‘Come north,’ he ordered. ‘Go to three hundred and forty degrees. We’ll try for Spitsbergen.’
The helmsman obediently swung the helm, further and further over. His gaze was fixed on the binnacle and his open Uzbek face gathered into a frown of concern as the printed card sat immobile. For the first time in ninety-six hours, the heading was changed. And the act revealed that the compass wasn’t working either.
They were utterly lost by then. Blind, deaf, dumb and dying. Hundreds of kilometres north of where they thought they were, hundreds of kilometres further west. Had the radar been working, it would have shown the coastal ice, perhaps the coast, towards which they were heading. Had the radio been working, the frustrated radio officer would have been able to talk to his colleagues at the nearest land-based radio station in Scoresby Sound, Greenland, which was slightly south and west of them, not very distant at all.
Since changing course at the captain’s last conscious order to gather the wind beneath their skirts, they had been forced to maintain a steady ten knots to keep steerageway. But the wind and current had pushed them westwards, latterly north-westwards, at more than twelve knots and they had covered in excess of eighteen hundred kilometres. During that time they had come south of Bear Island and west of Spitsbergen. They had passed north of Jan Mayen Island yesterday and now, did they but know it, the forbidding wastes of King Frederick VIII Land on the north-west of Greenland, with its mountainous ice-capped cliffs and towering glacier outthrusts, was all that awaited them, a little more than twelve hours’ sailing dead ahead. It was a mark of the damage done to the ship’s normally reliable equipment by the radiation leaking from the forward hold that something as massive as Greenland could remain so utterly invisible.
Captain Borodin continued unknowingly north-westwards, believing he was going one hundred and twenty degrees further to the south, pushing forward much more rapidly than he imagined possible. Had he been well and alert, things would have been very different, but of course he was neither. Had Tatiana Bulgakov been more experienced and less exhausted, she might have seen the danger. Had Sholokov not been consumed by the deadly cargo, he might have pulled the captain up and changed the heading or the orders to the engine room.
But because no one knew what the strange black glass actually was, where it had come from or what it could do, none of these things happened.
Leonid Brezhnev, laden with hundreds of tons of explosives and the result of General Gogol’s wild attempt to avoid a meltdown at Chernobyl, was heading for disaster at what in calm conditions would have been full speed ahead.
Borodin held on until mid-afternoon, but it was obvious that his strength was all but gone by the time Tatiana’s first eight to four watch was over. Although fast sickening herself, she had him taken to bed then checked on the sick. At six she grabbed an hour’s sleep and at seven she forced herself to eat something. By eight she was back on the bridge, relieving the exhausted third officer who could at least sleep without having to worry about the sick crew. She slumped in the watchkeeper’s chair, feeling the food in her stomach begin to rise in revolt. She tasted iron whenever she swallowed and knew her gums were beginning to bleed like everyone else’s. She gritted her teeth and the sound that the roots of her molars made moving loosely in the gums beneath her cheekbones and ears was more than she could stand. She clutched her right fist to her trembling lips and fled.
The helmsman peered through the driving rain but he could see no distance ahead at all. He couldn’t even see the length of the weather deck. The noise of the storm drowned out everything else, even the sound of surf against cliffs. The set of the sea was coming in from behind them so that there was little enough to tell the sensitive fingers on the wheel that the ship was entering a deep, cliff-bound bay. There was no one in the forecastle head and the radar was utterly blind.
So, in the end, no one aboard appreciated what happened at all.
The bay had a wide mouth and a deep, deep floor. In fact it was a wide sweep of cliff-walled shore only made into a bay by the inexorable thrust of the glacier debouching out into the stormy sea.
The glacier was more than twenty miles across and it was this fact that had allowed it to push such a massive tongue of ice out for so many miles into the northernmost waters of the Denmark Strait. It had propelled itself, millimetre by millimetre, out into the water for millennia and now it was ripe to break free. The stormy conditions had cleared away the protective shield of shore ice that it normally wore, and the blind ship was running swiftly into the groin that the glacier made with the mountainous wall of the shore. Under normal circumstances, the outthrust of the ice would have broken off in smaller pieces, cracked laterally across as it was. But the Leonid Brezhnev negated all that. Millions of years of painstaking physical geography were nullified in the instant of its contact.
The coastline lay at an angle along an axis from south-east to north-west. The glacier protruded at right angles, like an arrow from a bow, aiming up towards the Pole. Of all the cracks that ran across it, the greatest was parallel to the coastal cliffs at the very point the ice oozed out of the timeless rock.
It was exactly here, at half past eight that stormy evening early in June 1988, that the ship Leonid Brezhnev, laden with hundreds of tons of explosives and carrying just enough sweating dynamite to act as the perfect impact detonator — as well as nearly a hundred tons of rough glass impregnated with the core of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor — struck at full speed ahead.
She was not as strong as she had been. Her sides were growing thin and her lateral bulkheads weak. Her bow rode up into the fissure by the shore, a valley nearly a hundred metres high and some kilometres in length but only a couple of metres wide. At once the pressure of the ice stopped the forward movement of the forecastle, but the rest of the ship, and everything it was carrying, continued at thirteen knots. The ammunition smashed through onto the glass from Chernobyl and the warheads came through on top of that. The reactors from the decommissioned submarines came through onto the warheads and brought the crates of sweating dynamite along with them. In a process as logical as a theorem by Pythagoras, the length of the ship concertinaed as the thin, rusty sides tried unavailingly to absorb the impact. The last and heaviest units that she had been carrying broke free as the engines, complete with their massive, old-fashioned boilers, blasted through on top of the sweating dynamite.
It took less than a minute for Leonid Brezhnev to tear herself to pieces but that was like an eternity compared with the instantaneous totality of the devastating explosion which followed the impact of the boilers on the dynamite. There was no way to calculate the force unleashed by the hell’s brew of explosives which suddenly found themselves on top of each other and all going up at once. How many cities it would have destroyed, how many small countries it might have devastated, how many states, republics or counties it might have laid waste cannot be counted.