Kerans rose and hurried around the pooi to the rail. "Don't tell me they're leaving today-? Riggs is clever enough to try that in the hope of catching us unprepared."
Beatrice at his side, the towel clasped to her breasts, they looked down at the base. Every member of the unit appeared to have been mobilised, and the cutter and the two launches surged and jockeyed around the landing jetty. The drooping rotors of the helicopter were circling slowly, Riggs and Macready about to embark. The other men were lined up on the jetty, waiting their turn to climb into the three craft. Even Bodkin had been roused from his bunk, and was standing bare-chested on the bridge of the testing station, shouting up at Riggs.
Suddenly Macready noticed Kerans at the balcony rail. He spoke to the Colonel, who picked up an electric megaphone and walked forwards across the roof.
"KER-ANS!! DOC-TOR KER-ANS!!"
Giant fragments of the amplified phrases boomed among the rooftops, echoing off the aluminium in-falls set into the sheets of windows. Kerans cupped his ears, trying to distinguish what the Colonel was shouting, but the sounds were lost in the mounting roar of the helicopter. Then Riggs and Macready climbed into the cabin, and the pilot began to semaphore at Kerans through the cockpit windscreen.
Kerans translated the morse signals, then turned quickly from the rail and began to carry the deck chairs into the lounge.
"They're going to pick me up here," he told Beatrice as the helicopter rose from its pedestal and lifted diagonally across the lagoon. "You'd better get dressed or out of sight. The slip-stream will strip your towel away like tissue paper. Riggs has got enough to contend with now."
Beatrice helped him furl the awning, and stepped into the lounge as the flickering shadow of the helicopter filled the patio, the downdraught fanning across their shoulders.
"But what's happened, Robert? Why is Riggs so excited?"
Kerans shielded his head from the engine roar and stared out across the green-ringed lagoons stretching towards the horizon, a sudden spasm of anxiety twisting one corner of his mouth.
"He's not excited, just worried stiff. Everything is beginning to collapse around him. Lieutenant Hardman has disappeared!"
Like an immense putrescent sore, the jungle lay exposed below the open hatchway of the helicopter. Giant groves of gymnosperms stretched in dense clumps along the rooftops of the submerged buildings, smothering the white rectangular outlines. Here and there an old concrete water tower protruded from the morass, or the remains of a makeshift jetty still floated beside the hulk of a collapsing office block, overgrown with feathery acacias and flowering tamarisks. Narrow creeks, the canopies overhead turning them into green-lit tunnels, wound away from the larger lagoons, eventually joining the six hundred-yard-wide channels which broadened outwards across the former suburbs of the city. Everywhere the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the foetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow discs of funguscovered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.
Clamped securely to the cabin handrail by the nylon harness around his waist and shoulders, Kerans gazed down at the unfolding landscape, following the water-ways unwinding from the three central lagoons. Five hundred feet below the shadow of the helicopter raced across the mottled green surface of the water, and he focussed his attention on the area immediately around it. An immense profusion of animal life filled the creeks and canals: water-snakes coiled themselves among the crushed palisades of the water-logged bamboo groves, colonies of bats erupted out of the green tunnels like clouds of exploding soot, iguanas sat motionlessly on the shaded cornices like stone sphinxes. Often, as if disturbed by the noise of the helicopter, a human form seemed to dart and hide among the water-line windows, then revealed itself to be a crocodile snapping at a water-fowl, or one end of a subsiding log dislodged from the buffeted tree-ferns.
Twenty miles away the horizon was still obscured by the early morning mists, huge palls of golden vapour that hung from the sky like diaphanous curtains, but the air over the city was clear and vivid, the exhaust vapour of the helicopter sparkling as it receded in a long undulating signature. As they moved away from the central lagoons in their outward spiral sweep Kerans leaned against the hatchway and watched the glistening display, abandoning his search of the jungle below.
The chances of seeing Hardman from the air were infinitesimal. Unless he had taken refuge in a building near the base he would have been forced to travel along the water-ways, where he had the maximum possible protection from aerial observation under the overhanging fern trees.
In the starboard hatchway Riggs and Macready continued their vigil, passing a pair of binoculars to and fro. Without his peaked cap, his thin sandy hair blown forwards over his face, Riggs looked like a ferocious sparrow, his little jaw jutting fiercely at the open air.
He noticed Kerans gazing up at the sky and shouted: "Seen him yet, Doctor? Don't dawdle now, the secret of a successful sweep is one hundred percent cover, one hundred percent concentration."
Accepting the rebuke, Kerans scanned the tilting disc of the jungle again, the tall towers of the central lagoon pivoting around the hatchway. Hardman's disappearance had been discovered by a sick-bay orderly at 8 o'clock that morning, but his bed was cold and he had almost certainly left the previous evening, probably soon after the final ward-roll at 9-30. None of the smaller scows hitched to the jetty rail had gone, but Hardman could easily have lashed together a couple of the empty fuel drums stored in a pile by the C-Deck hold and lowered them noiselessly into the water. However crude, such a craft would paddle smoothly and carry him ten miles away by day-break, somewhere on the perimeter of a search area of some seventy-five square miles, every acre of which was honeycombed by derelict buildings.
Unable to see Bodkin before being winched aboard the helicopter, Kerans could only speculate about Hardman's motives for leaving the base, and whether these were part of a grander design maturing slowly in the Lieutenant's mind or merely a sudden meaningless reaction to the news that they were leaving the lagoons for the north. Kerans' initial excitement had evaporated, and he felt a curious sense of relief, as if one of the opposing lines of force that encircled him had been removed by Hardman's disappearance and the tension and impotence contained in the system suddenly released. If anything, however, the task of remaining behind would now be even more difficult.
Unshackling his harness, Riggs stood up with a gesture of exasperation and handed the binoculars to one of the two soldiers squatting on the floor at the rear of the cabin.
"Open searches are a waste of time over this type of terrain," he shouted at Kerans. 'We'll go down somewhere and have a careful look at the map, you can have a shot at reading Hardman's psychology."
They were about ten miles north-west of the central lagoons, the towers almost obscured in the mists along the horizon. Five miles away, directly between them and the base, was one of the two motor launches, cruising down an open channel, its white wake fading across the glass sheet of the water. Blocked by the urban concentration to the south, less silt had penetrated into the area, and the vegetation was lighter, more expanses of unbroken water between the principal lines of buildings. Altogether the zone below them was empty and uncongested, and Kerans felt convinced, though for no rational reason, that Hardman would not be found in the north-west sector.
Riggs climbed up into the cockpit and a moment later the speed and inclination of the helicopter altered. They began to make a shallow dive, swinging down to within a hundred feet of the water, glided in and out of the wide canals looking for a convenient rooftop on which to perch. Finally they picked out the humped back of a half-submerged cinema and let down slowly onto the square firm roof of the neo-assyrian portico.