A Grue Of Ice (11 page)

They say the eyes see best ten degrees off centre. Mine

caught -the tell-tail flicker of light away to starboard. It wasn't a ship.

Sailhardy spun the wheel. It seemed ages before
Antarctica
started to come round.

" Get my night glasses from the cabin—quick!" I told the Norwegian quartermaster whose place Sailhardy had taken. Upton handed me the bridge binoculars. I took one look at the name. " Standard British glasses are useless at night," I said. " I wonder how many ships were sunk during the war through not seeing a raider because of poor glasses." The man returned and handed me my own.

Pirow smiled at Upton. " Raider's glasses! Zeiss. Sevenfold magnification. They took months to perfect a single pair of binoculars for one of our raider captains. The Herr Kapitan Wetherby has all the answers."

The night drew in under their power, but I could not trace

the momentary light which had alerted me. I opened one of

the bridge windows. " We are in raiders' waters," I said.
"
Meteor
used to rendezvous with
Neptune
off Tristan. U-boats, too. I almost surprised one. His oil hoses were still in the water." Gale-impelled rain deluged through the opening.

" Ice!" said Sailhardy. " Ice! I smell it. Ice, Bruce, very close."

" I smell it,
too,"
said Helen.
I
had not heard her come to the bridge.

The gale held an indefinable smell. There is nothing like it anywhere else: not in Arctic ice, even. In the Southern Ocean the smell of it passes into men's clothing ; the lookout in the swaying barrel on a catcher's mast knows that faintly wet, indescribable smell as his deadliest enemy and the companion of his labours.
64

We did not have to wait. The night was torn by a splendour

of white light. The incandescent burst was man-made.
Thorshammer
had also seen what I had glimpsed. She had promised to use starshells.

The great iceberg was in two dimensions. It must have been two or three miles long and a thousand feet high. From
Antarctica's
bridge it was strange and beautiful under the slowly-descending parachute of the starshell. Towards its left-hand extremity, as if superimposed forward of the

main body of the tabular berg, was a gigantic anvil soaring nearly its entire height ; it seemed almost disembodied from the rest. Disembodied in colour, too : anchored for half a

mile in a solid platform over which the sea spouted, it was deep green ; where the blade of the anvil flared it was yellow, almost amber at the summit. The island of ice embayed itself near the right-hand cliff and I could see in the ephemeral light a tiny lake of blue water, dominated by fluted, grooved cliffs on either side. The weather face of the stupendous berg was hard and clear ; the lee was blurred by a tumble of disintegrating spicules of ice, feathering their way on the gale.

" My God!" exclaimed Upton. Then he remembered
Thorshammer.
"She'll see us! Turn away! Turn away!"

" No," I retorted. " She's on the other side of the berg. It will block out anything this side."

" She can't miss us with her radar," Upton said.

Pirow disagreed. " That berg is breeding enough radar angels to fox anyone."

" Radar angels?" he asked.

" The ice, especially when it is disintegrating, produces all sorts of unaccountable echoes on a radar," he said. " We call them angels."

The starshell was doused. Darkness clamped down.

Helen was still next to me. " It is the sort of thing one remembers all one's life. I didn't know icebergs came so far north."

" It was probably ten times that size off Cape Horn," I said.

From the starboard wing of the bridge I stared astern. Of
Thorshammer
there was no sign, not even a funnel glow by which to pick her up in the blackness. I came back and

shut the window.

" Signal the catchers with the Aldis," I told Pirow. " Steer .

. ." I checked in my mind—" steer one hundred degrees. 65

Eight knots." Helen was shivering. Sailhardy spun the wheel. My order had told him everything.

" Steady as she goes."

" Aye, aye, sir."

Antarctica
plunged southwards.

" One hundred degrees," said Helen. " Destination? I looked deep into her eyes.

" Bouvet Island."

5.
The Island that Never Was

For three days
Antarctica
and the four catchers fought their way to the south through the storm. Now, on the fourth morning, the wind had dropped, but there was a tremendous swell running from the south-west. The heart of the gale had passed to the north and east, and was on its way to spread snow on the distant high plateaux of the South African mainland. I was on the bridge, and Sailhardy at the wheel. A growler stood out on the starboard bow. The four catchers formed a ragged rearguard to the factory ship. Nearest was Walter's
Aurora.
She seemed to ride better than the others. She stuck her bow, blunt and aggressive like a boxer's nose, into the swell. A tarpaulin masked the deadly purpose of the harpoon-gun forward. She sank down on our port beam
as
if kneeling to the plunging factory ship, and took it green up to the cluster of winches below the bridge. All I could see was her mast-head above the rollers. I watched the whip of the long flexible mast, which looked like an outsize fishing rod because of its cables to the harpoon. Water poured off her deck in triangular streams as she rose, channelled by the three-cornered bollards anchoring the whaling cables.

The sea had changed from the clear blue of Tristan's waters to a dirty-threatening grey. The fleet was now well to the south of shipping routes and striking across the path of the Roaring Forties. The heavy top-hamper of the factory ship, the four massive gantries, the big bollards by the rails, and the heavy steel cables supporting the masts, were drenched in spray. A Wandering Albatross whose wing-span I guessed to be twelve feet, tipped the wind effortlessly from under his wings, and hung above the stern like a white boomerang. His presence copyrighted the South. Of the other three catchers,
Chimay
lay out to starboard, and
Crozet
and
Kerguelen,
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further away, gave me on the bridge no more than an occasional glimpse of the thick winch wires and lashing blocks which reached almost to the height of their crow's-nests while they steamed beam-on to the seas.

" Someone built that ship good," remarked Sailhardy.

" Smith's Dock Co., Middlesbrough,"
I
said absently. " They build the best."

My mind was not on
Aurora's
seaworthiness, although professionally I admired the way the rounded bows of the catcher came up and their flare fought the sea. One moment

her cruiser stern plunged so deep I wondered if it would ever come up again ; the next, she shook her whole fifteenfoot depth free in an explosion of spray. The wicked handles of the harpoon-gun stuck out of the weathered tarpaulin, like death in hand cuffs.

I
was worried: after the departure from Tristan
and
the fleet's successful evasion of
Thorshammer,
Upton had taken over command from me, despite his assurances before we had left the anchorage, with Bjerko playing stooge to him. He had immediately altered the course to one which was causing me the gravest concern. Upton had also been asking questions about the charts
I
had mentioned at our first meeting. At first his probings had been guarded, but now they were more open and persistent.

The exhilaration of dodging
Thorshammer
had given way in my mind to gnawing fears about my complicity in Upton's schemes. Nor had those doubts been lessened by Pirow's smooth radio deception of the Norwegian warship and Upton's refusal to tell the other skippers except Walter that
Thors-
hammer
was hot on our trail. We were now striking the fringe of the wild seas where I would have to seek the other prong of The Albatross' Foot, and the sight of the great seas rolling up from the ice continent dampened my first flush of enthusiasm, despite the success of the Tristan escape. It seemed an almost impossible task to seek to find anything in an ocean as savage as this.

My apprehension had not been helped by Sailhardy. Two

days out from Tristan he had told me that the flensing crews spent their time playing cards 'tween decks, and that no attempt was being made to get the factory ship shipshape for the impending record catch. He maintained that Upton's interest in me centred on the old chart in my oilskin case, so that I had brought the chart up from my cabin to study through the long hours of watch at night. My own suspicions 67

revolved round some part-knowledge Pirow and I might share from our wartime operations, and I thought Upton was aiming to dovetail the two interrelated pieces of knowledge held separately by Pirow and myself, once we got to Bouvet. Helen, too, remained a mystery to me. On the few occasions

she had appeared on the bridge she had been even more distant and withdrawn than before. Her questions to me were, I felt, consciously professional regarding weather, but I had noticed a decided uneasiness in her as the fleet neared colder waters.

Now, this morning, as I stood on the bridge shortly after

sunrise, my doubts crystallised. I had gone below to my cabin during the night, and although I could not pin down anything specific, I felt it had been searched. I had the old chart on the bridge. The oilskin bag, which served as a chart-case, was almost as I had left it—but not quite. It was one of those indefinable things—an awareness, more than a fact, that it was not as I had left it.

I pulled the folded square of parchment from the inner pocket of my thick reefer jacket. It crackled
as
I unfolded i t , t o s t u d y i t o n c e a g a i n t o t r y a n d f a t h o m U p t o n ' s objective.

" For God's sake, Bruce!" Sailhardy exclaimed. " Put that damn thing away! What if Upton or Pirow come here?"

" You're seeing shadows, Sailhardy," I said. " This old thing simply can't mean what you think it might. Neither Upton nor Pirow will come to the bridge as early as this."

" Take the wheel a moment," he said. While I did, he locked the bridge doors leading to Upton's cabin and the radio office.

" We've been over this a score of times in the past three days," I said. " I'm damned if I can see what an old—and inaccurate—map of Bouvet Island in 1825 has to do with a socalled whaling expedition in 1961." The old parchment was intersected by wavy lines, with a

shape like a Chinese maple leaf in the centre. Both margins were marked with tiny crosses. From the right-hand top corner, meandering irregularly towards the maple-leaf shape
in
the middle, was a line. Below the line and opposite one of the quaint marginal crosses which said 54 degrees South, were three dots, and a little further down another dot which was labelled " rock ". Is novelty had long since been lost upon me. The chart had come to me shortly after the war when the firm of Wetherbys had eventually folded up.

68

It was the log and track chart of the Wetherby sealer
Sprightly,
which had rediscovered Bouvet Island in 1825. Her master, Captain George Norris, had not only charted the island, but had also sketched it.

" That's not all, and you know it," retorted Sailhardy. " And I think Upton guesses that too."

" You mean Thompson Island?" I said derisively.

" Yes," replied Sailhardy. " I mean just that—Thompson Island."

My thoughts went back to the day upon empty day I had trailed up and down the great staircase at the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society near the Albert Hall in London. The days upon days spent sitting outside someone's office at the Admiralty, waiting to be fobbed off and sent to yet another office. The stale smell of the Greenland kayak on the Geographical Society staircase was synonymous in my mind with the endless questioning, my endless frustration, among the disbelieving experts. They did not want to believe, any more than the Admiralty wanted to believe, what I had seen.

I wondered if my innermost reason for accepting Upton's offer to go to Bouvet had been less of a desire on my part

to nail down The Albatross' Foot and more an attempt to vindicate myself. The Royal Geographical Society and the Admiralty had both said, leave it alone, leave it alone.