Target 5 (35 page)

Beaumont felt the deathly freeze as darkness blotted out
everything. The icefield went, the water below disappeared,
the damned deck vanished. He had been looking ahead,
gauging the next ram, when the black frost closed over him.
Panting with exhaustion he took a deep breath and a grisly
sensation passed through him. His lungs felt as though they
were congealing, filling up with liquid ice. He was gasping for breath, felt a great weight descending on him, trying to drag him off the crosstree. The vessel started moving for
ward, took him clear of the freezing menace. He opened the
eyes he had instinctively closed and saw with a shock of horror that his parka was coated with ice crystals, layered
with them. He had been freezing solid.

'Are you OK, Beaumont? Beaumont, Beaumont ...'
Schmidt's voice had lost its normal detached control, was filled with urgency and anxiety.

'I'm OK. This time we do it.' Beaumont paused for
breath. 'We hit the port side of the ice fifty yards before the
crack. Got it?'

'Fifty yards before the crack?' Schmidt sounded in
credulous.

'Yes. Port side! Fifty yards! I'm going to bounce her -
into a starboard crack. Full power!'

'Full power! I'll kill you ...'

'Get this fucking ship moving, Schmidt!' Beaumont was
shouting down the mike. 'When I say full power I mean full
power!'

'O K. It's your decision.' Schmidt just stopped himself in
time: he had been on the verge of saying it's your funeral.

The
Elroy
sheered forward, throbbing in a way it hadn't
throbbed before, pushing aside the dark water, sending a
bow wave coursing against the ice on both quarters, build
ing up maximum power for its next run against the barrier,
Beaumont's tactic was unusual: he was directing Schmidt to
hurl
the massive weight of the moving vessel against one
point of the ice so that its rebound would strike a segment of
ice it couldn't otherwise have reached, a segment where a
wide zig-zag extended a long way towards the ever-widening
lead in the distance. It was a tactic he had experimented
with - which had succeeded - when he had led the
Exodus
into Smith Sound three years before. But not at full power.

He talked Schmidt in this time, guided the ship's onrush, taking it towards a precise point on the port side of the ice. Below him there was a significant development: Schmidt
had ordered the deck cleared of men prior to the coming
impact. Grayson had gone up to the bridge, was leaning out of a window, staring up at the tiny figure he could
hardly see poised on the crosstree. Full power
...
If it had
been possible he would have countermanded Schmidt's
order.

At the masthead Beaumont was staring to port, laden
down by his outer clothes which were like a steel canopy,
solid with the crystals. He issued one last instruction. 'If you
feel her going through, Schmidt, keep her going ...' The
vessel surged forward, the engine throbs echoed in Beaumont's brain, he clasped his arms tightly round the canvas-
wrapped mast, he took a deep breath, the vessel hit.

The
Elroy's
bows slammed into the ice on the port side,
hitting the barrier at an angle, a glancing blow. They
bounded off the barrier, swung at an angle, rammed for
ward with terrible momentum into the starboard ice. Beau
mont had used the icebreaker like a gigantic billiard ball,
cannoning the bows off one side so they would strike the op
posite side close to the zig-zag. Above the throb of the beat
ing engines came a different sound, a grinding smash which
travelled through the ship, which stunned the crew below. But the effect at sea-level was nothing compared to what
happened at the masthead.

The mast began to vibrate like a tuning fork, whipping
back and forth as though about to rip itself out of the ship,
whipping Beaumont back and forth, whipping like a
flexible cane instead of an eighty-foot-high mast. The ordeal
was appalling, well-nigh unendurable, and Beaumont be
came disorientated as the whipping went on - back and
forth at incredible speed. He felt his strength, his mind,
going. He felt as though his teeth were being shaken out of
his head, his head loosened from his body, his whole body
structure coming apart.

He opened his eyes, his hands still locked round the mast,
and everything was blurred. He couldn't make out whether
they were stopped or still moving forward. He looked down,
saw a huge crack, a crack which was almost a lead, and flopped against the mast he felt the cold mike against his chin. He spoke without realizing it, spoke like a man re
peating a rote. 'Keep her moving, Schmidt . .. keep her
moving ...' There was a salty taste in his mouth, blood, an
agonizing pain across his shoulder blades. He wondered
whether his back was broken. 'Keep her moving,
Schmidt

Schmidt kept her moving. From the moment they struck the starboard ice, from the second he felt the penetration,
Schmidt kept her moving. The scarred bows battered,
heaved, forced their way forward, thrust aside huge slabs of
ice, up-ended them, bull-dozed them, bit deeper and deeper,
went on and on and on, smashing through the barrier which
was at last giving way. Below decks the chief engineer
stared at his gauges, unable to drag his gaze away from the
needles quivering well above danger point. If Schmidt wasn't careful the boilers would blow.

Schmidt wasn't careful, he maintained full power. And
the vessel responded, wouldn't stop, was mounting its bows
on top of the ice, riding up on it, breaking it down with
sheer weight and power. From the masthead, barely con
scious, Beaumont began to grasp what was happening, saw
the ice parting, the crack widening to a lead, the lead
spreading back and back, and he knew they were going
through all the way. Then he lost consciousness, relaxed his
hand-grip, slipped from the crosstree, and like a man hang
ing he hung there, suspended by the chest-strap, his body swaying like a pendulum.

It was Borzoli, the burly seaman who had shoved a bucket
in Beaumont's way, who went up to get him. Grayson had
one foot on the icy ladder when Borzoli pushed him aside with an oath, 'You're too small for this job, friend...' And
probably the seaman was the only man aboard who could have attempted it; a couple of inches shorter than Beau
mont, he was built like a wine cask. He clawed his way up
the swaying mast, went up and up while the icebreaker con
tinued driving through the ice.

'Christ, he must be dead . . .' Langer stood beside
Grayson, holding on to the ladder to keep himself upright
as they stared up in horror at the body swinging eighty feet
above them in the night. Like a man hung from a yardarm two hundred years ago, Beaumont swung backwards and
forwards, swung free of the mast as he pivoted in space.
'That strap won't hold his weight much longer,' Grayson
murmured. Borzoli was smaller now, was moving up at an
incredible pace, and Grayson had his heart in his mouth for
both men - for Beaumont whom he expected to see spin off
the crosstree at any second, for Borzoli who had only to
make one mistake to bring himself crashing down sixty feet -
or was it seventy? - he was close to the crosstree now.

Hardly daring to believe the evidence of his own eyes he
saw the tiny climbing figure stop. Grayson looked away, not
able to watch any more, and then the vessel lurched with a terrible violence and he lost his grip on the ladder, went
hurtling across the icy deck to crash against a bulkhead. He
lay there for some time, the wind knocked out of him, trying
to get his breath back as Langer bent over to make sure he was all right. That terrible impact had, of course, knocked both men above them off the ship; they were now lying
somewhere on the pack, dead.

'Get me up, Horst.. .'

Langer helped him to his feet and he stood there, holding on to a rail, not daring to look up. Both men stared upwards
at the same moment and then went on looking, hardly
breathing, scared out of their wits. Borzoli was on his way
down, was on his way down with Beaumont suspended from
his back by the chest-strap he had released from the mast.

How the hell could the seaman stand it, Grayson won
dered? He was descending a ladder of sheer ice, a ladder rocked by the continuous collisions of the bows with the pack, descending with another man's weight trying to tear
him backwards off the ladder with every downward step he
took.

Borzoli grew larger, Beaumont grew larger as the descend
ing man came nearer the deck, and now, feeling his strength
ebbing, the seaman was coming down as fast as he dared,
his great boots hammering at the ice-coated rungs, smashing
off the ice because it was the combined weight of two out
size men battering at the rungs. Splintered ice showered
over Grayson and Langer. They ducked their heads to save
their eyes, and when they looked up again Beaumont's sway
ing body was only just above them. They grabbed at it,
took the weight off the exhausted Borzoli, and then both
men were at deck level as the
Elroy
surged forward into the
open lead, towards the ocean beyond.

Thursday, 24 February: 6AM-Midnight

'What would happen if there was a collision?'

Papanin stood on the bridge of the
Revolution
close to
Tuchevsky who was watching the radar. The bridge was
very large, had a great sweep of armoured glass beyond the
helmsman, was fitted with every scientific device available
that might help navigation. Compared to the Russian ship,
the 6,500-ton
Elroy,
her radar gone, was back in the nine
teenth century.

The vibration of the powerful diesel motors was gentle,
barely more than a persistent humming,
and a battery of
searchlights poised at different angles beyond the bridge
shone out into the dense mist. The helmsman was several
yards away as Papanin spoke in a low tone, too low also for
the officer of the watch to hear as he stood in front of an
outsize clear-vision panel. 'What would happen,' Papanin
continued, 'if we came out of the fog and struck the
Elroy
amidships with our bows?'

The
Elroy
was at sea, a weird and terrible sight, and she was
sinking. It was dark, total darkness, although somewhere
above the screen of black frost the moon still shone down.
Her lights - the searchlights projected over the heaving ocean - showed glimpses of the horror.

The bridge, the mast, the rails, the deck were mantled with the deadly crystals where the atmosphere itself had frozen over the ship, coating her, polluting her, tarring her with the evil black sheen which glistened when light caught it. The temperature was -39°F - seventy-one degrees below freezing point. The air was colder than the ice-cold sea, was liquid ice which hung over the ship like a black cloud, a cloud of death. And there were over five hundred tons of ice on the deck which listed dangerously to port. It was only a matter of time before the
Elroy
capsized, went down.