Harry opened the door. Stepped down. Took one step. Took another. He moved jerkily, like a robot in an old science fiction film. Robert, however, was liquid grace and speed, out of his door and up behind the little man to catch him by the shoulder and pull him up short. ‘Harry. You don’t know what did that. There might be mines, for heaven’s sake. You understand, Harry? Mines!’
Harry stook looking up at the intense, dark face. ‘What is going on here, Robert?’ he asked. He sounded old, plaintive, confused.
Robert looked back at Ann, his face in the moonlight desperate. She moved to help him at once, sliding out of the Land Rover and onto the solid mud. The night air was cool. A light breeze eddied from behind her, full of forest fragrances. Then the wind changed, and so did the smell. The stench brought back too vividly the sights and sounds and emotions she had felt immediately before she passed out in the village. She screamed at the top of her lungs and turned to run away.
‘Ann!’ The desperation in Robert’s voice brought her up short. Whimpering like a terrified child, she turned to look at him, unaware that she was continuing to back away. ‘Stay here!’ he called urgently. ‘If you go off alone you’ll die. You’ll die, Ann. I promise you!’
When she started to scream again he thought that his brutal words had driven her over the edge of hysteria.
They hadn’t. The forest wall of the Dr Julius Karanga Game Reserve two hundred and fifty metres behind him was behaving in a very peculiar way. The trees were leaning of their own accord, preparing to topple out and down into the dry river bed. Something behind them was pushing them, shrugging them aside with thoughtless power as it strove to come out towards them.
All she could think of was that the elephants were coming back. Robert’s words by the pathway in the forest had been correct. His prophecy was coming true. The great grey tusker with its widespread ears and mad black eyes was coming back to tear them limb from limb and trample what was left of them into the ground. In her mind’s eye she could see the great grey bulk of it shrugging the trees aside as it came roaring into the open trumpeting its warcry, its trunk high and its tusks reaching out.
But that was not what happened at all. The monster that emerged from the forest shadows over the trunks of the fallen trees was grey but unwrinkled, not animal but machine, and what reached out in front of it was not the trunk of an enraged elephant but the barrel of a 125mm smoothbore gun extended by a bulky flash-guard. What was coming out of the jungle towards them was not an enraged and maddened tusker, it was worse.
It was a Soviet-made fully armoured T-80 main battle tank.
STREAM
THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
And the gilded car of day
His glowing axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantic stream …
Chapter Thirteen
‘In the south-western quadrant of the North Atlantic, here, between Bermuda and the Bahamas, there is a hill made of water. It does not stand very high, this hill; perhaps two metres above the level of the rest of the ocean at its peak. It is covered in sargasso weed and it is the Sargasso Sea. The hill of water is caused by currents flowing into a circle very fiercely, and, although the mass of water making up the hill is very still, there are currents also flowing out of it, and currents flowing around it. A strong current comes westward from the coast of Africa, driven by the trade winds. Just as this current reaches the southern slopes of the Sargasso, it is joined by the outflow of the Brazil current which pushes along the coast of South America from Natal to Caracas …’
‘The Spanish Main,’ supplied John Higgins.
‘As you say,’ agreed Professor Yves Maille with a Gallic shrug of his slim shoulders. He glanced round the table in Richard’s day room to see whether the interruption had disturbed any of his audience at the first full captains’ briefing. All eyes were fixed on him. His own eyes lingered on those of Captain Katya Borodin whose looks particularly appealed to him. A slim, slight, lined, dark-skinned Mediterranean man himself, he was drawn to the blonde Nordic farm girl type, of which she was a perfect example. Dragging his eyes away at last, he gestured at the Atlantic chart before him. ‘But now, look. The currents meet. Their speed is augmented by water flowing out of the southern flank of the Sargasso. They run westward and, because of the Coriolis force, they wish to run northwards, and here before them is a land mass which guides them further northward over a shallow continental shelf. So the currents turn and run up the coast of the United States at five knots and more, past Florida and up the coast to Cape Hatteras. And so the Gulf Stream is born. It is a ribbon of water moving very fast, powerful, like the outflowing of a fire hose.’
‘When it is moving at speed, it even throws up a wall,’ added John, the practical sailor as well as the nautical historian. ‘Whether there is much to see at the surface depends on the conditions, but I have heard sailors talk of a west wall and a north wall on the outer edges of it. And they mean a wall of water. Something that can stand up above the level of the rest of the sea. Like the professor’s Sargasso Hill.’ The faces round the table were grim. They all knew they were due to start crossing the North Wall at about midnight tonight. At their current speed, if Titan went over on schedule, Achilles would be crossing at breakfast time. The iceberg would be passing through the wall of water for eight solid hours. There was much dark speculation as to what that would do to the massive piece of ice.
‘Yes indeed. This so-called wall is a reflection of very strong changes in temperature, salinity, water speed and so forth at the interface. It can be very powerful indeed. It will be the first great test of Manhattan’s true strength. But look, we have calculated on this, Captain Mariner and I. We will not be crossing the wall at right angles but coming in along this confluence with the Labrador Current here.
‘Regard. The mass of the Gulf Stream turns away from the American coast here at Cape Hatteras, and no one is quite certain what happens to it then. It changes its name, to begin with, and becomes the North Atlantic Drift. Perhaps it changes its nature too, but I think not much. It wavers and spins and twists. It goes up and down in massive waves. For your purposes this does not matter too much because the current is there and running at some speed at one depth or another for most of the time and, even more importantly, at this latitude it runs under the constant weather coming across from the west and heading eastwards for Europe.’
‘So,’ Richard summed up the meeting so far, ‘if we can get Manhattan over the North Wall out of the Labrador Current and into the Gulf Stream — North Atlantic Drift — we will have the help of water and weather moving eastwards at some speed.’