Kizel’s eyes were clouding up and out of focus; he was flying by touch again and just succumbing to the blessed belief that he was pulling free after all when he felt the fist of his commanding officer come pounding on his shoulder. His eyes leaped wide and he risked a quick, startled glance to his left.
Gogol had gone utterly insane. His face was twisted with a wild, terrifying combination of stress and agony. He was yelling as loudly as he could through a throat no longer designed to accept volume, forcing air up out of lungs which no longer should have known how to breathe. He was doing to his cancer-corrupted body what Kizel was doing to the buckling frame of the Hind. He was screaming at the top of his voice and he was pounding on the pilot’s shoulder and gesturing wildly dead ahead and upwards.
At first, still believing the man was mad with fear, Kizel thought Gogol was ordering him to get the helicopter up and away. He shook his head, frowned, shrugged the importunate man away. But Gogol would not be dismissed. He screamed until blood came boltering from his gaping mouth. He battered the pilot and gestured.
At last Kizel looked upwards towards where the general was pointing. He never really believed what he saw but he saw it so clearly that he carried the sight to his grave. The crest of the frozen wave was etched against the bright blue sky so absolutely that the ice itself seemed dark. And, frozen into the line of that crest, was the forecastle of a ship. The steel sides were twisted; blast-damaged, burned, half-melted out of shape, but they were there. And they were unmistakable. There was part of a ship frozen into the ice.
Abruptly, as though a spike of ice had been pushed down his throat, Kizel froze. He knew what ship this was. There could only be one. He glanced back across at Gogol. The general was slumped back in his seat now and he seemed to have grown a bright red beard.
From that moment on, Illych Kizel saw things only in still pictures, as though the sun had become a massive strobe light. He saw the bows of the ship Leonid Brezhnev rear in silhouette against the sky. He saw the general leaning back in his seat coughing up more blood. He saw the cliff falling as the helicopter continued to rise at his implacable command. He saw the ship topple forward beneath the nose of the Hind. He saw Gogol, gesturing wildly, jerk forward as the frozen ship fell, and he understood. He saw the open front of the ship, its metal spread wide open by the force of some unimaginable explosion, its name still readable. Its identity and nationality still all too obvious. He saw Gogol jerking as his lifeblood burst out to run away down his chest and onto the heaving floor. But still the man would not give in. He should have been dead eight years earlier; he was not going to lie down now.
The hand he laid on Illych Kizel’s shoulder was the merest feather now, but it had more force and command than all the battering which had rained down earlier. Both men were permanently deaf and yet the pointing of that quaking finger spoke more eloquently than the words of Chekov himself.
The nose of the Hind dropped back down as Kizel aimed the whole machine at the tumbling bow of the ship. His face swung towards Gogol, stunned with confusion. All of their air-to-surface missiles were heat-seeking and he was pointing them at ice! But even as he looked at the general, so he saw him smashing the Grail anti-tank missile through the cracked windscreen in front of him. A hail of glass shards burst in over the pair of them. The wind grasped Kizel and tried to chuck him bodily out into the sea. The Hind’s head dropped, but not before Gogol had pulled the trigger on the Grail. The rocket fumes filled the cockpit, only to be snatched away again by the rabid wind. A section of the ice immediately below the frozen bows erupted and Kizel launched the first series of missiles.
The whole side of the iceberg burst asunder. The shock wave hit the helicopter, causing it to fall the better part of fifty metres into the top of the mist.
Kizel knew that his choice was very simple now. He could wrestle the dancing Hind up out of the mist again and fly away, leaving the job half done, or he could obey the last order of his general.
He glanced across into the co-pilot’s seat. Gogol seemed to be asleep now, nursing the empty tube of the Grail’s launcher, but Kizel wasn’t fooled for a second. The decision was his and, thinking of the prediction at the end of the general’s story of civil war for Russia if the ship was ever discovered, he made it. The wall of white in front of him might have been made entirely of mist except that part of it was unnaturally bright. That was where his missiles were exploding in the solid ice. He pressed the button which launched the next flight and pushed the controls forward.
The Hind came up just sufficiently to maintain level flight through the shock wave caused by the second wave of missiles. It would have fallen from the sky upon the impact of the third wave, but instead it flew directly into the cliff and blew the last signs of Leonid Brezhnev away into the heaving sea.
HAVEN
MAU
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb
And out of the swing of the sea
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Psyche joined Ajax and Achilles at the westernmost end of the iceberg which could no longer really be called Manhattan. Titan and Niobe continued to take the lead at the eastern end, but where they had been anchored to an island with coastal cliffs three hundred metres high, the new tabular configuration of the berg meant that the cliffs now were little more than one hundred metres tall at their highest point and sloped back down to almost nothing at their lowest.
Richard was back on Titan and fully in charge. He had been on Psyche for a while, up on the ice with the engineers re-establishing the line, on Ajax with Katya Borodin, trying to discover whether her crew had noticed anything in particular about the pirates. Everyone was now agreed that the helicopters had been Russian and the accents of even the English-speakers has been Russian, and that they had talked to each other in Russian. Their one, taciturn, prisoner was certainly Russian. He had prepared a preliminary report of the tragedy to send to the United Nations and faxed it out from Ajax. Then he had returned to Titan and started making the plans he was discussing now. No one had seen him sleep since the attack, and that had been over for seventy-two hours now — to the extent that it would ever be over for any of them.
He was driving himself and his command as hard as he could as the days ticked by and Mawanga harbour came closer and closer. By mid-afternoon, more than three days after the iceberg had rolled over, the ships were re-anchored in their new positions and back up to full power, though they were now moving forward at the five knots of the Guinea current, effectively idling in still water only just in control, while Richard held his captains’ conference in the big office aboard Titan. His first objective was to establish clearly the new position; then he needed to confirm the complex series of manoeuvres they would be performing during the next few days to bring the iceberg safely to port.