The fourth and last man was Sergeant Dundas and he was just that little bit more hesitant. He went through the doorway and hesitated. ‘Major?’ he called.
Silence. Still air here. The storm immediately behind. The roaring of wind and water. ‘Major Snell? Harry? Jock?’
No reply.
With every sense on the alert, with every hair on his long, Lowland body erect, Sergeant Dougie Dundas lay on his belly and slid forward over the slick ice. He came to a twist in the low tubular passageway and eased himself round it. Light came through the walls, a green light, surprisingly gloomy. God in heaven it was even coming up through the floor! Light enough to show him the walls of the tunnel for a metre or two ahead as he eased himself round the corner. Suddenly, atavistically, he was very worried indeed. He hesitated, in two minds whether to stretch out his hands and run the risk of having them grabbed by whatever horror had gulped down his CO and his squaddies, or to go round the corner head first and come face to face with it. Never a man to do things by halves, he pushed his face round first and head-butted the roof with a glancing blow as the tunnel vanished downwards like a wormhole a metre wide into an apparently bottomless black pit.
‘Jesus Christ!’ screamed the sergeant, overwhelmed with as much horror as if he had met the Loch Ness monster face to face. The sinister throat of the tunnel bubbled and hissed at him and it took only a moment to realise that it was full of water. Black, seething, restless water which he knew well enough from the rivers of his childhood. Rivers in full, deadly spate, which would suck in the unwary like liquid quicksand and gulp them away to their doom in a second. Water was doing in here what the wild wind was doing outside. Enraptured, like a child touching the picture of a monster, caught between horror and fascination, he reached his right hand down to touch the quick black liquid. It was a long stretch down a one-metre slope to reach the braided surface with his fingertips. Halfway down, something gleamed and caught the sergeant’s eye.
On a ridge of ice halfway down the slope there appeared to be a pile of large, rough crystals. As though in the grip of a vision or a drug-induced dream, the sergeant reached down and took the largest of the crystals. He brought it to his face. It looked like glass. Surely it was far too big to be a diamond. And it was dark, almost black. Was it full of tiny metallic flakes? He looked down at the rest of the little pile. Were they glowing? It seemed as likely as anything else going on around him. Without taking his eyes off the black water, he slid the first of the crystals into his sodden blouson jacket, then reached downwards again, inconsequentially thinking of chocolate.
His fingers had no more than brushed the topmost of the strangely gleaming pile when a broad hand burst up out of the rushing blackness and fastened round his wrist. He screamed and hauled back, fighting to get away. An arm came up out of the water and the pale threat of a face. Dundas, screaming at the top of his lungs, backed wildly out into the mouth of the cave, fighting with all his strength to break that deathly grip, certain that this was some kind of monster escaped from a nightmare buried deep in his subconscious. Only terror such as this could have given him the strength to move backwards.
Only the grasp of a drowning man on a straw of flesh and blood would have kept that iron grip unbroken as the terrified sergeant pulled him back.
They were still locked together when Richard and the men from the lifeboat arrived moments later to rescue them.
It was only when they were back in the warmth of Psyche’s little treatment room that they were able to break Tom Snell’s grip.
Chapter Fifteen
Yves Maille was the diving expert and only the foulest of luck would have taken him so far away when he was needed so badly. The French deep-sea explorer had no interest at all in the berthing of big ships and, quite correctly, had assumed that everyone else would be intimately involved in the operation. He had therefore taken the opportunity presented by the arrival of the two ships to do some of the work he had been brought aboard to do.
Before dawn, the Frenchman had headed off in the largest inflatable, together with the small team of seamen he was training to assist him in his work. With an absent-mindedness worthy of the most stereotyped of professors, he had taken no radio with him and so was impossible to contact now that an emergency had arisen. Nor had he bothered to inform the watch officer when he was leaving, so they didn’t know exactly when he had gone. All they knew was that he was somewhere on the ocean ahead — on rather than in, because he had not taken any diving gear — aboard a vessel capable of twenty knots, taking readings of sky and sea.
Richard didn’t want to wait any longer for him to return. He knew that inaction would only make a bad situation turn sour on them, and he wanted to press ahead. And, as far as he could see, they had no real reason to wait any longer. There were three others near at hand who could do the job perfectly well.
Richard had learned how to scuba dive in the Seychelles. Bob Stark had learned at his family’s summer home in Hyannis Port. Katya Borodin had learned at a Komosol dacha on the Black Sea. All three routinely kept their qualifications up to date, though none of them had ever, in their wildest dreams, supposed they would be called to dive down into the cavernous heart of an iceberg.
Tom Snell and Dougie Dundas were in the care of Asha Higgins MD who had helicoptered over from Niobe, which was under the command of her husband John; she was ensconced with the comatose men in Psyche’s sickbay. Psyche herself was snugly in place with the grey squall wind running outside round her southern-facing starboard flank and the grey surf thundering under her counter. John Higgins in Niobe was in technical command of the fleet as the six. mighty ships beat the following seas with their massive propellers, fighting to bring Manhattan’s huge, inertia-shackled bulk up to a speed in excess of ten knots.
Psyche’s great black bow reared above and abaft the little group now as they stood on the dull ice in the blessed wind shadow, considering the blast-widened opening to the ice cave and wondering what they would find down below.
No survivors, that was for store.
It was four hours since the accident — the quickest it had been possible to arrange things safely and sensibly. Neither Tom nor his sergeant had made much sense in the interim, but a quick inspection of the little cave had told its own story, especially to the wise eyes of Colin Ross. It was the big glaciologist who had overseen the engineers of Tom’s command as they blasted open the cave mouth to reveal the braided, sibilant rush of the water. It was he who would now be in charge of the group on the ice while the divers went down after the bodies below. Bob and Katya would be diving first, with Richard as reserve and back-up. The divers would be tethered to long lines as there was no knowing what conditions would be like down there. All of the divers wore bulky one-size dry suits routinely kept aboard Heritage Mariner tankers for small jobs over the side. The water temperature would be exactly at zero degrees Celsius and even a wet suit would be little protection in that temperature. And the dives would be short. Kate Ross, second only to die statuesque, red-headed Asha Higgins in medical qualifications, was there to make sure of that, and in case of the unexpected. Psyche’s lifeboat, loaded with emergency equipment, dry clothes and hot liquids, rode immediately at hand.