A Grue Of Ice (12 page)

When Captain Norris had rediscovered Bouvet Island,

after it had been lost for nearly a century, he had also found something Bouvet had not: an island fifteen leagues, or forty-five miles, north-north-east of Bouvet. Captain Norris positioned it. His own original log lay open in front of me. Thompson Island had never been found again—officially.

Captain Norris' discovery provoked the liveliest controversy for over a century and a quarter. Nations have lavished millions on ships specially equipped to find Thompson Island. Ahead of the field were the Norwegians, who specifically explored the seas round Bouvet in the late 1920s under the great Lars Christensen. The British R.R.S.
Dis-
covery
searched—Thompson was not found. Before that German, American and French expeditions had likewise

failed.

Sailhardy took his eyes from the compass in front of him.

It was fully a minute before he spoke. " You are the only living man to have seen Thompson Island."

" Yes,"
I said. "
But there's no need
to dramatise it like
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that. I know I saw an island as we went into action against the
Meteor.
It was near Bouvet. No one will believe I sighted land. I was told the same thing as Captain Norris when Thompson could not be found again—either I had seen a

big iceberg and mistaken it for land, or else it was simply water sky."

" Yellowish reflected light over a big shelf of ice," murmured Sailhardy. " An Antarctic man like yourself doesn't make that sort of mistake."

" No," I said. " If I were one of the catcher skippers, I would like to have used a very rude phrase to the armchair

critics who rejected what I had to say. Curious . . they said almost the same to Captain Norris. The Admiralty said

he'd seen a large iceberg, and the streaks which he described on the cliffs were simply barnacles."

Sailhardy looked at me reproachfully. " You know the history of Thompson Island minutely, you know how great

sailors from Sir James Clark Ross to Lars Christensen have searched for Thompson Island and failed, and yet you deliberately play it down in relation to Upton. It ranks with the island where Sir Francis Drake sheltered the
Golden
Hind
off Cape Horn and which has never been seen again, as one of the greatest of sea mysteries."

" The vital phrase is,
in relation to Upton,"
I said. " He is neither a sailor nor an explorer."

" No," replied Sailhardy. " He's got a flashy act
as a
modern-day buccaneer."

" That's not all," I said. " Underneath he is ruthless!"

" He's after Thompson Island," said Sailhardy doggedly. I shook my head. " If he'd wanted to discover Thompson Island, he would not have gone about it in this hole-andcorner way," I said. " A man in his position could telephone a London newspaper and say he was endowing a special

expedition to search for the great ocean mystery, Thompson Island, etcetera, etcetera. There would be no lack of takers. You don't have to string a fleet of catchers along with you, anyway, to look for an island. One ship would do."

" Keep that chart out of the way, that's all I ask," said the islander.

" What possible value could Thompson Island have to Upton?" I went on. " I have seen it. It's simply the tip of an undersea mountain range jutting out into the worst seas in the world. There's nowhere like it anywhere. Gales, snow, ice, gigantic seas, day in, day out, year in, year out." 70

" He wants that log," said Sailhardy.

" Take a look, I assure you there's nothing."

He looked at me strangely. " You are the only living man to have seen Thompson Island. There are only three others in history. One of them was Captain Norris."

I smiled at his earnestness. " One of the three was Francis Allen, an American sealer who started a line of islanders on Tristan—and you are of that line."

Thompson Island was the Wetherbys', I told myself. It was the old John Wetherby's because his favourite captain had discovered it for him—and lost it to the world ; it was mine, the last of the Wetherbys, because, I had found it again after four generations, or very nearly, since it had slipped away into the ice and fog with the same spectre-like elusiveness as it had done with Norris. Sailhardy was in it, too, and I could almost recall by heart the deposition made to the Franklin Institute by the man with whom Sailhardy's greatgrandfather had sailed: " Captain Joseph Fuller, of New London, now (1904) lighthouse-keeper at Stonington, served in the United States Navy during the Civil War and afterwards repeatedly went sealing and sea elephant hunting in the Antarctic—in 1893, in the
Francis Allen,
he saw Bouvet Island, and he saw Thompson Island bearing about north-east from Bouvet but he could not land on either on account of the ice, wind and fog." Joseph Fuller named his ship
Francis Allen
after his friend and mate Francis Allen. Only I had seen Thompson since.

Sailhardy went tense. His keen ears had heard someone coming. He jerked his head at the wheel. " Take it!" he hissed. " Give me that damn thing!" Before I could object, he folded the log of the
Sprightly
and thrust it inside his windbreaker. With equal swiftness, he unlocked the doors.

He was just in time. Upton came through. He looked curiously at me. " Are you the quartermaster as well as the captain, Bruce?"

I shrugged. " We may need two men at the wheel, the

way we're going."

Something was eating into him. He was morose, preoccupied. " What the hell do you mean?"

" This fleet is putting its nose into trouble—big trouble," I replied. Sailhardy took the wheel again.

" If you mean you're afraid of one little fisheries protection destroyer . . ."

" I'm afraid of the biggest destroyer there is—ice," I said. 71

" I must know where
Thorshammer
is, and what course she is steering. Our course is dead wrong. I want to get to the north."

Upton's face went pink. " You'll stay on this course, and keep out of the way of the
Thorshammer.
Pirow's last D/F bearing on her showed we were steering diverging courses. We should be out of range of her seaplane."

" Pirow's bearing was two days ago," I said. " Anything could have happened since."

Upton picked up the bridge phone. " Carl! Bridge! At once. Bring Bjerko with you." He came back to me. " So you're frightened of a little weather—the great Captain Wetherby?"

" Yes, I am," I replied, "—when I am steering directly into the heart of the atmospheric machine which provides the energy for the storms of the Roaring Forties."

" Nonsense!" snapped Upton. " Walter agrees with me

—it will be stormy, but you are well used to that."

" Listen," I said. " I originally set course, after we had given
Thorshammer
the slip at Tristan, to approach Bouvet from the north. Pirow got his D/F bearings on
Thorshammer.
I wanted to stay just beyond radar range, but you put her on this course in order to approach Bouvet from the south and

west. I say it is suicide."

"
Thorshammer
has a seaplane," retorted Upton. " Don't forget that."

" I'd like to see anyone take off in the kind of storm we've had," I replied. "
Thorshammer's
only got an old HE 114 for searching—Pirow heard that over the air. Its radius is not much more than a hundred and fifty miles anyway."

Pirow and the gauche Captain Bjerko came to the bridge.

" Carl," said Upton, " have you got a bearing on
Thors-
hammer?"

Pirow shook his head. " This part of the world is hell for radio. Thirty years ago Lars Christensen found that Bouvet was a radio ' dead-spot ', as we call it. I can't get any good signals from
Thorshammer."

Upton was edgy. " You mean, you can't get enough of

her sending for a D/F bearing?"

Pirow's lip curled. " I can get a bearing if a ship sends eleven letters. I proved it to the German Decryption Service."

" So you don't know what course
Thorshammer
is steering?" " No."

72

I tried to cash in on Upton's nervous uncertainty. " Even this big factory ship isn't good enough to stand up to what we're heading for."

" I have been in the Southern Ocean many times," said Bjerko. " This ship is good."

" You've never steered this course, or ' tried to make Bouvet from the south and west," I replied. " Bouvet is the heart of a fantastic, dynamic weather machine which tosses off more energy into the sea and wind than an atomic e x p l o s i o n . I c o u l d e x p l a i n i t a l l i n t e r m s o f w h a t i s euphemistically called the millibar anomalies of the Westerlies, but what it boils down to is that Bouvet acts as a kind of highvoltage booster station to weather which already has two thousand miles of punch behind it. It is a wild hell of driving water, fog, ice and icebergs, all racing at a hundred knots to God knows where. I repeat, it is suicide to approach Bouvet the way we are doing, particularly in early November."

" Early November?" echoed Bjerko. " That is the best time in Antarctica. It is the start of the summer. The ice meltspoof, it is gone."

" Walter says the same," added Upton.

" And I say simply this," I went on. " This ship will be nipped in the ice and sunk, if we approach Bouvet the way we are doing now."

" My dear fellow, when the sea is starting to warm up ...?" Upton began.

I cut him short. " On the edge of the continental pack-ice the sea temperature is always just above freezing point at this time. It stays so—until Bouvet. Just south of Bouvet, it rockets."

Upton shrugged. " I'm not interested in a lecture on sea temperatures. I want to know about
Thorshammer."
I ignored him. " Into that freezing or near-freezing sea, I believe, cuts the other prong of The Albatross' Foot. I have only seen the results, not the cause. It is, with the Southern Lights, the most spectacular of many wonderful sights in the Southern Ocean. In late October and early November you get an explosive warming in the stratosphere shortly after the sun appears over the South Pole. This, coupled with the inrush of The Albatross' Foot, produces a fantastic fall-out of energy and weather. That is what I am warning you about."

" These are a sick man's fears," said Bjerko.

" There's a giant glacier in the sea where we are going," 73

I said. "The pack-ice disintegrates northwards towards Bouvet from the Antarctic mainland. Yet the tip of this vast tongue of ice—it is four hundred miles from the mainland—

remains untouched. It has a life of its own. It draws its life from the atmospheric machine I'm talking about round Bouvet. The Albatross' Foot and the glacier conspire. There is a grand battle between warm and cold. Bouvet lies in no-man'

s-land. No-sailor's-sea, I would call it. In a sea of slush and bergy bits, suddenly it freezes like a vice. Bouvet makes its own particular brand of pack-ice. Within hours, before you

can escape, the sea is frozen solid. I warn you, if you take this ship the way we are going now, the ice will close and tear her guts out. She'll be nipped along the water-line and be crushed to death."

" Wait," said Upton. He was back in a minute. The document he handed me sent a tremor of apprehension through me. Harmless in itself—my weather knowledge and Kohler's would probably add up to the same thing—it proved beyond doubt that my fears and Sailhardy's about the true purpose

of Upton's expedition were well founded.

I read it aloud so that Sailhardy too would see its significance. " Kapitan zur See Kohler—Oberkommando der Marine." I took my eyes from the heading and watched Pirow as I translated for the islander. " Captain Kohler to High Command, German Navy. Top Secret. Raider
Meteor's
climatological report on Bouvet Island area."

In other words, Upton had delved deep—as deep as
a
top-secret document—in order to get information about Bouvet, or was it about Thompson Island? Had Kohler the sea-wolf not gone down under my fire, Upton might have had no use for Bruce Wetherby

My face must have given me away, but Upton misread it. " All men have their price," he said jauntily. " Even for top secrets." Was Pirow's price the knowledge of Upton's objective, I asked myself.

I glanced at the opening sentences in order to compose

my thoughts. " Situation with a westerly movement. Visibility poor in early summer. Fog and cloud frequency increases.

I
did not need Kohler to tell me about Bouvet's weather, secret and vital though it was to U-boats and raiders. The

way we were headed meant certain disaster, but to reveal the fleet's position to
Thorshammer,
if that were possible, would mean ignominy for me. That is why I did not analyse the

74

underlying motive of Pirow's suggestion. It seemed at the

time as if might provide a way out of my dilemma, or information on which to base my future course of action.

" Why does not the Herr Kapitan take the helicopter and see for himself where
Thorshammer
is steering? It's hopeless for me to try and get a bearing on her."