But it did have enough force to crack the antediluvian tongue of ice. It had sufficient power to send that crack snaking along the valley from side to side of the glacier. It had exactly the impact needed to launch into the Arctic Ocean the largest iceberg that had ever been seen there.
The power of the storm took the iceberg at once and as it could not push the monster westwards, drove it north. With debris from Leonid Brezhnev and her cargo blasted deep into her flank like shot embedded in the side of an elephant, the iceberg crashed up into the pack ice at the top of the world.
Through that first brief summer she drifted, undiscovered by mankind, away into the Angara Basin north of Spitsbergen, and in the sudden autumn froze in place like an alp adrift in the midst of the slowly spinning continent of ice. Through that first winter she stood, three hundred metres of her reaching up into the sky, nearly nine hundred metres of her reaching down into the black depths which are so cold that only the weight of the ice above keeps them liquid. Through summers and winters the berg drifted round the Pole. It took her one complete year to grate across the Harris Ridge, but once she had done so she moved more quickly. By the time she wintered in the Beaufort Sea, there was a community thriving around her: on the deep reaches beneath the surface, she had grown weeds as though she was made of rock, and shrimp and krill came to feed on the weed. Cod came to feed on the shrimp, and seal to feed on the cod. As the summer released her to drift past Prince Patrick Island, so the Arctic birds also came to feed on the cod, and foxes came to feed on the birds and polar bears to feed on the foxes and the seals. But no man saw her. Not then. Not the next summer when she drifted majestically past the wildernesses of Ellesmere Island and back at last towards her birthplace. And now so many years had passed that no one remembered the good ship Leonid Brezhnev, and even the memory of Chernobyl was beginning to fade.
Just as a storm had condemned her to spend five years in the frozen wastes of the far north, so it was a storm which released her. She had never pushed deeply into the pack, but had instead inhabited the edges, following a narrow track along the top of the world where the waters were deep enough to accommodate her massive depth. The slow, unstoppable grinding against ridges and outcrops had shaped her into a long teardrop fifteen kilometres wide and one hundred in length. The bulk of her lay beneath the water but an outcrop, three hundred metres high and eight kilometres wide, stood along the first fifty kilometres of her length. A hook of ice stood out from her side, however, spoiling the symmetry of her shape, and causing her to spin slowly as she moved.
The storm came down from the north in the very middle of that summer and caught the berg as she hesitated at the mouth of the Greenland Sea. For the first time since her violent birth, she moved south. Spinning slowly, she followed the deep-water channels down through the summer-shattered pack ice past Jan Mayen and into the Denmark Strait. Spinning slowly, she followed the dictates of the current and sailed south in the gathering autumn towards Cape Farewell. For the first time since the lookouts of Leonid Brezhnev had seen too little of her too late, men looked upon her. From planes and boats, even from the shore, they looked in wonder. But they saw nothing of her true potential for good or bad. Not these men. Not yet.
By the time winter closed in across the Davis Strait, she was drifting north again, but this time ice and a maze of islands stood between her and the Pole. North she ran, however, until the sea froze solid enough to stop her up in Baffin Bay on the edge of the North Water.
Spring released her into the grip of a new current which pulled her, like a great bird migrating out of season, south.
And men and women came to her at last. Men and women who understood what a wonder she really was. Colin Ross the glaciologist came with his wife Kate, a glacio-biologist, to study the unique environment she created simply by existing. Robin Mariner came with her ship Atropos to effect urgent repairs. Richard Mariner came in the sister ship Clotho to find Robin. He found her and they took their ships home.
And then he came back.
MANHATTAN
THE DAVIS STRAIGHT, NOW
I’ll take Manhattan,
The Bronx and Staten
Island too…
Chapter Five
Deep-sea research vessel Antelope’s Bell UH-1H Iroquois helicopter skimmed along the surface of the restless sea like a lost dragonfly. Steel-grey waves reached hungrily for its sleek little fuselage and tumbled back roaring in thunderous frustration. The spray they spat up fell thickly on the windscreen and the wipers had a hard job keeping it clear. The storm wind had calmed temporarily between squalls, but there was still very little time to make the transfer. The apparently frail little craft was nose down, tail up, dashing wildly through the murk above the Davis Strait.
Richard Mariner, sitting in the left-hand seat, squinted through the roiling overcast dead ahead, but his eyes were defeated by the low cloud and the spray.
‘Can you see it yet?’ called Colin Ross from just behind, the stentorian bellow of his voice all but lost in the clatter of rotors and the thunder of great waters.
‘Not a sign.’
‘It never ceases to amaze me that something that big can be so hard to see at times.’
‘It’s there,’ supplied the pilot, his eyes busy on the instruments. ‘Dead ahead. Couple of miles.’ An incoming radio signal crackled in his headphones and he stopped talking to his passengers for a moment. He stopped talking to them; he did not stop thinking about them.
The pilot, Sam Jenkins, was an old hand and by no means easily impressed and yet the two men he was carrying seemed head and shoulders above the common run of passengers, even the sort of passengers who needed to be ferried between deep-sea research vessels and ice islands in the furthest reaches of the North Atlantic.
Head and shoulders above the rest both literally and figuratively. Both were unusually tall men. Richard Mariner stood well over six feet four in his stockinged feet and Colin Ross topped him by an inch or two. Neither man stooped, as is common with extremely tall people; instead they both walked with an upright vigour and went about all physical activities as though they were twenty years younger than they actually were. The pilot didn’t know either man intimately enough to be certain of their ages, but both were public figures and it was general knowledge that they were at the late forties-early fifties line.
As far as the pilot was aware, each of his passengers was an outstanding man in his field. Colin Ross was a world-class scientist. He and his wife Kate had been on the shortlist for a Nobel Prize a year or so ago for their ground-breaking work on glaciation and the Arctic environment. There was nothing the pair of them did not know about ice and the way it behaved in large masses on land or — as in this case — at sea. Or, for that matter, about any lichen, moss, plant, animal, fish or mammal associated with it.
Richard Mariner was a different kettle of fish. He was the last of the independent shipping men in Britain. He owned and ran Heritage Mariner, a company which had dominated the shipping world since the fifties. He owned and ran a fleet of supertankers transporting oil between the Gulf and Europe, out to the Far East, in to the States. He owned and ran the two great nuclear waste transporters Atropos and Clotho which carried waste product for safe reprocessing between North America and Europe — and, the talk was, his were the only such ships which would be allowed to pick up the incredibly lucrative Russian nuclear disposal market too. Heritage Mariner were also into leisure boating and were responsible for the Katapult series of multihulls — the Rolls-Royce of the boating world. And because he was a sailor as much as a pilot, the man at the controls knew that Heritage Mariner had a subsection perhaps more famous than the mother company, an offshoot which was Richard Mariner’s personal creation and ultimate achievement. This was Crewfinders, the most famous and efficient crew-finding agency in the world. A legendary organisation whose unmatched reputation was based upon their promise to replace any crew member on any ship anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours. The pilot wondered whether they dealt with marine helicopter men. He must remember to ask; he wouldn’t mind going on the Crewfinders books himself if they would have him. He wouldn’t mind working for Richard Mariner at all, in fact, and he was a notoriously hard man to please.