Target 5 (44 page)

He was still unable to move as hands hauled his bruised
and blood-stained body upright and started carrying him
towards a staircase. He was muttering something as they carried him, and DaSilva had to ask him to repeat it before he understood. 'Grayson and Langer are safe,' the mate told
him. 'We're OK. We're on our way home.' It was not a
sentiment shared by Commander Alfred Schmidt at this
moment who was asking for full power at all costs. The ice
breaker was heading for almost certain destruction.

Everywhere the icebergs were coming together, caught in
the cross-currents, closing in on the
Elroy
as her engines beat
faster. But it was the two huge bergs dead ahead that
Schmidt was watching with great anxiety. The silhouettes of the bergs rose to port-and starboard, castles of ice in the moonlight, castles converging on each other across the
perilously narrow channel the
Elroy
was steaming down.
Another five minutes and they would know whether they
had made it. Another five minutes and they would be
through the gate or crushed between the closing bergs.

'Full power ...'

DaSilva came on to the bridge as the commander re
peated the order, something which he had never done be
fore, something to drive home to the chief engineer below
that this was a terrible emergency. In front of DaSilva
Schmidt's head was constantly swivelling on his neck as though supported by ball-bearings. Port, ahead, starboard.
The view was always the same - icebergs, moving icebergs,
and every time Schmidt looked they seemed to have moved
closer. The bows thrust forward, brushing aside huge floes,
pointing towards the ever-narrowing gate.

The repetition of the same order had communicated its
message to the engine-room, and without being told the
men below guessed what was happening. The chief engineer
stared at his bank of gauges but his mind was outside the
ship, imagining cruel jaws of ice coming towards him. He sensed the tremendous impact when ice met steel, saw the
hull coming in on him, first a spur of ice, followed instantly by
an inundation of water. The engine-room crew watched him
and he tried to
maintain a bored look. They would never
get out in time, of course. The engine-room was the ship's graveyard. As he had done on other occasions, he swore to
himself that if he got out of this one he would never go to sea
again.

The icebergs were on either quarter of the bows, so close it was like entering a deep cutting, like proceeding inside the Corinth Canal with rock walls towering on either side - but these were walls of ice, moving walls. Schmidt stared in front of him, refusing to look sideways any more, knowing that DaSilva, the helmsman and the officer of the watch were glancing at him in terror. Then he took out his handkerchief, mopped his forehead, and spoke in a casual voice. 'Getting a bit warm in here.5 From the bridge window he could have thrown out a bottle and hit the iceberg on the port quarter. And no moonlight shone on the fore-deck which was dark with the shadows of the icebergs. DaSilva, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, could have screamed with the tension, but Schmidt's erect figure, his recent remark, his refusal to look to port or starboard, kept him under control. Like the captain, the other men on the bridge stared stonily ahead.

'Take a look through the rear window, Mr DaSilva.'
Schmidt suggested.

'We're through! We're through the gate!'

'Maintain your present course.'

Ahead there was a pale cold light in the distant sky, the sun returning to the Arctic, the sun whose palest glimmer
had been blotted out by a heavy cloud bank for days.
DaSilva looked back through the rear window. The gate
way between the bergs was so narrow that even a launch
could no longer have passed through. The silhouettes
merged and across the ocean rang the appalling crack of
collision, a terrible rumbling crack followed by a roar as the
bergs ground up against each other. Then an echoing boom
which went right out across the Arctic. DaSilva jumped when he heard Schmidt speaking.

'Clear water ahead, Mr DaSilva. We're going home.'

On Wednesday, 7 March, Beaumont went ashore at
Quebec, limping as he moved down the gangway with the
aid of a stick, and his face was so covered with bandages that
only the eyes showed, eyes which were bleak and remote. Schmidt, Grayson and Langer leaned out of a bridge win
dow to watch him go, but he didn't look back as he hobbled
on to the dockside. Seamen lined the rails in silence, ready
to wave, but he didn't even glance in their direction.

It was cold on that March day long ago, and ice drifted in
the St Lawrence while snow glistened on the rooftops of the
Chateau Frontenac as the sun came out. Lemuel Dawes and
Adams were waiting for him, hurried forward, and then
hesitated as the tall, heavily-built Englishman stared at
them from between his mask of bandages. Beaumont shook
hands formally and quickly. 'I have to get away,' he
growled. 'Grayson can give you any details you need — and
I've written you a report.'

He took the core tube out of his parka and gave it to
Dawes. 'What you want is inside this core - take the top bit
of rock out with a knife and you'll find it.' He paused as
Dawes took the core. 'I hope it was worth it - a lot of men
died.'

He hobbled away before Dawes could reply, hobbled past the official car and got into a taxi. 'Airport,' he told the driver. He was silent for most of the drive, staring out of the window without taking in anything he was passing. As they came close to the airport he asked a question. 'Any idea when the next flight for Miami takes off?'

Aftermath. May-July 1972

The ice island, Target-5, continued its drift south into Ice
berg Alley - into destruction. On 7 March, the day Beau
mont went ashore at Quebec, a C130 transport landed
safely on the airstrip, stopping a few yards from the burnt-
out wreck of its predecessor. It was in no danger of repeating
the earlier aircraft's suicidal performance because the rocks
had disappeared off the airstrip.

The men who came out of this plane hurried to take on
board the crated equipment - nervous about the island's
nearness to the sea and worried because the fog was closing
in again. When they found Matthew Conway's body under
the wrecked Sno-Cat they assumed he had driven off the
ramp in the fog; they hurried to put the body aboard the
plane and later it was flown to Cincinnati for burial. What did puzzle these anxious men was that they could find no trace of Rickard, the wireless operator, or Sondeborg, the gravity specialist. Their disappearance became a mystery.

In May the American President visited Moscow and
among the many agreements concluded was one which
promised there would be no more close-shadowing - which
might result in collision - of American vessels by Soviet
ships and vice versa. No one outside government circles wondered why this particular moment was chosen to make
this pact when near-collisions between American and Soviet
vessels spying on each other - although rarely reported in
the press -,had been commonplace for years.

Also in May, Target-5, which had earlier broken into four
pieces, further fragmented into eight separate slabs between Greenland and Iceland, and American planes from Keflavik
kept a special watch on the slab supporting the huts. Then,
while it was hidden from them by dense mist, they lost it for
two months.

In July, a Danish liner cruising off Frederikshaab on the
west coast of Greenland, reported sighting an ice floe which
carried buildings. Police boats were sent out from port and passengers on board the liner watched from the rails as the
police entered the still-intact huts. It was an Inspector
Gustaffson who went inside the research hut and examined
it thoroughly. When he lifted the floorboards covering the
hole where the core drill had once been lowered a four-
month-old mystery was solved.

Jeff Rickard and Harvey Sondeborg were lying frozen on
the lower platform of floorboards, the platform which
covered the hole going down into the Arctic. An autopsy
was carried out and it was concluded that Rickard had probably been murdered by Sondeborg, who was still
clutching an ice pick when the bodies were found. Gustaff
son then suggested - he had no proof- that Sondeborg had
killed his fellow-American and had tried to hide the body
inside the hole.

In Gustaffson's opinion Sondeborg had intended drop
ping the corpse below the second platform into the Arctic,
but he slipped and fell himself, dying beside his victim from injuries received during his fall. In Washington Gustaffson's
report was disbelieved and filed. Probably no one will ever know positively how these two men died.

It was in July that a shipping correspondent in London
made a routine inquiry at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington
Palace Gardens. Looking for copy for a projected article
on modern ships, he asked for information as to the present
whereabouts of the
Revolution,
nursing a faint hope that one
day he might be shown over this showpiece vessel. The
Soviet official he met consulted a more senior official, then
told him that the
Revolution
had returned to a Black Sea port
for an extensive refit. Apparently she had collided with an
iceberg while undertaking research in Arctic waters.

And it was in July 1972 that the Fischer-Spassky world chess contest opened at Reykjavik in Iceland, the contest a certain Igor Papanin was to have attended, officially as one of Spassky's chess advisers, unofficially as chief of security for the duration of the contest. Another man, less qualified in both fields, quietly took his place.