Target 5 (40 page)

'Can't understand why it didn't come down when it hit
us,' Langer whispered.

'They can take a lot of punishment and then they go suddenly,' Beaumont replied. 'We've seen enough. Let's get back.'

'God in heaven, look up there, Keith ...'

The mist had drifted away from a giant column of ice, exposing a good two hundred feet of ice tower, a tower
whose summit was hidden. The tower was massive, at least a
hundred feet wide, but there were huge windows cut out of the tower, windows which were holes in the ice, so many
that Beaumont couldn't understand why it was still vertical.
The mist cleared from higher up and Beaumont's expression
tightened as he saw the tower was supporting a great over
hang from the back of the cliff, was probably supporting the
whole damned cliff.

'It won't last much longer,' he said. 'We'd better get
back.'

Only a few men aboard the ship were told what they had
found, but within an hour the grim report had spread
through the
Elroy's
grapevine. From then on the tension be
came appalling. If a man banged his elbow against a bulkhead his comrade glared at him; they found their appetites
had gone, that they couldn't sleep, that they could do
nothing but keep quiet and keep still, and the inactivity
crucified their nerves. For seamen accustomed to the move
ment of the ship the lack of movement was another source of
tension. The bergs were moving all the time, rotating slowly
in the current, but there was no sensation of movement.
Given time, just a little more time - the time they
couldn't
gauge - they would become a bunch of screaming neurotics.

'Why are we so interested in explosives ?' Grayson asked at
one stage while they were sitting in Beaumont's cabin.

'If we ever get out of here we may need some kind of weapon to defend ourselves. I don't know how or where or
when - but I don't share Schmidt's optimism. I'm thinking
of some kind of floating mine - I've actually talked to DaSilva about it.'

'He wasn't worried - about Schmidt?' Langer inquired.

'DaSilva is in a mutinous frame of mind,' Beaumont told
him. 'Normally he wouldn't be - it's the silence and the
stillness that's getting him, getting us all,' he added with a bleak grin. 'The
Elroy
doesn't even creak any more.'

'You feel we might get out one day ?' Grayson asked.

'If we do, it will be when the ghost berg is on the southern
side of us - with the current tugging at it. There's just a
chance that it might break loose again, drift away.'

'And you still think you heard a chopper while you were on the ghost berg?' Grayson asked. 'Schmidt didn't look as
though he believed you.'

'That's because Horst didn't hear it. I not only heard it -
I think I saw it for a second when the mist cleared for a few
seconds.'

'Which means Papanin now knows where we are?'

'I fear so. Time - whatever it is - will tell, if that ghost
berg cuts loose.'

The ghost berg broke loose some time on Friday, 25
February. 'Approximately 2200 hours ...' the log recorded. Its departure was not spectacular, there was no great rend
ing of ice, no inundation of sea rushing in; there was simply
one loud terrifying crack which stopped the pulse of every
man aboard. From his post at the rear of the bridge DaSilva
saw what had happened. The huge spar jammed inside the
bay had snapped; the ghost berg, still intact, still not collapsing, moved away from the entrance to the bay while
DaSilva watched it go. And something like a half-submerged
monster, the huge severed spar, was following the mother
berg into the current.

When Schmidt reached the bridge with Beaumont the
view they had become used to - the land-locked lagoon with
the towering cliff on the far side - was transformed. The
exit was again open. Beyond it the colossus was only faintly
visible in the gathering mist, disappearing even as they
watched her go. Schmidt permitted himself a rare display
of emotion: he let out a deep breath.

'That's it. We take off as soon as I can get the screw moving - whatever there is waiting for us out there.'

The developing situation in Iceberg Alley - so far as it was known - had been anxiously followed for days by Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, still worried that something might
happen which would cancel the American President's visit
to the Russian capital in May. Then all communication
with Col Papanin ceased: the radio-jamming which was so
effectively isolating the
Elroy
also cut off the
Revolution
from
the outside world.

On Friday, 25 February 1972 - while the American ice
breaker was still drifting aboard its giant transporter -
Brezhnev undoubtedly consulted Marshal Andrei Grechko,
and the Soviet Minister of Defence decided that a diversion was necessary, something to distract certain journalists who
were
already checking rumours that something was hap
pening in the Arctic. Whatever happened, there must be no
reference to the crisis in the world's press, so something else
happened - something close enough to Iceberg Alley to
account for the rumours, but something far enough away to
distract attention from the events taking place hundreds of
miles further north.

The Times,
published on Wednesday, 1 March, carried
the first report, datelined Washington, 29 February.

A crippled Soviet submarine wallowing in a North
Atlantic gale for the past four days, was taken in tow today
by a Russian tug according to a United States Navy
spokesman.

Rough seas.. . now subsiding, enabled the tug to get a line aboard the vessel six hundred miles north-east of
Newfoundland.

The submarine of the 3,7oo-ton Ha 'hotel' class has a crew of ninety. It was first spotted on Friday by reconnaissance aircraft from the American base at Keflavik,
Iceland
...

The Soviet ships, the tanker
Liepaya,
and the fish fac
tory trawler,
Ivan Chigrin,
have also entered the immediate area.

The cause of the Russian vessel's trouble was not
known here.

Despite the fact that the world's newspapers were full of
their accounts of the American President's return from his
recent visit to Peking, the report of the near 'disaster' to the
Soviet submarine appeared in many newspapers, together
with aerial pictures showing the supposedly stricken vessel wallowing in fifty-foot waves under the lash of a fifty-five
knot wind. And the diversion worked - not a line was
written about the missing
Elroy,
which should have been well on its way to its home port of Milwaukee via the St
Lawrence Seaway.

It must have been just about the time when the American
aircraft from Keflavik first spotted the Soviet submarine
that the
Elroy
left the iceberg and steamed out into the fog
bound channel.

Friday, 25 February: the last hours

The huge screw at the stern of the
Elroy
was revolving,
churning water, slamming aside small floes as it whipped
up a white froth. Schmidt gave the order and the icebreaker
began moving backwards, slowly, then it stopped and Schmidt increased the power. The screw thrashed, the
engines throbbed as though they were coming up through
the deck, and the
Elroy
moved again. She came down the
chute very slowly, like a ship being launched the wrong
way, and the noise was terrible as the keel ground over the
ice under it, spitting out sparks, channelling deeper into the
iron-hard ice.

The screw churned on, its dragging power greater now that more of the ship was in the water, heaving the
Elroy
back into the sea. There was an enormous splash as the
bows went down, but the crew on deck behind Beaumont
at the stern didn't make a sound as the vessel edged her way
across the bay and out between the narrow exit. Beaumont left the stern, walked along the vibrating deck towards the
bows.

They had chosen the moment for departure carefully.
Above them the mist had cleared briefly and the moon
shone down, reflecting off drifting floes, off the ice-coated
starboard rail, but ahead of
them as Schmidt turned his
vessel slowly there was dense mist only half a mile away. 'I
don't like it,' Grayson said as he stopped behind Beaumont
close to the bows, 'I think we should have stayed on the
berg. DaSilva thinks so, too. And why the hell do we have
to come out like a flaming cruise liner ?'

The simile was apt. On Schmidt's specific orders the
Elroy
's lights were ablaze. Every possible light which could
be lit was switched on, and her searchlights beamed out to
port and starboard and over the bows. 'We'll be on the
high seas,' Schmidt had repeated for the hundredth time.
'If I go down Iceberg Alley with my lights
ablaze and the
horn booming there's no possible excuse for a collision.'

'You think they need an excuse - with Gorov and the
Catherine charts aboard?' Beaumont had demanded.
'When we're totally out of touch and can't even signal what
may be happening?'

He had lost his argument - as he knew he would. And up
to a point Schmidt had reason on his side: if they tried to
slip south without lights and in silence Papanin could after
wards say that the collision had been the Americans' fault -
how could they have seen them or heard them in the fog?
As they headed south Beaumont raised his night-glasses and
swept the water.

'See anything ?' Langer asked anxiously in his ear.

'Just ocean. And mist.
5

'See anything?'

It wasn't Langer who asked the question this time.
DaSilva had come quietly down from the bridge and stood
at Beaumont's left shoulder. 'With your eyes,' he added,
'you ought to be up top where you were before.'

Beaumont looked behind him, stared up at the eighty-
foot mast where a seaman hung from the crosstree with a
headset clamped under his fur hood. This was the lookout
who would try to warn Schmidt of any obstacle in the
Elroy's
path. 'No thanks,' he said. 'Not again. And I can't
see anything out there - yet.'

'The Carley float is near the stern, starboard side,'
DaSilva murmured. 'Near the cabin where the explosives are - and Langer has a key. If we need him, Borzoli will
help us with the launch - he's on lookout duty near the
float. Mind telling me what you have in mind - if some
thing does happen?'

'I'll have to try and scare them off,' Beaumont replied
vaguely.