‘Is he likely to do himself any harm?’ John sounded defensive in his own ears.
‘No,’ her own tone moderated in the face of his. ‘At least, not if we keep an eye on him. We don’t know whether he understands about the dangers of the situation we’re going into.’
‘Yes I do,’ said Richard, making them all jump.
‘OK, old chap,’ answered John at once. ‘But we only have your word for that and we don’t know how much you actually remember.’
‘I remember about falling off bloody great lumps of ice.’
‘Yes. I suppose that sort of knowledge runs pretty deep. Do you remember what one of these is?’
Richard’s cocky self-assurance slipped a little. ‘Telephone?’
‘You remember about portable telephones?’ John was stunned. Even Kate was looking surprised, and Colin’s eyebrows were just distinguishable from his hairline.
But Richard was shaking his head. ‘Asha answered one hanging on the wall by my bed. I asked what it was and she told me.’ He looked at John. ‘Do you know Asha?’
This was deeply unsettling. Perhaps it had been a bad idea after all. ‘I’m married to her. Asha is my wife.’
‘So you’re John!’
‘That’s right. Captain John Higgins. Ring any bells?’
Richard pushed his cheeks out slightly and shook his head. He looked mildly regretful but not particularly worried.
‘And you don’t know what this is?’
‘Not if it isn’t a telephone.’
‘Right. It’s what we call a Geiger counter. Do you remember anything about radioactivity?’
Again, Richard blew his cheeks out and shook his head. John took a deep breath and began to explain. They were going up to the furthest extreme of the exposed section of Manhattan and walking south to the bow section; he had a nice long chopper ride to explain to his old friend just what was going on here.
Tom Snell had his men with him on a high point looking northward towards the barely visible shapes of Ajax and Achilles. They had not been idle while waiting for the helicopter and its passengers; they had already surveyed the immediate area. There were six engineers, a closed unit, who could be relied upon to discuss nothing with the crews of the ships they were on. A unit, moreover, which very much wanted to discover what had happened to their sergeant.
With Richard and the Rosses from Titan had come Yves Maille. John had brought Steve Bollom with him, trusting Sally to be senior officer in command of the two lead ships while his own extremely competent second officer guided Niobe on a steady course through a calm sea. Other than an unforeseen accident on the ice, only the unexpected return of the harmattan would make things difficult and the French weather expert was confident that he would see it coming early enough for them to get the helicopter back out. And even if that went wrong, they had scaling ropes and two tight-packed inflatables which would be more than enough to get them back to the ships. In this position, Kraken and Psyche would be the closest; when they got up to the bow section, then the lead ships would be their safest haven.
It felt unnatural to John to be taking command while Richard was with him, but only for the first few moments, then he simply got on with the job. His old friend was quite obviously not fit to command a rowing boat at the moment. But Richard had caught on quickly enough to the way Geiger counters functioned and to the fact that they must maintain the fiction that they were here looking for more mysterious Russian corpses.
‘We’ll split up into two groups,’ ordered John. ‘I’ll take the seamen with me, and perhaps subdivide again if conditions warrant it. My second group would be led by you, Colin. Tom, you take your unit and do the same if need be. We’ll go down the starboard side, you take the port. Colin here has two rough maps of the section above water, but we don’t know how accurate they are after the last couple of days’ weather. Over to you, Colin.’
As Colin Ross began to talk about elementary ice safety, the group of men and one woman looked glumly down the length of dirty, slushy berg. The island in front of them was still much the same size as the island of Manhattan. It was pear-shaped, with the long point facing south. On either hand of them, the ice reached towards fifteen kilometres in width. Here it seemed largely flat, but it was much more hilly in the middle, especially in the widest sections just aft of Psyche and Kraken in their anchorage positions three hundred metres below the mean surface level.
They were looking at a long, hard, dirty day’s work. Only the fact that they were due to spread out and check the ice’s surface with the Geiger counters for unexpected extremes of radiation made the proposed action at all realistic. If they had actually been looking for bodies, the task would have been hopeless. ‘Above all, keep an eye on each other,’ Colin concluded, the rumble of his voice easily carrying over die quiet tinkling of water which surrounded them like spring-time in the Alps. ‘The ice is beginning to perish. God alone knows what fissures, caves and crevasses will open up now. If we were at either Pole in these conditions, I’d be inclined to stay put and radio for help. It will be very dangerous, so take care.’
There was nothing more to be said and they moved off.
Within the hour, John was forced to face the fact that the task they were all engaged in was well-nigh impossible. The ice island was almost as big as his native Isle of Man, and true Manx people never travelled from one end of the island to the other unless they could stay for the night. And no one in their right mind would dream of walking from Douglas to Ramsey unless it was for charity along the Millennium Way, perhaps. Searching the mountainous interior with a dozen companions armed only with Geiger counters and walkie-talkies would be considered the action of someone desperate or insane. It would be an utterly pointless waste of time here and now except that the Geiger counters might discover a source of radioactivity powerful enough to damage the crew of the ships at some range. And, of course, the main object of the exercise was actually to put the minds of the crews at rest by proving that there was nothing unnatural — or supernatural — on the ice at all.
John found these depressing thoughts sweeping over him as he and Richard entered the first real hill valley between rounded swells of ice. Colin and Kate were away on the coastal side of the central icy outcrop and Steve Bollom and his team were just entering the foothills on the inward side of them, between the Rosses and himself. Each team was exploring a notional swathe of territory about two kilometres wide.
The surface of the ice was dirty and dull, covered in a thick overlay of wet sand which the runoff was beginning to carve into channels and fans with glistening, crystalline floors. It was a strange, restless environment and it put John forcefully in mind of the strange geodes which he had seen in jewellers’ shops all over the world. He had often thought of buying Asha one of those rocky coconuts which contained not white flesh but breathtaking crystals, but he had never had quite enough money in the right place at the right time. Now when he looked around him he felt as though he was walking on the dirty, rocky shell of one which was being slowly worn away to reveal the glittering jewelled interior. All around was the sound of running water and the slither of sliding sand as the fans of streams overlapped and whole slopes of dirt unexpectedly slipped down to reveal dazzling white scars. It was like watching a thaw in negative, with the brightnesses of frosty winter being uncovered as the surface melted.