And beyond everything lay the sea, the island-studded, ice-filled waters of Baffin Bay. Off-shore there was a mile-wide belt of loose pressure ice - the season was not yet far enough advanced for the fantastic shapes it would assume in the early spring -streaked with open, ever-changing leads and dotted at rare intervals with small icebergs - probably ones that had broken off from the east coast, drifted south round Cape Farewell and then moved north again, the whole half-lost, unearthly, and impossibly, weirdly, continuously altered in configuration by the white drifting fog that hung miasma-like over the sea.
But two things there were that were not lost: two ships. The one to the south-west, wraith-like and blurred though its lines were through the swirling mist, was quite unmistakable, that raked and slender silhouette would have been unmistakable anywhere: it was a destroyer, it could only be the Wykenham, moving slowly, cautiously shorewards through the ice-filled waters of the bay to our left. A heart-warming, immensely reassuring spectacle - or it should have been: but after the first cursory identifying glance I lost interest, my attention was taken and completely held by the second ship.
I couldn't see all of it, most of its hull was hidden by the precipitous end of the glacier, but its small squat bridge, two masts and broad, bluff seaward-pointing bows were clearly etched against the mirror-calm waters of the head of the fjord and the sloping ice-bare rock that brushed its portside fenders. I could see no flag. It was a trawler, unmistakably so, and I thought grimly that it must have been a very special trawler indeed to have battered that still-visible path through the ice-choked mouth of the fjord.
My gaze moved back to the trawler again and a second later I was grabbing Hillcrest's binoculars without so much as by your leave. One glance was enough, even in that shadowed gloom of the depth of the fjord I could see all I wanted to see by the grey noon-light. I could see a great deal more than I wanted to. For a few seconds I stood stock-still listening desperately for the sound of the Citroen's engines: moments later I was in the tractor cabin, by the radio table.
"Still in contact with the Triton, Joss?" He nodded, and I rushed on: "Tell them there's a group of men coming ashore from a trawler in the Kangalak Fjord. Ten, twelve, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure whether they're armed. I'll be damned surprised if they aren't. Tell them I'm certain they're going to move up on the glacier."
"Now?"
"Of course!" I snapped. "Send a message immediately. And-"
"No. I meant are they moving up the glacier now?"
"Take them ten, fifteen minutes - the fjord walls are pretty steep and it's tricky to climb.. . . After that ask the Wykenham if they will send a landing party ashore. An armed party. And for God's sake tell them it's urgent."
"Will they get here in time, Doc?" Zagero was behind me. "By the time they lower a boat, row ashore, cross this headland - it's half a mile if it's an inch - it'll take them fifteen minutes, maybe more."
"I know," I said irritably - irritably, but softly, for Joss was already talking into the table microphone, in the swift, staccato yet strangely unhurried voice of the trained radioman. "If you have any better suggestions-"
"It's coming!" Hillcrest's excited face had just appeared at the door of the cabin. "Come on! We can hear it coming down the glacier."
And indeed they could. The deep throaty roar of that heavy engine was recognisable anywhere. Hurriedly we moved about a hundred yards away from the moraine-ringed depression where we had parked the tractor, Jackstraw, Hillcrest and I each with a rifle in our hands, and crouched down behind the concealing protection of some ice-covered debris at the edge of the glacier. From where we lay we could command a view of the glacier across its entire width and up to a point several hundred yards away, where it curved sharply out of sight.
We needn't have hurried. The Citroen was still some good way off, the sound of its engine being funnelled down through the glacier valley well ahead of it, and I had time to look around me. What I saw seemed good. I was banking everything on the hope that the Citroen would still be on the same side of the glacier as when we had last seen it, and, from what I could see, the chances were high that it still would be. The entire centre of the glacier was a devil's playground of crevasses ranging from hairlines to chasms twenty and more feet in width, transverse, longitudinal and diagonal, and as far as I could see they extended clear to the other wall. But here, on the left side, close in to the lining wall of moraine, was a relatively clear path, fissured only at long intervals, and not more than thirty yards broad. Thirty yards! Jackstraw could never miss at this point-blank range, even with a moving target.
I stole a glance at him, but his face might have been carved from the glacier itself, it was immobile and utterly devoid of expression. Hillcrest, on the other hand, was restless, forever shifting his cramped position: he was unhappy, I knew; he didn't tike this one little bit. He didn't like murder. Neither did I. But this wasn't murder, it was a long overdue execution: it wasn't life-taking, it was life-saving, the lives of Margaret and Solly Levin. . . .
There came the sudden click, abnormally loud even above the closing roar of the tractor, and Jackstraw, stretched his length on the snow, had the rifle raised to his shoulder. And then, suddenly, the Citroen had come clearly into sight and Jackstraw was gently lowering his rifle to the ground. I had gambled, and I had lost. The tractor was on the far side of the glacier, hugging the right bank as closely as possible: even at its nearest point of approach it would still be three hundred yards away.
CHAPTER TWELVE - Saturday 12.15 P.M. - 12.30 P.M.
The Citroen was travelling in a most erratic fashion - one moment slowing down almost to a stop, the next jerking forward and covering perhaps twenty to thirty yards at a rush. Although we couldn't see the glacier surface at that distance, it was obvious that the driver was picking his way round ice-mounds and threading along between fissures at the best speed he could manage. But his average speed was very low: it would probably take him almost five minutes to reach that point opposite us where the glacier fell away sharply to the left towards the outer angle of the dog-leg half-way down towards the fjord.
All these things I noted mechanically, without in any way consciously thinking of them. All I could think of was that Smallwood and Corazzmi had outwitted us right up to the last -almost certainly, I could understand now, they had seen and been warned by the rockets Hillcrest had fired to give the Scimitar our position, and decided to give that side of the glacier the widest possible berth.
But the reasons no longer mattered a damn. All that mattered was the accomplished fact, and the fact was that Corazzini and Smallwood could no longer be stopped, not in the way we had intended. Even yet, of course, they could be stopped - but I had no illusions but that that would be at the cost of the lives of the two hostages in the tractor.
Frantically I tried to work out what to do for the best. There was no chance in the world that we might approach them openly over the glacier - we would be spotted before we had covered ten yards, and a pistol at the heads of Margaret and Levin would halt us before we got half-way. If we did nothing, let them get away, I knew the hostages' chances of survival were still pretty slim - that trawler would almost certainly have a name or number or both and I couldn't see Smallwood letting them make an identification of the trawler and then come back to report to us - and to all the waiting ships and planes in the Davis Strait - Baffin Sea area. Why should he take the slightest risk when it would be so easy to shoot them, so much easier still to throw them down a crevasse or shove them over the edge of the glacier into the freezing waters of the fjord a hundred and fifty feet below.. . . Already the Citroen was no more than three minutes away from the nearest point of approach they would make to us.
"Looks like they're going to get away with it," Hillcrest whispered. It seemed as if he feared he might be overheard, though Smallwood and Corazzini couldn't have heard him had he shouted at the top of his voice.
"Well, that was what you wanted, wasn't it?" I asked bitterly.
"What I wanted! My God, man, that missile mechanism-"
"I don't give a single solitary damn about the missile mechanism." I ground the words out between clenched teeth. "Six months from now other scientists will have invented something twice as good and ten times as secret. They're welcome to it, and with pleasure."
Hillcrest was shocked, but said nothing. But someone was in agreement with me.
"Hear, hear!" Zagero had just come up, his hands swathed to the size of boxing gloves in white bandages. The words were light enough, but his face was grim and his eyes bleak as he stared out across the glacier. "My sentiments exactly, Doc. To hell with their murderous little toys. My old man's in that buggy out there. And your girl."
"His girl?" Hillcrest turned, looked sharply at me under creased brows for a long moment, then murmured: "Sorry, boy, I didn't understand."
I made no response, but twisted my head as I heard footsteps behind me. It was Joss, hatless and gloveless in his excitement.
"Wykenham's anchored, sir," he panted out. "Her-"
"Get down, man! They'll see you."
"Sorry." He dropped to his hands and knees. "Her powerboat's already moving inshore. And there was a flight of four Scimitars already airborne: they should be half-way here already. In two minutes'-time four or five bombers are taking off, with HE and incendiaries. They're slower, but-"
"Bombers?" I snapped irritably. "Bombers? What do they think this is - the Second Front?"
"No sir. They're going to clobber the trawler if Smallwood gets away with that missile mechanism. They won't get a hundred yards."
"The hell with their missile mechanism. Do human lives mean nothing to them? What is it, Jackstraw?"
"Lights, Dr Mason." He pointed to the spot on the fjord wall where the men from the trawler had already covered two-thirds of the horizontal and vertical distance to the end of the glacier. "Signalling, I think."
I saw it right away, a small light, but powerful, winking irregularly. I watched it for a few moments then heard Joss's voice.
"It's morse, but it's not our morse, sir."
"They're hardly likely to signal in English just for our benefit," I said dryly. I tried to speak calmly, to hide the fear, the near despair in my mind, and when I spoke again my voice, I knew, was abnormally matter-of-fact. "It's the tip-off to our friends Small-wood and Corazzini. If we can see the men from the trawler, it's a cinch the men from the trawler can see us. The point is, do Smallwood and Corazzini understand them?"
Five seconds later I had my answer in the form of a suddenly deepening roar coming to us across the glacier from the engine of the Citroen. Corazzini - Hillcrest's binoculars had shown him to be the driver - had understood the danger all right, he was casting caution to the winds and gunning the engine to its maximum. He must have been desperate, desperate to the point of madness, for no sane man would have taken the fearful risks of driving that tractor through sloping crevasse ice with the friction coefficient between treads and surface reduced almost to zero. Or could it be that he just didn't know the suicidal dangers involved?
After a few seconds I was convinced he didn't. In the first place, I couldn't see either Corazzini or Smallwood as men who would panic under pressure, no matter how severe that pressure, and in the second place suicidal risks weren't absolutely necessary, they would have stood a more than even chance of getting away with their lives and the -missile mechanism if they had stopped the tractor, got out and picked their cautious way down the glacier on foot, with their pistol barrels stuck in the backs of their hostages. Or would they - rather, did they think they would?
I tried fleetingly, frantically, to get inside their cold and criminal minds, to try to understand their conception of us. Did they think that we thought, like them, that the mechanism was all important, that human lives were cheap and readily expendable? If they did, and guessing the quality of Jackstraw's marksmanship with a rifle, would they not be convinced that they would be shot down as soon as they had stepped out on to the ice, regardless of the fate of their hostages? Or did they have a better understanding than that of minds more normal than their own?
Even as these thoughts flashed through my mind I knew I must act now. The time for thought, had there ever been such a time, was past. If they were left to continue in the tractor, they would either kill themselves on the glacier or if, by a miracle, they reached the bottom safely, they would then kill their hostages. If they were stopped now, there was a faint chance that Margaret and Levin might survive, at least for the moment: they were Smallwood's and Corazzini's only two trump cards, and would be kept intact as long as lay within their power, for they were their only guarantee of escape. I just had to gamble on the hope that they would be desperately reluctant to kill them where they were now, still a mile from the end of the glacier. And the last time I had gambled I had lost.