‘Yes?’ he snarled.
The radio began to babble at him in breathless Russian. ‘Sergeant Suslov on Psyche here, General. The code word is Tomsk. We’ve just heard from Kraken. There’s something wrong with the communications, General. They can get us but they can’t get through to you. Can you check you radio, General? Things seem to be going…’ The transmission ended abruptly.
Gogol looked down at the hissing radio. His gaunt face folded slowly into a frown. ‘Now what was that all about?’
The tone in which the question was asked made Illych Kizel’s blood run cold. He could feel it all beginning to slip out of control. Starting with Gogol’s sanity. ‘That was not the correct procedure at all!’
And even though the code word was correct, it didn’t sound at all like Sergeant Suslov either, thought Kizel; but he said nothing, fearing Gogol’s reaction.
‘Send the helicopters out,’ ordered the general at once. ‘I want things checked.’
‘Excuse me, but if we send them out now, General,’ countered Kizel gently, trying to disguise his desperation, ‘we may not have enough fuel to get back to base again. Even with the extra we picked up in Mawanga, things will be very tight.’
Gogol paused. Thought. Took a morphine tablet. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait for the next set of reports to come in.’
‘The bridge is a mess,’ reported Kraken’s first officer. ‘Captain Odate is dead. He threw himself on a grenade. Saved most of the rest of us, though. The soldiers are all dead but everything is shot to pieces. I don’t know whether or not we have control.’
Richard was not a trained battle commander but he had been in war situations and tight spots. He knew that the horror threatening to overcome him must be forced down at all costs or it would incapacitate him. But he could not remember whether or not the Japanese captain was married. Would he have to write to the man’s family? Had he been a Heritage Mariner captain, it would have merited a personal visit to break the news, even to Japan.
His face when he swung round to his captive reflected all of his frustrated rage. The young man’s scrotum clenched automatically with fear and only Duvalier’s quick reactions saved him from castration. ‘When should Kraken be reporting in?’ snarled Richard, and the young soldier told him. Everything.
‘He suspects something,’ said Richard after the terrified boy had pretended to be the dead sergeant. ‘He has to. We’d better cut and run.’
He meant it literally.
He gave the order directly to the line watches. He could check what was happening on the bridges later — though quite frankly he did not want to at all. On his command, they each pulled down the handle on the side of the bright yellow disc which clasped the massive, unbreakable hawser attaching them to the ice.
As soon as the red handles were pulled, bright laser beams, invisible within the bright casing, began to force themselves irresistibly and rapidly between the molecules of the black carbon fibre. The ropes fell back, pulling the cutters with them. The ropes connected to the iceberg had little elasticity, only that lent to them by the fact that the strands had been plaited round each other, and so they could hardly be said to have sprung back.
At one moment the iceberg called Manhattan was tethered to six supertankers. The next it was free, running at thirteen knots, a little north of due east, while the tankers began to sail away.
Kraken’s guardian helicopter, alerted by Gogol’s request for extra vigilance, noticed first. Such was the slowness of the whole proceeding, however, that it was not until the ship was pulling quite appreciably clear of the iceberg that they really believed their eyes. And by then it was too late. The situation was this. General Gogol’s last order had caused the two lead ships to turn north. The force exerted by these vessels was enough to swing the head of the iceberg round by four degrees, pulling it across the northern flow of the Guinea current and up out of the northernmost deep of the Guinea trench. Just as the ships cut themselves loose and the Hind guarding Kraken began to report in, the northernmost flank of Manhattan grazed the southernmost edge of the outwash of the River Niger.
Far beneath the water, a cliff of solid ice swept up against a desert of submarine dunes. At first the soft silt yielded to the hard ice but all too soon Manhattan grazed up against the rock-solid lip of the trench edge. The iceberg’s impetus was all to the north and east. The edge of the rock curved to the south. The sound of the glancing impact was overwhelming. The submarine cliff was smashed back and shattered. Cracks like bolts of lightning split the rock, racing northwards at the speed of sound.
The iceberg rocked, tipping its flat top towards Nigeria. While the pilot was still talking into the handset of his radio, reporting to his general that Kraken seemed to be sailing away, a sort of earthquake overtook him and the whole surface of the ice seemed to heave beneath him. While he was still looking around in confusion, the helicopter simply tipped up and toppled slowly over the edge of the cliff. And, halfway through the report, screaming wordlessly as he fell, the soldier went with it.
All the other helicopters stayed on the surface of the ice. They slid for a metre or two while the ice inclined northwards, but then they slowed to a stand. The incapacitating cacophony of sound began to echo sluggishly towards a kind of silence. The men picked themselves up, slowly dusted themselves off, and looked uncomprehendingly around. Then, one and all, with the exception of Illych Kizel, they reached for their handsets and began to report in.
‘Get in the helicopter. General,’ Kizel was yelling.
The Hind stood still but was rocking on its suspension at the end of the little trenches carved by its undercarriage. Gogol sat beside it, looking upwards. The Hind had been facing eastwards along the length of the iceberg towards its forecastle head. The helicopter had slid sideways and the general had been fortunate not to be crushed beneath it as it moved. The handset of his radio dangled out of the open side and the radio itself shrilled with incoming messages.
‘Get in the helicopter, General. We have to lift off at once!’
Gogol looked across at Kizel and his lip curled. ‘There is no need to panic, Illych, the movement has stopped!’
Kizel almost danced with impatience. ‘No it has not, General. Think! If the iceberg tilts one way and stops, then that is only a pause before it tilts the other way! It is obvious. It is a simple law of physics.’
The general looked up, uncomprehendingly.
‘Did you never play with boats in your bath? What goes one way rocks back the other way too!’ Kizel’s throat tore as he yelled. And as he yelled, he realised that the sounds he was making were vanishing. Being eaten. Swallowed. Swept under. Drowned beyond rescue in the rising tide of thunder which could mean only one thing.
He ran forward, surprised — horrified — to realise that he was already running up a slight slope.
Slight, but steepening.
The Hind hesitated on the very edge of motion, trembling at the top of the little trenches, ready to slide back down.
Illych Kizel caught up the body of his general officer and, too preoccupied to be surprised by the lightness of his burden, climbed into the helicopter with Gogol in his arms. No sooner were they inside the square space of the fuselage than he felt the Hind begin to slide away under him. He dropped the general at once and began to fight his way up the bucking length of the helicopter. He was vaguely aware that Gogol was following him but at some distance. Then he forgot about his commanding officer and threw himself into his seat. The horizon was already looking seriously out of true to his eyes, but that was nothing to the way it looked on the instruments in front of him. And it continued to tilt further and further over in a slow, majestic surge as he fought to get the engine started.