‘The whole thing has rolled right over and settled upside down,’ he was saying, referring to a carefully drawn scale diagram pinned to the wall behind him. ‘The top is flat and the bottom, deep below the surface of the ocean, is now uneven, with two keels which used to be the islands we could see above the surface. The forward keel, about fifty kilometres long, reaches nearly one thousand metres straight down. It combines the three hundred metres of cliff which stood above the waves with the nine hundred which reached down below. The rear keel is much smaller and represents the inverted remains of the little island at the back of the berg to which Ajax and Achilles have been tethered for the last month.’
‘It’s a hell of a way to wash the sand off,’ observed Bob Stark grimly, and his dark attempt at a little humour failed to ignite any response from the others. They were all exhausted. They were shocked and depressed by the loss of Kraken and her complement. They were still in clinical shock from the unexpected, violent nature of the mysterious attempt to wreck their mission. They were all still looking over their shoulders all the time, expecting another gang of armed men to drop out of the sky. Even the iceberg, now obviously in an utterly stable position, remained a source of wonderment and terror. All the ships were on the longest possible lines, and Richard was quite content that they should stay that way.
‘The keels are important,’ Richard persisted. ‘They give the berg even more stability than it had before …’
‘Which was not one hell of a lot, as it turned out. Be fair—’
Richard’s hand slammed down onto the table. ‘Bob! I will not be held responsible because I couldn’t dictate the exact movements of a billion-tonne iceberg in the middle of an airborne invasion by armed soldiers! Now for Christ’s sake, let it rest.’
The American looked stunned. He literally gaped at his old friend, then he swept the cow’s lick of gold hair out of his bright eyes. ‘God, Richard, I didn’t mean … Jesus … I’m sorry.’
Richard took a great, racking breath. ‘No,’ he said more quietly. ‘I’m sorry. I know you didn’t mean anything. It’s just that… Well, let’s get on.’
He turned back to the diagram on the wall.
All his friends exchanged glances. They all tended to regard him as a man of steel, especially those who knew him best and longest, and his outburst had shocked them. Not so much the outburst, perhaps, but the depth of the strain it revealed. This was Richard at his grimmest, with all of his cheery self-confidence gone and all his breezy self-assurance buried under the dogged, joyless need to get a dirty job done. The joy had gone out of the work for all of them, but they still had their contract to fulfil, and a difficult job to do with absolute precision; for each of the forty men and women dead in this venture so far, one hundred thousand more stood to die.
‘The keels will keep the berg stable and ensure that it continues to move in an absolutely straight line. It is our job, of course, to ensure that the straight line it is following takes it in through the opening of Mawanga harbour. Also, and this is equally important, we have to ensure she is still moving fast enough to reach all the way down the full length of the anchorage but that the way comes off her completely before she smashes into the mouth of the River Mau and rides up into the middle of the city itself. I understand there are hundreds of thousands of insurance claims ready to go if there is the slightest evidence of any property damage at all.’
‘And almost all of the residents of Mawanga city have taken to the hills,’ supplied John, who had been listening to Mawanga Radio earlier that morning. ‘Except for reporters and disaster freaks.’
‘Welcome to Mawanga!’ said Bob, with bitter irony. And this time Richard at least gave a grunt of wry laughter.
‘Welcome to Mawanga!’ said a distant but familiar voice not quite lost among the babble of official greeting. Indira Dyal looked past the welcoming faces of the reception committee and caught the eye of Emily Karanga. She raised her hand and swept forward, leaving Mohammed Aziz to deal with polite officialdom.
Emily and Warren Cord were standing on the tarmac apron, just off the wide red carpet laid out to conduct the Executive Assistant and the Chef de Cabinet from their aeroplane to their official car. There was some talk that the Secretary General himself would be here tomorrow in order to welcome the iceberg on its arrival in two days’ time, but in the meantime the leaders of the Mau Club were getting the full treatment.
‘I’ll rely on Mohammed to represent us at as many official functions as possible,’ said the elegant Indian woman decisively. ‘I want you two to show me what’s really going on here.’
That was all she had time to say before she was swept back into the line of minor government dignitaries desperate to get their faces in the papers and on the television screen.
Emily and Warren walked back towards the car they were sharing. ‘That’s our Indira,’ observed the American. ‘You decided what you’re going to show her?’
‘Everything I can. And what she can’t see for herself I’ll get witnesses to describe to her.’
‘Ann Cable?’
‘If she’s well enough. I’m just on my way over to see her now. Can I drop you?’
‘Yeah. Shoot on past the hospital for a kilometre. Drop me at the docks. We’ve still got to get the harbour mouth fixed up.’
‘Is it being particularly difficult?’
‘I don’t know. No one’s ever tried to make a door that will open wide enough to let in a billion tonne iceberg and then close it right up behind it.’
‘I see your problem.’
‘No matter how you look at it, the problem will be time,’ said Warren Cord to the chief engineer.
The tall black man nodded in agreement, his eyes narrow as he checked across the opening of the anchorage again. He was a man who placed absolute reliance on accurate drawings — then came out to check them at the site as often as he could. The two of them were standing on the westernmost edge of the northern arm of land. A slight wind gusted over the bull’s horns of the anchorage mouth, carrying the United Nations man’s words away southwards across the twenty kilometres of restless water.
‘I mean,’ persisted the American, ‘you’re dealing with an opening here which is almost as wide as the Straits of Gibraltar. It’s only just going to be wide enough to let the sucker in, but once it is in, then you’ve got to close it off. Build a barrage, or a dam or something like that before the iceberg melts and starts leaking fresh water back out again.
‘I’ve looked into all that very carefully and—’
‘You don’t have a shallow base to build up from because the iceberg is a thousand metres deep and that’s at least how deep the harbour mouth has to be.’
‘And is. We know all this, Warren.’
‘I know! I’m just thinking out loud, for heaven’s sake.’
The black civil engineer gave a bark of laughter as he realised what Warren was really up to. ‘You are practising for press interviews! Are you going to be seen around town with the devastating Dr Dyal, then, my friend? You will need to move fast to get her away from Aziz!’
Wearing an outfit of khaki bush gear instead of her usual stately sari, Dr Indira Dyal was almost impossible to recognise. Those heads which turned, and there were a good few, were turned not by fame but by the sight of two such striking women riding together in an open-topped jeep out through the shantytown towards the reception camps. Only the small truck of armed guards behind them gave any hint of their true political importance. But the guards were tense and watchful — it was little more than a week since their leader General of Police Nimrod Chala had been assassinated. The country still simmered on the edge of civil war, but the dead leader had left a power vacuum. Many of the men who so smilingly greeted Dr Dyal at the airport were scheming to fill the vacuum themselves, but General Moses M’Diid was best placed to take advantage, for the army stood behind him as firmly as the police had stood behind their leader. Moses was especially well placed now because his younger brother Aaron was currently acting head of state. As soon as the matter of the water was sorted out, there would be elections. And Nimrod Chala was no longer there to fight them or disrupt them or seize power and make them redundant.