Killer

“Mother of God!” He was tearing off his mittens, reaching for the Remington. Knees spread, moving from the waist, he arced the barrel over the ocean, searching. He was back into the shadow now. So slow . . . so slow . . .

The first one erupted yards away, forced up by the submarine reaches of the berg. He swung on to it, jerked the trigger: missed. Slammed another into the breech. Tightened his finger again, but it was gone. The echoes of the first shot roared around him, hurting his ears. Idiot. How many in the magazine for Christ’s sake? Don’t waste them! Wait! Wait till you see the whites of their eyes.

He was still speeding backwards when the next killer hurled himself out of the black water. He fired once, saw the roof of its mouth explode. Its body twisted in the air and crashed down beside him, the top of its head burst like a bag. He swung back. They were coming up beside the boat. CRACK. CRACK. A black and white head flew to pieces. They would be coming up under the boat. He leaned over the side, disregarding the dangerous list, peering into the depths. There! A black and white form streaking up. He aimed at random, and fired three times. Black and green streamers sprang from its head.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! Out of sequence. Setting up overtones so deep they made his eyeballs tremble in his head; so powerful he could feel them as he breathed. So high they were like nails driven into his ears. And beneath it all, swelling as though out of a tunnel, the terrible roar of collapsing terraces.

He swung back to look at the berg. As he watched, the colour of the nearest cliffs became lighter and lighter. Great cracks shot up the towering faces like lightning. Monstrous boulders sprang free and began to tumble. The whole outline of the huge berg lost definition, and began to fall. The sound was unbelievable: nearly fifty thousand tons of ice exploded into boulders and rushed into the water. The boat ground silently into the ice of the floe behind him. Quick reeled out of it. Ross and Job chucked the rope into it, lifted it, and ran for the distant camp. Spray rained down on them all, engulfing them. Quick turned back and watched.

The great foaming column of water tumbled back. The sea reeling, tearing hither and thither, trying to cover the great wound. The huge waves speeding away to the west, twenty, thirty feet high. The foam spreading calmly. Then, slowly, unbelievably, with all the inevitable majesty of a rocket rearing against the sky, the edge of the berg which had been held under the water by the weight of the terraces, shrugged the wild sea aside and rose, foot after foot, yard after yard, its shadow spreading like oil over the water, over the floe. Water cascaded down its crystal sides. The great point reaching up: two hundred feet high.

Now the column of ice reeled, more than half out of the water. The rate of its great leap began to falter. It began to turn in the air. Finally it began to fall.

A column of spray roared up into the sky. The waves began to form in their circles, fifty feet high, and move out at high speed. They hit the floe, exploded against the solid wall of the ice hills, reared them up, forced them back. The floe seemed to slam into the air, the whole range of the ice hills rocking up and back along the line of the crash. Such was the noise that the cracking of the ice was lost. The hills closed down on the ice like ragged crystal jaws folding shut, then opening again.

It was long after the silence returned that they realised the noise had stopped, and they were safe. Ross rose first, and looked around. One by one the others rose with him, and stood looking, silently. There was nothing to say. Half an hour earlier, they had been in the middle of a floe of nearly twenty acres. And now it was mostly gone: the ice hills, all except one; the old campsite; the southern point where the plane had bounced on to the floe; all smashed loose, and floating in the jumble of restless ice all around them.

As they watched, the last sight of the berg faded into the golden mist. It had reduced their refuge by nearly two thirds, from the size of a modest farm to the size of a large garden; and now it left them as it had come, suddenly, silently.

OceanofPDF.com

SEVEN

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The sounds echoing in the caverns of the iceberg moved through the water five times faster than they moved through the air and the killers had begun to run even before Quick’s boat had been hauled up on to the floe. They did not all run in the same direction, but split up and scattered. They did not run as a unit because they knew as well as the men on the floe the danger, and did not pause to organise. The leader and his consort ran side by side, great boulders of ice plunging deep into the water around them like unimaginable hailstones, spurting bubbles, turning over and over, crashing against other boulders coming sluggishly upwards, crunching, crying, ringing.