John Higgins was actually on the bridge of Niobe when it happened, close beside the helmsman looking forward down the deck. And so he got perhaps the best view of all. He never knew exactly where the helicopter appeared from. It was just there, suddenly, its cockpit windows dead level with his eyes, a matter of metres in front of him, its rotors beating the air apparently only millimetres up. The shock — the sound — was overpowering.
Ropes cascaded out of the side and men slid down them. Men in uniform, armed to the teeth. ‘My God,’ he whispered, and drew in his breath to order a general distress signal. Then he saw how many air-to-surface missiles were pointing directly at him. And, for die first time in his life, he felt faint. Every bullet-shaped warhead etched itself indelibly on his consciousness and he heard someone swearing very loudly and extremely obscenely. It could well have been himself.
The helicopter jerked up and away abruptly, as though it had been hooked like a fish, and John swung round and tensed to sprint across to the radio room, just as the three-man commando came in through the door.
Silence.
Stillness.
Then, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ said a deep voice in slow, heavily accented English. ‘May I introduce you to our weapons? This is what is called in the West the 5.45mm AKS-74 assault rifle. It can fire its full magazine of bullets in very much less than a tenth of a second with a muzzle velocity in excess of 870 metres per second over a range of about 500 metres. My colleague over there who has just incapacitated your communications equipment is holding the 7.62mm SVD rifle which is deadly at more than 1500 metres. And this is the RGD-5 hand grenade. For your further information, the men in the engine room with the engineering officers are similarly armed. Now, are there any questions so far?’
With very slight variations, this was what happened to all of them. Hardly surprisingly, the abrupt appearance of a heavily armed Hind-D helicopter hovering within scant metres of the bridge clear-view while soldiers abseiled out of it onto the deck stopped everyone dead in their tracks. No one managed to contact any of the others and within a very short time each ship had had its main radio equipment destroyed and was cut off from the rest of the convoy, with a group of heavily armed, quietly courteous soldiers on the bridge and in the engine room only too ready to explain both their own arms and those on the helicopters currently aimed unerringly at each bridgehouse. Only with Katya Borodin and her crew was there any threat of trouble at first for they reacted particularly violently to being pirated by their own compatriots, but it was obvious that the invading soldiers knew that they were going to be dealing with Russian officers and crew and after a while they calmed things down. So all the soldiers were in their allotted places and all the messages of confirmation had been radioed up to the command helicopter on the ice, and the next stage of the iceberg’s destruction could begin.
Gogol had positioned his helicopter in the logical place: exactly in the middle of Manhattan, equidistant from the four other helicopters which were stationed on the cliff edges closest to the ships they were threatening, available to back any one of them up. The communications were clear, and it was easy enough to pass out orders either individually on the prearranged closed channels or generally on the open frequency. But between giving the orders, hearing that they were being obeyed, and seeing the result, there was a long wait. And during that time, with the tension sending adrenaline fizzing through his system, adding its weight to the morphine overdose, the general began to talk.
To the stunned young Captain Illych Kizel he described that night at Chernobyl and its aftermath. How, still ignorant of what the radiation was doing to him, he oversaw the digging up and crating of the black glass he had created. He relived the long train ride north to the coast and the loading of the Leonid Brezhnev. He described the horror with which the loss of that good ship had been welcomed in some rarefied political circles and his own feelings of sadness as his body had finally begun to show him what must have happened to the men and women on the freighter far out in the Arctic Ocean. He described, for the first time in his life and the last, exactly what was wrong with him and what the doctors at the institute had done to try and control it. How he had entered periods of remission for long enough to give evidence at the inquiry, then been forced to take early retirement, with nothing left to do but count the days of his consumption from within.
Then came the chance of coming to Africa and getting back into the swing of things, working with his beloved tanks again. And the sudden shock, the horror, of discovering that, entombed in the iceberg on its way to Mau, the irradiated contents of the lost ship were returning to haunt him. That Chernobyl was forcing its way back into his life.
‘It is here,’ he said. ‘Somewhere below us. They are certain of it. They have found evidence. They have found pieces of the glass, the glass which no one in the world outside Russia must ever know about. The black glass which even now could destroy our international standing and bring us to the edge of the abyss. The glass I made, on that terrible, terrible night.’
He pulled himself up, surprised to discover that the weight of the story had bowed him down until he was almost on his knees beside the open side of the helicopter. The act of straightening brought sweat to his white lips and he crunched up another morphine tablet before he raised the helicopter’s handset to his lips and said on the open channel, ‘We are not moving off line quickly enough. Tell the two lead ships to steer north as hard as they can.’
It was Wally Gough who first alerted Richard, coming into the ping-pong room at a dead run, his face alive with excitement, yelling, ‘Have you seen that helicopter, sir? My God, I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life! I think it’s actually flying backwards in front of the bridge.’
Richard had been deep in concentrated calculations and, because his room was closer to the cliff than to the sea, he had not even heard the helicopter. As soon as he realised that the excited boy was not engaged in some kind of joke he was on his feet and following him out into the corridor. They arrived just in time to see six heavily armed soldiers pounding up the stairs towards the navigation bridge. Richard ran back to his makeshift office and grabbed his walkie-talkie. By the grace of God he had it on channel twelve, an open channel to the radio room, and he knew exactly what it meant when the signal suddenly went silent.
He swung round, stunned by the speed of events, just as Wally came back in through the door behind him. All the boy’s excited elation had been replaced by sick fear. ‘They’ve destroyed the main radio,’ said Richard without thinking. ‘My God, they’ve cut us off!’
Wally stopped dead, as though he had been hit. He sank into a nearby chair and it was a mark of his shock that he did not ask permission first. ‘What is it?’ he asked faintly. ‘What do you think is going on, sir?’
‘We’re being hijacked! Well, I’m damned.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, offhand I’d say that either someone doesn’t want Manhattan to arrive at Mawanga, or they want it to arrive somewhere else.’
‘But there’s nowhere else on the west coast of Africa that could take anything this big.’
‘Quite right, my boy. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ As he was speaking, Richard was punching in the contact number for the engine room, but the number just rang and rang without answer. ‘Damn! They’ve beaten me to it,’ he said. He took in a deep breath. ‘So, they control the bridge and the engine room on Psyche…’