And then abruptly there was silence.
“Where is it? Sweet Jesus, where is it?” Colin was searching the fog with almost insane eyes, but all he could see were vague and shifting shadows, looming huge but insubstantial.
“Help!” he yelled, his voice pitifully weak.
“There!” cried Kate, pointing. Something was moving in the lower skirts of the fog. They strained to see more clearly, calling out as loud as they could, “HERE! HERE! HELP!”
But what they could see moving were ten tall black thorn-shaped fins. The pack was back.
Ross fell to his knees, his spirit very nearly broken, and Kate knelt beside him, holding his shoulders, tears streaming down her face as the black sails began to circle the tiny floe.
Unable to speak, they watched as they formed an arrow and began to close in on them, towering out of the water. Shuffling stiffly, the two humans turned round and round, their eyes fixed hopelessly upon the whales. In the tense quiet the ocean lapped against the tiny fragment of ice, the water hissed and bubbled as the fins moved closer. The floe began to rock as the huge bodies brushed against it. There were ten in all, their fins varying from four feet to nearly seven feet high.
The hope which had bubbled in them at the sound of the ship’s engines drained away. It seemed to both of them that they had been fools to think they might survive. Like children lost in the dark they clung to each other, and waited for the inevitable end as the arrow-head formation of the killers moved away, becoming vague in the mist, only to turn and begin to build up speed in an attacking run at them.
Now that it no longer mattered, Ross relaxed and his great frame convulsed. Every muscle began to jerk with wrenching force. His teeth crashed together. Kate hugged him harder, wrapped both arms round him with all her strength, stroked his writhing shoulder muscles. “It’s all right,” she whispered, “it’s all right, Colin.”
The fins sank out of sight, several yards out. Colin tensed his massive frame for the shock. His right arm, round Kate’s waist, all but cracked her ribs.
Nothing happened.
Then the killers surfaced. Kate and Colin jerked round in unison, just in time to see the formation of the fins break up and vanish silently behind them. And out of the silence came a new sound: the powerful buzz of an outboard motor.
Neither of them moved or spoke, as though this were some strange magic which they could destroy by an unwise act or word. They simply knelt side by side on the ice, searching the shifting fog with wild eyes.
Ross saw it first, and told Kate by tightening his right arm again, and lifting the slightly bent club of his left arm. While silently, behind them, the fins reappeared and held still as the pack watched.
Out of the fog a tall shape took form. For a terrible moment they thought it was a fin of a whale for it was of equal size, but a fluke in the wind cleared the fog a little, and a tall, broad-shouldered man was revealed. He was clean-shaven, with short dark hair sticking out from the tight hood of his bright yellow anorak. He was standing erect, legs slightly parted, in the bows of a fat little inflatable. He had a long boat-hook held in the navy-prescribed fashion across his chest, parallel to the surface of the water.
“Kto vi?” called the man. He had a deep resonant voice. The rest of the rubber boat gathered itself out of the mist. There were four more men seated in it, all staring suspiciously at them past the legs of the man in front. “Kto vi?” he repeated. The boat slowed.
“What?” called Colin. His voice was faint, broken.
“Kto vi? Vi otkuda?” The boat stopped and bobbed uneasily.
“What is he saying?” whispered Colin to Kate.
“I don’t know!”
There was a little silence before the man in the boat, clearly confused, tried again. “Kto vi? Vi otkuda? Vi nachoditis v sovjetskich vodach.”
The word sovjetskich slowly sank into Ross’s cold-fuddled brain. “Of course!” he said. “They’re Russian! Soviet!”
“Russian?” Kate’s face was blank with astonishment.
“Yes. We must have drifted into Russian waters.”
The man in the bows of the boat, only twenty feet away now, looked back over his shoulder, then he repeated “Vi nachoditis v sovjetskich vodach.”
“English!” Ross pointed to himself, to Kate. “We’re English. Do any of you speak English?”
The man in the bows made a gesture. The boat turned a little. It looked as though they were going away again. Then, suddenly, there was a plump, deep-chested young man standing by the man in the bows. He turned his head towards them, light catching his glasses, glistening in the fog-droplets on his short dark brown beard. “I speak,” he yelled. He had a light, baritone voice. “Menya zovut Pjotr Picatel.” he gestured to himself and repeated, “Pjotr Picatel.”
“Well, how do you do Pjotr? It’s nice to meet you. Now can you get us off the fucking ice?” Colin was in an agony of impatience. Surely they could sort all this out later, on their ship, in the warm.
“Please,” cried Pjotr “Not fast. You listen. Eto vtoroi ofitser . . . ah . . . this second officer, Sergei Antonovich Ivanov.” He gestured towards the tall man holding the boat-hook. “He ask questions. You listen. I translate. OK?” He beamed.
“Kto vi?” snapped the second officer.
“Who you?” yelled Pjotr Picatel, cheerfully butchering the grammar of a language he did not fully understand.
“Colin Ross. Kate Warren.”
“Vi otkuda?”
“Whence you?”
“We were wrecked east of here. Plane crash.”
“Skolko vremeni vi uzhye na Idu?”
“How long on ice?”
“A week.”
“Yeshyour ostavshiyis v zhivich?”
“Any survivors more?”
“There were four more. They’re dead. And we’ll be dead too if you don’t bloody hurry up!”
Pjotr Picatel obviously translated all of this when he whispered to the second officer, because Sergei Antonovich shrugged and said, “Nash vrach budyet vas osmatrivat.”
“Our doctor examine you,” said Pjotr, grinning cheerfully. “We take you on ship now.”
The buzz of the idling engines snarled a little louder. The boat moved slowly forward until the fat black rubber bows nestled against the ice. Kate and Colin picked themselves up stiffly, and, suddenly very weak indeed, staggered towards the boat. Pjotr Picatel leaped on to the ice and stood, holding one end of the boat-hook in his left hand keeping the boat in place, ready to help them on board. The second officer held the other end of the boat-hook. Another of the crew was shaking out heavy grey blankets, ready to wrap them round their frozen shoulders.
Kate went first, stepping carefully over the plump bulge of rubber on to the slatted wooden grating in the bottom of the boat. The second officer helped her aboard. The other sailor wrapped the heavy blanket round her and courteously turned to support her down the fifteen feet of the boat’s length to a seat. Her knees gave out. Two more crewmen leaped up to help her. Only the man controlling the outboard motor did not move.
“Now, Ross,” said Pjotr, his right arm thrown back invitingly.
Colin glanced round what was left of the floe. It had served them well after all; it would have supported all of them, had they survived. Suddenly it was like leaving an old friend. His eyes flicked over the mottled white, slightly uneven surface, then up into the fog as though he expected to see the other five of them there: the pilot, Hiram, Warren, Job and Simon. And indeed there was something . . .
“LOOK OUT!” he pointed.
The ten fins cut the water, one, nearly seven feet high with a great bite taken out of it. With steady, silent power, they were coming towards the boat. Pjotr let go of the boat-hook and the boat surged back away from the ice. The ten fins closed, the water folding back from their leading edges. Then they began to sink. In perfect arrow formation they dived under the boat, surfaced on the far side, and vanished into the fog.