‘Do you think it will have as destructive an effect as all that?’ Peter glanced across at Richard, and found his tall companion’s shape silhouetted against the first white ray of the rising moon.
‘Who knows? It’s possible that there could be enough meltwater there to affect conditions briefly, yes. Whether it will do so, heaven alone knows. But, looking at the other side of the coin, only the UN could have got so much positive input from all over the world. Look at the range of nationalities involved already. Even the Russians, and they’ve got troubles enough of their own, God knows.’
‘Well,’ Peter said cynically, ‘they’ve got a lot to play for in Moscow, haven’t they? They want the West’s help still, economically and socially, and that means politically. Of course they’re going to be falling over themselves to help with something as high-profile as this. They’ve had their fingers in this particular African pie for a long time and it won’t do them any harm to be seen either by the Americans or the Africans to be helping now. This way they get the kudos of supporting a great humanitarian endeavour without having to pay out too much. And if Mau is pulled out of the mire, you can bet the Russians will be in there bidding for business. Of course, if it isn’t pulled out of the mire then you just know their armaments men have already been in there bidding for business. Not just in Mau; Angola, Zaire, Congo, Guinea, Congo Libre, all of the local areas. They may not be selling Marxism any more, but they’ve got a lot of military hardware and the expertise to back it up. Hardware they don’t need now, foreign currency they do need. You know that, and even if Moscow wouldn’t sanction it, what about the republics? They say there’s even nuclear stuff up for grabs. A Ukrainian nuclear physicist gets paid about the same as a part-time janitor in the West; a full general earns less than the seamen down the deck, for God’s sake. And they’ve just been hit by capitalism in all its glory. Market forces for all.’ He swung round suddenly to face Richard, his expression creased with concern, his features etched by dead white moonlight reflecting off his glossy black skin. ‘For less than it cost to fit out this ship we could probably have bought a regiment of tanks equipped with battlefield nuclear arms. Or a nuclear power station with all the staff to run it.’
‘Chernobyl, perhaps,’ Richard temporised. In the near distance there was the sort of scream, long and unending, that had echoed over the freezing ocean for hours after Titanic had sunk. Richard’s scalp prickled. Peter continued to speak passionately, as though he had heard nothing of the dreadful sound.
‘Well, maybe. Or Tomsk Seven. They’re probably all that’s stopping all sorts of people falling over themselves to buy it all in.’
They walked on in silence for a moment. The screaming died away. The wind shouted in the Sampson posts suddenly and Peter exploded again.
‘And finally, if we pull this off, establish that there is a market, then think about it: in the northern hemisphere, the greatest number of naturally occurring icebergs is in the Davis Strait, but the greatest concentration of ice is in the Arctic Ocean and who has the longest Arctic shoreline? Who could just sail up there and start blowing chunks of the stuff off and shipping it out through the Norwegian Sea or the Bering Strait? No, apart from the United Nations, I’d say the Russians probably have the most to play for.’
As they talked, they had been walking up the four hundred metres of Psyche’s length and apparently into a different, more sinister, world. The ice was no closer to the ship here than it had been at the stern, but it seemed to be so. All the comforting presence of nearby humanity which had cast its protective mantle over the little poop was missing here. Even the throb and shudder of the motor was a distant indiscernible thing. There was no hiss or thunder of surf. There was the ice, and it cast a terrible, terrifying spell.
The four men on the watch had not bothered to build a shelter. They huddled away on the starboard rail of the forecastle head, close enough to see the winch, which they had illuminated with a stand of electric lanterns, but as far away as they could reasonably get from the ice. The wind thundered down the deck and swirled the constant waterfall away forward, but the friction this caused with the cliffs sucked the water inwards as well, as though Manhattan wished to reclaim what it had lost. The battering of the wind along the open deck, its hollow whimpering and hissing among the long sheaves of pipes and around the deck furniture came to its natural conclusion in the wavering, unremitting howl it made as it played against the straining black rope. Across the long, taut line it sobbed and screamed with the voice of a creature in unnamable torment. It was the voice, said the crew, of the woman with the long white hair, calling them from below.
But the ice made noises of its own. The open mouth of the cavern which had gulped down the soldiers gibbered and chuckled with the kind of lunatic intensity that the dangerously insane in horror films use. Behind and below the chilling sound, the ice rumbled, thundered and roared. It spat, hissed and cracked. There was never any pattern to the sound, nothing that the imagination could comprehend and deal with. The rumbling of air movement within the caverns of the ice seemed independent of the blowing of the wind. And indeed maybe it was, here, Richard thought. But who knew what winds were stirring fifty kilometres behind them, pushing their own dark forces through the ice, preparing to explode out of the cliffs in avalanches when least expected. Who knew what black currents from the icy depths where night-time was perpetual nine hundred metres below were being forced at incalculable speeds through the narrow honeycombs of tunnels into whirlpools, lakes or oceans entombed? Was it the manic gibber of the water which was to be most feared, or the sibilant, almost silent, surging hiss of great force fighting to break free into the thunderous glory of destruction? What was the sound they were to listen for particularly, the most dangerous sound of all? He had better check with Colin, who had warned him of the danger. He had better check with Colin soon, though he doubted that even the great knowledge locked in the glaciologist’s astounding memory would supply exactly the sound that an iceberg could be expected to make in the instant before it reared out of the water and toppled over like a white whale breaching. A white whale weighing more than a billion tonnes.
As Peter Walcott talked to the quiet group, Richard found himself lured across the broad green deck by the mesmeric power of the ice. He could never go so close on Titan, had never stood so solidly under the spell of it. He was a sensitive, imaginative man. He was fascinated, not only by the aura of naked danger which the iceberg seemed to emanate, but by his own atavistic, visceral reaction to it. Both Robin and their friend Ann Cable had been up on the ice. Ann had been lost up there, alone with a murderous terrorist and lucky to survive. It was this man, the deadly Henri LeFever who was still up there, somewhere, frozen into the ice. Ann and Robin had both described to Richard at length and in detail how the ice had affected them, and yet he had never imagined that it could actually be so powerful, so sinister, so overwhelming.
He was still standing there, lost in thought, when die relief watch arrived and Peter came over to touch him on the shoulder. ‘The relief line watch brought a message,’ he said. ‘Dr Higgins would like to see us. I don’t think it’s good news.’