As the ship entered the lee, Hansen issued more orders, all of them mysterious to Findhorn. The Captain pointed. 'There's your route up, laddie.'
Findhorn made out the thin rope ladder, now overhanging the tilting cliff, its base immersed in the churning water. Little hunks of ice and snow were splitting away from the top of the iceberg and crashing into the sea around the ladder. Thundering echoes came from the bergs scattered around. His mouth was parched and he was beginning to feel petrified with terror.
'I'll not move in much closer, some of these beasts have a wide underwater shelf. And I'll not risk more men than necessary. Findhorn, get up there. Do your job, and get yon people down that ladder ASAP.'
Findhorn stood, frozen. 'Quickly man,' Hansen snapped, 'before she turns turtle.' A practical man, our captain, Findhorn thought, not given to expressions of good luck or similar flim-flam.
'Sub-surface ice one thirty metres ahead, captain. It goes way down.'
'Very well. This is as far as I go.' Hansen lifted a telephone and a shudder ran through the ship.
'Can't you take me closer?' Findhorn was looking at the mountainous waves between him and the berg. The ship was plunging like an elevator in free-fall and fear was distorting his voice.
'Mister Findhorn, sir. Don't push your bloody luck. I shouldn't even be here. I'm breaking icebreaker Rule Number One as it is: you can handle any two of fog, storm and ice, but if you have all three you get the hell out of it. I'm not about to tempt fate with Number Two: don't approach an iceberg closer than its height.' Hansen nodded over Findhorn's shoulder: the execution squad, in the form of Leroy, the Jamaican first officer, and Arkin, the red-faced bosun, ice club in hand and looking like a murderer.
'I've seen this happen before,' Hansen said. 'She's about to turn turtle. And when she flips, she'll do it without warning.'
Findhorn, out of words, pulled up his fur cape. A sailor pushed the door open against the wind, and the bridge was suddenly filled with whirling snow. The man grinned as Findhorn passed.
On deck, the roar was overwhelming. A wheel came from overhead, from ice-festooned cables and wires attached to the masts. The snow was like stinging needles. The ship suddenly rolled. Churning black sea rose towards the deck. Findhorn overbalanced, grabbed a thick white handrail. Leroy snatched at his cape, hauled him upright. They clambered along the deck, Arkin leading and rapidly turning into a snowman.
On the lee of the ship, four sailors dressed like Eskimos were gripping the stanchions connected to the motor launch. Two of them were hammering fiercely at thick ice. Arkin climbed in, and Findhorn felt an indeterminate number of hands heaving him into the boat. Then he was gripping its side in terror as it was hoisted up on a derrick and swung out over the sea, the leverage exaggerating the ship's roll. The Zodiac slapped onto the water and Arkin snapped open the quick-release shackles, almost falling into the water as he did.
Down at sea level, the waves were immense. One loomed high over them. It hypnotized Findhorn. He watch its approach, assumed he was about to die. Instead the wave lifted the boat upwards, like a rapidly rising elevator, and threatened to smash it against the iron hull of the icebreaker; but then Arkin quickly puttered the little boat up and over its crest, towards the ice cliff. The berg seemed to have stopped tilting, but neither was it righting itself. This close to the boiling waves, the water seemed greasy. It was covered with a thin layer of frazil ice, and wisps of frost smoke outlined Findhorn's lungs and penetrated his layers of thermal clothing. The spray and snow assaulting his face were painful.
'You wan' try for the rope?' Leroy shouted, his face pitch-black against his white furry cape. Arkin was steering round an ice flow twice the size of the motor boat.
Findhorn looked at the big waves thundering off the face of the berg. The boat would smash itself to pieces if they approached too close. The ice on the cliff looked as hard as steel. Too terrified to speak, he nodded.
The rope ladder was dangling near a large cave. The water inside it was relatively calm. Arkin puttered them towards it. This close, the berg seemed monstrous. It was hissing, as the melting ice released bubbles of ancient air; Findhorn saw them sailing into the open jaws of a living entity. As they entered the cave the sea water began to churn below them, slapping powerfully off the side of the berg and drenching them with icy salt water. Arkin gripped the tiller with both hands. Then the boat was rising upwards.
Leroy shouted: 'Ice platform rising! Clear off!'
There was a terrifying hiss as the rising berg sucked in water and air. The sea churned. Arkin, eyes wide with fear, revved up the engine and swung the tiller. As they raced out from under the overhanging ice the rope ladder scraped alongside and Findhorn, in a moment of pure insanity, leaped at it. He grabbed a wooden rung and swung dizzily back under the overhang. The boat was racing clear. The noise was terrifying. He scrambled upwards, not daring to look down, but then the berg was pulling him up from the maelstrom. Ice showered from above, a fist-sized lump striking him painfully on the shoulder. He scrambled up recklessly, desperate to escape the hissing monster at his feet.
Fifty metres up, gasping for breath, he summoned up the nerve to glance down. Arkin had taken the Zodiac well clear of the berg. Small, pale faces looked up at him. The snow was closing in again and the Norsk Explorer was just a hazy outline. He thought of what he had just done and his whole body began to tremble.
He looked up. The rope ladder ended about twenty metres above him, tied around shiny metal pitons hammered into the ice. Beyond it was a ridge about three feet wide, an old shoreline, and on the ridge was a bearded man. Findhorn, his heart hammering in his chest, climbed up the last few feet of rope. He grabbed the gloved hand tightly and found himself hauled up on to a flat stretch of rough ice, and facing a man with a pinched nose and a worried face adorned by a five-day growth of ice-covered, grey beard. Small hard eyes peered out from behind the snow goggles. Buster Watson: Findhorn knew him from half a dozen international conferences; a pushy little egoist.
'Thank God,' the man shouted into the wind. 'Where the hell have you been, Findhorn?'
'We're lucky to be here at all in this weather. What happened to your radio?'
'We lost nearly everything when the bloody thing calved off.'
You lost the radio but not the huts?
Then Watson was shouting, 'Move it, we have very little time.' Bent almost double against the wind, he led the way across the top of the berg, along a flat plateau about fifty metres wide. Through the driving snow Findhorn glimpsed violently flapping tents and snow-driven huts. A tethered silver balloon was straining horizontally at its leash, rubbing against the ice. They passed a sonar tower whipping in the wind, firing little chirps of sound into the atmosphere overhead. The site looked for all the world like a scientific ice station.
Only the location was crazy.
Now they were passing the charred remains of a hut, a downwind line of soot marking the wind direction at the time of the fire, and the plateau was beginning to slope down. Watson led the way to a rectangular hut about twenty feet long; one of Findhorn's specks of dust. There was a surge of warm air as Watson pulled the door open against the screaming wind. Inside, a generator was throbbing. It was secured to the ice with deep steel pins. There was a smell of diesel. A shiny black cable from the generator was pinned along the ice and disappeared into a shaft about four feet wide.
Watson threw back his fur hood and took off his goggles. 'We started with a steam probe. The hole it made was a guide for a big gopher. It just melted its way down.'