As the machines vanished behind the billowing smoke of their exhausts into the silver-grey shimmer which joined the sky to the sea and the thudding rumbling of their engines faded, her eyes refocused on the faint reflection of her face in the double-glazing of the window. It had white skin now, for the black colour of smoke, soot and mud had been gently washed away during the last week. But her nose was still slightly misshapen from her fall, and her lips and eyes still swollen from the bites of the mosquitoes and all the other nameless blood suckers of the bush. Her hair clustered round the unnatural moon-shape of her face in dark, fire-curled ringlets. If her parents had still been alive, they would never have recognised her, even now. In another week or so she would either be well enough to get on with her life or she would be deep in the grip of tick fever. At the moment she didn’t really care which alternative turned out to be true.
The door behind her opened and she shifted her desolate gaze to see the reflection of Emily Karanga standing there. ‘How are you feeling?’
Ann took a deep breath and turned stiffly but with a smile. ‘Much better, thanks,’ she lied heroically.
Gogol looked lazily down. He was not a sailor and had never much liked the sea, but he found the simple scale of Mawanga harbour impressive. The dry river split the seaward side of the city like the wound from a giant axe. A great ridge of mud-covered rock kept the sea out of die dry bed, but the silt from a million and more years of flow still stretched out like a pair of bull’s horns seventy-five kilometres long and five wide astride the almost bottomless, fault-floored bay of the anchorage. Only where the horns of land all but joined again, at their tips far out in the Gulf of Guinea, did the sea bed begin to rise once more, into another ridge which broke the force of the waves and made the fifteen-kilometre width of water as calm as a pond.
Down the middle of each horn ran a busy roadway and dotted along these were warehouses, storage facilities and factories. On either side of the pair of horns were docks but only on the outside were there ships. The whole great bay of the anchorage was empty, still, waiting. Along the horns, crouching on the insides above the still surface of the water between the docks and the buildings was a series of massive free-standing pumps capable of moving millions of litres an hour. They were in place but untended. For most of their length, the great low ridges of land were deserted. At the very tips of the horns, however, was a bustle of men and machines so active that Captain Kizel automatically jerked his stick back so that the formation of Hind helicopters jumped bodily over the entrance to the empty, expectant anchorage.
General Warren Cord, US Army (Rtd), explosives expert and UN representative, looked up as the helicopters roared overhead and frowned. Now just what in hell’s name were five big Soviet gunships doing racing around at zero metres out here? Automatically, he checked around himself, but there was nothing else to see in the sky. There wasn’t all that much to see in the sea, either, come to that. Certainly not since all the local tankers had pulled out and sailed west to offload the first consignment of water. There was a lot to see on the land around him, however, for he and his men were busily involved in the most dangerous part of the reception being prepared for the iceberg. The plan looked simple enough on paper, but getting it to work in practice was going to be something else again. Thank the Lord they still had a good few days to get everything in place and properly primed. He turned back to the engineers and the other explosives experts and forgot about the helicopters.
Out over the Gulf of Guinea, the Hinds went to a heading a couple of degrees north of due west and swung into line-abreast formation. With their noses low and their throttles wide, they roared out over the wavetops at 250 kph. After ninety minutes they hopped over a flotilla of heavy-laden freighters. ‘We’re on the right heading,’ observed Kizel. ‘That’s encouraging.’
Gogol leaned back into the depths of the helicopter’s seat. It was not comfortable as such things go and would never have been given space on a Western passenger plane, but it was the most comfortable seat Gogol had occupied in his life. He relaxed, and let exhaustion wash over him. Nothing could go wrong now until they reached the iceberg itself. ‘Wake me in two hours, Illych,’ he ordered and surrendered to the Greek god whose name was shared with the drug he used so much.
An instant later, he was blinking himself awake, his body one long agonising ache. Only the intensity of the pain told him that he had been asleep for hours and needed another morphine pill at once. Even before he orientated himself properly, he had reached into his breast pocket and pulled the pill box out. He crunched the unutterably bitter pill into powder and swallowed convulsively, knowing that this was the quickest way to get it into his system and disrupt the all too efficient communication between the pain centres in his brain and the nerve filaments reaching into the excruciating carcinomas with which his body was filled. Unusually, he took a second, even before the soothing warmth of the first had spread through him. Then he counted to a hundred, slowly, and opened his eyes.
The iceberg was coming up over the horizon now. They were approaching it low and bow on. He had expected it to be white but it was dirty, almost the same colour as his desert-camouflaged helicopters. He had expected it to tower magnificently like an alp. Even from this angle, it seemed to be squat and low. It was only when he registered that the long black water beetles around it were in fact laden supertankers that he really got to grips with the scale of the thing. And it made him catch his breath. He thought back to the anchorage at Mawanga harbour, all that grey area of still water between the bull’s horns of land. This would just fit inside there; just and no more, like a key into a lock. He began to get a sense of its size then, of its weight and latent power. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to cross die harbour even at full speed.
Richard Mariner was on the bridge of Psyche beside Peter Walcott, overseeing the final grudging loosening of the lines to let the fully laden ship settle into her new relationship with the iceberg. Everyone aboard was tense — some of them were terrified, if the truth be known — for it was becoming increasingly obvious that Manhattan was growing unstable.
‘It’s going to be a close-run thing,’ Colin Ross had said last night, and Richard had been forced to agree with him. But their options were severely limited. There was no action they could take which would cause the berg to roll safely. Or to stop it rolling once it began to move. Sometimes it seemed that all that was holding it upright was the speed at which it was moving forward, as though it was some kind of gargantuan bicycle. They couldn’t just cut and run, for they had a responsibility at the very least to try and influence the direction of the roll and direct the resulting waves away from the nearest coasts. They couldn’t just stand by and allow the iceberg to flood the nearest land to the north and east. They had held it up and kept it under their sway, more or less, for twenty-eight days so far. They had moved it further and faster than anyone had ever believed possible — except the men and women whose vision had started the experiment in the first place. They were mere days out from their destination and they could not let it all slip away now.