A Grue Of Ice (9 page)

in South Georgia?"

" I had to meet Captain Wetherby here . . ." Upton began. " Listen," I interrupted. " Forget Captain Wetherby. The war has been over a long time."

Mikklesen smiled. " No, Captain. Seas and wars do not forget their captains." He confronted Upton. " Have you a permit from the International Whaling Association?"

Upton was on the defensive. " I will explain more to you. . . ."

Mikklesen pressed on. " Do we fish where we should not? What country's waters, eh? Is this a second Onassis and the
Olympic. Challenger?
Will we also be bombed and arrested?"

" There is a territorial limit of two hundred miles which has been laid down which
is
completely unreasonable and no nation would really adhere to it if . . ." said Upton. Mikklesen certainly was on the ball. " So we fish in my own country's territorial waters?" he asked with a thin smile. " We fish for the thing every Norwegian whalerman has dreamed of since he first heard the crash of a harpoongun, or since he fiensed his first whale? The breeding-ground of the Blue Whale?"

Upton tried again. " Technically, I say, we will be inside territorial waters. With the knowledge I have, I cannot risk a maritime court action ; it would give everything away."

" It is Bouvet, is it not, Sir Frederick? Not so, Captain Wetherby? Inside Norwegian territorial waters, off Bouvet?"

" It is Bouvet, blast you " roared Upton. " But, by God, Mikklesen, you can search until you are as blue as a Blue

Whale, but you won't find the breeding-ground—not without Wetherby! "

Mikklesen's answer was quick. " That I know. Every season for thirty years I have sailed near Bouvet. I have never found it. I try every time."53

Walter broke in. " We are fishermen, and two hundred miles for a territorial limit is damn stupid. Twelve miles maybe."

The other captains, except Mikklesen, grunted approval.

" We are hunters," went on Walter. " We hunt where the game is. You cannot draw lines across the ocean and say, keep out. Where would we be if the British did what Norway has done, and kept us away from South Georgia and the South Shetlands?"

" We Norwegians first thought of the breeding-ground," Mikklesen retorted angrily. "It belongs to Norway, even if two hundred miles is a stupid limit, and as a whalerman I agree that it is."

Upton saw his opening. " You are a hunter first, or a patriot first, Captain Mikklesen? Will Norway offer you a hundred and twenty thousand pounds like I will?"

" A hundred and twenty thousand pounds?" echoed Mikklesen. " A moment ago it was a hundred thousand pounds."

Upton did not sense his mistake with Mikklesen in bidding up. I did, and Mikklesen's grudging agreement should have warned Upton. " That's the new price," he laughed. " So that everybody feels quite happy."

" This secret belongs to Norway, not to one man or one expedition," said Mikklesen doggedly.

" I thought more of your spirit of enterprise," said Upton. " Does that mean you are not joining us?"

" I'll come," he replied sullenly. " For a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Now I must get back aboard

my ship." He gave me a further long glance, as if to satisfy himself he had really seen someone who had located a secret so precious to Norway, and went.

" Some of these boys like jam on it," laughed Upton. He turned to me. " He'll feel differently once he sees the sea red with dead whales. They just cannot resist it, you know." Mikklesen's departure lifted the air of tension over the gathering. I had heard of the drinking prowess of South Georgia whalermen, but even so, the way they downed their Cape Homers astonished me. But then, they were also drinking dreams of their £120,000. Upton became one of them as the strong liquor and his camaraderie loosed their tongues.

". . . Fanning Ridge," Walter was booming. "It's the best landmark on South Georgia as you come up from the

54

south-west. Damn me, I've seen it from as far away as

fifty miles on a clear day."

" Nonsense," said Lars Brunvoll. " Why come from the south-west, anyway?"

Walter let out an oath. " I wouldn't have been coming at all, if it hadn't been for the emergency huts the Americans put up on Stonington Island."

" Stonington Island?" Hanssen echoed. " That's to hell down the Graham Land peninsula, way in Marguerite Bay!"

" Too true," Walter replied. " I was caught by one of those violent gusts which come down the glacier near Neny Island."

" In other words," smiled Upton, " you thanked God and the Norwegians who first set up the emergency depots they

call roverhullets throughout the Antarctic and its islands."

" It was the Scots who started the idea, on Laurie Island, in the South Orkneys, sixty years ago . . ." began Reidar Bull. I stood aside
as
the argument developed, as only sailors and whalermen can argue. Mikklesen's shrewd formulation of the illegality of the proposed expedition worried me. There could be no doubt that, in terms of the Antarctic Treaty, which twelve of the major powers with possessions and interests in Antarctica, including Britain, the United States and Norway, had signed, we were infringing Norwegian territorial waters. If we were caught, Upton might buy or talk his way out of trouble, but for me it would be different. I, a Royal Society researcher, would acquire a life-long stigma for throwing in my lot with an expedition whose one and only

purpose was gain, Upton's gain. In fact, the whole

business could lead to a small shooting war if Norway got

tough. That is exactly what had happened when Onassis allegedly flouted the two-hundred-mile offshore whaling limit declared by Peru, Ecuador and Chile in 1954. His
Olympic
Challenger
expedition, as Mikklesen had pointed out, had been bombed by the Peruvian Air Force and seized by the Peruvian Navy. That had created a major diplomatic incident, and the ships had been released only on payment of £1,000,000 indemnity by Lloyd's.

The breeding-ground of the Blue Whale was far more

important to Norway than Onassis' mere infringement of whaling limits. That was where the parallel between the
Olympic Challenger
expedition and Upton's ended. Had the
Olympic Challenger
had on board an oceanographer like me who could have nailed down a killer-current the Peruvians

55

call El Nino—a warm, less saline stream which blitzes the

life-flow of the Peru Current and kills fish, whales and seabirds by the million off the coast of South America—the knowledge in itself would have been worth that £1,000,000 indemnity many times over.

The Albatross' Foot represented
a
mighty challenge. What, I asked myself as the catcher skippers grew more noisy, if a similar challenge had been rejected by the man who, only since World War I, had revolutionised all ideas on the great Gulf Stream itself? He was laughed to scorn

—but he proved his theory. Until ten years ago the United States was unaware that yet a second great Gulf Stream, known as the Cromwell Current, swept in to its shores, this time from the Pacific ; again,
it
was one man's persistence, pitted against all contemporary scorn, which proved that a 250-mile-wide column of water, equal to the flow of the Nile, Amazon, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Yellow and Congo Rivers together multiplied several thousand times, washed the Pacific coast of the United States.

Here, at my fingertips, lay the possibility of
a
discovery as great as either of these, if not greater. The whole of the world's whaling industry would be affected by knowledge of my current. That, I argued with myself, could bring conservation on a global scale of the disappearing schools of whales in the Southern Ocean, even if Upton killed off
a
few hundred in pinning down that knowledge for me.

There was, too, a vital military aspect of The Albatross'

Foot. In H.M.S. Scott I had sunk a U-boat deep in the Southern Ocean toward the ice. She had surfaced before she sank, and
I
recovered her log. For submarines, knowledge of water temperature and salinity is vital.
I
had been surprised at the data the log had shown of the area where
I
now knew The Albatross' Foot must be: it was a picture of

current and counter-current, of rapid temperature changes in the boundary layer between surface water and the main body of the sea itself, which we oceanographers call the " thermoc-line ". A study of the waters round Bouvet would yield new and invaluable operational information for atomic submarines guarding the vital sea route round the Cape of

Good Hope.

How else but through Upton would I ever get near Bouvet? It had been difficult enough to persuade scientists at the Royal Society to let me investigate the Tristan prong of The Albatross' Foot ; no government or scientific organisation

56

would be prepared to spend tens
of
thousands of pounds on an expedition to the wild waters of Bouvet merely to test

an unsubstantiated theory. The answer was: Upton's expedition must not be located. To me that meant only one thing—I must take command. Sailhardy and I knew every trick of the Southern Ocean. We had learned it the hard way. I grinned a little wryly to myself now that the decision had been formulated: I was deliberately seeking out the worst seas in the world, among whose fogs I would hide the factory ship

and catchers from whatever ships Norway might have there while I sought within my " circular area of probability " (

as the missle-men say of the target at Cape Canaveral) the missing prong of The Albatross' Foot.

Sailhardy moved away from the porthole when Upton

tried again to press a drink on him, and came over to me, frowning deeply. " Bruce," he said, " we can get to Tristan, even in this gale. Let's get out—now."

I submerged my own misgivings. " Why? This is a oncein-alifetime opportunity for me to get to Bouvet, as you know."

" Look," replied the islander. " We've been shanghaied. Politely, but none the less shanghaied. Upton has sailed all the way from Cape Town to Tristan in order to tell you that your plankton discoveries will help him discover the breedingground of the Blue Whale. Fair enough—they probably will."

"Then what are you objecting to?" I asked.

" His methods, his timing, everything," he replied. " He could have written you a letter asking you to go to see him in England, or flown you there from Cape Town, for that matter. True, the letter might take six months to reach you, but six months are not important for something

that has been searched for for half a century. It must have cost five thousand pounds a day to bring this ship to Tristan. When he gets here, he sends his daughter off into one hell of a storm to find you. It all points to one thing: you must be valuable—very valuable indeed—to him."

" He told us, he could net a straight three million pounds." " It's a big expedition, isn't it?"

Yes."

" If he finds this breeding-ground, you'd expect this factory ship to be mightly busy, wouldn't you?"

" Yes."

" Pirow and I walked through the crew's quarters when

we landed, to put his gear in his cabin," he said slowly. 57

" There are only enough men to cope with a moderate catch. I smelt a rat at once, so I asked the chief flenser about biomycin. Biomycin is the latest American way of preserving a whale—you know, normally the meat and fat of a whale is quite useless about eighteen hours after the kill, unless preserved with biomycin. You can then keep them up to forty hours. You'd expect them to be cutting up whales on an assembly-line basis if Upton found the breeding-ground. Yet there's no biomycin aboard, and tiny, almost skeleton, flensing crews to cut them up."

" Upton may be a bit old-fashioned in his methods . . ." I started to say.

" What have you got in that bag of yours?" Sailhardy demanded, indicating the oilskin bag which the sailor had brought from the whaleboat.

" Charts, sea-temperature readings—that sort of thing."
"
What
charts?"

" Admiralty charts of Tristan, Gough, the South Shetlands —

you can buy them anywhere. Oh, and an old chart and log

which came to me when Wetherbys folded up. It's about 1825. It's probably the first of the waters round Bouvet."

"Bouvet!" breathed Sailhardy.

The cabin door flew open, Pirow stood there, a radio message in his hand. It was the disciplined attitude of the man, his deference to Upton, his superior, and his taut bearing, that made me recognise him in a flash.

The Man with the Immaculate Hand!

I looked in silent wonder across the noisy room at the

man who had lured so many British and Allied ships and

men to their deaths during World War II. Carl Pirow,

radio operator of the German raider
Meteor,
was a very different proposition now from the oil-drenched wretch

they had brought aboard H.M.S.
Scott
after I had gone in with torpedoes while the
Meteor's
5.9-inch salvoes blanketed my ship. I considered Pirow the most dangerous single man