In fact, as he found out immediately on arrival, the water wasn’t as still as he had calculated. Even down here, there was an appreciable drift towards the roaring suction of the crack, but he was able to hold himself still enough to follow the beam on down. Because the beam was shining directly up at him, he was dazzled by it and could not see what lay behind it at all. He simply prayed that it would be Katya, lying stunned but otherwise uninjured on the icy hollow of the floor. And, as he came closer, it seemed that he might well be right; he could see a shape in the strange shadows made by the ever so faintly glimmering ice ledges. ‘It’s OK, Katya,’ he crooned, ‘I’m here to get you. It’s OK…’ He reached down and grabbed the light, moving it with ever such gentle hands.
‘JESUS CHRIST!’ he shouted.
Bob’s bellow of shocked surprise jerked Richard out of a reverie induced by the hypnotic effect of the whirling, dancing life in front of him and by the drone of Bob’s monologue, which had had the further effect of stopping Colin Ross from breaking in for updates and reports. And it could not have broken the spell at a more opportune moment for as he leaped into shocked wakefulness, the entwined bodies of the unconscious Katya and her dead partner drifted past, having just completed their first circuit of the hellish ballroom this place had become.
At first Richard simply could not believe what he was seeing. Their entwined bodies, bound at the waist by the bright serpent of Katya’s lifeline, slowly swirled towards him out of the shadows and into the beam of his torch with all the balletic grace of a spacecraft in orbit or a tiny planet spinning round a dark star.
He supposed Bob must have called him on purpose to warn him. But no, surely Bob was too far down to see what was going on up here. He would be looking up through more than a hundred metres of thick, whirling black water at what? At four feet dancing on air! Such was Richard’s stunned confusion that he almost let the nightmare vision sweep by.
As the Soviet sleeping beauty floated past in the arms of her dead beast in United Nations fatigues, Richard launched himself forward, dangerously stretching his own lifeline to the limit and provoking a roar of protest from Colin. The loops of Bob’s lifeline that Richard had been holding tumbled into the cavern as he closed his fists like steel grips round the cut end of Katya’s lifeline.
The reciprocal tug of the contracting line was augmented by a sharp tug from his team. He performed a half-flip back into the tunnel entrance like a miraculous high diver returning to the board. The jerk of Katya’s line brought him up short with a shock which nearly dislocated his shoulders but he was ready for that now, having shrugged off the last dangerous dreaminess under the old familiar imperative of urgent action. His fists did not relent, nor did his wrenched wrists, his torn elbows or shocked shoulders. He had no idea he had shouted in pain until Colin bellowed ‘RICHARD! What is going on? First Bob, now you!’
He did not reply — and he noted that Bob was saying nothing more for the moment either. Instead he concentrated all his massive strength on holding onto the bright, braided rope as the forces unleashed by his wild dive transferred themselves to the gently floating, weightless, fairytale couple at the far end of it. Suddenly their dream waltz picked up speed, took on the features of a wild, whirling tango. On axis, like a planet, they spun in the void twice, three times, faster and faster, until Katya was brought up short by her harness, provoking a gasp from Richard that sounded as though he had been punched hard below the belt, and Jock broke free in a whirl of arms and legs to perform a gruesome Highland fling away into the merciful black shadows.
Richard tugged gently, hand over hand, until he held Katya cradled in his arms, as tenderly as though she had been his daughter.
‘I’ve got her, Colin!’ His voice throbbed with relief. ‘Bob, it’s all right. I’ve got Katya.’
Bob Stark knelt on the bottom, right down in the ice-green, dead cold throat of that wide funnel on the floor of the cavern’s hourglass shape. He held Katya’s torch beside his own, both of them shining downwards. Richard’s voice distantly began to penetrate the layers of shock which surrounded him like deadly cotton wool. His dark eyes came alive. His wide mouth choked in a breath. Bubbles rose again from the vent beside his head. His heart fluttered painfully and continued to beat, his blood moved in his arteries and he felt the hot surge of it as though it had been stopped for a while. He moved his face a little, shook himself, looked down anew at the body lying supine between his knees, at the white overall clinging in rags to the wreckage of bony limbs, at the grinning, eyeless death’s mask face with its Nordic farm girl’s wealth of long blonde hair stirring and floating in the current, home to a host of darting fish, and he said, ‘Richard, if you’ve got Katya up there with you, then who in hell’s name is this dead broad I’ve got down here with me?’
Chapter Sixteen
It took them a week to cross the North Atlantic. Seven days and nights of hard sailing and grinding effort as everyone began to put in the sort of hours Sally Bell had observed Richard Mariner working and he worked even harder. The better part of two hundred and fifty people were directly involved here, but it was the senior officers who worked the hardest. They battered out the routines which fitted with the requirements of ship handling, general sailing, weather and ice. The crews followed their orders, did their jobs and took their food and rest. They watched the monster they were towing with a kind of proprietorial awe, but it seemed that only the upper echelons felt the responsibility, the urgency.
Tom Snell recovered quickly and moved his men off the ice — it was getting too wet and dangerous up there for camping any more. As the surface of Manhattan began to weather, so the foundations of the huts began to weaken and there came a distinct worry that they would blow, or simply slide, over the edge one night. The ice was always covered in a skim of runoff, even on the rare days when the constant flow of frontal systems which swung in behind them after that first squall did not bring a good deal of rain to accompany their welcome westerly winds.
Colin and Kate Ross moved off their encampment, last of a series that had been on various locations on the berg for nearly a year, and took up residence in Titan, although Colin was often called to Psyche or Kraken, especially during the early days when the two ships closest to the ice required constant advice and assurance about everything from dealing with cascades of runoff thundering onto their upper works with the sound of avalanches to the rate at which Manhattan could be expected to rise in the water as it melted — the rate, consequently, at which the unbreakable lines needed to be paid out to stop the ships being picked up out of the water. In the early days, such a horror seemed entirely possible.