Gogol arrived, dumping himself in the co-pilot’s seat and raising a long, clumsy tube into plain sight. ‘Another Grail missile,’ he said. ‘Like the one we used on Chala. Get me to one of those bastard tankers and I’ll light a big enough fire to call down all of your heat-seeking missiles!’
Kizel nodded, but he wasn’t really paying much attention. He was going through the shortest pre-flight of his flying life. The tanks were half empty and the gas was not too keen on pushing itself up into tubes at this odd angle. The engine coughed and snarled. The rotors surged into motion then slowed as the motor failed to catch. The Hind reached the end of its little trenches and hesitated, apparently unwilling to go up over the rough, sandy snow.
The sound of the rolling iceberg was of a thunderstorm in an echo chamber with a recording of a military barrage at full volume behind it on the biggest speakers in the world. Kizel was crying because of the pain in his ears. And yet even that seemed secondary to the agony in his chest. The very air that he breathed was vibrating so hard it threatened to tear his lung linings loose. His heart was actually being massaged by the throbbing in the shaking air. He could feel his brain trembling in his skull and his sight began to fail as the smallest blood vessels behind his eyes ruptured and began to spray threads of blood across his vision.
A fully-laden Hind-D helicopter weighs in excess of 25,000 kilograms. There were four left on the upper surface of Manhattan, and so 100,000 kilos, nearly a quarter of a million pounds, was sliding down the slope adding weight and inertia to the slow, inexorable tilt of the ice. Compared with the mass of the whole thing, of course, this weight was less than nothing. But the balance of the iceberg was so questionable, its reaction to brushing the lip of the submarine cliff so intense, the destabilising effect of being cut loose and slowing down suddenly so cataclysmic that the extra weight of the helicopters was more than enough to turn it over.
With a kind of languorous majesty, it heaved and tipped, throwing its sand-marked upper surfaces southwards and pulling its submarine foundations up into the heaving air. It was so massive that the physics of its movement caused enormous disturbance of the sea which heaved up into great waves speeding south. Only the quick-thinking and desperate orders of Richard Mariner turned the ships in time so that at least they were riding stern on to the swell. Psyche was nearly drowned by spray and her whole bridgehouse was discovered, later, to have moved one clear metre forward down her deck. Nevertheless, she survived.
Titan and Niobe, running away to the east, were battered but unbowed. Ajax and Achilles in harness to the west likewise escaped.
Exactly what happened to Kraken, however, no one ever knew.
As the iceberg rolled, it rose up in the water as though the sideways motion was causing it to leap into the air for joy. It hurled itself upwards far faster than the slow ocean could ever move to fill in the unutterable, abysmal vacancies it left behind it. For the instants of its unimaginable arousal, it literally tore a hole in nature. And the tanker was simply gulped down. Running north and east for safety though she was, she never stood a chance, for the movement of something as gigantic as Manhattan caused even the winds to move, and the same forces that piled up the sea on one side into great waves and made a Grand Canyon in the ocean on the other acted on the air as well. The hurricane storm to the south which threw the spray so hard at Psyche’s upper works that her funnel was hurled over her forecastle head and away across the sea in front of her, simply, on the northern side of the rolling berg, sucked Kraken like a feather into the hole in the Gulf of Guinea made by a billion tonnes of solid water in violent motion, and swallowed a quarter of a million ton supertanker as easily as it had swallowed the Hind helicopter a little earlier.
Only the instruments told Kizel that the engine had caught. By the time it came to life, its sound was as nothing in the storm. He engaged the rotors once again and actually began to pray as the great span of die blades began to swing into its accustomed circle. He was extremely fortunate that Kraken’s guardian had already fallen off, for by the time he had his own craft under some kind of control it was plain that everything else on the surface was in violent motion down the slope which was all too rapidly steepening into a cliff. Even as he lifted off, he kept looking up that dirty white slope, expecting to see Kraken’s helicopter come tumbling down on top of him.
The lurch as the cabin swung back down to a horizontal setting threatened to throw both men out of their seats, for neither was strapped in. Whereas it nearly knocked Kizel out, it served to wake Gogol up. By this time he had consumed so many of his morphine tablets that he was far removed from reality. The drug’s painkilling properties cocooned him from the agonies of noise and concussion which were threatening to incapacitate his pilot. He pulled himself up and looked around. If he was beyond pain, he was by no means beyond the reach of shock, and what he saw smashed into his consciousness like a right hook from a heavyweight champion. He had lost his command. That much seemed certain. And, for the first time in his life, he had failed in a mission. Increasingly wildly, he looked around die swinging cabin of the Hind as Kizel fought to bring it dancing out from under the rearing avalanche of the spinning iceberg.
The same deft hands and feet which had made the Hind seem to fly backwards before Psyche’s bridgehouse and had jerked the craft away like a fish on a line fought to carry the bucking helicopter through the increasingly wild winds piling up under the lip of solid ice which was breaking down over them like a big surf. At last, the helicopter was indeed flying backwards and Kizel, a pilot of real genius, perhaps the greatest helicopter pilot in the Russian armed services, was bringing his craft back out of the jaws of hell to the first heart-stopping promise of safety.
‘Yes!’ He tore his throat, screaming with, the wild, ecstatic combination of hope and elation, feeling his labouring craft beginning to come to life.
He hauled her nose up as though he was a weightlifter at the outer edge of his strength. His eyes began to clear, for he had been flying by touch up until now, and he began to see, rising out of the billowing clouds of spray on which he seemed to be floating, more and more and more of the eternal iceberg rising up to meet him. The glass in front of him split across and began to leak inward at once. He screamed. The Hind screamed. Neither could be heard. He gained another gramme or two of strength. The metal of the control column began to twist out of shape in the force of his grip. His foot slid another millimetre down the slowly warping pedal. And by main force, the Hind continued to climb on the back of the hurricane wind, skipping backwards all the time and away from that massive leap of the ice which, far back behind the rising, rolling mountain, was gulping Kraken down and creating massive waves in the southern edge of the Bight.