‘Oui! The current will be moving at a mean five knots, the surface features — the waves — at a mean twenty knots if the wind averages force five on the Beaufort scale. Of course at that force the wind itself will be moving at nearer thirty knots and will be pushing at the exposed section of ice as though it were a sail. You wish Manhattan to average ten knots …’
‘More if we can manage it. The water will be warm.’
‘Perhaps. I have two thoughts on that. First, the main current may not be all that warm and in any case, as I said, it will come and go, wavering up and down and from side to side. And secondly, as the iceberg melts, it will automatically lower the temperature of the water around it. Even though you move it faster than the current, you may still find that the more it melts, the more slowly it will melt. It is a huge thing, you see? It will create its own climate. But in any case, all of these factors will help the berg move quickly. And more quickly still when the last two ships arrive and become attached.’
Richard nodded. ‘That’ll be within the next couple of days. We need them to drive Manhattan forward through the Stream — or the Drift — while we guide her down across it.’
‘Again, the size of the berg and the enormity of the forces you are dealing with will help you. As the Coriolis force makes the Stream turn north off the Gulf of Mexico, so it will make Manhattan pull southwards as you move it at speed. The Gulf Stream tends southwards itself, though it sends eddies to the north. The main bulk of the water movement is pulled southwards across the Western Approaches to La Manche — what you English call the Channel — and becomes part of the Canaries current which then goes into the current which flows west below the Sargasso. It is one huge circle. What my friends of the Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole call the North Atlantic Gyre.’
‘And once we get on it, we will ride it to the Canaries and catch an offshoot called the Guinea current down to Mawanga.’ Katya Borodin’s voice was cool. Her English correct. Her pronunciation had a combination of Russian roundness and American nasality which Yves Maille, for one, found irresistible. Her tone was one of not so mild amazement that any set of apparently sane captains could possibly be engaged upon such a hare-brained enterprise as this.
‘But you are riding it already, you know. The Labrador Current which carries us south as we speak is but an offshoot of the North Atlantic Drift returning from Baffin Bay.’ Yves did his best to make his answer sound seductive.
‘Right, thank you, Yves,’ said Richard, bringing the meeting to order. ‘Any questions?’ His eyes also lingered on Captain Borodin, but only because he sensed her lack of faith and wished to allay it at once. But she did not accept his invitation, so he continued. ‘No? Any observations, John?’
‘No. The navigation is theoretically simple, in the big picture, certainly, but I suspect we’ll find it challenging enough when we get down to the detail. We’ll need to know exactly where we are at all times if the information Yves is promising about water and weather is going to be used properly.’
‘Yes. I see that.’ Richard nodded. ‘And, of course, it will be of absolutely crucial importance with regard to sailing orders. Over to you, Bob. Propulsion?’
Bob Stark leaned back in his chair and stretched his long legs under the table. He brought his broad palm up his forehead to sweep the golden cow’s lick out of his eyes. Katya Borodin observed him in much the same way Yves Maille observed her, and they made a striking couple as they sat side by side: Nordic farm girl meets Kansas cow hand. But the good-looking New Englander was unaware of her gaze; he was concentrating absolutely on the matter in hand. ‘It’s taken us two days and more to get Manhattan up to a mean speed of seven knots, and we’ve only been sailing in a straight line. We’ve got to try and turn left off Flemish Cap tonight. How will that work? As Yves has said, we’re reckoning on a lot of help from the Labrador Current swinging east at that point to push us through the North Wall and into the main flow, but the whole plan relies upon picking up speed. What we haven’t had to face yet is how on earth do we actually control this amount of momentum once we build it up? Have you done your sums on that one, John? How much force is actually involved in moving one and a half billion metric tonnes at ten knots? How long will it take us to stop it, if we can stop it at all?’
‘God knows. But it has to be moving with enough momentum to do some serious damage to any poor sod who gets in the way,’ observed John.
‘Or any poor island. Or any poor cape. We don’t want to arrive off Africa with Cape St Vincent and a couple of Azores wedged up against our bowsprit,’ Richard commented wryly.
A chuckle went round the table, though they all knew Richard was only half joking. Then Colin Ross met the chairman’s eye and, on Richard’s tiny nod, stepped in. They were brushing against his areas of expertise now. ‘In fact,’ he growled, ‘it would be a mistake to see Manhattan as being particularly solid. Not now; certainly not later on. Under the circumstances Professor Maille has described, with warm seas and following weather, average winds of force five and waves of twenty knots, we can expect a good deal of water loss through melting and runoff — runoff depending on sunshine and air temperature too of course — but most of all from wave erosion. We’ll have to choose the anchorage sites for Kraken and Psyche with extreme care because they’ll be at the rear of the ice island above the surface and the following seas will smash that section to pieces.’ They all nodded. Richard, Colin and Kate were due to be scouting for those very locations in the Sea King with Tom Snell the engineer this afternoon, in fact.
‘You’ll have to keep an eye on Manhattan’s bow section as well,’ the glaciologist continued. ‘Remember, the bows are just hard ice, they aren’t steel or rock. They’ll wear away fantastically quickly. We’re just hoping they’ll wear away evenly, or all the Coriolis force in the universe won’t swing her onto the right course.’ He looked round the table. It wasn’t quite a glare, but it was an expression of warning. ‘You’ll have to watch the ice all the time. Don’t let the size of these boats fool you. One bad ice fall and even Titan would just vanish. Don’t think of it as a hulk you’re towing. Think of it as an enemy. Take your eye off it, turn your back for a second, and it will kill you.’
‘So far in this project,’ expanded Richard, ‘it’s killed one man, crippled another and landed a third in hospital. It did that for openers on the first day. Colin’s right. Watch your course. Watch your instruments. But, above all, watch the ice.’
Titan’s Sea King helicopter hung low in the restless air over the cliffs at the blunt northern end of Manhattan. Richard, Colin, Kate and Major Tom Snell looked down gloomily. Long grey rollers rode down the back of the Labrador Current, making the sea look like a huge dull file. For fifty kilometres further to the north, the submerged section of the iceberg acted on the water like a reef and its existence was revealed by a disturbance in the otherwise regular pattern of the waves. On the distant horizon, looming out of the freezing mist, the twin hulls of Ajax and Achilles rode astride the white islelet of the far end of ice.
Immediately below the helicopter, at the foot of the square cliffs, was a seething maelstrom as the waves, propelled by the fresh breeze, foamed up against the white ice in a dazzling surf. It was clear to the watchers that all that stopped the cliffs from being undermined in short order was the pale reef of ice which swept from a brief, smooth beach away beneath the worst of the foam into the slate-grey depths beneath the serried ranks of freezing water. Finding anchorage points for the last two ships was going to be more difficult than they had expected. Working on that foam-weltered glass-smooth beach was clearly going to be impossible and, in any case, putting all too fragile hulls so close to submarine ridges of ice was unthinkable, especially to someone like Richard who had come within an ace of joining Titanic in her grave two miles down in the Western Ocean south of here.