Killer

They were moving parallel to the edge of the mountainous pack, half a mile now in front of the great whale they had stayed to watch. The ice swept away on his right to the North Pole and beyond, a sharp-edged jumble of blocks reaching more than a hundred feet at their peaks. No chance of landing there . . . His eyes narrowed against the brightness. There! A thousand yards ahead! He might just . . . already he was turning left over the sea. pushing the nose down, the wind lifting the right wing, the plane slipping down faster, half-sideways, in a wide arc out – then, sharply, in: into the wind at ninety degrees to his original course, still at one hundred knots, the last turn robbing him of more precious feet. Glance at the altimeter, twenty-five feet and falling. Too little. Christ! They weren’t going to make it! The weight of the nose was an awesome pull on the muscles of his back: at these speeds the jet had all the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. He saw the edge of the ice twenty yards ahead, but without even looking he knew there was no more air left under the plane. He opened his mouth to yell, and they hit the ocean still moving at one hundred knots.

What the pilot had seen a thousand yards further back was a tongue of ice thrusting out of the line of the pack. At some earlier time some quirk of wind and tide had bent the ice until it had been thrust up into an unusually long and stable series of hills. When the edge of the pack receded with the summer melting, these hills had remained, and with them a flat platform of ice curved for more than five hundred yards, a little like the blade of a broad knife. He had chosen to try to land on this because it was much flatter than the corrugated surface of the rest of the pack. He had put the nose of the aircraft down, thus gaining enough speed to control at least the beginning of the descent, turned south out over the ocean, then immediately north into the wind, pulling up the nose but maintaining speed, in an attempt to crash-land on the tongue. The plane hit the water twenty yards short, bounced forward like a stone skimmed by a boy, throwing up huge curtains of spray and crushed ice.

Kate looked at her father. His head was down on his forearms, pressing them against his knees. She kicked off her shoes and did the same. Sound, movement, water, ice exploded round her. Her body was hurled against the strap.

The plane, still in one piece, leaped ten feet in the air, gulped down the twenty yards in an instant, then fell on to the beginning of the great tongue of ice.

The pilot, blinded by the spray streaming down the windscreen, saw only the shapeless hunch of the ice hills on his left.

Kate’s stomach wrenched. Again the explosion of sound and violent movement. Cases from the back of the plane hurled forward and burst around her, but nothing heavy hit her. Her knees bludgeoned up with the vibration, knocking her arms away, beating against her forehead with stunning force until her nose began to bleed.

The plane was shrieking. It was a truly terrible sound, and it went on and on.

The pilot, still conscious, saw the hills on the port side rushing nearer. He estimated to within a tenth of a second when the wing tip would touch them, and was tensed to meet the new forces as the aeroplane slewed round.

Abruptly the cabin hurled to the right. Then the fuselage reared up on its tail.

“That’s it,” thought the pilot as the nose began to rise, crashing up the concave slope of ice as the plane slowed, “I’ve done it.” Great pride welled in him. Then the windscreen exploded in against his chest.

The cabin juddered up to the vertical. And the last thing Kate knew was that something had plunged through the wall in front of her like the point of a giant harpoon.

The movement, the sound, everything, stopped.

OceanofPDF.com

TWO

The sound of the crash echoed through the shallow Arctic Ocean, and the great blue whale’s hearing had no difficulty in picking it up; but he neither went to investigate nor swam away. He was too tired: simply that. The huge knotted muscles of his back, and the sagging sheets and hawsers in his belly, all sent a dull, persistent message to his brain which it did not recognise as pain. The great flukes of his tail, more than twenty feet across, beat the water only fitfully, leaving him to drift for a moment as he tried to regain his breath. His back broke water again, and he sent a great cloud of steam and water-vapour roaring into the Arctic sky. His jaws fell open, and hundreds of gallons of the krill-thick soup which is arctic water washed over the baleen sieve in his mouth. He pressed it dry with his giant tongue, and swallowed it. His mouth fell open again. His tongue moved. He swallowed. His eyes closed for the first time in nearly fourteen days. He slept.