Kate looked up from the fire, and saw it beginning to fall, well clear of the camp now, towards the ice. She saw the heads of the two whales vanish as they jerked under the water. She dived for cover, rolling well clear of the hot tray with its dangerous pile of smouldering sticks to where the tent might afford a little protection.
The stick of dynamite fell through the lower air on to the thin tongue of solid ice between the two holes lately occupied by the killers. When it hit, it skidded along the smooth surface until it wedged itself under the bulk of the largest of the dead walruses.
Then it exploded.
The walrus vanished into the air in a red-brown column.
The sound washed over the floe with the wind, tearing at the tents, taking a great cloud of sparks from the fire tray. It knocked the breath out of Kate’s body, and she lay stunned for a moment. The three men looked through narrowed eyes, Job and Simon at the south of the floe, Colin at Kate. She began to pick herself up . . . and was thrown flat again. There was a grating, slopping sound which seemed to fill the air. The floe heaved and rocked. A curtain of spray roared up through the crack under the tent. The lines holding the net in place, holding the camp together, groaned and stretched. The orange square twisted out of shape, then slowly reformed.
The hill to the south-west of the floe began to fall over.
The force of the explosion, though not particularly great, was strengthened immeasurably by the body of the walrus which sent almost all of its power down into the ice. The ice here to the south, and in an arc right up to the west of the camp was soft and rotten. The force of the explosion was sufficient to make it break as far as the ice hill, and the forces set up as that began to move were enough to do the rest. The sections of the floe to the south and west of the camp slowly detached themselves and began to move away. The ice hill, with nothing to balance its overhang, slowly toppled over and vanished into the water.
The floe was now shaped like a bullet with its blunt tip facing west. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred feet wide, held together by the firmly anchored net. The camp took up almost the whole of it, with its forty-foot long ropes stretching very nearly to the water in all directions. At the two northern corners of the net there were holes where two tents had stood.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Simon, pale and shaking.
“Where are they?” demanded Job. Wherever they came through now it could only spell disaster.
“Kate?” yelled Colin.
“OK.” She picked herself up again. Colin felt better.
“What do we do now?” asked Simon.
“Kill them,” said Colin. “It’s still all we can do. Before they kill us.”
“Which they’ll have no trouble at all doing now,” said Job, going to the very edge of the water and looking out, hefting a stick of dynamite from hand to hand. “Where are they?” he asked again.
Simon stood at the edge of the hole where the supply tent had been, looking down into the black depths. He felt sick, and this was better than hiding in the latrine tent. The wave of nausea passed and he lifted his head. In the distance, something moved. “There,” he said.
“Where?” Job. He and Colin swung round.
“There.” Simon pointed. His arm stretching over the hole.
And the whale came up through the small ring of water, reaching – as it had seen the leader do – for the reaching arm. The breadth of its flippers foiled it, however, for they crashed into the ice before it had completed its attack. Its great yellow teeth snapped on empty air. Simon, screaming, went over backwards. The killer lunged again. Simon rolled backwards, just clear of the white chin.
Colin, grabbing one of the silver spears, pounding back again. He came to a halt beside the whale, looking for a weak spot. The killer was too preoccupied with Simon as he scrabbled frantically away on all fours across the ice to be aware of him. Not the head – it was covered with bone of far too great a thickness to be vulnerable. Not the eyes, he couldn’t get to them. The back of the neck then. Of course!
The whale lunged again, silently. The silence was terrifying. The ice heaved. Colin staggered, but did not fall. He went round to the back of the hole, and his eyes narrowed, looking for the dimple of its blowhole.
The whale, thwarted for the moment, began to sink down, its blowhole gaping as it breathed in. Ross struck with all of his terrible strength and the first two feet of the spear vanished into the body of the killer. It reared back immediately, its mouth wide, its eyes mad with agony. Ross rolled free as the harpoon sang in the air while the killer writhed. Choking on its own blood, it tried to jerk its head free, but the steel sticking solidly out of its back wedged against the ice and would not let it free. Its mouth opening and closing, it lashed madly from side to side, hurled itself forward until its flippers crashed into the ice, jerked itself back, tearing at the brittle floe with all the power in its lithe twenty-eight foot body.
Fascinated, sickened, but unable to look away, Simon and Colin watched the killer in its terrible agony as it tried uselessly to break free, its efforts gradually weakening until it quietened down, blood boiling slowly from its head and its mouth. Then it gave one last terrible, convulsive heave, and lay still.
Colin went over to Simon and picked him up. They turned and looked over the camp. Kate was on her knees by the fire. Beyond her Job was kneeling at the very edge of the ice, holding his dynamite, looking out to sea. Fifty yards away were the two black sails, coming in to see what all the noise was about.
Without looking back, Job said, “Light.” His voice was almost a whisper. If I can light this, he was thinking, I can kill them both now. The fins moved in. “Light!” cried Job again. Softly. Urgently.
But Ross was watching the two containers of dynamite behind Job’s back, slowly settling out of sight. “My God, the floe’s breaking up!” he cried, throwing himself forward on to the suddenly soggy ice. “Job! It’s breaking up!”
The last convulsive shudder by the dying whale had done it. There came a series of sharp, defined reports as though someone were practising small-arms fire. The two black fins, one of them even taller than Ross, began to move nearer.
“Job!” Ross flung out his arm, and the Eskimo, turning at last and seeing the danger, also reached out to his fullest extent. Their hands almost met. There were only inches between them. And so they stayed for interminable seconds, frozen, reaching but not touching. Then a vagary of the current swirled the two pieces of the floe apart and Ross watched, prone on the sodden ice, as his friend, spreadeagled on a raft hardly bigger than himself, was turned away and away by the black spite of the Arctic Ocean.
“Job!” he cried. Then Simon was there with twenty feet of rope from one of the harpoons. He hurled it: Job came up on his knees on the rocking raft to catch it, but it was too short. The long rope was on the far side of the camp, beside the sleeping tent, where Kate had left it during the walrus attack. “Get the long rope,” snapped Ross.
Simon ran past the whale and leaped over the crack wildly. Then he had the rope and was running back, arms reaching out with it, over the unsteady crack, past the whale . . .
The whale saw the reaching arms again, and it had learned its brief and bloody lesson too well to let Simon past. It gave one last convulsive leap forward over the ice. Its flippers tore free at last, but its high fin, only a few feet further down its body, caught in its turn. Those few feet were enough. The blunt snout crashed into Simon’s side, knocking him off his feet. He rolled free, gasping for breath. The jaws snapped at him, only inches away. All self-control gone, he brought the coil of rope over his shoulder and struck at the whale with the heavy coils. The whale caught the rope, jerked it out of his hand, snapped its fifty interlocking teeth shut, cutting the rope to pieces. It lunged forward again.