Target 5 (39 page)

'Calm yourself, Kramer - and report to me every five
minutes from now on.'

Tuchevsky stiffened his shoulders as Kramer left the
bridge, turned to Papanin and spoke emphatically. 'So now
I can start my engines again -1 have warned you repeatedly
that it is terribly dangerous to drift in these waters without
power ...'

'You will do nothing of the sort! You have the most advanced radar in the world - use it! We must continue drift
ing to give our hydrophone operators the best possible
chance - I want to locate the American icebreaker's exact
position.'

Papanin put his little pipe back in his mouth and went to
the bridge window, leaving Tuchevsky on his own. Beyond
the clear-vision panel he saw a world of mist and sea. And
somewhere out of sight were the icebergs. The radar
operators were at this moment plotting the monsters' course
as they drifted steadily south with the Greenland Current,
their eyes constantly focused on the greenish glow inside the
rubber hoods where the sweeps went round and round and
the echoes never stopped, the echoes coming back from
over a dozen enormous icebergs.

Everyone was aboard, the engines were ticking over
steadily, the bridge was fully manned, lookouts had been
posted, the
Elroy
was ready to disembark from the berg, to
put to sea.

Schmidt, his hands clasped behind him, for once stood
looking the wrong way - towards the stern through the rear
window - as he waited to perform two dangerous man
oeuvres, taking his ship out of the chute, steering her backwards between the arms of the bay. Beaumont stood beside him, ignoring the chilly expression on the captain's face as
he stared into the distance beyond the bay.

The mist had returned at just the wrong moment, was
rolling like fog just beyond the two white peninsulas of ice
which almost enclosed the bay. Towering above them, Beaumont stood between Schmidt and DaSilva, who stood with almost as bleak a look on his face as Schmidt's. He totally disagreed with the decision Schmidt had taken, but he couldn't say anything; still only acting mate, he couldn't
say as much as Carlson might have done had he been stand
ing in his place. The engines built up more power, they
would soon be moving, stern first, into the water - if the
screw managed to haul them out.

Grayson, who had been standing near the lookouts at the
stern, burst into the bridge without ceremony, speaking
with even less ceremony to a man whose word was almost
life and death aboard his ship. 'You'd better wait! There's
something out there - just inside the fog!'

'What?'

Schmidt's single-word question was explosive, betraying
some of the inner tension he was labouring under, and he
stared at Grayson with a look the crew knew and feared.

'I don't know ... but there's something ...'

'I can see it myself,' Beaumont said grimly. 'You'd better
not move this ship yet, Schmidt.'

'God, it's the
Revolution ...'
DaSilva muttered.

But it wasn't the
Revolution,
it was too big, infinitely too
big even for a 16,000-ton ship, the thing which was coming
slowly through the mist towards the exit from the bay. It
sheered up like a ten-storey building, a moving ten-storey building, its invisible summit way above the height of the
Elroy's
masthead, lost in the mist. The stern lookouts were
shouting now, shouting at the tops of their voices as Schmidt
opened the window and leaned out into the night. Ice-cold
air flooded in over them and they were hardly aware of it as
they stared, hypnotized by the menace coming towards
them. It looked like a towering headland now, a headland
of ice as it brushed aside the mist and came on, drifting
straight for the bay. Even across the width of the bay it
seemed to hang over them, above them, a colossus of an ice
berg heading straight for the leviathan they were beached
on.

Schmidt reacted very quickly to give warning. He hardly
seemed to move and then he was talking into the tannoy
system which would reach every corner of the ship. 'Hold
on tight. Hold on tight. Major collision coming!'

DaSilva grabbed Beaumont's arm. 'Look! Inside the
bay!
5

'Underwater spar.'

A spur of ice projecting from the giant berg, a spur which
could be up to fifty feet in diameter, was spearing across the
bay after slipping inside the entrance, disturbing the moon
lit water, water very palely lit by a shaft percolating through the mist. Behind the leg, the body followed. The men on the
bridge were gripping rails, bracing themselves for the
coming impact, and below them the lookouts clung to the rails still intact. Beaumont's head moved slightly as something fell out of the sky, something huge, bigger than a mansion, something from the summit of the berg which hadn't even touched the opposing ice yet. The mansion, the
enormous chunk of ice, hit the water just beyond the bay
and sent up a great funnel of water. 'Christ!' Langer gasped.
'This is a ghost berg . . .'

Which meant that the entire edifice, millions of tons of ice, could collapse at the moment of impact, bringing an
avalanche down over the bay, over the ship, burying it. Like
waxwork figures they waited for the impact. At the last
moment Schmidt gave the order to stop the engines. The
colossus floated out of the mist and showed them its
enormity, then the spur reached the shore of the bay and
the bergs met.

The impact sound was deafening, a sound like the end of
the world. The shattering collision sent a tremor through the
iceberg which had been struck, a tremor which shuddered
the
Elroy,
shaking the hull, rattling the plates, hurling rivets
on to the ice. The impact threw DaSilva clear across the
bridge, shook a man off the catwalk above the engine-room
and sent him to his death twenty feet below. It shattered
crockery, wristwatches, fractured the still-intact glass on the
engine-room gauges, made compass needles spin. Then it
was suddenly quiet, frighteningly quiet.

The engines had been stopped before the impact. No one spoke. For a short time no one moved. They were gazing at
the exit from the bay, an exit which was no longer there.
The ice cliff filled it,
locked into the opening like a cork into
a bottle. The bay had become a lagoon, a lake without an exit. They were trapped inside their giant transporter, an
iceberg drifting with the Greenland Current at twenty
miles a day. But the ghost berg hadn't collapsed yet despite
the collision. Beaumont was the first to break the silence and
everyone on the bridge stared at him as though it were strange to hear a human voice.

'Now we'll have to drift with the berg, Schmidt. No
option.'

'No option,' Schmidt agreed grimly. 'And all the time we'll be waiting for that thing to fall on us.'

'Their engines have stopped!'

Kramer sounded alarmed, bewildered, and Papanin left
the bridge with the Bait to go down and see the hydrophone section for himself. The seaman in vest and shorts who was
listening to the instrument looked up as Papanin came in. 'Kramer tells me you can't hear them any more. Is your instrument defective?'

'No. Their engines have stopped. We are getting no
echoes.'

'How far away ?'

'A mile, maybe even closer ...'

'They were that distance ten minutes ago!' Papanin
glared at Kramer. 'Listen to me! They were a mile away
only ten minutes ago. Their engines continued beating
until a few seconds ago. They are still a mile away. It's not possible! We are drifting - they are moving south under power. They must have, moved closer!'

'It's true,' the seaman said.

'It cannot be true - it's, technically impossible!' the
Siberian stormed.

'It's been puzzling me . ..' the seaman began.

'That's a hell of a lot of use!' Papanin folded his arms and
stared at the seaman. 'If they were drifting with the current like we are, then it would be true - we would remain the
same distance apart. But they're not drifting! You heard the
sound of their bloody engines!'

'Very distinctly - until a minute ago.'

'How do you explain it?' Papanin gestured towards the
hydrophone equipment. 'It's your job to explain things!'

'I can't...'

The Siberian said nothing, standing with his arms folded while he mastered his frustration. When he spoke again it
was in such a reasonable tone that the seaman was
frightened. 'Don't worry about it -just go on listening with those earplugs of yours.' He turned to Kramer. 'There is
another way of checking - since they are so close - send up
that helicopter. The pilot can't come back until he's found the
Elroy.
'

Perched aboard its giant transporter, hemmed in by the
two coupled bergs, the
Elroy
continued to drift south with the current. It drifted for many hours, timeless hours, because for the men imprisoned inside the ice there was no
longer any way of being sure of the time.

It had seemed incredible at first, so incredible that
Schmidt had ordered a check on every
timepiece aboard the
ship, and when the check had been made the incredible was found to be true: every single clock and watch had stopped,
stopped presumably by some freak tremor which had passed
through the vessel at the moment of impact when the ghost
berg struck. There was a frantic search for one clock or
watch which was still going, and there wasn't one.

So they had to guess at the time and from then on the
ship's log carried strangely imprecise entries. 'Approxi
mately 1900 hours .. .' 'About 2200 hours...' Not knowing
the time gradually got on men's nerves, the proximity of the
ghost berg got on their nerves, the knowledge that at any second millions of tons of ice might simply topple, come
down on them, flattening the ship and everyone inside
her.

And there was nothing to do, nothing they dare do. All
normal work ceased: they couldn't even occupy themselves
with levering up and throwing overboard the remaining ice
on deck - because they were afraid that some unguarded
echo from the hammering of a tool might be just enough to bring the colossus crashing down on top of them. The atmosphere became far worse after Beaumont and Langer
returned from an exploratory tour of their overhanging
neighbour.

'It has all the appearance of a ghost berg,' Beaumont said
when he proposed the tour to Schmidt, 'that huge piece of
ice which came down from the summit was pretty signifi
cant, but I think we'd better check before we all go
crazy . . .'

It was a ghost berg, the biggest Beaumont had ever seen.
The far side of the two-hundred-foot-high cliff, the side
facing away from the sea, was like something out of the Arabian Nights. To get there they crossed the great spar of
ice sticking up out of the bay and made their way along a
narrow ledge at the base of the cliff, and when they turned a
corner they looked up in horror. Enormous alcoves and
caves were hollowed out of what had seemed solid berg
from the outside; great roofs of ice were precariously
poised on frozen columns fifty to a hundred feet above
them; and below where they had paused, a long way above
sea level, was a gigantic hole at least three hundred yards in
diameter, a hole which might have been gouged out by a
meteorite. The hole was a lake of blackness and as they listened they heard the faint lapping of water, the splash of the Greenland Current against ice. The ghost berg, at least half a mile long, was hollow, a dangerous sham, like an
enormous rock pinnacle eroded by termites. It was about as stable as sweating gelignite.