‘An important consideration, I should think.’
‘Yes. Now, at the Canaries we’ll have to move under our own steam for a bit, but if we’re lucky we can pull Manhattan south fairly quickly — I’m hoping for an average of about eight to ten knots — and hitch our final ride on the Guinea current which will deliver us to the very doorstep. What do you think, John?’
John Higgins’ voice was very distant indeed — it was being relayed via Heritage House from the bridge of Prometheus off Kharg Island in the Gulf. ‘You’ll have to give me some time to think about it, Richard. It sounds feasible, though. My God! Does it ever! Look. I’ve got to go now. I’ll be seeing you as soon as possible. I’m getting Niobe, I understand.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I hope it doesn’t end in tears …’
Richard hung up with a wry smile. It was an old joke. A reference to the ship’s name and a line from Hamlet. Richard pulled himself to his feet, muttering it to himself in his very best Laurence Olivier, lines which, all things considered, were surprisingly apt for the matter in hand:
A little month; or ere the shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body
Like Niobe, all tears …
He had no real idea that he was saying Hamlet’s bitter words aloud, for he was too caught up in the coincidence that, if the plan went ahead, then a little month was just about all they would have before the iceberg reduced itself to tears and ran away.
Sally Bell watched him go. She could hardly believe her ears. His half of the conversation with Captain Higgins had shown an impressive enough knowledge of the oceans, especially as she knew he was looking only at the chart of the Atlantic Ocean’s major currents which he carried in his memory, but that he should come out spouting Hamlet was simply too much! It was no wonder he was a legend, she thought; all this and Shakespeare too.
Sally — and, indeed, everyone aboard — was a good deal less in charity with Richard when he sat down to complete his final outgoing phone call of the first day. His own mood had darkened with the gathering of exhaustion once again. Even his massive energy could not really be renewed by six hours’ sleep after four days without even seeing a bed. He was soaking wet, as were they all, for the weather had worsened again during the afternoon and the rain had been sheeting down by teatime. Which had not prevented him from calling a lifeboat drill at seven o’clock, just as everyone was sitting down to dinner.
‘Hello, darling,’ he said, the deep gravelly sound of his voice betraying his exhaustion. ‘Sorry to be getting through so late. Twins off to bed all right?’
And Robin Mariner, who had been waiting for this call, relaxed into the big sofa and rested her golden head on the soft cushions behind. She was concentrating on the distant rumble of his words so hard that even the organ-pure tones of Lucia Popp singing the Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute faded into nothingness, and the still grey eyes went out of focus as her mind represented in vivid detail what he was doing as he spoke to her. The French windows, open to the veranda for the last time this year, the gentle slope of the lawn down to the wall at the end of the garden, and the breathtaking view across the Channel from this, the next high shoulder of South Down to the west of Beachy Head, were all as nothing to her. She would have traded it all at once, traded even the great house Ashenden itself, to be there, in that tiny, cramped radio room, hungry and wet, exhausted and unpopular; and with him, with him, with him.
Chapter Eleven
Richard stood on the sternmost section of Titan with the binoculars clamped under his frowning brows. The lower cliffs of Manhattan’s rough-hewn bow glimmered dully in the late afternoon overcast, which was a mercy. In the time he had been away, the iceberg melt rate had grown slightly and the skim of water even over the tall vertical surfaces added to the intensity with which they caught and reflected every candlepower of light. Colin and he had talked at length already about the advisability of spraying those parts with the fastest melt rate with some kind of protective coating, but they couldn’t come up with a coating which was easy to apply, strong enough to do the job, and simple to get rid of at the far end. Even the expanded polystyrene that disposable cups were made of would be impossible to get rid of if they used it, and might leave an environmental legacy of the worst sort — a plastic cup fifty kilometres long which was non biodegradable. But there was time enough to worry about that later.
He was jerked out of his thoughts by a sudden ripple of brightness along a line exactly level with his gaze. Brightness which came from deep within the ice. The strange light was lost immediately in a blinding mixture of ice dust and spray which billowed out into the stillness of the calm afternoon. A series of flat, dull reports reached Richard’s ears as the clouds began to thin and settle. The cliff face immediately above the line of the explosion began to move. With the slow majesty of an avalanche, it lost definition as the cliff face shattered into boulders, then settled down into the sea.
‘Looks good,’ said Richard to the man standing beside him.
‘Yes,’ answered Major Tom Snell of the Royal Engineers, seconded to NATO and the UN.
Tom Snell was a solid bull of a man with broad shoulders and a thick waist. He had a square, pugnacious face with overhanging brows, a straight, short nose, a downcurving mouth emphasised by a clipped military moustache and a square, protruding jaw. He wasn’t too happy to be here and he was not a man to hide his feelings. But orders were orders and he and his engineers had been pulled out of their posting in Norway to come and oversee the placing and maintenance of the tow lines. He might have said more than the flat monosyllable, but further conversation became impossible as the thunder of the falling ice overwhelmed them.
Richard refocused his binoculars up on the top of the cliff where the distant figures of Colin and Kate looked down at the results of the engineers’ work.
The avalanche slowed and the thunder receded. For once, Tom Snell initiated the conversation. ‘We’ll need to go over for a closer look now.’
‘I’ll come.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘I’ll come anyway. Helicopter or inflatable?’
‘Whatever you think, sir.’
‘Inflatable. We’ll have to get used to nipping back and forth so we might as well start now. Unless you want to clear off ledges big enough to allow the helicopter a landing site.’
‘No. That would take more time than we have available,’ said the square soldier, but his eyes lingered wistfully on the bright side of the Westland Sea King as they passed it. Tom Snell did not like boats or boating.
It took them longer than expected to reach the berg, although Richard had had the foresight to equip the crew of the big inflatable with long boathooks. Snell’s explosives had brought down a lot of ice and getting through the mess of floating boulders took persistence and time. The noise was unexpected. The ice boulders made quite a racket as they bobbed and clashed, rumbled and rolled, settling down individually and collectively, as though coming slowly to terms with the new situation. There was a very real danger of some of the larger, unstable pieces rolling over and swamping the rubber craft, so Richard who had the helm took things slowly and very carefully indeed.