“OK,” said Ross.
Quick took the Remington and the pegs, and climbed aboard. He felt good. He knew about boats the way Ross knew ice. He was at home here; knew what he was about. He began to paddle strongly; easily. The berg had moved away with surprising speed: they would have to work fast. He dug the paddle in deeper, surged out of the shadow of the iceberg. He had come about fifty yards. The nylon rope was not too heavy a drag because it floated. He slitted his eyes even behind the mask because of the sudden return to the golden brightness. Nor far now . . .
“SIMON!” Colin’s voice, surprisingly clear. Urgent. He looked back. The rope snapped taut, hurled him forward: Job had stopped paying out. Now he was pulling in feverishly. The stern, sharp as the bow, creamed through the water. Quick knelt in the waist of the boat, looking wildly round. Then, in the distance, he saw them: five huge fins in arrow formation, coming in at impossible speed.
“Mother of God!” He was tearing off his mittens, reaching for the Remington. Knees spread, moving from the waist, he arced the barrel over the ocean, searching. He was back into the shadow now. So slow . . . so slow . . .
The first one erupted yards away, forced up by the submarine reaches of the berg. He swung on to it, jerked the trigger: missed. Slammed another into the breech. Tightened his finger again, but it was gone. The echoes of the first shot roared around him, hurting his ears. Idiot. How many in the magazine for Christ’s sake? Don’t waste them! Wait! Wait till you see the whites of their eyes.
He was still speeding backwards when the next killer hurled himself out of the black water. He fired once, saw the roof of its mouth explode. Its body twisted in the air and crashed down beside him, the top of its head burst like a bag. He swung back. They were coming up beside the boat. CRACK. CRACK. A black and white head flew to pieces. They would be coming up under the boat. He leaned over the side, disregarding the dangerous list, peering into the depths. There! A black and white form streaking up. He aimed at random, and fired three times. Black and green streamers sprang from its head.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! Out of sequence. Setting up overtones so deep they made his eyeballs tremble in his head; so powerful he could feel them as he breathed. So high they were like nails driven into his ears. And beneath it all, swelling as though out of a tunnel, the terrible roar of collapsing terraces.
He swung back to look at the berg. As he watched, the colour of the nearest cliffs became lighter and lighter. Great cracks shot up the towering faces like lightning. Monstrous boulders sprang free and began to tumble. The whole outline of the huge berg lost definition, and began to fall. The sound was unbelievable: nearly fifty thousand tons of ice exploded into boulders and rushed into the water. The boat ground silently into the ice of the floe behind him. Quick reeled out of it. Ross and Job chucked the rope into it, lifted it, and ran for the distant camp. Spray rained down on them all, engulfing them. Quick turned back and watched.
The great foaming column of water tumbled back. The sea reeling, tearing hither and thither, trying to cover the great wound. The huge waves speeding away to the west, twenty, thirty feet high. The foam spreading calmly. Then, slowly, unbelievably, with all the inevitable majesty of a rocket rearing against the sky, the edge of the berg which had been held under the water by the weight of the terraces, shrugged the wild sea aside and rose, foot after foot, yard after yard, its shadow spreading like oil over the water, over the floe. Water cascaded down its crystal sides. The great point reaching up: two hundred feet high.
Now the column of ice reeled, more than half out of the water. The rate of its great leap began to falter. It began to turn in the air. Finally it began to fall.
A column of spray roared up into the sky. The waves began to form in their circles, fifty feet high, and move out at high speed. They hit the floe, exploded against the solid wall of the ice hills, reared them up, forced them back. The floe seemed to slam into the air, the whole range of the ice hills rocking up and back along the line of the crash. Such was the noise that the cracking of the ice was lost. The hills closed down on the ice like ragged crystal jaws folding shut, then opening again.
It was long after the silence returned that they realised the noise had stopped, and they were safe. Ross rose first, and looked around. One by one the others rose with him, and stood looking, silently. There was nothing to say. Half an hour earlier, they had been in the middle of a floe of nearly twenty acres. And now it was mostly gone: the ice hills, all except one; the old campsite; the southern point where the plane had bounced on to the floe; all smashed loose, and floating in the jumble of restless ice all around them.
As they watched, the last sight of the berg faded into the golden mist. It had reduced their refuge by nearly two thirds, from the size of a modest farm to the size of a large garden; and now it left them as it had come, suddenly, silently.
SEVEN
i
The sounds echoing in the caverns of the iceberg moved through the water five times faster than they moved through the air and the killers had begun to run even before Quick’s boat had been hauled up on to the floe. They did not all run in the same direction, but split up and scattered. They did not run as a unit because they knew as well as the men on the floe the danger, and did not pause to organise. The leader and his consort ran side by side, great boulders of ice plunging deep into the water around them like unimaginable hailstones, spurting bubbles, turning over and over, crashing against other boulders coming sluggishly upwards, crunching, crying, ringing.
The current caused by the iceberg’s massive rush towards the air plunged them willy-nilly deep in the black heart of the ocean. The female, injured, hurled down like a dummy, trailing bubbles. The leader followed her, only partly in control of his headlong rush. Blood streamed from his mate, but was whipped away by the terrible currents like smoke in a hurricane. Powerless as leaves in autumn they tumbled into the deep, until the solid shelf of the bottom rose to meet them and the turbulence rushed them towards the surface again. Then, abruptly, it was over.
The leader slowly regained absolute control of his progress, and caught up with his wounded mate. Carefully, he angled his vital body against her still flank and began to push her away from the danger and towards the surface. As he moved he sent out urgent cries, but it was many minutes before any of his pack came to their aid. Even then he would not relinquish her completely to their care, not accept their help himself. Another large male supported her on the other side, and more rapidly now, they lifted her towards the air. Most of the rest of the pack returned and grouped solicitously around them, rising rapidly ahead of them to smash away the half-frozen debris of ice which now covered the ocean, so that they could breathe.
For several hours they lay on the surface, breathing deeply, recovering, beginning to shrug off the weariness and move more freely – all except the leader’s consort who lay still, not obviously wounded, nor bleeding any more, but badly stunned by a heavy blow to her head, the back of which was swollen and horribly discoloured by a great bruise. No more of the group joined them. Now there were only twelve of them: not a large pack, but still a formidable force. The leader carefully positioned his mate across his broad forehead so that she could still breathe, and began to move with her: temporarily heading south away from the ice-pack.
ii
Back on the floe, the hours dragged interminably by in a haze of shock for all of them. Even Ross and Job were deeply shaken by their narrow escape, and depressed by the greatly increased danger of their new situation. For now a gentle wind came creeping from the west and moved over the floe, shifting crystals like sandgrains, pushing the temperature down even further, bringing the sounds of restless ice and quiet water. The wind had been blowing for some time, but the ice-hills had functioned as a barrier against it and kept it from the floe itself.