Target 5 (38 page)

Friday, 25 February

'One hundred pounds of gelignite, timer mechanisms, and a
few hundred foot of cable . . .'

'Where do they keep it, Horst?'

'You'd never guess - inside a cabin off the main deck.'

Langer grinned at Beaumont. 'Strictly against the regu
lations, DaSilva says, but he also says that when he has to
heave defective jelly overboard he doesn't want to carry it all the way up from the explosives store.'

'DaSilva has his head screwed on the right way,' Grayson
said. 'Those people back in Washington who write out regu
lations never travel with the stuff.'

The three men were sitting inside Beaumont's cabin while
they ate their lunch of clam chowder and cinnamon pie.
The fact that the meal had been sent to the cabin suggested
that once again their popularity had waned. 'We're in the
doghouse,' Grayson observed as he put down his coffee cup.
'Anybody would think you sent Quinn out so he'd be blown
up by that berg . ..'

'Schmidt's more worried than he lets on,' Beaumont
replied. 'He pretends he's concentrating on his navigation but I've an idea he's as worried as we are about those Russian vessels. It's the
Revolution
I'm bothered about - all
sixteen thousand tons of her. The trawlers the
Elroy
could push out of the way. What's that, Horst ?' The German was
showing a key in the palm of his hand with a smug ex
pression.

'Key to the explosives cabin. DaSilva doesn't see eye to eye with Schmidt on this,"we're on the high seas so no one
can touch us" business. And somehow that hundred pounds of gelignite has got itself tucked away inside a couple of
shoulder-packs - just in case ...'

The cabin lurched under the massive blow, shuddered as
though the bulkheads were on the verge of caving in. The
cabin walls tilted to port, back to starboard, then upright
again. From under the
ship came a terrible grinding sound
as though its keel was being torn out and the grinding went
on and on. 'Christ...' Grayson hauled open the cabin door
and they heard shouting, the thud of running feet, a terrible
crash beyond the port bulkhead, then the vessel was still with its engines ticking over. The lights dimmed, almost went out, came back to full power reluctantly.

'We've struck,' Horst yelled.

'Unless the
Revolution
just hit us ...' Grayson began.

'More like an iceberg!' Beaumont was dragging on his
parka. 'Make for the bridge.'

Beaumont ran along the deserted companionway, paused at the bottom of the staircase to button his parka, to slip on
mittens and gloves, and from the deck above he heard men's
voices, voices with more than a hint of panic. He went up the
staircase, opened the door, and the mist met him, cold
clammy mist with silhouettes moving about inside. It was impossible to see what had happened, what was beyond the port rail. Beaumont couldn't even see the damned port rail
as he felt his way towards the ladder leading up to the
bridge. A large burly figure came out of the mist and cannoned against him. Borzoli.

'We've struck!' he gasped hoarsely.

'Going down?' Beaumont asked, feeling the core tube
inside his parka pocket.

'God knows ...'

Beaumont went up the ladder to the bridge, had almost
reached the top when the mist beyond the bows shifted.
Something like a mountain appeared and then vanished, a
mountain only yards away. He went on to the bridge cautiously as Grayson and Langer came up the ladder
behind him. Schmidt was standing at the front of the bridge with a window open and the icy air was rapidly dispersing
the warmth. The helmsman was still holding the wheel although they weren't going anywhere, and the floor was
canted towards the stern. DaSilva was hanging out of
another open window, staring to port. And the engines had stopped. Glancing over his shoulder, Schmidt saw Beau
mont.

'Come over here a minute, Beaumont,' he called out. His tone was neutral, the mood of anger gone. 'It's the damned
est thing - we've ridden up on an iceberg.'

It took them an hour to assess the position, the extraordinary position they were now in. Steaming very slowly
through thick mist, the
Elroy
had passed inside a small bay
on the coast of a giant iceberg; in less than a minute it had crossed the bay and the bows had driven inside a wide,
scooped-out gulley of ice eroded out of the side of the berg,
a huge natural ramp tilting up out of the sea. At, the first
grinding scrape Schmidt had acted, but by then the bows,
the forepart of the ship, were lifted out of the water like a
ship in dry dock, while at the stern the screw was still in deep
water.

Schmidt had stopped the engines but the 6,50O-ton vessel
was marooned, the bows and a third of the hull resting on
the ice chute, the other two-thirds of the ship and its stern still in the bay. At the end of the trough the wall of the berg
rose sheer in the mist, greenish and massive like a cliff in the
searchlight's beam. To Schmidt it had seemed incredible,
but to Beaumont it was only strange: a year ago a British
trawler had endured a similar experience off Spitsbergen; in
heavy fog she had driven her own bows deep inside a chute
at the edge of the icefield. The captain had used his com
mon sense, faced with this unique experience - he had
simply reversed his engines and the screw had dragged the
trawler back into the sea.

'Jesus!' DaSilva called out from the rear of the bridge. 'How the hell did we ever get inside here ?'

They went to the rear window and Schmidt blinked. The
mist had cleared a little for the moment
and beyond the
stern was a small bay with arms which curved out to flank a
narrow entrance. It had been little short of a miracle that
the
Elroy,
moving blind through the mist, had cleared both arms of the bay when she steamed direct inside. The mist drifted over, blotted out the arms of solid ice.

'With a little judgement, a lot of luck, we should be able
to manage it,' Schmidt said thoughtfully. 'Most of the ship
is still in the water so if I reverse the screw it should haul us
off the ice chute.' He let out a deep breath. 'Isn't it the
damnedest thing?'

'You know the ice went?' DaSilva asked Beaumont. 'It
went as we hit the chute - you can see now.'

Beaumont looked down out of the port window where the
mist had lifted off the chute. It wasn't surprising he hadn't
been able to see the port rail when he came up on deck - the
port rail hadn't been there to see. As the keel ground its
way up inside the chute the mountain of ice they had tried
to shift for many back-breaking hours had left them, had
taken the rail with it. Beyond the ship a vast mass of
heaped-up ice lay on the chute floor with here and there a
fragment of rail sticking up out of the heap. Fur-clad
figures, the seamen Schmidt had sent down rope ladders to
explore the berg, were moving like ghosts in the mist. A
head came up over the side where the rail was still intact
close to the bows. Langer's. He scrambled up the ladder and
joined them on the bridge.

'It's not a ghost berg, Keith, I'm sure ...'

'You're certain?'

'Dead certain. Sam and I climbed up as far as we could
and it's solid - a cliff of ice ...'

'You can see it now,' Schmidt called out from the front of
the bridge. The mist, swirling, in constant motion, had
drifted away beyond the bows and for a few minutes the
majesty of the berg they were marooned on was exposed. A
hundred yards beyond the bows the ice sheered up ver
tically like the cliffs of Dover. The mist drifted further and they saw the cliff sweeping away on both sides until it
disappeared inside the drifting whiteness. They were
marooned on a floating island of pure ice, on a leviathan
of a berg which could easily be half a mile long, maybe
longer.

'Recall the men,' Schmidt said crisply to DaSilva. 'Use the loudhailers. We're getting out of here.'

'I suppose we have to leave the berg right away?' Beau
mont asked quietly.

'As soon as we can make it. . .' Schmidt stopped speaking
and stared at Beaumont. 'Just for a second I thought you were coming up with another of your bright ideas.'

'It might be safer to stay where we are for the moment.'

'Stuck here? Getting nowhere? You want to get home
some time, don't you ?'

'We are getting somewhere,' Beaumont pointed out. 'I
know we don't feel to be moving but both of us know we are.
This huge berg is being carried south all the time by the
Greenland Current - at a rough guess the berg is moving at
a rate of twenty miles a day . . .'

'Not exactly breaking nautical records, is she ?' Schmidt
observed dryly.

'Do we have to ?' Beaumont persisted. 'A few hours ago Quinn reported that those Soviet trawlers were forty miles
south of us, that the
Revolution
was only thirty miles away -
they'll be much closer now. This berg is acting as a gigantic
transporter for the
Elroy.
If we stay on her the berg will carry
us past those vessels some time during the night.'

'We'd be stuck here - unable to manoeuvre . ..'

'Does it matter?' Beaumont rasped impatiently. 'If they
don't see us? The
Revolution
carries the latest radar but
what will her radar pick up when we're close to her ? Only
another iceberg!'

'The berg as a giant transporter!' DaSilva was excited. 'I
like the idea . . .'

'I don't!' Schmidt walked over to the voice-pipe to speak to the engine-room. When he had re-stoppered the tube he
looked at DaSilva. 'Chiefy reports there's no structural
damage to the engine-room. The glass on the gauges shattered, one man got steam-scalds, but he thinks the engines are OK. And I think, Mr DaSilva, I asked you to recall the
men on the ice. I'm starting up the engines to check
them . . ..'

'That is inadvisable,' Beaumont said bluntly. 'The
Revolution's
hydrophones will pick up the vibrations . . .'

'And then,' Schmidt went on, ignoring Beaumont, 'we'll steam out backwards the way we came in.' He gave Beaumont the benefit of his attention. 'You are getting to be too much of a sea lawyer for my taste. And whether you like it
or not this ship is disembarking off this berg in two hours'
time!'

'The
Elroy
is very close to us - we have picked up her engine
beat on the hydrophones!'

Kramer had run on to the bridge of the
Revolution
with the
news, had hardly recovered his breath before he gasped out
the words. The Siberian, who was standing next to a silent Tuchevsky, took his pipe out of his mouth and waved it at the Bait.