‘Less than five metres. Wait a minute. What, Richard?’
‘If we secure the end of his line to my safety harness, it’ll double the length available to him. I’ll go straight to the end of the tunnel and we can take it from there.’
‘Sounds good. Did you hear what Richard said, Bob?’
‘Yup. Sounds good to me too, Colin.’ There was a slight pause. Then, ‘Katya, it’s Bob here. Can you hear me? Katya. It’s OK, we’re coming to get you. Hang on. Stay calm and hang on.’
While he was broadcasting his message to Katya, one of Richard’s seamen was securing the end of Bob’s line to the front of Richard’s safety harness. Richard gave Colin and Kate a wave and slid into the water.
Like the other two before him, he was struck by the smoothness of the air-shafted walls, by the quality of the light coming through them; by the strength of the flow and by the unexpected warmth of the water creating it. It wasn’t exactly hot, but it wasn’t icy cold either.
Where the others had taken their time, exploring with some care — to begin with at least — Richard knew what was down here and he hadn’t the inclination to linger. And the men in charge of his safety line would not pull him up short before he reached the tunnel mouth. He was able to do what Katya had wished to do, therefore: he fell forward into the heart of the flow and finned purposefully down the tunnel as quickly as he was able. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Bob,’ he said as he swam swiftly down the tunnel. ‘Wait till I get there before you move.’
‘I hear you, but hurry it up.’
As he swam, Richard collected the slack line in great loops so that when he did come up behind Bob, he was ready and able to control the speed at which the American went into the cavern beyond. ‘Anchor me,’ he ordered, and his safety line tightened at once. Following Bob’s gesture, he saw the curved blade of metal protruding from the tunnel’s mouth and he angled himself so that his body would ensure Bob’s rope came nowhere near it. In order to do this efficiently, he had to come very near the mouth of the tunnel and so, as his American friend stepped out into the whirl of it, Richard found himself perfectly placed to observe the cavern and almost everything within it.
It was just possible to see the far wall, about seventy-five metres distant, — although as Katya had observed it was difficult to judge distance down here. His first glance out gave him an instant impression of being able to see the whole shape of the formation, however, and he carried that in his head as he concentrated on keeping an eye on Bob as he fought against the whirlpool current.
The shape of the cavern seemed to be like the top half of an hourglass. There was a roof, domed and shadowed, quite close at hand above, then walls which fell inwards as well as downwards to shadows which made their foundations impossible to fathom. Richard guessed he could see more than two hundred metres straight down, however, before the green light failed. And even then, there was the quicksilver gyre of the current reaching further downwards still. The mouth of the tunnel in which he was wedged was but one dark spot among many, though as far as he could see it was the topmost.
What was happening immediately around him and what he could see and understand of what was happening further out in the cavern made it quite easy for him to understand what was happening in this part of the iceberg as a whole. The cavern had begun to form because the honeycomb of tunnels crossed here and one at least opened out to die sea far below. In the flow of water — meltwater, sea water — a small gyrating current had been set up. Richard knew that until the hook had been blown off the cliffs fifty metres or so behind his back, the iceberg had moved around in circles, so perhaps the swirling current had been born of that movement. Or it might have begun to swirl because the iceberg had stopped doing so. Either way, he had no doubt that the force of the internal streams producing the whirlpool current would have been increased by the faster melting and the greater pressures caused by driving Manhattan at ten knots through the Gulf Stream.
The chamber had been shaped and filled by the whirlpool of water, fed by the streams endlessly spewing inwards from countless tunnels opening in its walls like the one he was standing in, and pouring out at its base, no doubt, the detritus which eventually fell down the quicksilver swirl of water at its heart. The outpouring below would intensify the suction above so that the tunnel rivers could never fill the place, no matter how fast they flowed, or satisfy the whirling suction of the gyre.
Bob was finning as hard as he could into the force of it and was just about holding his own. From Richard’s point of view he was soaring away across the current in bird-like flight, falling back slightly as though riding down a strong wind, but remaining more or less level with the tunnel mouth. But the wind was not a clear wind. Like an autumn gale, it was full of bits and pieces, hard and soft, with and without life. Bob’s torch showed the unexpected thickness of the detritus here. Much of it, blessedly, was weed. Unnerving sheets and streamers of brown; clumps of the stuff, torn loose to swim like huge brown octopi and giant men o’ war. In amongst the slow, sinister reaching of the ten-metre arms of the weed were dazzling dartings of tiny shrimp and fish which caught the white torchlight and gleamed like falling stars. Shoals of them darted, riding the dark force of the current with agile ease. And where the small, bright-sided sparks of life darted, larger fish hunted singly and in shoals of their own. Mackerel with flanks like oil on water, thick-finned hake, steely-sided cod. As insidiously as the trembling rumble of forces ill contained, of air bursting out and water gushing in, the iceberg had been unexpectedly filled with life down here as well as outside in the brightness and the air.
Suddenly, abruptly enough to make him shout with fright, the ragged wreckage of a dead seal tumbled past, trailing a bright cloud of shrimp.
‘Richard? RICHARD?’ Colin, distantly, and Bob, calling his name together.
‘It’s all right. Dead seal gave me a bit of a fright. That’s all.’
‘See anything, Bob?’ asked Colin.
‘Nothing of any use. I was hoping I’d be able to make out the beam of her torch but I’ll be damned if I can. How much time has she got left?’
‘Depends on how deep she is.’
‘Yeah. I guess it does at that. OK, Richard, cut me some slack. I’m going on down.’
Richard watched the angle of his friend’s body change and he suddenly swooped down, the extra speed of the dive pulling him forward through the current for a while. Soon his body became difficult to distinguish against the dark, and only the bright blade of light remained clear. Even his voice began to break up so that Richard only caught snatches of commentary.
‘Hell… all sorts of rubbish… here … wood too … packing cases I guess … flotsam… wreckage… not so many fish down… colder too… noisy. Can you hear? Hell of a… See the bottom now… more of a narrow … say again, narrow crack… wide funnel sides … narrow crack… ridges down the funnel… all sorts of shit… HEY! I SEE HER LIGHT! I SAY AGAIN I SEE HER LIGHT …’
Only the certainty that he could see Katya’s light would have made Bob risk going down further. He had kept up a constant report to Richard and Colin as much to ease the tension he was feeling as to keep them informed and even then he wasn’t certain they had heard him; certainly, he had heard no replies. The current was getting very strong here and he would have to be careful not to get sucked into it. As he had been explaining to Richard, it looked as though the chamber bottomed out here at the back, off axis. Immediately below was a wide funnel with shallow, ridged sides on which was piled all sorts of junk which must have drifted down over the years, but it looked to him as though the actual current exited the chamber through a long, narrow crack in what he reckoned must now be the west-facing quadrant of the lower wall. The wide-throated funnel in the floor was below the bottom of the gyre, therefore, and caught anything drifting down out of its clutches into the bottom ten metres of relatively still water. And it was here that the light of Katya’s torch tempted him to brave the fierce suction towards that long, tall, ice-fanged, deadly looking crack and head for the ten metres of still water below it.