With some relief Colin stowed his oar and got out the harpoons, hefting them in his hand, measuring the change in balance brought about by the attachment of the ropes, testing the fine-honed sharpness of their points.
When he looked up, they were very near to the other floe. Kate, unable to stand on the madly rocking surface, crawled over on to the very edge, water from the uneven bow-waves slopping over her knees. “Colin,” she cried.
“Closer,” he shouted to Simon. Simon glanced at the edge of the ice, the water folding itself into waves and eddies beneath it, narrowed his eyes, and edged the canoe another foot towards the side of the floe. Then he hunched forward a little more and settled down to the deep rhythmic thrusting of the paddle which would keep them up with the whale for hour after hour if necessary.
“I’m going to kill it, then come back for you,” Colin yelled to Kate.
“Be careful.”
“Too right I will.”
There was nothing more to say. Colin brought his hand down on Simon’s smoothly working shoulder. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get the bastard.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Ahab,” said Simon and pulled on away from the floe. Ross picked up the harpoons again and balanced them, lost in concentration, his shoulders tense, hulking like some great figurehead over the front of the tiny boat.
They were closing in.
Simon felt good. He felt like singing he was so excited. He suddenly realised that he was not in the slightest afraid, and he laughed to himself. He had taken charge of the boat in the emergency, and before that he had fought with the great Ross and got him at his mercy. All his life, it seemed, he had been working towards this moment.
The killer, lost in a panic at the burning strength of the net around its head, was running, with all its massive strength, on the surface. As soon as the net had closed around it, the whale had been hurled back in its memory to the moment when, as a calf, running in a small family unit with its parents in the south Pacific near Antarctica, it had been captured. They had used nets on it then too, wrapping its sensitive young body in the strong strands, dragging it out of the water and into the boat, away from everything it knew and loved, and into a strange, terrifying world.
But now its panic was coming under control. It had not been dragged, helpless, out of the water. It still had a chance to escape. As it swam, it tore at the strands tight across its face and mouth, and began to free itself from the net.
Ross knelt, rigid, as the great fin loomed up, almost near enough to touch. He had to tilt his head back a little to see its curved rose-thorn point, nearly a yard above his head. Then he was looking down, through the thin covering of water which hissed and writhed over the black bulge of the killer’s back.
“Closer!” he yelled. “Give me another ten feet.” The monster seemed to be moving faster now. But they were inching up. He was over the net now. He glanced up. Only a yard or so away the back of its head rose like a wet rock out of the churning sea; its blowhole opening and closing as it gasped in air.
“A yard,” he screamed. “Give me a yard!”
Simon paddled harder, the strokes beginning to knot his back and shoulders as he thrust the canoe through the water. Colin took the first harpoon. He should have attached the twenty-foot length of orange rope to the hook at the front of the canoe but he forgot. They were coming in on the whale’s right, on their left. He would have to stab it down across his chest. They would have to be very, very close. He licked his lips and was surprised by the sharp taste of salt on his tongue. His face and the front of his anorak were running with spray.
“Closer,” he yelled.
The black, orange-squared hump was under the bows now, rising out of the water less than a foot from the left side of the boat. Colin leaned over to his left, harpoon poised over his head, breath held in excitement and against the warm stench of the whale breathing.
Simon, watching, guiding the boat up against the whale’s head, terribly aware of the huge black sail of its fin a little behind his shoulder, screamed, “Now!” and Colin’s hand began to travel down.
At Simon’s cry, as though it understood, the whale’s head lashed to the right, striking solidly against the side of the boat.
Colin stabbed out to his left as the boat wallowed right, out from under him. The harpoon came down behind the blowhole, into the breadth of the monster’s neck. For a terrifying moment, Colin hung over the ocean, his one hand gripped wildly on the solid column of the buried harpoon, legs in the rocking boat, the full weight of his massive body trying to hurl him down into the churning ocean. He looked down the length of the silver shaft as though in a dream to where it ended, not in a barbed point, but in a dimple of sleek black flesh which rapidly became a pool of blood. With his full weight resting on it the harpoon slipped even deeper, trembling under his hand as it rubbed against the hard muscles deep in the whale’s body, seeming to give off a tone like a tuning-fork. Ross pushed away from it, throwing himself back into the boat.
As soon as the great sail of the fin changed its attitude, Simon hurled the boat, made ungainly by the heaving weight of Colin in the bows, away to his right – and it was as well he did so, for the whale on its way down took the opportunity to strike at them with the breadth of its tail – which was almost twice the size of the boat. The great tail lashed down a scant yard away, missing them completely but nearly swamping them as it hit the water.
For a second they sat still in the wildly bobbing boat, Ross slowly straightening, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand; Simon sitting gasping for breath as though he were drowning.
The line hissed down into the water, until its end disappeared overboard. Colin cursed, then saw it didn’t matter. The floe, still moving sluggishly forward, tilted and began to turn round and round, like a very slow spinning top.
“Right,” said Simon, and he began to paddle easily away from the floe.
“Simon! Where the hell are you going?”
“About a hundred feet away from the floe. At least a hundred feet away. Further.”
Colin still didn’t see.
“Look. The killer’s attached to the floe, right? It can’t dive more than forty to sixty feet. It’ll never drag that much ice down with it. It has to stay within sixty feet of the floe. So, if we go within sixty feet of the floe, then we’re in the killer’s ground. It’ll come straight up through the bottom of the boat and tear us to shreds. See?”
Colin nodded.
“If, however,” Simon was lecturing now, as though to a backward child, “we stay clear, it will run out of air and – ”
“Simon! MOVE!” It was already coming up at them out of the shadows; magnified by the tricks of the water it seemed much closer than it really was, wrapped in the net like a drowned man. Horrible, unearthly. The silver column of the harpoon gleaming behind its head.
In a flash Simon was paddling again at top speed. The whale altered its angle of attack, trying to come up under the boat.
“Faster!” screamed Colin, craning back, still seeing it.
“Is it still coming?” gasped Simon.
“Believe me! You want it to bite you in the arse?”
Simon hurled the canoe wildly through the water, panic lending him strength.
At the last moment the net jerked the killer out of its angle of attack, and it hurled out of the water scant feet behind them, its scream of rage exploding over the air. The jerk on the rope pulled it back like a leashed dog. Kate was thrown flat on her back. The whale slammed into the water, floundering for a moment.
“TURN!” yelled Ross, up on his knees at full stretch, the second harpoon up, the white throat and belly just out of reach. “HURRY!”
Shaking his head like a wounded bear, Simon hurled the light craft round and back into the attack as the killer thrashed helplessly. For a second, the boat ground against the heaving side. Ross hurled the spear with all his massive strength.