At last there was nothing left to say or do other than to get wet. Katya and Bob crossed to the sinister black hole in the ice, pulling again at their safety harnesses and testing their regulators, their long, braided orange polyester safety lines trailing like tails in their wake. Together they sat on the edge of the ice, putting their feet into the obsidian rush of the rogue current with all too obvious reluctance. In concert, already working in unconscious mirror image, as though they had been diving as a team for years, they settled their full face masks, flashed their heavy duty, underwater torches, and checked the tightness of their light equipment belts. Then they gave each other a swift glance and offered Richard and Colin a thumbs-up to show that they were ready.
Colin depressed the SEND button on the walkie-talkie he held tuned to the wavelength of the tiny transmitter-receivers in the divers’ headgear. ‘Katya, can you hear me? Over.’
Her head bobbed. ‘Yesss,’ came her reply, distorted by the machine already.
‘Bob, can you hear me?’
‘Yesss.’
‘And can you hear each other?’
‘Yesss.’
‘Loud and clear.’
‘Lines tight,’ ordered Richard quietly. ‘Ready all.’ He glanced back to where the three teams of mixed soldiers and seamen stood beside the tripods they had hammered into the ice. At the top of each tripod hung a block and tackle through which the line was fed. Behind each tripod stood the three men who would let the line out grudgingly — and be prepared to gather it in swiftly — as occasion required.
Richard tapped Katya on the shoulder and she rolled forward into the water. Her team staggered as the current took her, and then began to pay out line.
‘Wait!’ snapped Colin to the men. ‘Katya. What can you see?’
There was a short pause as she orientated herself and looked around, then her voice came strongly through the hissing of the open channel. ‘Tunnel. Narrow upstream, widening downstream. There is light here. Is not too cold.’ She paused, then added, ‘The roof of the tunnel is uneven. There are holes in it, from air bubbles I guess. Big enough to be handholds. It would be possible to pull oneself along for a little way, even against the current, I think.’
Richard’s eyes met Colin’s. So that was how the quick-thinking Tom Snell had managed to save himself. They had been wondering.
‘Right. We’re going to pay out more line and put Bob in behind you. Good luck.’
Richard crossed to Bob, his eyes straying constantly to the quivering tension of Katya’s orange line which was already eating into the rim of the ice hole as her team continued to pay it out.
At Colin’s nod, Richard hit his old friend on the shoulder and the black water swallowed the American. Both the divers were important to the project, but the order of their going had been dictated by the difficulty of replacing them if anything went wrong.
When Bob had vanished, Richard stood looking down into the hole, lost in thought. The triangular edge of his headgear bit across his forehead and squashed his cheeks together. TTie face mask dangled on his upper chest, the top of it pressing up under his chin. The suit was bulky and uncomfortable around him, but he noticed none of this. Colin was listening to what Bob could make out of the tunnel and of Katya ahead. How warm he felt the water was. How quickly he wished to catch up with his Russian colleague. But Richard noticed little of that, too.
He crouched down, as though fascinated by the hissing surface of the water, staring into the heart of it like a seer of old looking for the future in a magic bowl. What would they find down there? he wondered. What was hiding down there waiting to be found?
Asha Higgins swept the luxuriant thickness of her long chestnut hair out of her dark eyes and frowned down at Sergeant Dundas. There was something just not right here but she simply could not put her finger on it. She had worked for years as a doctor — in hospitals, briefly in general practice, and since the mid-eighties on a whole range of ships, most of which belonged to Heritage Mariner. In the last few she had been there not only as ship’s doctor but as wife to the captain, and she missed John now. She had got into the habit of talking things through with him, bouncing ideas off his relative ignorance but availing herself freely of his fund of simple wisdom and solid good sense. She said he played Watson to her Sherlock Holmes, which made him smile with wry amusement because for years he had been cast as Little John to Richard’s Robin Hood. Always the sidekick, he would complain, never the romantic lead.
She bitterly felt his absence now, for there was something wrong with the sergeant she simply could not put her finger on. Could the slight discolouration of his upper right cheek and the bridge of his nose be wind burn? Could the cracks on his right hand be a kind of frostbite? And what in the name of Allah could have caused the rash of blisters across the pale expanse of his chest?
She had looked through his clothing for clues when she first noticed the strange symptoms, but had found nothing. Well, she would just go down to the ship’s laundry and go through the clothing again. The sergeant’s and the major’s, just in case. She crossed the room purposefully and swept out through the door.
Dougie Dundas’s eyes opened to the merest slit and, through a haze of nausea, he watched the doctor depart. A fine figure of a woman, he thought dreamily. When he was rich he would surround himself with lots of others just like her. But he hadn’t liked the way she had searched through his clothing when she thought he was asleep from her drugs. She must suspect something about his diamond, he thought. And if she did, then who else did? He had been right to hide it. It was so big and so rough that he had almost choked to death getting it down his throat, but it would be safe enough inside him until he worked out where else he could put it when Nature returned it to him again in due course. And in the meantime, not even Dr Higgins would find it unless their relationship became a great deal more intimate!
Katya Borodin found it very difficult to swim at first. The current kept pushing her forwards down the slope of the widening tunnel, and in spite of incipient claustrophobia, she would have liked to lie forward and fin along easily in the middle of it. But every time she tried to do so, the rope pulled her up short and her legs would swing under her until she was almost hanging vertically again.
There was very little to see in the tunnel. It was roughly round, slick and featureless, though the walls, floor and roof were honeycombed with holes of various sizes where bubbles of air must have risen through the apparently solid medium. And the lack of absolute solidity was borne in upon her by more than her sense of sight. Behind the crackle of the open channel in her earpieces she could hear the sighing bubble of trapped air on the move, the sloshing rumble of water washing not just over the ice, but through the very heart of it. When she touched the walls or the roof above, even through the thickness of her diving glove she could feel them faintly vibrating as though, among all the other sounds she could hear, there was one too deep to be audible, which the mighty berg could feel.
The crystalline ice was lucent, but as she went down, the light faded fast. What brightness there was came in gathering shades of green. Behind her, Bob was outlined in viridescence which flared and dimmed with the passage of clouds or waves. On either hand, the walls darkened from jade to emerald shot through with the lighter tracks made by the captive air bubbles fighting upwards; ahead, the darkest bottle-glass darkened further. But never to absolute darkness, and never to formlessness. As she fought her way further down against the tugging of the safety line, she could see where the tunnel ended.