us, DaSilva,' he said grimly. 'More ice is forming than we're getting rid of.'

At the port window DaSilva peered down and he wasn't
prepared to give the captain an argument: the ice on deck
was nearly rail-high. He pressed his face close to the armour glass, withdrew it quickly as his nose felt the temperature. A
seaman, Borzoli he thought, had pulled his hand up quickly and the glove he should have worn was gone, trapped under a slab of ice. Even though he wore mittens under it frostbite would attack him within seconds, Borzoli was running, his
hand tucked under his armpit, running for the nearest stair
well, and DaSilva prayed it wouldn't mean amputation.
Then he couldn't see anything as spume from a wave hurtled
through the air and hit the glass with a crack, freezing as it landed.

'I hear Beaumont is OK,' Schmidt said.

'Beaumont is recovering,' DaSilva agreed. 'He must be
like this glass - armoured.'

Inside Langer's cabin Beaumont was sitting up alone,
listening to the thump of ice floes against the hull beyond
the cabin wall. He could tell that something was wrong
from the tilt of the cabin: it was almost permanently canted
to port. But he was thinking about Papanin, about things
Schmidt had told him three hours earlier soon after he had
woken.

'They're about forty miles south of us - the six Soviet
trawlers,' Schmidt had said, pointing to his chart. 'Spread
out across our path like a screen. Quinn found them - before
the black frost caught us he took his machine south to the
limit of his fuel - and he thought he had a glimpse of a much
bigger ship just about here.'

'Less than thirty miles away. The
Revolution?
'

'Could be. The fog down there closed in just as he
spotted her. He thought he saw a big radar dome - the
equipment she uses for tracking our satellites. We'll just
have to make sure there's no collision when we're passing
them ...'

Beaumont eased himself to a more comfortable position in
the bunk. McNeill, the ship's doctor, had told him in a voice
of some wonderment that he was still in one piece. 'Your
clothes and that canvas buffered you. The fact that you
swung free from the mast without striking it helped - but
you'll be here till we hit Quebec ...'

Beaumont didn't think so: he'd be up soon now. His torso was badly bruised, felt twice its normal size, which meant it
felt very large indeed, but soon now
...
As he settled him
self he winced. Well, maybe in a few hours. As he stared at
the opposite wall without seeing it he thought about the
short tune he had spent with Papanin in the hut on Target-5-
He was remembering the Siberian's huge, shaven head, the very wide mouth, the almost Mongolian bone structure. A ruthless man.

And now there were at least seven Soviet vessels in front of the
Elroy
which was carrying Gorov - and the Catherine
charts. Reaching behind him, he fumbled in the pocket of
his parka and took out the core tube. He weighed it in his
hand - the entire Soviet underwater system, and Papanin
knew where it was. 'We'll just have to make sure there's no
collision ...' Schmidt had said, and Schmidt had been
thinking of an accident. Beaumont was thinking of some
thing quite different as he returned the core to his parka
pocket, pulled the blankets up under his chin, and stared
into the distance, trying to see the future. Then, without
realizing it, he fell asleep.

The
Elroy
had increased speed dangerously, was ploughing
forward at half speed, her bows plunging deep inside a
trough as a wave crashed over the port rail and submerged it. When the bows lifted again half the wave crest was attached to them, frozen solid to the rail which was now six inches thick with ice.

'We'll have to take a chance,' Schmidt had decided ten minutes earlier. 'We'll have to increase speed in the hope that we take her out of the black frost.'

'She'll go over ...' DaSilva had stopped speaking when
Schmidt looked at him, understanding the glance: they
were going over anyway, so what was the difference? And
every possible factor was deteriorating.

The wind had increased to thirty-five-knot strength, was
howling like a banshee among the ice-clogged rigging,
hurling spume inboard, spume which froze in mid-air so it
landed on the backs of the stooped men on deck like lead
shot. They were losing the whole battle for survival on every
front - and they knew it. The ice still piled up faster than
they could get rid of it, was now solid to rail height on the
port side. The rising wind was turning the sea they had to
plough through into a churning cauldron of forty-foot
waves, great green combers which came rolling above them,
half as high as the remnant of the mast which was also canted to port.

The giant combers inundated the deck frequently,
swirled waist-high round men clinging to the icy lifelines, submerging the ice they were struggling to shift overboard.
And frequently it brought with it floating spars of ice which crashed into the bulkheads with lethal force, such force that one spar shattered into pieces before the sea retreated. They
lost one man in this way - hanging on to a lifeline he was pinned to the bulkhead, the whole of his middle crushed in
by a heavy spar which
came at him like a torpedo. It worried
the
men that they hadn't saved the body, but privately
DaSilva thought it a blessing - the mangled corpse would
later have had to be buried ceremonially. As Schmidt had said,
they had to take a chance. So they went up to half power.

'I think we ought to clear the decks,' DaSilva said fifteen
minutes later.

'Why?'

Schmidt joined him at the port window and saw why.
The port rail was submerged again and looking down
from the bridge it was an extraordinary, terrifying spectacle.
Only the top half of men waist-deep in water showed. The
rail was gone, the mountain of ice had vanished, it was as
though the bridge was floating by itself. Frozen spume
bombarded the window and Schmidt had to move to find a
still-uncovered patch he could peer down through. Schmidt
went back to keep watch on the bows.

'Keep them at work,' he ordered.

'They can't work, for God's sake! How can they - waist-
deep in sea?'

'Are they waist-deep now ?'

'No, not at the moment, but they will be when the next
wave comes.'

'Keep them at work.'

Deep down inside himself DaSilva knew that Schmidt
was right. Every pound of ice they could lever overboard
between inundations gave the ship a little longer to float, to
live, to move forward to what might be safety, or a kind of
safety. They had to get clear of the black frost or die.

So for sixteen hours they changed the work teams at even
more frequent intervals, gave the men time to go below to
dry out and warm up before they froze to death, and then after a short break they toiled up again, to start all over
again, to get rid of a pitifully small amount of ice, to face the
cold and the wind and the sea and the danger of ice spars
flattening them against the bulkhead walls. Only a man
like Schmidt could have subjected them to such an ordeal;
only for a man like Schmidt would they have submitted to
the ordeal. And Grayson and Langer took their turn with
the rest while Gorov, the man who had brought them all to this, lay on his bunk sea-sick.

The break came suddenly, and DaSilva was the first to grasp what was happening. Down on deck for the fourth
time, levering at a slab of ice, he looked up and stared at the others. They were still working, still hacking at the ice, still unaware of any change. He threw his crowbar down a stair
well, ran to the ladder, climbed up to the bridge. 'It's
lighter!' he shouted as he burst inside. 'We're through!'

'I do believe we are.'

There was no relief, no satisfaction in Schmidt's voice as
he gazed through the rear window. It was simply a statement of fact. The vessel was still tilted to port, there was
still a small mountain of ice on that side, but the atmosphere
was clearing and something like moonlight was bathing the
deck in its pale wash. And the curtain of black frost was a
distinct curtain, drifting away from them in all its horror
many cable-lengths behind the stern.

It was 11
pm
when Beaumont made his way slowly and painfully up the stairwell which led to the foredeck, wondering what the hell was going on. He had just seen a seaman running up the staircase ahead of him and out on deck, and above him he heard the excited clatter of other running feet. Nobody ran about a ship layered with ice unless he was very bothered indeed.

When he entered the bridge Schmidt - in these weather conditions - had opened a window and was staring through his night-glasses. Beaumont glanced at the helmsman, at DaSilva, and decided
not to ask any questions at this moment. Both men were standing in attitudes suggesting more than a little anxiety. The answer came to him unasked as he moved closer to the open window and heard a reedy lookout's voice travelling up to the bridge.

'Icebergs on the port bow! Icebergs on the starboard
bow! Icebergs ahead!'

* * *

'No!' Tuchevsky exploded. 'I would ask to be relieved of
my command before even thinking of giving such an order.
In fact, I shall take action now. I shall order the radio-
jamming to be stopped - until I have sent a signal to
Moscow and had a reply . . .'

'You can't!' Papanin's tone was matter of fact. 'You know
we have a Special Security detachment aboard this ship - it has already taken control of the jamming section.'