Ross felt frustration more than fear. He had faced death before, and faced it down; but he had been in control then where now he was helpless. In many ways it was a cruel test of his courage just to sit here and leave all the responsibility in hands other than his own. He chewed his lips, crushed his head to his right forearm, eased his left arm down beside his left thigh, tensed himself and waited.
Preston might as well have been carved of wax. He had retracted the flaps and undercarriage and now sat, eyes fixed on the spinning needle of the altimeter while the pilot tried to save them. There was nothing else he could do. Even if they had not passed far beyond the ends of his experience and ability, he still would have been too scared to do anything. He just sat, hypnotised as the altimeter clock face with its functional white numbers told him the plane was less than one hundred feet above the sea while the similar gauge beside it told him the aircraft was still moving at more than one hundred knots.
For the pilot in many ways this was the climax of his life, the moment for which talent, inclination and fate had perfectly tailored him. He had first crash-landed in a Douglas DC3 at Gander during the war and he had force-landed one or two turbo-prop aircraft since, but never a jet. Never on water. And yet he knew well enough what he was doing. With back, neck, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands under rigid control, he was flying a plane which could no longer fly; he was keeping aloft a falling object until he could find somewhere to put it down. In his early days, long before he had become a captain, flying had seemingly been the performance of one impossibility after another. He was jerked back through thirty-five years now by this final impossibility and he smiled. They had been good days, those, and this was the last of them, coming out of nowhere in the ice of a north wind. The last of the good days.
They were moving parallel to the edge of the mountainous pack, half a mile now in front of the great whale they had stayed to watch. The ice swept away on his right to the North Pole and beyond, a sharp-edged jumble of blocks reaching more than a hundred feet at their peaks. No chance of landing there . . . His eyes narrowed against the brightness. There! A thousand yards ahead! He might just . . . already he was turning left over the sea. pushing the nose down, the wind lifting the right wing, the plane slipping down faster, half-sideways, in a wide arc out – then, sharply, in: into the wind at ninety degrees to his original course, still at one hundred knots, the last turn robbing him of more precious feet. Glance at the altimeter, twenty-five feet and falling. Too little. Christ! They weren’t going to make it! The weight of the nose was an awesome pull on the muscles of his back: at these speeds the jet had all the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. He saw the edge of the ice twenty yards ahead, but without even looking he knew there was no more air left under the plane. He opened his mouth to yell, and they hit the ocean still moving at one hundred knots.
What the pilot had seen a thousand yards further back was a tongue of ice thrusting out of the line of the pack. At some earlier time some quirk of wind and tide had bent the ice until it had been thrust up into an unusually long and stable series of hills. When the edge of the pack receded with the summer melting, these hills had remained, and with them a flat platform of ice curved for more than five hundred yards, a little like the blade of a broad knife. He had chosen to try to land on this because it was much flatter than the corrugated surface of the rest of the pack. He had put the nose of the aircraft down, thus gaining enough speed to control at least the beginning of the descent, turned south out over the ocean, then immediately north into the wind, pulling up the nose but maintaining speed, in an attempt to crash-land on the tongue. The plane hit the water twenty yards short, bounced forward like a stone skimmed by a boy, throwing up huge curtains of spray and crushed ice.
Kate looked at her father. His head was down on his forearms, pressing them against his knees. She kicked off her shoes and did the same. Sound, movement, water, ice exploded round her. Her body was hurled against the strap.
The plane, still in one piece, leaped ten feet in the air, gulped down the twenty yards in an instant, then fell on to the beginning of the great tongue of ice.
The pilot, blinded by the spray streaming down the windscreen, saw only the shapeless hunch of the ice hills on his left.
Kate’s stomach wrenched. Again the explosion of sound and violent movement. Cases from the back of the plane hurled forward and burst around her, but nothing heavy hit her. Her knees bludgeoned up with the vibration, knocking her arms away, beating against her forehead with stunning force until her nose began to bleed.
The plane was shrieking. It was a truly terrible sound, and it went on and on.
The pilot, still conscious, saw the hills on the port side rushing nearer. He estimated to within a tenth of a second when the wing tip would touch them, and was tensed to meet the new forces as the aeroplane slewed round.
Abruptly the cabin hurled to the right. Then the fuselage reared up on its tail.
“That’s it,” thought the pilot as the nose began to rise, crashing up the concave slope of ice as the plane slowed, “I’ve done it.” Great pride welled in him. Then the windscreen exploded in against his chest.
The cabin juddered up to the vertical. And the last thing Kate knew was that something had plunged through the wall in front of her like the point of a giant harpoon.
The movement, the sound, everything, stopped.
TWO
The sound of the crash echoed through the shallow Arctic Ocean, and the great blue whale’s hearing had no difficulty in picking it up; but he neither went to investigate nor swam away. He was too tired: simply that. The huge knotted muscles of his back, and the sagging sheets and hawsers in his belly, all sent a dull, persistent message to his brain which it did not recognise as pain. The great flukes of his tail, more than twenty feet across, beat the water only fitfully, leaving him to drift for a moment as he tried to regain his breath. His back broke water again, and he sent a great cloud of steam and water-vapour roaring into the Arctic sky. His jaws fell open, and hundreds of gallons of the krill-thick soup which is arctic water washed over the baleen sieve in his mouth. He pressed it dry with his giant tongue, and swallowed it. His mouth fell open again. His tongue moved. He swallowed. His eyes closed for the first time in nearly fourteen days. He slept.
Fourteen days ago, the blue had been making his leisurely way up through the east Pacific Ocean. He was north of the Murray seascarp, some five hundred miles west of San Francisco, swimming along at three to four knots, diving sometimes to two thousand feet, leaping sometimes completely out of the water, content and at peace. When he heard the screams, songs and clicks which were the voices of other whales, he answered sometimes, and sometimes he did not. Ten years ago he would have been searching for a mate, if he did not already have one; but he was old now, and content to follow his annual odyssey from the arctic to the equator, searching out the krill which he swallowed, a ton in every mouthful.
Then, that day, the day which men called the eighth of June, he heard them: the killers. He identified their cries, twenty-four of them; five close behind, six between him and the shore, and thirteen in an arc to the west closing off the way to the deeps of the central Pacific. At first he was content to raise his speed to a little over ten knots; and by the dawn of the next day he was over the Medocino seascarp, more than two hundred miles north of his original position, and it was there and then he realised that the killers were hunting him.