A Ravel of Waters

Perhaps it was mainly Tideman's diagnosis that the winner in a hostage snatch was the one who kept his nerve the longest that kept us going. That, and our endless – and sometimes futilely impractical – plans to retake the ship which we formulated and reformulated as the hours and the guards' presence leaned on us. The worst aspect was that we had nothing to keep us occupied. An adjunct to our plotting – like prisoners of war doing mental mathematical calculations to prevent them from going mad – was our attempts to estimate Jetwind's speed, course, and destination. The gale had fluctuated between Forces Seven and Nine. Neither Tideman nor I needed instruments to judge that. Only once did Jetwind slow. There was a curious hiatus one afternoon when the wind fell to a light northwesterly breeze and the ship rolled heavily in the rough swell. Then the wind backed strongly and Jetwind put on her seven-league boots again. The course was the big poser. We know Jetwind still headed eastnortheast from the sun's position through the porthole. Often, however, it was obscured by cloud.

World interest in Jetwind became progressively less as the days passed. At first there was some comment on the radio bulletins about the lack of further information. However, a report that the British Antarctic survey ship RRS John Biscoe would shortly be leaving South Georgia and would traverse the area from which Jetwind had supposedly radioed, seemed to kill the drama in the media's eyes.

Our guards had remained super-vigilant but we saw almost nothing of Grohman. On one of his rare visits I had tried to rattle him by accusing him of throwing the bodies of Brockton and Arno overboard. His reply had been, had he the discretion, he would have done so. As it was, they were being kept in deep-freeze 'for clinical examination' at Molot. This answer had started new trains of speculation. Clinical examination postulated a base with facilities.

Now – it was late in the afternoon watch. Kay, Tideman and I were trying to kill the uhkillable time. Suddenly Kay exclaimed, 'What's happening?'

A second guard had entered the glassed-off section. The sentry himself seemed surprised. The newcomer gestured in our direction. He was strung about with spare UZI magazines and there were two grenades at his belt. He opened the door. 'Come!'

The two hijackers conducted us along a passageway leading to the navigation and chart offices and finally to the bridge.

There I paid no attention to Grohman: I had eyes only for what lay ahead of the ship. 'By all that's holy!' exclaimed Tideman softly.

In Albatros, it had been a hallucination, a dream; now it was a living nightmare.

The entire ocean was a fantasy in foggy blue, white and pearl with no clear demarcation between green-grey sea, pale horizon and grey overcast. The misty reality was the same as before; the two groups of piled-up icebergs were the same. So was one great isolated berg which rode alone and whose resemblance to a Cunarder had made me doubt my senses when I had sighted it from Albatros's cockpit. The two assemblages of bergs tumbled together to form a kind of gigantic gateway to what lay behind – undefined as yet, vast, murky, secret. 'Molot!' Grohman was amused at our thunder-struck silence. 'It's not on any chart,' I said doubtfully.

Chart or no chart, it was engraved in my memory. It was there, out to starboard, inside the huge entrance, that I had seen the Orion vanish into a no-world of water vapour, ice and sky. Further in still, I had sighted the submarine. Kay found her voice. 'Molot – what does it mean?' 'Hammer,' replied Grohman. 'The hammer…' '… and the sickle,' added Tideman.

Grohman chuckled. 'Molot is on the chart – if you have the right chart.' He brought one out from under his arm. He'd obviously been waiting for the question – the typical need for exhibitionism of the paranoiac.

I did not need to understand the Russian lettering. It was the Soviet Fleet's nuclear submarine chart of the Southern Ocean. Tideman gaped.

Grohman indicated a position. I could not follow the Russian scale; at a guess, the place was about six hundred nautical miles southsouthwest of Gough Island.

'Molot!' he repeated. He waved to the spectacle outside as if to underscore what he was telling us. 'Molot!'

'There is no land!' I expostulated. 'There can't be! It would have been discovered years ago!'

'It is not land,' answered Grohman. 'It was not land we were after. Molot is a seamount, a series of shallow-water shoals. It is the shape of a huge triangle – the sides measure thirty-one by twenty-nine by eighteen kilometres.' 'No one has ever suspected that such a place exists!'

'Of course they haven't – except the Red Fleet,' Grohman retorted contemptuously. 'What do you think was the true purpose of years of patient oceanographical research carried out by Soviet ships in the Southern Ocean? Whales? Plankton studies? No! The purpose of our search was strategic, and we found what we were looking for – Molot.'