‘Come to seven knots, please,’ said Captain Odate. ‘It seems you are maintaining a better speed than you thought, Captain Mariner.’
‘Seven knots,’ said the helmsman, his words coming under Captain Odate’s observation and Richard’s surprised grunt of agreement.
The pounding of the great oil-fired motor below moved up a beat.
‘Perhaps a degree further south?’ suggested Richard.
‘Steer one degree further south,’ said the captain.
‘One degree further south,’ said the helmsman.
‘Ready with the thrusters, fore and aft.’ Captain Odate was willing to listen to Captain Mariner, but he would be ready to take evasive action if his tall adviser got it wrong. How could even this legendary seaman pilot a supertanker into a floating dock alongside an iceberg?
‘Ready with thrusters.’
‘Seventy-five metres and closing on the starboard side.’
‘Steady as she goes.’
‘Fifty metres on the starboard. Steady at one hundred metres astern.’
‘Very good. Bow thruster ready if we go nearer than twenty-five metres.’ Odate was a little more relaxed now; perhaps Captain Mariner was as gifted as they said after all.
‘Fire away the forward line now, Tom,’ said Richard into his walkie-talkie, and even as the Japanese captain began to relax, he instantly tensed up again.
An arc of light suddenly cut through the mist as though a sky rocket had been fired a month early to land somewhere beyond the brightening glow of the Sea King. At once the walkie-talkie in the fourth officer’s hand squawked, and the young Senegalese officer reported to his captain that the first line was aboard.
Captain Odate nodded once. ‘Take it to the windlass and winch the main cable aboard,’ he commanded. ‘Steady as you go, helm, and watch in case the weight of the cable is sufficient to pull you further over.’
Richard thumbed the SEND button. ‘Line well aboard now, Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s going down to the windlass now. Stand by.’
He listened to Tom Snell’s monosyllabic acknowledgement, then he stood and watched silently, knowing that the carbon fibre cable was nowhere near heavy enough to affect the stately progress of the great ship. His feeling of elation was at a new peak now, though combined with a certain amount of tension. For a start, he was surprised to find Manhattan was picking up speed. Perhaps they had lucked into a surge of the current; perhaps there was something else going on. He would have to check later, though. Tethering a supertanker to an iceberg was something no one had ever done, and God alone knew if they were doing it right. The plan was simply to get the bow attached, then allow the hull to swing in. Both Kraken and Psyche had come with enough buffers to stave off an avalanche and these were now disposed along the great ship’s starboard side to protect her plates from the rough embraces of the ice. Tethered at die bow, with her side well armoured, she would settle in against the ice itself and be tethered again from the stern. As the same process was being completed with her sister nine kilometres south, the black lines would be finally adjusted and, on Richard’s order, hopefully tonight, the six ships would slowly begin their run up to full speed, moving Manhattan right along with them.
The walkie-talkie spoke again and the young fourth officer — the UN could afford larger crews than Heritage Mariner, Richard observed — informed his captain that the main cable was coming aboard. Unable to stand as stolidly as the Japanese captain, Richard crossed restlessly to the starboard bridge wing and opened the door. The bridge filled with the smell of cucumbers. ‘What is that odour?’ demanded Captain Odate, surprised out of his studied imperturbability.
‘It’s Manhattan,’ answered Richard. ‘Apparently all icebergs smell like that.’
Silence returned — or partly so, at any rate. The opening of the door admitted more than Manhattan’s smell. It let in some of the sounds she was making. The cascading of runoff, as though Kraken’s bow wave had suddenly leaped much closer. There came a grating rumble as though her well-buffered side had struck already. There came a sharp crack as though the line had parted. Richard caught Captain Odate’s eye. ‘It’s safer than it sounds,’ he said, and stepped outside.
As soon as he did so, he felt the kiss of the wind on his right cheek. So that was why Manhattan was moving more quickly. Some sailors know there is wind about because they hear it, magically, in the far distance; others, like John Higgins, could find wind with their eyes, reading sky and sea with uncanny accuracy. Others used their noses. Richard used the skin of his cheeks, which was fortunate since all the other alternatives were out of the question under the current circumstances, with sight, hearing and smell overwhelmed by the nearness of Manhattan. Richard moved his face like a blind man, searching the damp, cucumber-smelling air for another kiss. It came, and he smiled. There was some weather swinging in behind them at last.
Suddenly the mist was snatched away and Richard found himself looking into one of the cavernous bays they had been exploring in the Sea King less than forty-eight hours ago. From the helicopter it had seemed little more than an impressive natural formation, like a cliff-backed cove on a rocky coast. Now, it took his breath away. It stretched out on either hand, curving like an archer’s bow bent slightly out of true, not quite into a half-pear shape one kilometre long. Before him, the limpid blue water washed up against a beach a hundred metres wide, sloping gently up from an edge of ice falling sheer into black darkness in the ocean’s depth. The beach ran up into the curve of a cave as shadowed as anything made of lucent white can be, then sloped up into an overhang which took into its gleaming opacity every shade of blue from the sea. And, above that outward curve, towering above his head in a carefully dynamited slope back to the crest and the skyline, was a hundred metres more of ice which reflected almost to the point of being unbearable every liquid hue of the cerulean sky. And liquid was an apt word to apply. The blast-slick slope was running with a river of runoff and a waterfall hung like a jewelled curtain a kilometre wide before the mouth of the broad, shallow cave.
From a point the selection of which was the result of almost Einsteinian calculation came the first line, reaching forward through the pouring brightness to the windlass on the forecastle head, overseen still by Tom Snell’s men upon the ice. Just less than a full ship’s length behind, the second of Snell’s teams was ready with the equipment to send the second line aboard. Beyond them, perched apparently precariously on the square dry shoulder of the raised ice reef, sat the Bell Iroquois helicopter from Achilles, ready to lift them across to the other shore in due course.
Richard found himself swept in and in, until the waterfall was so close he could have put his hand into it had he reached out from the furthest end of the bridge wing. Instead he was content to stand, feeling the wind steady, looking down through the dancing drizzle to the shadowed ice below. Stretched out and hammered home, the iron points of eight claws dug into columns of carefully angled concrete plunging down into the white shelf. Even as he watched, Kraken gave the slightest shudder and he looked straight over the edge to see the fenders between the ship’s side and the sheer ice bulge upwards and become slick with spray and runoff as they were nipped between the sides of two of the largest things ever to float across the Atlantic Ocean.
He thumbed the SEND button again. ‘OK, Tom, let go the aft line now.’
A flat report warned him that the second line was on its way aboard, and he walked back onto the bridge just in time to see the fourth officer report the fact to the captain. Richard’s job aboard here was finished for the time being. And quite successfully so, from the look of things.