" Enough to murder a couple of innocent men?" His laugh jarred. " Dear God, man, can't you see that nations will fight atomic wars over Thompson Island's caesium? Millions may die, not only two. They were unimportant beside this!"
I looked again at the old chart, at the five dicelike pieces of caesium rock, and at the wild eyes of the whaling tycoon. Men had suffered and died in the past to find Thompson, and now in the present the island had come back with a lure more deadly, and a threat more lethal, than anything that had gone before. As my eyes lifted they met Helen's. There was no need to formulate the, resolution in my mind never to reveal Thompson Island's whereabouts.
I turned to Reidar Bull. " The man is mad," I said harshly. " You should lock him up. Thompson Island isn't where the chart says, anyway. Remember that, Sir Frederick."
The awful pink flush suffused his face and he threw himself at me, using the manacles as a weapon. Again and again he struck at me, shouting obscenities, while Lars Brunvoll clubbed him with the butt of the Luger. It took Brunvoll and Hanssen to drag him off me.
" Judas!" he half gasped, half screamed. " You-who know-you have betrayed me! Curse all the Wetherbys, curse Bruce Wetherby…"
Helen stood back in anguish as he screamed; Pirow's face was grey. Reidar Bull's savage anger was stilled.
" Let us march," I said to Reidar Bull. " Sailhardy and will fetch the whaleboat. You can send Brunvoll along too, if you like, but there isn't anywhere for us to escape to."
Hanssen held Upton now, still mouthing threats, at me and the skippers.
When we returned, carrying the boat easily by up-ending her with the bow and stern-thwarts on our heads, the party had already formed up. There was no goodbye allowed to Helen. She stood, camouflaged in her sea-leopard coat against the snow at thirty yards, next to one of the helicopter's landingwheels. Her lips moved soundlessly to me as we moved off, Reidar Bull bringing up the rear with Schmeisser at the ready, Upton leading, with Brunvoll's Luger at his back. The whaleboat was no real burden, Sailhardy could have carried its weight alone himself, but two of us made its bulk easier to handle, especially when the wind plucked at it. The ice was hard, and we started briskly. Antarctica lay against the sick sun. The last I saw of her was when she lurched yet again, like a beaten wrestler trying to keep his shoulder off the mat.
By lunch-time, by following the markers which Reidar Bull had laid at intervals across the icefield, we came to the iceedge. The four catchers Crozet, Kerguelen, Chimay and Aurora-were moored together. Already the ice had started to trace a needlework pattern on their rigging. Unless it was cleared, they would be carrying a top-hamper which would roll them to their doom once they got outside the protection of the icefield, which damped down the great rollers of the Westerlies. Each ship had a white square on its black funnel on which was painted its name, and to the inexperienced eye all four might have been cut from the same matrix-the flared bows, the canvas-enclosed bridge, the big steam pipe running up and round the funnel, the heavy foremast with a 'crow's-nest, the long, low platform aft like a frigate's depth-charge platform. To a whalerman's eye, however, they were as individual as those of us who made up the marching party. On the march, Upton had given no more trouble. He had pulled his blue hood over his head and all we could see from behind was the hunch of his shoulders.
As we paused for a breather before making the last leg to the catchers, Pirow fell back alongside me. The greyness had not passed out of his face, and he spoke low and agitatedly, so that Reidar Bull behind could not hear.
" Herr Kapitan! " he said. " Where is the rendezvous with the destroyer-with Thorshammer?"
I was puzzled at his tone. " Why, at Bouvet," I said. " You know that already."
" Yes," he said quickly. " But where? Off the island, or where?"
" There's only one anchorage-in the south-west, at
Bollevika. That is the rendezvous."
He took my arm, as if to steady himself.
" What is it, man?" I asked, he appeared so agitated.
" The Meteor mined the approaches to the anchorage and Bollevika itself," he said.
10. Bouvet
Pirow's words released in me a wave of depression which had been mounting ever since my unspoken farewell to Helen. Along the march, the image of that lonely figure in her sealeopard coat had returned again and again. Always, however, to my mind's eye rose those strange eyes which, I was able to tell myself now, had come alive and vital-she had said it herself-through me. In seeking The Albatross' Foot, I, like Saul, had gone in search of asses and found instead a kingdom. Now the full reaction of that empty farewell set in. I knew, as I considered the prospect before me, that there would be little chance of meeting her again. Reidar Bull had made it quite clear that, although not a prisoner like ourselves, she would not be free to come and go. If she disobeyed Reidar Bull and stayed at the Antarctica, she was courting disaster; if she could locate Thorshammer, she could fly to the destroyer and tell her story-but would they believe her any more than Reidar Bull and the others did? The fact that she was Upton's own daughter made her suspect. The thought of my own future brought me despair: as far as the Royal Society was concerned, I was probably done for.
Mere suspicion of what I was supposed to have done would be enough for that august body to finish with me-and The Albatross' Foot. In the light of what had happened, it would appear as if the whole story of The Albatross' Foot had been simply a cover for dubious activities in the Southern Ocean along with Upton and his gang. What action would Thors- hammer take. when Reidar Bull handed us over, as he had every intention of doing? I could not see Pirow's deception about the seaplane crew being more than a temporary red herring. Short of Walter confessing, I could see no way out. Upton, Walter and Pirow's crime was an infringement of Norwegian waters-mine was murder, if things went the way they were going. The thought of Helen waiting for me to become conscious after I had fallen off the Spandau-Hotchkiss into the sea, and the strange, deep look in her eyes when I told her what had really happened, made my prospects more agonising. She believed me ; Sailhardy believed me; but the events which had enmeshed me in shooting down the seaplane were as complex as those which had brought me to Bouvet, doorway to Thompson Island.
Automatically I felt for my sextant case, which I had hung from my belt. Inside that sextant case lay the secret of the whereabouts of Thompson Island. It was no more than a notch on the vernier, the scale for reading the altitude of the sun and stars. It would mean nothing, in someone else's hands. I intended Thompson Island to stay unknown.
The frost crackled on my gloves as I crunched them together. The four catchers lay off the ice-edge, steam rising from their funnels like frost-smoke. Had I only known that Kohler had mined the approaches to Bouvet, I might have caught him months earlier. I had sent a damaged ship to anchor temporarily at Bouvet-and all I had heard from her again was a stifled, desperate message: " Underwater explosion
…" and then no more. A day later another merchantman had been sunk a thousand miles away and I had rushed off on a wild goose chase. I had assumed from the two widely separated sinkings that Kohler was working with a U-boat in my waters. Now I knew it was a mine. One might, I suppose, call Bollevika an anchorage, but really there's scarcely any holding ground for an anchor: Lars Christen' sen's ship, under the most favourable conditions, had had to steam backwards and forwards slowly for a whole month waiting for the shore party to return, since she was unable to obtain anchorage at Bollevika, which lies open to the gales and seas which sweep in endlessly from the south-west quarter.