'I'm not interested!'

'These are dangerous waters for a vessel of this size . . .'

'Now tell me something new!' Papanin stripped off his outer gloves, peeled off his mittens underneath, dropped the sodden articles on a side-table. Taking out a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, he stared at the chart on the table, picked up a pencil, made a cross. 'The American icebreaker Elroy was about there when I last saw her. She will now be smashing her way out of the ice. She will sail due south . . .' He scrawled a brutal line down the chart. 'We continue sailing due north.' His pencil went straight back up the line. 'So get on this course. And make this old tub of yours move!'

Tuchevsky took off his cap, dropped it on the chart so the Siberian could make no more markings, folded his arms and stared straight at Papanin. 'I command this vessel. I have an order to receive you, to carry out your instructions - but I am still in command . . .'

'Of course!' Papanin towered over the five-foot-six Tuchevsky as he beamed down at him. 'I fashion the bullets, you fire them!' Sitting down on the floor, he tugged off one boot and then the other, still grinning at the captain.

'I wish to protest formally about this order to proceed due north,' Tuchevsky continued with an edge in his voice. 'The Revolution is our latest and most modern research vessel. It cost millions of roubles. And yet I am ordered to take this vessel into a sea littered with icebergs ...'

'The Elroy made it - and part of the way without radar. I saw she had lost her masthead equipment. You have that damned big ear twitching at the top of your mast - use it!' Papanin stood up in his stockinged feet and began padding about the chart-room, looking at things. 'I want to speak to the radio-jamming officer,' he went on. 'There will be a short pause to send a signal to the Gorki - all helicopters are to search for the present position of the Elroy. The first one to find it flies here immediately to report.. .'

'Why?' flared Tuchevsky. 'Why are we doing this insane thing? I shall radio an immediate protest to Moscow.'

'No you won't!' Papanin looked at him over his shoulder. 'The pause in the jamming will be very brief- only sufficient to send off my signal to the Gorki. The Elroy is sailing south into a sea crammed with icebergs. She will be sailing blind -her radar is gone. She will be lost to the outside world - the radio-jamming has isolated her. Get me some tea, please, Tuchevsky, and I will tell you what it is all about.' The Siberian paused. 'You see, we are going to intercept the Elroy.'

The murderous, shuddering impacts of steel smashing into solid ice woke Beaumont after three hours' sleep at four in the morning. Had an earthquake been erupting outside the effect would have been mild compared with the quivering, grinding sensation he woke to as the bows smashed and drove into the polar pack. And of all men aboard Beaumont was receiving the full treatment - his cabin, the only other quarters available apart from the one amidships he had given to Grayson and Langer, was under the bows.

Befuddled with sleep, he blinked, wondering why the cabin walls seemed to be oscillating, as though some tremendous force just beyond was about to burst through the plates and crash down on him. He checked his watch. 4 am. He'd had three hours' sleep since coming aboard. The oscillation of the cabin walls was quietening down but the reverberating crash was still in his ears when the door opened and Pat DaSilva, acting mate, peered in cautiously with a mug of steaming coffee.

'I wondered if you were awake,' he said solemnly. 'And you'd better swallow this fast before the next ram.'

'Thanks.' Beaumont took the mug and sipped cautiously while he studied DaSilva. The acting mate was a short, stocky man of about forty with curly black hair and a squarish head. At first glance he looked tough and uncompromising, but there was a glint of humour in the steady grey eyes if you studied him carefully. Beaumont swallowed a lot of the scalding liquid. American coffee. Very strong.

'Here it comes again,' DaSilva warned as he grabbed hold of the door frame. The vessel was moving forward, its engines throbbing with power. Just beyond the wall of the cabin was the bow. Somewhere just beyond that was the ice as the steel bow cut through black water. Beaumont put out a hand and waited, his coffee mug three-parts empty, his hand pressed against the end of the bunk. The ship struck.

The cabin vibrated with the massive collision. DaSilva almost lost his grip and was hurled across the cabin, but he saved himself. Beaumont had the feeling that the bows were breaking, the plates buckling, that within seconds the cabin wall would crumble while an avalanche of smashed ice deluged in over them. But at the back of his mind he knew this wouldn't happen: this was an icebreaker. The ship stopped, the engines still throbbing. Beaumont looked at the coffee splashed over the opposite bulkhead. 'Are we getting anywhere?' he asked.

'No place fast. It's been going on for over an hour - God knows how you slept through it - and we're stuck solid. The trouble is we've lost not only the radar - the observation cage went down as well. With the mate inside it,' DaSilva added soberly. 'Which promoted me to acting mate. I could have done without it - Carlson was a good guy. We need someone up top,' he explained, 'to see what angle to hit the ice at. The trouble is there's no top to send anyone up to.'

Beaumont was getting dressed, putting on his boots and his parka as the vessel withdrew from the ice. The cabin shuddered again; the grinding, grating sound of steel withdrawing itself from the vice of the pack was appalling. 'I'm going up to the bridge to see what's happening,' Beaumont said as he fastened the parka. He looked directly at the mate. 'Could I have imagined it,' he inquired, 'or was there a certain lack of enthusiasm as we came aboard?'

DaSilva looked uncomfortable. 'You don't want to take any notice of it.' He hesitated. 'The fact is Schmidt wasn't too happy about bringing the ship as far north as this in February. The rumour is he received some gut order from Washington - get the hell north and damn the consequences. He kind of blames you for being alive, for bringing him up here.'

'Some of the crew too?'

'Maybe a guy here and there. We were going home to Milwaukee when the order came through. They'll get over it.

But they hadn't got over it yet. Beaumont sensed the hostility around him as he made his way up to the bridge. He'd have had to be blind not to have sensed it. Seamen he passed didn't seem to see him coming. One burly character on his hands and knees in a companionway who was cleaning the floor moved his bucket in front of Beaumont.

'Shift that bucket fast, Borzoli,' the acting mate snapped.

The burly man looked up. 'I didn't see you, Pat...' He moved the bucket quickly. It wasn't just that they had been sent up Iceberg Alley, Beaumont reflected as he mounted a staircase; DaSilva hadn't told him the whole story. He was being blamed for the death of the mate, Carlson. It looked as though the voyage could be marred by the odd incident; the men who crewed an icebreaker weren't the gentlest characters who went to sea. Commander Schmidt's opening remark wasn't exactly encouraging either.

'I'd keep to your quarters if I were you, Beaumont. You need the rest.'

The high bridge gave a good view out over the ice ahead and the vessel was driving along the channel for another ram. At least the surviving channel had been wide enough for Schmidt to turn his ship round before he attacked the pack, searching for a way out south. At the end of the channel the ice was battered but still intact, and when the bows struck no crack appeared. Beaumont released his gloved hands from the rail he had gripped and looked at Schmidt. 'We're in trouble. At this time of the year the icing up will go on - if we don't get out soon we'll be stuck here till spring . ..'

'You think you're telling me something?' The dark-browed commander stared bleakly at Beaumont from under his peaked cap. 'Against my better judgement I came up here on account of you people. What I can do without is your comments.'

'You need a man high up,' Beaumont insisted, 'a man eighty feet up so he can guide the angle of the ramming, so he can detect the slightest trace of a fissure which will tell him where to ram next time . . .'

'Come with me!'

Schmidt's expression was even bleaker as he gave an order for the ship to be stopped and then left the bridge quickly. They went backwards down a slippery ladder which had recently been cleared of ice, and on deck teams of men were shovelling ice over the sides, great slabs of ice which other men were levering off the deck with crowbars. The Elroy's Sikorsky was just coming in to land, hovering over the pad aft of the bridge and then dropping. 'Checking up on those Russians out on the ice,' Schmidt snapped. 'Like you suggested,' he added grudgingly. 'A Soviet chopper airlifted them out half an hour ago.' They arrived at the base of the huge mast. 'Take a good look,' Schmidt growled.

The huge structure speared up into the moonlight. Eighty feet above them, the tip of the spear was jagged and torn, looked as though it had run into the wall of a building. The crosstree below was intact, and even from their great distance below, it Beaumont could see that the crosstree was sheathed in ice. A seaman levering up an enormous slab of ice tipped it over. It smashed down inches from Beaumont's right foot - because Beaumont had moved the foot just in tine. 'Do that again,' Schmidt roared, 'and I'll have you in the brig. Get over to the port side!' He waited until the seaman had gone before he spoke again. 'They all liked Carlson,' he said.

'And they hold me responsible for his death?'

'I didn't say that. Now, for God's sake, look at it! And you say I ought to send a man up there!'

A metal ladder ran up the side of the ice-coated mast, its rungs encased in gleaming ice; the rigging was festooned with ice; ten-foot long icicles hung from the tips of the cross-trees. Seen from the deck as Beaumont stared up, the mast was like some weird glass pylon. It looked totally unassailable.

'I didn't say you ought to send a man up,' Beaumont replied. 'I can get up there myself. I'll need a leather strap to hold me, canvas padding round the mast, and a telephone set to communicate with the bridge ...'

'And a coffin to bury you in,' a voice behind him added.

'This is Quinn, the chopper pilot,' Schmidt said gruffly, so Beaumont shook hands with Quinn, the first man who had extended him this courtesy since he had come aboard. Lean and lanky, in his early thirties, Quinn reinforced his warning.

'You should have died on the ice. You didn't - so stick to your cabin till we hit Quebec. We'll get there one day.'

Schmidt was staring resignedly up at the mast. 'It's what we need - someone high up. But what damned use would you be up there?'

'I did the same job for your sister ship Exodus' Beaumont replied quietly. 'Three years ago north of Baffin Bay. She was trying to head up Smith Sound and she had the same sort of problem - solid ice ahead. I knew the area so I went aloft and guided them through.'

'That's MacDonald's ship.' Schmidt stared at Beaumont and then up at the mast again. 'We have a telephone box up there already and the mast is padded - DaSilva went up to locate a way into the icefield, but I brought him down before we started hammering the pack.'

'Mac was the captain when I was on the Exodus.' Beaumont smiled dryly. 'He wrote out a dummy certificate for me afterwards - to show I could act as pilot in Smith Sound. And I think we ought to get out of here - that radio-jamming bothers me.'

'Standard procedure when Ivan is in a bad temper. You know what's going to happen if you're up there when I slam into the pack? It's suicide.'

Beaumont looked round the deck where seamen were continuing to heave ice overboard. Heads turned away when he caught their gaze, one man spat on the deck and then hurriedly resumed work as Schmidt glared at him. 'Suicide?' Beaumont repeated. 'Then everyone here will be happy.'

Three hours' sleep had revived Beaumont, but he was hardly his normal energetic self as he mounted the ice-coated ladder, swaddled in clothing, the leather chest-strap clamped round his body, the second snap-clip strap for fastening round the mast dangling, the telephone headset in position under his fur hood. Below him on the deck a subtle change had come over the seamen who ten minutes earlier had been so hostile. They paused in their work, staring up with some awe at the huge Englishman climbing the deadly ladder. Beaumont had noted the change when he came on deck the second time, had ignored it. To hell with them.

Twenty feet above the deck he stopped to smash his boot down hard to break the ice. His boot slipped, his gloved hand tightened on a rung, and the ice he had hammered was intact. He was mounting a ladder of pure ice. As he went on up he felt the sub-zero temperature penetrating his gloves, seeping through the mittens inside them, rasping at the raw skin of his fingers. He felt the bitter night air freezing his face, prickling his eyelids, catching his throat. His eyes watered, his vision blurred. He went higher and the sensation of relentless cold began to blot out everything else - the throb of the waiting engines, the searchlight Schmidt had projected over the bows, the endless icefield planing away to the south.

He was forty feet up when the snap-clip dangling from his chest-strap hooked on to one of the rungs; he went on up, not realizing what had happened. He had one foot on a lower rung, the other reaching for a higher perch, when his body jerked taut in mid-air. It caught him off-balance and he lost his equilibrium. The foot in mid-air thrashed about in space and the boot lower down, poised on a rung of ice, had to take all his weight, the shock of the sudden halt. Then the lower boot slipped off the rung. He dropped.

Suspended forty feet above the ice-coated deck by only his hand-holds, gloves clawing at slippery ice, he fought to regain control, his boots swinging in air as he tried to find rungs he couldn't see. He felt his hand-holds losing their grip, slithering round the icy rungs, then one foot found a rung, took some of the weight, and within seconds he had his other foot back on the ladder. As he paused for breath he had a glimpse downwards of the deck, of tiny faces staring up at him. He waited for his heartbeats to slow down to something nearer normal, then he resumed his ascent.

The crosstree was a right royal bastard. The steel ladder ended just below it, so he presumed it must have led straight up through a trap into the observation cabin where Carlson had died. He now had to climb beyond that, climb up over the crosstree before he could straddle on it and attach the chest-strap to the mast above it. And he was now eighty feet above the deck. Before he attempted this tricky manoeuvre he reached up with one hand to test the canvas padding wrapped round the crosstree. He found that it revolved, gave no safe purchase at all.

It took him ten agonizing minutes to get up over the crosstree, to get seated on the unstable canvas sleeve with the mast between his groin, to get the second strap looped and fastened round the mast, to attach the telephone terminals into the box already fixed to the mast. Only then did it occur to him that under his clothes his body was covered with sweat, that sweat was running down his face. He fumbled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and used it to wipe his face. Beads of ice came away from his forehead. Before communicating with the bridge he looked around and the view was spectacular.

He pulled back the side of his hood to listen. No, he hadn't imagined it: weird gibbering and squeaking echoes were coming across the ice, then a low rumble like a volcanic upheaval. Half a mile away he saw the turbulence starting -half a mile ahead of the Elroy. Walls which seemed no larger than ripples from that height and distance began to heave up, to creep over the plain of ice, moving away from the Elroy, moving south. As he watched a ribbon of dark water appeared, spreading away from the icebreaker. The night was full of the sound of ice cracking, ice shattering against itself. And the lead went on expanding, creeping towards a distant belt of darkness which was the ocean. The Elroy had to break through to that lead.

Twisting round, held to the mast by the chest-strap, he looked beyond the stern. A half-mile of open channel lay behind the vessel, and at the end of that channel, a long way down, lay the ruins of the Soviet helicopter Beaumont had flown to the ship. He had deliberately landed the machine under the bows of the Elroy and later Schmidt had completed the job, reversing his vessel a short distance and then ramming into the ice, into the machine perched at the brink. When he withdrew the steel bows dragged the remnant with it, dropped it into the sea. But it wasn't the end of the channel Beaumont was staring at now; appalled, he was looking at something well beyond it.

Carried forward by a rising breeze from the north, a black pall was creeping towards the ship, a pall quite different from the fog which had blanketed Target-5, a black curtain hundreds of feet high, a curtain which glittered ominously in the moonlight. A bank of black frost was drifting towards the ship, the most dreaded phenomenon in the Arctic. What Beaumont was staring at was a bank of frozen fog, a rare weather condition so insidious that it can cause frostbite requiring instant amputation if it settles on a man. If it caught him at the masthead he could be dead within seconds. And it was already invading the pressure ridge zone. He spoke quickly into the mike dangling from his chin.

'Schmidt! Reverse her!'

He clung to the canvas-padded mast as the engine throbs increased in power, then the vessel was moving back, sliding through the dark water behind its stern. The immediate effect at the masthead was more gentle than Beaumont had feared; no more than a slight sway as the icefield drifted past below and dark water appeared on both sides, a dark stain against the pallor of the pack. Then the vessel slowed, stopped. Knowing what was coming Beaumont felt his stomach muscles tighten. It took a conscious effort of will to start the process, to give the order into the mike.

'Half speed! Forward!'

'OK, Beaumont, here we go! Hold on tight.'

Beaumont hugged the mast, his head to one side, prepared to take the impact. The power increased, quivered up the mast, the vessel moved forward. The icefield slid past in the opposite direction far below, the water stain narrowed, and Beaumont watched the narrowing stain - because when the stain vanished the icebreaker would hit, ship against ice, steel against the barrier, a moving force against an immovable force. The stain narrowed, faded to a ruler-line, vanished. The ship went on, moving faster . . . Grkkk! The steel bows struck. The impact shuddered the entire vessel, raced up the mast, and the mast shuddered, whipped, vibrated to a maximum at its tip. It hit Beaumont like a hammerblow as he clung desperately to the mast, his body pressed into the canvas. Then the vibration slowed, stopped. The icebreaker was stationary, locked into the ice.

Beaumont relaxed his grip, stared ahead. A dark crack extended beyond the bows, but no more than a few feet. He looked either side of the crack, searching for a more promising fissure, found nothing. The ice was intact. His concentration was so great that it took him a few moments to realize that Schmidt was talking to him. He took a firmer grip on the masthead, saw half a mile away that the lead was still growing wider, then he heard Schmidt again and there was a hint of anxiety in the firm voice.

'Beaumont, are you receiving me? Beaumont. . .'

'I'm OK. We didn't do much this time. Same again is the answer - and hit the ice in exactly the same place if you can.'

'Reverse?'

'Take her back, Schmidt.'

The engine power built up, the screw thrashed the dark water at the stern, and from his great height Beaumont could sense the icebreaker fighting to tear herself free. Hurling her great bulk against the ice the Elroy had trapped herself; the ice had parted, let the bows bite into it, then closed round them like a massive vice. The throbbing built up a second time, built up greater power, and when Beaumont was certain Schmidt had failed again the ship suddenly wrenched herself loose. The sound of rending ice came up to him above the engine throbs, then the Elroy slid backwards, leaving a dark smear on the port side where the remnants of her paint stained the damaged ice. As the vessel went back Beaumont looked back. The black frost curtain was advancing over the belt of smooth' ice, coming closer to the ship. He waited until the ship stopped again.

'Half speed! Forward!'

Schmidt had taken the ship further back down the channel this time, so when the bows met the ice they would be moving faster. Beaumont braced himself. Eyes half-shut, staring down, he watched the narrowing stain of water, not knowing that Grayson and Langer were on deck, gripping a rail, staring up in horror. The gap closed, the ice was under the bows, the impact was far greater. The tremor shot up the mast and Beaumont was in trouble, shaking like a leaf with the mast's brutal vibration. He had his eyes still half-open and the vast icescape shuddered horribly, shuddered as though in the grip of an earthquake. Then the ship was still.

Thirty minutes it went on at half speed, thirty bruising, battering minutes. Beaumont changed the angle of attack, used the Elroy as his own personal battering ram, hammering into the icefield, and slowly something began to happen. The ice began to fracture, to show a pattern of dark zig-zags. And something else was happening, not so slowly. Beaumont was methodically being reduced to a state where he hardly realized what he was doing. His face was horribly sore and bruised, sore with the aching cold, bruised with pressing it into the canvas at the moment of impact. And now the black frost had almost reached him - they had to break out quickly before it killed him.

'Reverse, Schmidt,' he croaked. 'Take her back to the end of the channel this time.'

They went back. They went too far back. A finger of black frost was creeping out over the point where the submarine killer had gone down. The finger curled out to the masthead and Grayson, seeing what was happening, bellowed up to the bridge in a way passengers don't normally address ships' captains. 'You stupid idiot - get her moving! Beaumont's in the frost!'

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 forward, 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 incredulous.

'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, building 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 forward with terrible momentum into the starboard ice. Beaumont had used the icebreaker like a gigantic billiard ball, cannoning the bows off one side so they would strike the opposite side close to the zig-zag. Above the throb of the beating 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 became 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 repeating 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 conscious, 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 hanging 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 Beaumont, he was built like a wine cask. He clawed his way up the swaying mast, went up and up while the icebreaker continued 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 wondered? 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 descending 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 outsize 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 swaying 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.

'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 nineteenth 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.

It was horrible on deck - horrible and dangerous where groups of men, all the crew which could be spared, fought to heave the ice overboard in time, and as they fought the black frost hovering all round them added more layers to overwhelm them. They couldn't see - except by the glimmers of light from bulkhead lamps smeared and half-obscured by the molasses-like frost encrusted on the glass. They couldn't stand upright - because the deck was permanently canted over to port by the great weight of ice they desperately tried to shift. They could hardly breathe -because when they took in breath they took in air which had crystallized to liquid ice, air which it was no cliche to say was as heavy as lead.

Frozen with the terrible cold, their clothes weighed down by ice crystals, they used picks and axes and hammers and shovels to smash at, break up, lever up and heave overboard the tonnage which was killing them. The sound of the slow-beating engines was almost muffled by the hacking, smashing, cracking noises. And the unquiet sea heaved the vessel up and down, made their impossible task infinitely more dangerous as, caught off balance, they grabbed for lifelines sheathed in ice. It had been going on for twenty-four hours.

Beyond the plunging bows the sea hissed and rolled in the searchlight, and in the beam, looking down from the high bridge, Schmidt saw ice descending in mid-air, black ice. 'It's beating us, DaSilva,' he said grimly. 'More ice is forming than we're getting rid of.'

At the port window DaSilva peered down and he wasn't prepared to give the captain an argument: the ice on deck was nearly rail-high. He pressed his face close to the armour glass, withdrew it quickly as his nose felt the temperature. A seaman, Borzoli he thought, had pulled his hand up quickly and the glove he should have worn was gone, trapped under a slab of ice. Even though he wore mittens under it frostbite would attack him within seconds, Borzoli was running, his hand tucked under his armpit, running for the nearest stairwell, and DaSilva prayed it wouldn't mean amputation. Then he couldn't see anything as spume from a wave hurtled through the air and hit the glass with a crack, freezing as it landed.

'I hear Beaumont is OK,' Schmidt said.

'Beaumont is recovering,' DaSilva agreed. 'He must be like this glass - armoured.'

Inside Langer's cabin Beaumont was sitting up alone, listening to the thump of ice floes against the hull beyond the cabin wall. He could tell that something was wrong from the tilt of the cabin: it was almost permanently canted to port. But he was thinking about Papanin, about things Schmidt had told him three hours earlier soon after he had woken.

'They're about forty miles south of us - the six Soviet trawlers,' Schmidt had said, pointing to his chart. 'Spread out across our path like a screen. Quinn found them - before the black frost caught us he took his machine south to the limit of his fuel - and he thought he had a glimpse of a much bigger ship just about here.'

'Less than thirty miles away. The Revolution?'

'Could be. The fog down there closed in just as he spotted her. He thought he saw a big radar dome - the equipment she uses for tracking our satellites. We'll just have to make sure there's no collision when we're passing them ...'

Beaumont eased himself to a more comfortable position in the bunk. McNeill, the ship's doctor, had told him in a voice of some wonderment that he was still in one piece. 'Your clothes and that canvas buffered you. The fact that you swung free from the mast without striking it helped - but you'll be here till we hit Quebec ...'

Beaumont didn't think so: he'd be up soon now. His torso was badly bruised, felt twice its normal size, which meant it felt very large indeed, but soon now ... As he settled himself he winced. Well, maybe in a few hours. As he stared at the opposite wall without seeing it he thought about the short tune he had spent with Papanin in the hut on Target-5-He was remembering the Siberian's huge, shaven head, the very wide mouth, the almost Mongolian bone structure. A ruthless man.

And now there were at least seven Soviet vessels in front of the Elroy which was carrying Gorov - and the Catherine charts. Reaching behind him, he fumbled in the pocket of his parka and took out the core tube. He weighed it in his hand - the entire Soviet underwater system, and Papanin knew where it was. 'We'll just have to make sure there's no collision ...' Schmidt had said, and Schmidt had been thinking of an accident. Beaumont was thinking of something quite different as he returned the core to his parka pocket, pulled the blankets up under his chin, and stared into the distance, trying to see the future. Then, without realizing it, he fell asleep.

The Elroy had increased speed dangerously, was ploughing forward at half speed, her bows plunging deep inside a trough as a wave crashed over the port rail and submerged it. When the bows lifted again half the wave crest was attached to them, frozen solid to the rail which was now six inches thick with ice.

'We'll have to take a chance,' Schmidt had decided ten minutes earlier. 'We'll have to increase speed in the hope that we take her out of the black frost.'

'She'll go over ...' DaSilva had stopped speaking when Schmidt looked at him, understanding the glance: they were going over anyway, so what was the difference? And every possible factor was deteriorating.

The wind had increased to thirty-five-knot strength, was howling like a banshee among the ice-clogged rigging, hurling spume inboard, spume which froze in mid-air so it landed on the backs of the stooped men on deck like lead shot. They were losing the whole battle for survival on every front - and they knew it. The ice still piled up faster than they could get rid of it, was now solid to rail height on the port side. The rising wind was turning the sea they had to plough through into a churning cauldron of forty-foot waves, great green combers which came rolling above them, half as high as the remnant of the mast which was also canted to port.

The giant combers inundated the deck frequently, swirled waist-high round men clinging to the icy lifelines, submerging the ice they were struggling to shift overboard. And frequently it brought with it floating spars of ice which crashed into the bulkheads with lethal force, such force that one spar shattered into pieces before the sea retreated. They lost one man in this way - hanging on to a lifeline he was pinned to the bulkhead, the whole of his middle crushed in by a heavy spar which came at him like a torpedo. It worried the men that they hadn't saved the body, but privately DaSilva thought it a blessing - the mangled corpse would later have had to be buried ceremonially. As Schmidt had said, they had to take a chance. So they went up to half power.

'I think we ought to clear the decks,' DaSilva said fifteen minutes later.

'Why?'

Schmidt joined him at the port window and saw why. The port rail was submerged again and looking down from the bridge it was an extraordinary, terrifying spectacle. Only the top half of men waist-deep in water showed. The rail was gone, the mountain of ice had vanished, it was as though the bridge was floating by itself. Frozen spume bombarded the window and Schmidt had to move to find a still-uncovered patch he could peer down through. Schmidt went back to keep watch on the bows.

'Keep them at work,' he ordered.

'They can't work, for God's sake! How can they - waist-deep in sea?'

'Are they waist-deep now ?'

'No, not at the moment, but they will be when the next wave comes.'

'Keep them at work.'

Deep down inside himself DaSilva knew that Schmidt was right. Every pound of ice they could lever overboard between inundations gave the ship a little longer to float, to live, to move forward to what might be safety, or a kind of safety. They had to get clear of the black frost or die.

So for sixteen hours they changed the work teams at even more frequent intervals, gave the men time to go below to dry out and warm up before they froze to death, and then after a short break they toiled up again, to start all over again, to get rid of a pitifully small amount of ice, to face the cold and the wind and the sea and the danger of ice spars flattening them against the bulkhead walls. Only a man like Schmidt could have subjected them to such an ordeal; only for a man like Schmidt would they have submitted to the ordeal. And Grayson and Langer took their turn with the rest while Gorov, the man who had brought them all to this, lay on his bunk sea-sick.

The break came suddenly, and DaSilva was the first to grasp what was happening. Down on deck for the fourth time, levering at a slab of ice, he looked up and stared at the others. They were still working, still hacking at the ice, still unaware of any change. He threw his crowbar down a stairwell, ran to the ladder, climbed up to the bridge. 'It's lighter!' he shouted as he burst inside. 'We're through!'

'I do believe we are.'

There was no relief, no satisfaction in Schmidt's voice as he gazed through the rear window. It was simply a statement of fact. The vessel was still tilted to port, there was still a small mountain of ice on that side, but the atmosphere was clearing and something like moonlight was bathing the deck in its pale wash. And the curtain of black frost was a distinct curtain, drifting away from them in all its horror many cable-lengths behind the stern.

It was 11pm when Beaumont made his way slowly and painfully up the stairwell which led to the foredeck, wondering what the hell was going on. He had just seen a seaman running up the staircase ahead of him and out on deck, and above him he heard the excited clatter of other running feet. Nobody ran about a ship layered with ice unless he was very bothered indeed.

When he entered the bridge Schmidt - in these weather conditions - had opened a window and was staring through his night-glasses. Beaumont glanced at the helmsman, at DaSilva, and decided not to ask any questions at this moment. Both men were standing in attitudes suggesting more than a little anxiety. The answer came to him unasked as he moved closer to the open window and heard a reedy lookout's voice travelling up to the bridge.

'Icebergs on the port bow! Icebergs on the starboard bow! Icebergs ahead!'

* * *

'No!' Tuchevsky exploded. 'I would ask to be relieved of my command before even thinking of giving such an order. In fact, I shall take action now. I shall order the radio-jamming to be stopped - until I have sent a signal to Moscow and had a reply . . .'

'You can't!' Papanin's tone was matter of fact. 'You know we have a Special Security detachment aboard this ship - it has already taken control of the jamming section.'

It was very warm inside the large chart-room behind the bridge of the Revolution and the argument had been going on for ten minutes. Papanin was, in fact, wearing down this prig of a captain, a tactic he had known would be necessary the moment he set eyes on him. Tuchevsky protested again.

'When I took command of the Revolution it was to carry out research, oceanic research . . .'

'Hypocrite! You have been tracking American satellites. This is research, of course - military research!'

'We also do oceanic research,' Tuchevsky snapped. 'Water temperatures, salinity . . .'

'All of which vitally affects submarine operations! You make me sick, Tuchevsky! You know that all the data you collect goes to our military intelligence people - who decide what scraps they will hand on to the professors . . .'

'I will not do it!' Tuchevsky shouted. 'I will not sink the American icebreaker. You must be mad - we could never get away with it...'

'You are wrong again,' Papanin observed cynically. 'The Elroy is steaming south without radar - we know this from the,helicopter which found her two hours ago. And she cannot communicate with anyone - the jamming barrage has completed her isolation.'

'She has a helicopter,' Tuchevsky said viciously. 'I suppose you'd overlooked that?'

'No.' Papanin went over to the chart table to hide his irritation. Tuchevsky had touched a tender nerve there; for hours the Siberian had tried to think of a way of immobilizing the Elroy's Sikorsky. 'Gorov and the Catherine charts are on board that ship,' he explained patiently. 'If we cannot get them back we must destroy them ...'

.'I will not do it.'

'I don't remember asking you to do anything. But these waters are littered with icebergs - and accidents can happen. And you should think of your family,' Papanin added casually.

'My family? What has this to do with my family?'

'Your wife, specifically,' the Siberian said woodenly. 'She is a Jewess . . .'

'That is a lie!'

Papanin sighed. 'She is half-Jewish. Her mother was a Jew. You seem to have forgotten that one of my duties is to check on Jewish agitation in Leningrad . . .'

'She has nothing to do with that . . .'

'Tuchevsky! Please keep quiet! Have you forgotten the signal ordering you to carry out my instructions ?' Papanin went on explaining patiently. 'If it was discovered that your wife is mixed up in certain anti-Soviet activities I could easily arrange for her to be sent to Israel. You would never see her again, would you ?'

'You wouldn't dare ...'

'What would happen next? For a few years she would hope - hope you would come. Women are very strong on hope. Then she would realize it was all over, that she must live her own life. We might even arrange for a divorce if she requested it. . .'

'You bastard . . .'

'I have to be,' Papanin agreed calmly. 'It is one of the main qualifications for my job.'

'There must be some other way . . .'

'If you think of it, let me know.'

'Your Sikorsky is on the way back, Beaumont,' Schmidt said without the trace of a smile. Beaumont didn't reply as he stood on the Elroy's bridge with Grayson and Langer. 'Your helicopter .,.' It was Beaumont who had urged Schmidt to send up Quinn again to check what lay ahead of them - if Quinn was willing. The fact was that Quinn had been itching to take up his machine ever since they had emerged from the black frost. Not unnaturally, Schmidt was most concerned at the moment with the problems of navigation.

Icebergs surrounded them on all sides, icebergs only dimly visible in the heavy sea mist drifting over the suddenly calm ocean. Two hours ago the scarred and battered ship had been fighting for her life in forty-foot seas, and now she was cruising slowly forward over water like cold milk. But she was still listing heavily to port, she still carried the enormous burden of the great load of ice pressing against the port rail, and it was still diabolically cold.

One massive berg, over a hundred feet high, a jagged cliff of floating ice, drifted less than a quarter of a mile away on the port bow. Mist curled at her base, another belt of whiteness was wrapped round her waist, but her enormous peaked head loomed up clear in the moonlit night. A smaller berg, her summit fretted and turreted like a Spanish castle, floated the same distance from the ship to starboard. They seemed like mountainous islands from the bridge, appearing, vanishing, then reappearing.

Langer moved closer to Beaumont, whispered the words. 'You asked me to check with DaSilva whether there were explosives aboard. There are . ..'

'Later,' Beaumont murmured. He was worried about Quinn - he felt responsible for this latest flight and he wouldn't feel happy until the chopper was safely back on its pad. At his suggestion one of the powerful searchlights near the bows had been switched on and elevated almost vertically into the night. It was this beacon poking up through the mist which Quinn was homing back on from the south, as yet only a tiny blip in the distance where it was caught by moonlight. The mist drifted, the blip vanished. Beaumont shifted his feet restlessly.

228

'I wonder whether he found those ships,' Grayson ruminated aloud.

'If they're still steaming north he probably has,' Beaumont guessed. 'He had seven vessels to look for - he should have spotted one of them . . .'

'I don't give a damn where they are,' Schmidt growled as he looked to starboard. 'We're on the high seas - we'll steam straight past them.5

Behind the captain's back Beaumont caught DaSilva's glance, a very dubious glance. The acting mate did not share Schmidt's sublime confidence in the freedom of the seas, a doubt which Beaumont had detected earlier, which had encouraged him to ask Langer to talk to DaSilva about explosives. 'Find out if they have any on board,' Beaumont had suggested. 'It's likely they're carrying something to blast their way out of ice. You're an explosives expert, so he won't think the question funny.'

The ship throbbed its way slowly forward over the oily sea, a sea which was dark and shiny in the moonlight, which made it look very much like a lake of oil. The mist so far was patchy, clinging to the iceberg zone on either side, and at this time of the year the sea was often calm like this in these waters. Perhaps it was the great weight of the floating masses of ice which gave it stability. Faintly, they heard the beating of Quinn's chopper coming in, but they still couldn't see him.

Beaumont looked to starboard where a searchlight was playing on the nearest berg. Illuminated, it looked gigantic, more like a Spanish castle than ever as the light shone through windows high in the turrets, through holes which penetrated the ice to the atmosphere beyond. It was almost frightening in its proximity and vastness. 'Couldn't be a ghost berg, I suppose?' Grayson murmured.

'I hope not - they're liable to collapse if you shout a rude word at them.5

Which was literally true, Beaumont thought, incredible though it might seem to people with no knowledge of the Arctic - that an unguarded human voice could bring down a colossus weighing millions of tons. Eskimos knew this; in their kayaks they glided past a ghost berg, not even daring to whisper, so fragile were these floating giants on the verge' of collapse. Beaumont watched the light playing over the castled berg, hovering at its summit, then the summit burst.

One minute the peak was there, then it had gone, vanishing in a cascade of ice bursting outwards in all directions as the echo of its detonation reverberated across the ocean, echoing from berg to berg. Fragments of ice shot down the beam of the searchlight, vanished into the floe-littered sea. At least twenty feet of the summit had disintegrated. Schmidt gave a quick order, altering course a few degrees to port, away from the monolith.

'Not a ghost berg - an exploding berg,' Grayson commented. 'I don't want to meet any more of them.'

Quinn's Sikorsky came into view, was close enough now to see the rotor disc haloed by the moon, was less than a quarter of a mile away as it lost altitude and came down to two hundred feet, heading for the Elroy on a course which would take it over the summit of the huge berg to port. Schmidt gave a fresh order to slow the engines while Quinn landed. The mist round the berg's waist had drifted away, showing the immensity of the great cliff of ice rising sheer from the mist at its base.

'I hope he found the Revolution,' Langer said.

The vast berg exploded as Quinn flew over it, exploded like a gigantic bomb no longer able to contain the pressure inside. But this time it wasn't just the summit which disappeared - the whole berg blew up with a boom that thundered out across the ocean, deafening the men on deck below the bridge. The bridge itself shuddered under the shock wave. The face of the overhead compass shattered, showering glass over the helmsman. Schmidt grabbed at the wheel to keep them on course.

The roar went round and round among the bergs, and came back to the ship as a shattering echo. Foam and vapour where the berg had been shot five hundred feet up into the night, a massive geyser which rivalled Old Smoky. As the vapour column fell back to sea level it revealed nothing but boiling water. The berg had gone, the Sikorsky had gone, and Quinn had gone.

Beaumont went to Schmidt who had handed back the wheel to the helmsman and was standing close to the window, staring at the frothing lake of sea. 'He was right over the summit when it exploded . . .'

'I know,' Schmidt replied quietly. 'Dear God ... Quinn.' He squared his shoulders and spoke without looking at the man beside him. 'If you get any more bright ideas, Beaumont, you know what you can do with them.'

It wasn't so much the words as the quiet way he said them which expressed the bitterness. Beaumont walked away, nodded to Grayson and Langer, and they followed him off the bridge. He was appalled at the death of Quinn, but if possible he was even more appalled at the loss of the helicopter. The radar was gone, the wireless-jamming made it impossible to send or receive any signal, and now their last link with the outside world had been taken away from them. With Papanin to the south of them they were isolated. One hour later the Elroy struck the berg.

'One hundred pounds of gelignite, timer mechanisms, and a few hundred foot of cable . . .'

'Where do they keep it, Horst?'

'You'd never guess - inside a cabin off the main deck.'

Langer grinned at Beaumont. 'Strictly against the regulations, DaSilva says, but he also says that when he has to heave defective jelly overboard he doesn't want to carry it all the way up from the explosives store.'

'DaSilva has his head screwed on the right way,' Grayson said. 'Those people back in Washington who write out regulations never travel with the stuff.'

The three men were sitting inside Beaumont's cabin while they ate their lunch of clam chowder and cinnamon pie. The fact that the meal had been sent to the cabin suggested that once again their popularity had waned. 'We're in the doghouse,' Grayson observed as he put down his coffee cup. 'Anybody would think you sent Quinn out so he'd be blown up by that berg . ..'

'Schmidt's more worried than he lets on,' Beaumont replied. 'He pretends he's concentrating on his navigation but I've an idea he's as worried as we are about those Russian vessels. It's the Revolution I'm bothered about - all sixteen thousand tons of her. The trawlers the Elroy could push out of the way. What's that, Horst ?' The German was showing a key in the palm of his hand with a smug expression.

'Key to the explosives cabin. DaSilva doesn't see eye to eye with Schmidt on this,"we're on the high seas so no one can touch us" business. And somehow that hundred pounds of gelignite has got itself tucked away inside a couple of shoulder-packs - just in case ...'

The cabin lurched under the massive blow, shuddered as though the bulkheads were on the verge of caving in. The cabin walls tilted to port, back to starboard, then upright again. From under the ship came a terrible grinding sound as though its keel was being torn out and the grinding went on and on. 'Christ...' Grayson hauled open the cabin door and they heard shouting, the thud of running feet, a terrible crash beyond the port bulkhead, then the vessel was still with its engines ticking over. The lights dimmed, almost went out, came back to full power reluctantly.

'We've struck,' Horst yelled.

'Unless the Revolution just hit us ...' Grayson began.

'More like an iceberg!' Beaumont was dragging on his parka. 'Make for the bridge.'

Beaumont ran along the deserted companionway, paused at the bottom of the staircase to button his parka, to slip on mittens and gloves, and from the deck above he heard men's voices, voices with more than a hint of panic. He went up the staircase, opened the door, and the mist met him, cold clammy mist with silhouettes moving about inside. It was impossible to see what had happened, what was beyond the port rail. Beaumont couldn't even see the damned port rail as he felt his way towards the ladder leading up to the bridge. A large burly figure came out of the mist and cannoned against him. Borzoli.

'We've struck!' he gasped hoarsely.

'Going down?' Beaumont asked, feeling the core tube inside his parka pocket.

'God knows ...'

Beaumont went up the ladder to the bridge, had almost reached the top when the mist beyond the bows shifted. Something like a mountain appeared and then vanished, a mountain only yards away. He went on to the bridge cautiously as Grayson and Langer came up the ladder behind him. Schmidt was standing at the front of the bridge with a window open and the icy air was rapidly dispersing the warmth. The helmsman was still holding the wheel although they weren't going anywhere, and the floor was canted towards the stern. DaSilva was hanging out of another open window, staring to port. And the engines had stopped. Glancing over his shoulder, Schmidt saw Beaumont.

'Come over here a minute, Beaumont,' he called out. His tone was neutral, the mood of anger gone. 'It's the damnedest thing - we've ridden up on an iceberg.'

It took them an hour to assess the position, the extraordinary position they were now in. Steaming very slowly through thick mist, the Elroy had passed inside a small bay on the coast of a giant iceberg; in less than a minute it had crossed the bay and the bows had driven inside a wide, scooped-out gulley of ice eroded out of the side of the berg, a huge natural ramp tilting up out of the sea. At, the first grinding scrape Schmidt had acted, but by then the bows, the forepart of the ship, were lifted out of the water like a ship in dry dock, while at the stern the screw was still in deep water.

Schmidt had stopped the engines but the 6,50O-ton vessel was marooned, the bows and a third of the hull resting on the ice chute, the other two-thirds of the ship and its stern still in the bay. At the end of the trough the wall of the berg rose sheer in the mist, greenish and massive like a cliff in the searchlight's beam. To Schmidt it had seemed incredible, but to Beaumont it was only strange: a year ago a British trawler had endured a similar experience off Spitsbergen; in heavy fog she had driven her own bows deep inside a chute at the edge of the icefield. The captain had used his common sense, faced with this unique experience - he had simply reversed his engines and the screw had dragged the trawler back into the sea.

'Jesus!' DaSilva called out from the rear of the bridge. 'How the hell did we ever get inside here ?'

They went to the rear window and Schmidt blinked. The mist had cleared a little for the moment and beyond the stern was a small bay with arms which curved out to flank a narrow entrance. It had been little short of a miracle that the Elroy, moving blind through the mist, had cleared both arms of the bay when she steamed direct inside. The mist drifted over, blotted out the arms of solid ice.

'With a little judgement, a lot of luck, we should be able to manage it,' Schmidt said thoughtfully. 'Most of the ship is still in the water so if I reverse the screw it should haul us off the ice chute.' He let out a deep breath. 'Isn't it the damnedest thing?'

'You know the ice went?' DaSilva asked Beaumont. 'It went as we hit the chute - you can see now.'

Beaumont looked down out of the port window where the mist had lifted off the chute. It wasn't surprising he hadn't been able to see the port rail when he came up on deck - the port rail hadn't been there to see. As the keel ground its way up inside the chute the mountain of ice they had tried to shift for many back-breaking hours had left them, had taken the rail with it. Beyond the ship a vast mass of heaped-up ice lay on the chute floor with here and there a fragment of rail sticking up out of the heap. Fur-clad figures, the seamen Schmidt had sent down rope ladders to explore the berg, were moving like ghosts in the mist. A head came up over the side where the rail was still intact close to the bows. Langer's. He scrambled up the ladder and joined them on the bridge.

'It's not a ghost berg, Keith, I'm sure ...'

'You're certain?'

'Dead certain. Sam and I climbed up as far as we could and it's solid - a cliff of ice ...'

'You can see it now,' Schmidt called out from the front of the bridge. The mist, swirling, in constant motion, had drifted away beyond the bows and for a few minutes the majesty of the berg they were marooned on was exposed. A hundred yards beyond the bows the ice sheered up vertically like the cliffs of Dover. The mist drifted further and they saw the cliff sweeping away on both sides until it disappeared inside the drifting whiteness. They were marooned on a floating island of pure ice, on a leviathan of a berg which could easily be half a mile long, maybe longer.

'Recall the men,' Schmidt said crisply to DaSilva. 'Use the loudhailers. We're getting out of here.'

'I suppose we have to leave the berg right away?' Beaumont asked quietly.

'As soon as we can make it. . .' Schmidt stopped speaking and stared at Beaumont. 'Just for a second I thought you were coming up with another of your bright ideas.'

'It might be safer to stay where we are for the moment.'

'Stuck here? Getting nowhere? You want to get home some time, don't you ?'

'We are getting somewhere,' Beaumont pointed out. 'I know we don't feel to be moving but both of us know we are. This huge berg is being carried south all the time by the Greenland Current - at a rough guess the berg is moving at a rate of twenty miles a day . . .'

'Not exactly breaking nautical records, is she ?' Schmidt observed dryly.

'Do we have to ?' Beaumont persisted. 'A few hours ago Quinn reported that those Soviet trawlers were forty miles south of us, that the Revolution was only thirty miles away -they'll be much closer now. This berg is acting as a gigantic transporter for the Elroy. If we stay on her the berg will carry us past those vessels some time during the night.'

'We'd be stuck here - unable to manoeuvre . ..'

'Does it matter?' Beaumont rasped impatiently. 'If they don't see us? The Revolution carries the latest radar but what will her radar pick up when we're close to her ? Only another iceberg!'

'The berg as a giant transporter!' DaSilva was excited. 'I like the idea . . .'

'I don't!' Schmidt walked over to the voice-pipe to speak to the engine-room. When he had re-stoppered the tube he looked at DaSilva. 'Chiefy reports there's no structural damage to the engine-room. The glass on the gauges shattered, one man got steam-scalds, but he thinks the engines are OK. And I think, Mr DaSilva, I asked you to recall the men on the ice. I'm starting up the engines to check them . . ..'

'That is inadvisable,' Beaumont said bluntly. 'The Revolution's hydrophones will pick up the vibrations . . .'

'And then,' Schmidt went on, ignoring Beaumont, 'we'll steam out backwards the way we came in.' He gave Beaumont the benefit of his attention. 'You are getting to be too much of a sea lawyer for my taste. And whether you like it or not this ship is disembarking off this berg in two hours' time!'

'The Elroy is very close to us - we have picked up her engine beat on the hydrophones!'

Kramer had run on to the bridge of the Revolution with the news, had hardly recovered his breath before he gasped out the words. The Siberian, who was standing next to a silent Tuchevsky, took his pipe out of his mouth and waved it at the Bait.

'Calm yourself, Kramer - and report to me every five minutes from now on.'

Tuchevsky stiffened his shoulders as Kramer left the bridge, turned to Papanin and spoke emphatically. 'So now I can start my engines again -1 have warned you repeatedly that it is terribly dangerous to drift in these waters without power ...'

'You will do nothing of the sort! You have the most advanced radar in the world - use it! We must continue drifting to give our hydrophone operators the best possible chance - I want to locate the American icebreaker's exact position.'

Papanin put his little pipe back in his mouth and went to the bridge window, leaving Tuchevsky on his own. Beyond the clear-vision panel he saw a world of mist and sea. And somewhere out of sight were the icebergs. The radar operators were at this moment plotting the monsters' course as they drifted steadily south with the Greenland Current, their eyes constantly focused on the greenish glow inside the rubber hoods where the sweeps went round and round and the echoes never stopped, the echoes coming back from over a dozen enormous icebergs.

Everyone was aboard, the engines were ticking over steadily, the bridge was fully manned, lookouts had been posted, the Elroy was ready to disembark from the berg, to put to sea.

Schmidt, his hands clasped behind him, for once stood looking the wrong way - towards the stern through the rear window - as he waited to perform two dangerous manoeuvres, taking his ship out of the chute, steering her backwards between the arms of the bay. Beaumont stood beside him, ignoring the chilly expression on the captain's face as he stared into the distance beyond the bay.

The mist had returned at just the wrong moment, was rolling like fog just beyond the two white peninsulas of ice which almost enclosed the bay. Towering above them, Beaumont stood between Schmidt and DaSilva, who stood with almost as bleak a look on his face as Schmidt's. He totally disagreed with the decision Schmidt had taken, but he couldn't say anything; still only acting mate, he couldn't say as much as Carlson might have done had he been standing in his place. The engines built up more power, they would soon be moving, stern first, into the water - if the screw managed to haul them out.

Grayson, who had been standing near the lookouts at the stern, burst into the bridge without ceremony, speaking with even less ceremony to a man whose word was almost life and death aboard his ship. 'You'd better wait! There's something out there - just inside the fog!'

'What?'

Schmidt's single-word question was explosive, betraying some of the inner tension he was labouring under, and he stared at Grayson with a look the crew knew and feared.

'I don't know ... but there's something ...'

'I can see it myself,' Beaumont said grimly. 'You'd better not move this ship yet, Schmidt.'

'God, it's the Revolution ...' DaSilva muttered.

But it wasn't the Revolution, it was too big, infinitely too big even for a 16,000-ton ship, the thing which was coming slowly through the mist towards the exit from the bay. It sheered up like a ten-storey building, a moving ten-storey building, its invisible summit way above the height of the Elroy's masthead, lost in the mist. The stern lookouts were shouting now, shouting at the tops of their voices as Schmidt opened the window and leaned out into the night. Ice-cold air flooded in over them and they were hardly aware of it as they stared, hypnotized by the menace coming towards them. It looked like a towering headland now, a headland of ice as it brushed aside the mist and came on, drifting straight for the bay. Even across the width of the bay it seemed to hang over them, above them, a colossus of an iceberg heading straight for the leviathan they were beached on.

Schmidt reacted very quickly to give warning. He hardly seemed to move and then he was talking into the tannoy system which would reach every corner of the ship. 'Hold on tight. Hold on tight. Major collision coming!'

DaSilva grabbed Beaumont's arm. 'Look! Inside the bay!5

'Underwater spar.'

A spur of ice projecting from the giant berg, a spur which could be up to fifty feet in diameter, was spearing across the bay after slipping inside the entrance, disturbing the moonlit water, water very palely lit by a shaft percolating through the mist. Behind the leg, the body followed. The men on the bridge were gripping rails, bracing themselves for the coming impact, and below them the lookouts clung to the rails still intact. Beaumont's head moved slightly as something fell out of the sky, something huge, bigger than a mansion, something from the summit of the berg which hadn't even touched the opposing ice yet. The mansion, the enormous chunk of ice, hit the water just beyond the bay and sent up a great funnel of water. 'Christ!' Langer gasped. 'This is a ghost berg . . .'

Which meant that the entire edifice, millions of tons of ice, could collapse at the moment of impact, bringing an avalanche down over the bay, over the ship, burying it. Like waxwork figures they waited for the impact. At the last moment Schmidt gave the order to stop the engines. The colossus floated out of the mist and showed them its enormity, then the spur reached the shore of the bay and the bergs met.

The impact sound was deafening, a sound like the end of the world. The shattering collision sent a tremor through the iceberg which had been struck, a tremor which shuddered the Elroy, shaking the hull, rattling the plates, hurling rivets on to the ice. The impact threw DaSilva clear across the bridge, shook a man off the catwalk above the engine-room and sent him to his death twenty feet below. It shattered crockery, wristwatches, fractured the still-intact glass on the engine-room gauges, made compass needles spin. Then it was suddenly quiet, frighteningly quiet.

The engines had been stopped before the impact. No one spoke. For a short time no one moved. They were gazing at the exit from the bay, an exit which was no longer there. The ice cliff filled it, locked into the opening like a cork into a bottle. The bay had become a lagoon, a lake without an exit. They were trapped inside their giant transporter, an iceberg drifting with the Greenland Current at twenty miles a day. But the ghost berg hadn't collapsed yet despite the collision. Beaumont was the first to break the silence and everyone on the bridge stared at him as though it were strange to hear a human voice.

'Now we'll have to drift with the berg, Schmidt. No option.'

'No option,' Schmidt agreed grimly. 'And all the time we'll be waiting for that thing to fall on us.'

'Their engines have stopped!'

Kramer sounded alarmed, bewildered, and Papanin left the bridge with the Bait to go down and see the hydrophone section for himself. The seaman in vest and shorts who was listening to the instrument looked up as Papanin came in. 'Kramer tells me you can't hear them any more. Is your instrument defective?'

'No. Their engines have stopped. We are getting no echoes.'

'How far away ?'

'A mile, maybe even closer ...'

'They were that distance ten minutes ago!' Papanin glared at Kramer. 'Listen to me! They were a mile away only ten minutes ago. Their engines continued beating until a few seconds ago. They are still a mile away. It's not possible! We are drifting - they are moving south under power. They must have, moved closer!'

'It's true,' the seaman said.

'It cannot be true - it's, technically impossible!' the Siberian stormed.

'It's been puzzling me . ..' the seaman began.

'That's a hell of a lot of use!' Papanin folded his arms and stared at the seaman. 'If they were drifting with the current like we are, then it would be true - we would remain the same distance apart. But they're not drifting! You heard the sound of their bloody engines!'

'Very distinctly - until a minute ago.'

'How do you explain it?' Papanin gestured towards the hydrophone equipment. 'It's your job to explain things!'

'I can't...'

The Siberian said nothing, standing with his arms folded while he mastered his frustration. When he spoke again it was in such a reasonable tone that the seaman was frightened. 'Don't worry about it -just go on listening with those earplugs of yours.' He turned to Kramer. 'There is another way of checking - since they are so close - send up that helicopter. The pilot can't come back until he's found the Elroy.'

Perched aboard its giant transporter, hemmed in by the two coupled bergs, the Elroy continued to drift south with the current. It drifted for many hours, timeless hours, because for the men imprisoned inside the ice there was no longer any way of being sure of the time.

It had seemed incredible at first, so incredible that Schmidt had ordered a check on every timepiece aboard the ship, and when the check had been made the incredible was found to be true: every single clock and watch had stopped, stopped presumably by some freak tremor which had passed through the vessel at the moment of impact when the ghost berg struck. There was a frantic search for one clock or watch which was still going, and there wasn't one.

So they had to guess at the time and from then on the ship's log carried strangely imprecise entries. 'Approximately 1900 hours .. .' 'About 2200 hours...' Not knowing the time gradually got on men's nerves, the proximity of the ghost berg got on their nerves, the knowledge that at any second millions of tons of ice might simply topple, come down on them, flattening the ship and everyone inside her.

And there was nothing to do, nothing they dare do. All normal work ceased: they couldn't even occupy themselves with levering up and throwing overboard the remaining ice on deck - because they were afraid that some unguarded echo from the hammering of a tool might be just enough to bring the colossus crashing down on top of them. The atmosphere became far worse after Beaumont and Langer returned from an exploratory tour of their overhanging neighbour.

'It has all the appearance of a ghost berg,' Beaumont said when he proposed the tour to Schmidt, 'that huge piece of ice which came down from the summit was pretty significant, but I think we'd better check before we all go crazy . . .'

It was a ghost berg, the biggest Beaumont had ever seen. The far side of the two-hundred-foot-high cliff, the side facing away from the sea, was like something out of the Arabian Nights. To get there they crossed the great spar of ice sticking up out of the bay and made their way along a narrow ledge at the base of the cliff, and when they turned a corner they looked up in horror. Enormous alcoves and caves were hollowed out of what had seemed solid berg from the outside; great roofs of ice were precariously poised on frozen columns fifty to a hundred feet above them; and below where they had paused, a long way above sea level, was a gigantic hole at least three hundred yards in diameter, a hole which might have been gouged out by a meteorite. The hole was a lake of blackness and as they listened they heard the faint lapping of water, the splash of the Greenland Current against ice. The ghost berg, at least half a mile long, was hollow, a dangerous sham, like an enormous rock pinnacle eroded by termites. It was about as stable as sweating gelignite.

'Can't understand why it didn't come down when it hit us,' Langer whispered.

'They can take a lot of punishment and then they go suddenly,' Beaumont replied. 'We've seen enough. Let's get back.'

'God in heaven, look up there, Keith ...'

The mist had drifted away from a giant column of ice, exposing a good two hundred feet of ice tower, a tower whose summit was hidden. The tower was massive, at least a hundred feet wide, but there were huge windows cut out of the tower, windows which were holes in the ice, so many that Beaumont couldn't understand why it was still vertical. The mist cleared from higher up and Beaumont's expression tightened as he saw the tower was supporting a great overhang from the back of the cliff, was probably supporting the whole damned cliff.

'It won't last much longer,' he said. 'We'd better get back.'

Only a few men aboard the ship were told what they had found, but within an hour the grim report had spread through the Elroy's grapevine. From then on the tension became appalling. If a man banged his elbow against a bulkhead his comrade glared at him; they found their appetites had gone, that they couldn't sleep, that they could do nothing but keep quiet and keep still, and the inactivity crucified their nerves. For seamen accustomed to the movement of the ship the lack of movement was another source of tension. The bergs were moving all the time, rotating slowly in the current, but there was no sensation of movement. Given time, just a little more time - the time they couldn't gauge - they would become a bunch of screaming neurotics.

'Why are we so interested in explosives ?' Grayson asked at one stage while they were sitting in Beaumont's cabin.

'If we ever get out of here we may need some kind of weapon to defend ourselves. I don't know how or where or when - but I don't share Schmidt's optimism. I'm thinking of some kind of floating mine - I've actually talked to DaSilva about it.'

'He wasn't worried - about Schmidt?' Langer inquired.

'DaSilva is in a mutinous frame of mind,' Beaumont told him. 'Normally he wouldn't be - it's the silence and the stillness that's getting him, getting us all,' he added with a bleak grin. 'The Elroy doesn't even creak any more.'

'You feel we might get out one day ?' Grayson asked.

'If we do, it will be when the ghost berg is on the southern side of us - with the current tugging at it. There's just a chance that it might break loose again, drift away.'

'And you still think you heard a chopper while you were on the ghost berg?' Grayson asked. 'Schmidt didn't look as though he believed you.'

'That's because Horst didn't hear it. I not only heard it -I think I saw it for a second when the mist cleared for a few seconds.'

'Which means Papanin now knows where we are?'

'I fear so. Time - whatever it is - will tell, if that ghost berg cuts loose.'

The ghost berg broke loose some time on Friday, 25 February. 'Approximately 2200 hours ...' the log recorded. Its departure was not spectacular, there was no great rending of ice, no inundation of sea rushing in; there was simply one loud terrifying crack which stopped the pulse of every man aboard. From his post at the rear of the bridge DaSilva saw what had happened. The huge spar jammed inside the bay had snapped; the ghost berg, still intact, still not collapsing, moved away from the entrance to the bay while DaSilva watched it go. And something like a half-submerged monster, the huge severed spar, was following the mother berg into the current.

When Schmidt reached the bridge with Beaumont the view they had become used to - the land-locked lagoon with the towering cliff on the far side - was transformed. The exit was again open. Beyond it the colossus was only faintly visible in the gathering mist, disappearing even as they watched her go. Schmidt permitted himself a rare display of emotion: he let out a deep breath.

'That's it. We take off as soon as I can get the screw moving - whatever there is waiting for us out there.'

The developing situation in Iceberg Alley - so far as it was known - had been anxiously followed for days by Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, still worried that something might happen which would cancel the American President's visit to the Russian capital in May. Then all communication with Col Papanin ceased: the radio-jamming which was so effectively isolating the Elroy also cut off the Revolution from the outside world.

On Friday, 25 February 1972 - while the American icebreaker was still drifting aboard its giant transporter -Brezhnev undoubtedly consulted Marshal Andrei Grechko, and the Soviet Minister of Defence decided that a diversion was necessary, something to distract certain journalists who were already checking rumours that something was happening in the Arctic. Whatever happened, there must be no reference to the crisis in the world's press, so something else happened - something close enough to Iceberg Alley to account for the rumours, but something far enough away to distract attention from the events taking place hundreds of miles further north.

The Times, published on Wednesday, 1 March, carried the first report, datelined Washington, 29 February.

A crippled Soviet submarine wallowing in a North Atlantic gale for the past four days, was taken in tow today by a Russian tug according to a United States Navy spokesman.

Rough seas.. . now subsiding, enabled the tug to get a line aboard the vessel six hundred miles north-east of Newfoundland.

The submarine of the 3,7oo-ton Ha 'hotel' class has a crew of ninety. It was first spotted on Friday by reconnaissance aircraft from the American base at Keflavik, Iceland ...

The Soviet ships, the tanker Liepaya, and the fish factory trawler, Ivan Chigrin, have also entered the immediate area.

The cause of the Russian vessel's trouble was not known here.

Despite the fact that the world's newspapers were full of their accounts of the American President's return from his recent visit to Peking, the report of the near 'disaster' to the Soviet submarine appeared in many newspapers, together with aerial pictures showing the supposedly stricken vessel wallowing in fifty-foot waves under the lash of a fifty-five knot wind. And the diversion worked - not a line was written about the missing Elroy, which should have been well on its way to its home port of Milwaukee via the St Lawrence Seaway.

It must have been just about the time when the American aircraft from Keflavik first spotted the Soviet submarine that the Elroy left the iceberg and steamed out into the fogbound channel.

The huge screw at the stern of the Elroy was revolving, churning water, slamming aside small floes as it whipped up a white froth. Schmidt gave the order and the icebreaker began moving backwards, slowly, then it stopped and Schmidt increased the power. The screw thrashed, the engines throbbed as though they were coming up through the deck, and the Elroy moved again. She came down the chute very slowly, like a ship being launched the wrong way, and the noise was terrible as the keel ground over the ice under it, spitting out sparks, channelling deeper into the iron-hard ice.

The screw churned on, its dragging power greater now that more of the ship was in the water, heaving the Elroy back into the sea. There was an enormous splash as the bows went down, but the crew on deck behind Beaumont at the stern didn't make a sound as the vessel edged her way across the bay and out between the narrow exit. Beaumont left the stern, walked along the vibrating deck towards the bows.

They had chosen the moment for departure carefully. Above them the mist had cleared briefly and the moon shone down, reflecting off drifting floes, off the ice-coated starboard rail, but ahead of them as Schmidt turned his vessel slowly there was dense mist only half a mile away. 'I don't like it,' Grayson said as he stopped behind Beaumont close to the bows, 'I think we should have stayed on the berg. DaSilva thinks so, too. And why the hell do we have to come out like a flaming cruise liner ?'

The simile was apt. On Schmidt's specific orders the Elroy's lights were ablaze. Every possible light which could be lit was switched on, and her searchlights beamed out to port and starboard and over the bows. 'We'll be on the high seas,' Schmidt had repeated for the hundredth time. 'If I go down Iceberg Alley with my lights ablaze and the horn booming there's no possible excuse for a collision.'

'You think they need an excuse - with Gorov and the Catherine charts aboard?' Beaumont had demanded. 'When we're totally out of touch and can't even signal what may be happening?'

He had lost his argument - as he knew he would. And up to a point Schmidt had reason on his side: if they tried to slip south without lights and in silence Papanin could afterwards say that the collision had been the Americans' fault -how could they have seen them or heard them in the fog? As they headed south Beaumont raised his night-glasses and swept the water.

'See anything ?' Langer asked anxiously in his ear.

'Just ocean. And mist.5

'See anything?'

It wasn't Langer who asked the question this time. DaSilva had come quietly down from the bridge and stood at Beaumont's left shoulder. 'With your eyes,' he added, 'you ought to be up top where you were before.'

Beaumont looked behind him, stared up at the eighty-foot mast where a seaman hung from the crosstree with a headset clamped under his fur hood. This was the lookout who would try to warn Schmidt of any obstacle in the Elroy's path. 'No thanks,' he said. 'Not again. And I can't see anything out there - yet.'

'The Carley float is near the stern, starboard side,' DaSilva murmured. 'Near the cabin where the explosives are - and Langer has a key. If we need him, Borzoli will help us with the launch - he's on lookout duty near the float. Mind telling me what you have in mind - if something does happen?'

'I'll have to try and scare them off,' Beaumont replied vaguely.

'OK, so play it close to the chest.' DaSilva paused, looking back at the bridge. 'Maybe it's better that way - considering Schmidt doesn't know a thing about it yet. I could end up as a clerk in a shipping office for this.'

'Better that than a skeleton floating at the bottom of Iceberg Alley,' Beaumont replied brutally.

'She's coming out,' Papanin said. 'That other berg we saw in the aerial shot must have broken away.'

On the bridge of the Revolution the Siberian bent over the radarscope hood, his head almost inside it, and the greenish glow from the scope bathed his smooth-skinned face,- his close-shaven head and his hands, making him a green man.

'How long ?' Kramer asked nervously.

Papanin looked up briefly from the hood, glanced across the bridge to where Tuchevsky was standing with his back to him, his hands clasped tightly behind him. 'You can start your engines now,' he called out. 'From now on we can track her by radar.' He put his eyes close to the hood again as he replied to Kramer's questions. 'By midnight I would guess - by midnight it will all be over.'

The Elroy was steaming due south down Iceberg Alley, her engines ticking over at half power, the bows sliding through water like milk, her lights blazing. But now there was an added factor to pinpoint her position: her powerful foghorn was booming non-stop, a deep-throated, mournful sound which echoed back to them across the ocean - and the echoing was significant. Somewhere inside the mist there had to be walls off which the echoes were rebounding, walls of ice.

Four men stood at the bows, chilled and numbed with the bitter cold, moving about frequently with the lookout Schmidt had posted. Beaumont moved about less than any of them, was constantly staring through his night-glasses as he swept the sea ahead. Feet crunched behind them.

'Coffee for you guys ...'

DaSilva and Borzoli poured them mugs of steaming coffee

from an insulated jug, but the coffee was still half-cold before they could swallow it. The acting mate sent Borzoli back to his post near the Carley float, sent the lookout away to check something imaginary on the port quarter before he spoke. 'Schmidt is feeling he took the right decision.'

'I'm glad somebody's happy,' Beaumont commented.

'It's looking good so far.'

Beaumont said nothing as he finished his coffee and raised his glasses again. His arms were weary with holding them, his eyes were sore with the cold, with the strain of staring into the lenses. There was a narrow channel of calm, moonlit sea ahead for almost a mile and then it was lost behind more mist. On the port side a huge berg was coming up, an ugly monster with a table-top summit. To starboard lay a great bank of mist, a dense pall rising at least two hundred feet above the ocean, and it stretched the full length of the channel they could see.

'Nothing over there,' DaSilva remarked as Beaumont swivelled his glasses on the bank. 'Just a load of mist.'

'Is the radio-jamming as strong as ever?' Beaumont inquired.

'Stronger. The worst yet.'

'Which means we're getting very close to the jamming source.'

The Elroy moved closer to the bottleneck formed by the monster berg to port and the mist bank to starboard, altering course a few degrees to pass down the middle. Ice crunched underfoot as Grayson moved his numbed feet. Langer banged his arms round his body to try and get some circulation back into his system. Behind them a door slammed high up as DaSilva returned to the bridge, and they were alone with the seaman on watch.

Langer watched Beaumont as the Englishman perched his elbows on the rail and stared through his glasses, sweeping them slowly to starboard. It was the huge bank of impenetrable mist which seemed to intrigue Beaumont, the bank which drifted less than a quarter of a mile away, the bank which would hem them in between itself and the iceberg once they entered the bottleneck.

'What's that? That thing in the mist well south to starboard?' Grayson called out.

Beaumont was already looking at the huge mass which had come out of the mist like a moving cliff. It was the ghost berg presenting its false face of rock-like stability. They were inside the bottleneck now with the table-topped monster coming up on the port bow. Beaumont glanced at the mist bank and stiffened. The bows of the Revolution broke the mist, bore down on them like a battleship.

'The American ship is heading due south - on a course at right-angles to us . . .'

'You'd better get ready,' Papanin ordered Tuchevsky.

The mist was smothering the Revolution, drifting just beyond the bridge window as Tuchevsky bent lower over the radarscope, watching the echoes which registered the Elroy's approach. It was going to need very careful timing - he had to bring his huge ship out of the mist at exactly the right moment, otherwise he would fail. 'Maintain present course,' he ordered the helmsman.

The Revolution was creeping forward at her lowest speed, her engine beats muffled by the mist, moving forward on interception course. Tuchevsky stared at the echoes, his face gleaming with sweat, his beard moist. His calculations had to allow for the speed of the Elroy, his own speed, the distance which would separate them when they first saw each other. He sensed the presence of the Siberian behind him.

'I want you to hit her amidships . . .'

The sweep inside the hood was pinging non-stop, tracking each fresh position of the Elroy as she approached the bottleneck between mist bank and iceberg. Tuchevsky heard Papanin's boots stirring restlessly. 'Aren't we moving too slowly?'

'You want us to come out too soon ?'

There were no lights showing aboard the Revolution, the ship was in complete darkness, but Papanin's eyes were accustomed to the gloom as the ship crept forward. He could just make out the bridge window frames and the faint blur beyond them, otherwise they might have been in a fog bound port, so smooth was the sea, so quiet the hum of the vessel's slow-beating engines.

'Maintain your present speed,' Tuchevsky droned.

'For how long?' the Siberian demanded.

'For as long as is necessary.'

Papanin fumed, remained silent, his nerves screaming with the tension. They had to destroy the American vessel first time. One annihilating blow out of the mist, steel smashing into steel, the bows of the Revolution grinding into the Elroy's starboard side, cutting clean through her. He imagined what it would be like - the Russian ship astride the American, driving her under, the broken stern to his left, the wrecked bows to his right. Which section, he wondered, would go down first?

'Papanin! Get to the back of the bridge! Hold on to the rail!'

The Siberian did as he was told, went back and held on to the rail with both hands as the helmsman, one of his own men, took a tighter grip on the wheel. Papanin was watching the mist beyond the bridge. When it lightened they would be coming out, they would see the Elroy under their bows. Why wasn't Tuchevsky increasing speed? The captain left the radarscope, took a firm grip of the telegraph handle, pressed it down to 'Half Speed', then ran back to the scope.

'Maintain present course!'

A flicker of pale light passed beyond the bridge window. The mist wavered as the engine beat increased enormously. It was very warm inside the bridge and Papanin wiped a hand quickly over his forehead to stop sweat dripping into his eyes. The mournful booming note of the Elroy's foghorn they had heard before became very loud, dead ahead.

Tuchevsky was staring into the radarscope, praying, then they were through.

Moonlight flooded the bridge. The lights of the Elroy were a glare. Dead ahead. The Revolution's bow wave spread out to port and starboard with the increased speed. The hull of the icebreaker rushed towards them. Tuchevsky gripped both sides of the radarscope as he stared through the window. Never before had he concentrated On a scope with such intensity - and he had calculated exactly. Or had he? .Increase speed! He prayed for the Elroy's captain to react in time, tried to will the order into the American's brain. Increase speed! Get out of the way! I gave you one chance, one warning - please, please, please!

The Elroy was moving faster already. The order had been given the instant the Revolution appeared out of the mist. Exhausted as he was, Schmidt had reacted with all the decision Tuchevsky had prayed for. The Russian continued on course, heading point-blank for its target, so it seemed to Papanin from the back of the bridge where he couldn't see clearly. The Revolution swept forward, the American ship's hull slid across at right-angles to the sweep, its mast towering above the Russian ship's bridge. Tuchevsky ran to the starboard side, looked down beyond his own ship's rail. He saw the Elroy's screw churning the water and his own bows cut through the turbulence.

'You missed her!' Papanin's control went. 'Next time I will take command!'

In his blind fury he strode across the bridge and began swearing at Tuchevsky, standing over him. The little captain pushed him out of the way, caught him off balance and pushed him across the bridge. 'You stupid animal - we're going to hit the berg!' Papanin stared in horror as he looked to the front. The monster berg with the table-top summit had filled the window.

Beaumont was close to the stern of the Elroy when the bows of the Revolution plunged towards them. Collision seemed inevitable, the Elroy was presenting her midships to the 16,000-ton Russian ship as the bow wave came forward, as the huge bows reared above the ship's rail. At the last moment Beaumont was certain the bows would smash the Elroy's screw, destroying her motive power. Then the Russian ship was sweeping past beyond their stern, missing its target by yards as it sped on towards the monster berg.

'She's going to hit the berg,' Grayson said.

'I hope to God she does . . .'

Beaumont stayed near the stern, saw the frantic effort to bring the Revolution round in time, saw the great wake behind her which showed the extreme course she was taking , to save herself, then he saw that she had saved herself. He gave very brief instructions to Grayson, Langer and Borzoli, and went straight to the bridge of the Elroy, his face grim, his boots thudding on the deck. When he reached the bridge Schmidt turned round from the rear window he had been gazing through.

'You were right, Beaumont,' he said tersely. 'She tried to sink us.'

'She'll try it again. You can't outrun her.'

'Outrun her? With my top speed sixteen knots?'

'So if possible she's got to be stopped. For the sake of your crew, for the sake of everyone on board .. .'

'DaSilva is cooperating with you over the explosives ?'

Beaumont stared at Schmidt who was nodding his head cynically. 'You think I don't know what's going on aboard my own ship, Mr Beaumont?'

'She's got to be stopped,' Beaumont repeated.

'This is something I may forget to put in the ship's log.' The captain looked across the bridge at Beaumont and spoke two words. 'Stop her.'

The Carley float, a raft for throwing overboard if the ship had to be abandoned, was packed with one hundred pounds of gelignite, was wired for detonation. The timer mechanisms were in place, the clocks had been set to trigger detonation in ten minutes' time, but they hadn't been activated. The float was now a potential mine.

Schmidt had to reduce speed considerably when they winched the launch over the side near the stern, and this was a nerve-racking decision because the Revolution was now coming up behind them, still a distance away, but she was overhauling the icebreaker. And the view ahead from the bridge was hardly more encouraging than the view beyond the stern. Heavy mist still drifted to starboard, half-obscuring the ghost berg which lay half a mile ahead. To port a whole column of icebergs had appeared, narrowing the channel of clear water, and in the distance dead ahead two massive bergs stood on either side of the channel, like sentries guarding a gateway. It was indeed an alley of icebergs Schmidt had to take his ship through.

'How long before she overtakes us?' Beaumont asked DaSilva.

'I'd say about ten minutes - and that's a guess.'

'Looks more like five minutes to me,' Grayson said grimly. He frowned and looked to starboard. 'Schmidt's changing course - he's moving closer to that line of icebergs.'

'I asked him to,' Beaumont snapped. 'He's going to leave a wider channel between the Elroy and the ghost berg.'

'So the Revolution can slip through on that side? He must be crazy ...'

'Then I'm crazy, too. We'd better get down in that launch.'

DaSilva followed him across the deck to where Borzoli and other seamen waited by the launch suspended from davit cables. 'Beaumont, I still haven't asked you what you're going to do - my guess would be you hope this blows up under the bows of the Revolution.'

'It wouldn't work - she's moving too fast. Now, lower us -and for Pete's sake watch that float when you send it down.'

The whole operation was diabolically tricky. The launch - with Beaumont, Langer and Grayson inside it - had to be winched down over the side of a moving vessel and then held there until the float joined them. The only thing working in their favour was the calmness of the sea. They hit the water with a heavy slap and then held on to the cables while they looked up. The float was already on its way down to them.

While still on deck Langer had given DaSilva a little warning. 'Technically, if the float hits the side of the hull on its way down nothing will happen.' He had paused and smiled without humour. 'And heaven is full of demolition experts playing harps who said the same sort of thing.'

The airborne mine came down to them with a terrible slowness, suspended from ropes gripped by seamen high above them. Langer watched its descent with his hand gripped tightly round the winch cable. They only had to unbalance it, to let it slant downwards, and securely as the gelignite was lashed something devastating could happen. Then somebody let a rope slip. The large missile suspended above their heads canted at an angle and Langer drew in his breath with a hiss of fury and fear. 'They'll do Papanin's job for him,' he muttered.

The angled float swayed, bumped with a heavy thud against the ship's hull, a thud heavy enough to dislodge its cargo. Beaumont glanced towards the stern, suppressing his impatience; now the Revolution had changed course and she was heading fast for the open channel which would take her to starboard of the Elroy. For Christ's sake hurry it up! His prayer was answered - with unnerving speed. The float dropped and kept on dropping, coming down on their heads.

It jerked to a halt three feet above them, still canted at its dangerously unstable angle, then it was lowered more gently. Langer activated the clocks - the only clocks aboard which hadn't been put out of action because they hadn't been working when the ghost berg struck. The float was put over the stern, attached by ropes to the launch. Beaumont started the engine, took over the wheel, shouted up to DaSilva, the winch cables were released and they moved away from the Elroy at speed, dragging the float behind them.

'I think we're too late,' Langer shouted, looking back at the Russian ship.

Beaumont opened the throttle wide and the launch roared across the calm sea, heading direct for the ghost berg, following a course at right-angles to the receding Elroy, to the oncoming Revolution. The mist was parting now, drawing back to expose the towering wall of ice they were speeding towards. The berg reared up like the edge of some great continent, seemed even bigger than when they had moved across its treacherous surface behind the cliff wall.

As they came closer to the section of the cliff they hadn't seen earlier Beaumont saw that it was hollowed out at the base, arched into caves which disappeared inside the cliff, For the first time he realized how the ocean reached the lake they had found on the far side of the cliff; there were subterranean channels leading into the lake, channels under the arched caves. He took his decision almost without thinking.

'We're going in closer - we'll let the float go at the edge of the iceshelf,' he shouted.

'We'll never get back to the Elroy.' There was alarm in Grayson's shout. 'We'll never catch her up again.'

'We'll have to chance that. I'm going to get the float inside one of those channels - then it may detonate on the far side of the berg.'

Beaumont's plan was simple, a very long shot indeed. The ghost berg was on the verge of collapse, should have collapsed when it first struck the bay where the Elroy was marooned; even more it should have collapsed when it wrenched itself free from the other berg. But it was still intact and every hour it drifted brought it closer to final dissolution. It could be that the detonation of a large quantity of gelignite close to the ice would trigger off the catastrophe. Or it could no more than tickle the berg, blowing up a few pounds of ice.

And yet there were recorded cases where the unguarded shout of an Eskimo in his kayak had shattered one of these monsters, had brought it down into the ocean, falling like a mountain. Beaumont's plan - his faint hope - was to bring down the ghost berg ahead of the Revolution, filling the channel with minor bergs which would stop the Russian ship. It was a very long shot indeed.

'We are gaining on them! When the time comes I will take the wheel myself.' Papanin growled. He was staring through the clear-vision panel, watching the distant silhouette of the Elroy pass through a mist trail. 'You will take charge of the telegraph, control the speed,' he told Kramer.

'There will be no room for manoeuvre,' Tuchevsky protested. Unlike the Siberian he was constantly switching his gaze from port to starboard and back again. And he was impressed by the enormous size of the great berg to starboard coming up, but he had no suspicion of its fragility as he stared at the towering wall. 'A launch has left the American vessel,' he said suddenly. 'It is crossing the channel ahead of us . . .'

'Don't worry about that! Increase speed .. .' 'It is dangerous - we are going too close to that berg . . .' 'Full power!' Papanin shouted at Kramer. 'Full power ...'

The cliff rose vertically above their heads as the launch nosed its way through ice floes close to the shelf where the ocean lapped the base of the ghost berg. Throttled back, the launch bobbed among the floes, a mere speck under the lee of the berg. Twenty yards to the south of them a great cave went inside the ice, the current flowed in under the berg. Beaumont could see the turn of the moonlit water as he shouted the order. 'Release the float!'

Grayson was ready with his knife. He slashed at the rope, holding it in one gloved hand while he sawed with the other, and it took him longer than he had. anticipated to cut through the tough fibres. Behind him Beaumont and Langer suppressed their impatience with difficulty. Beaumont estimated they had about five minutes left before detonation -but without a working watch he couldn't be sure.

Grayson cut savagely at the frayed rope - the last few strands still held them to the float. Langer cursed, struggled to get his own knife out of the sheath under his parka. Beaumont watched helplessly, unable to leave the wheel. The arched opening drifted closer. Langer found his knife, hauled it out, cut at the rope Grayson was holding for him. The fibres parted. The float left them. Beaumont opened the throttle and the craft surged away from the ghost berg with a burst of power. The engine beats of the Revolution were much louder as he headed out diagonally down the channel, speeding after the Elroy he could hardly see.

In the stern Grayson clung to the gunwale, twisted round as he watched the Carley float bobbing in the current, sailing past the arched entry under the berg. At the last moment the float caught on the ice, hovered, then the current sucked it inside and sent it down the ice tunnel leading to the lake on the far side.

'It went in!' Grayson shouted.

The throttle was wide open, the launch was tearing down, the dangerous, ice-strewn channel as Beaumont swung the wheel, avoided a large floe by inches, straightened up. More and more ice was appearing, small floes bobbing in the moonlight, large growlers drifting with the column of icebergs to port. Speed in such waters was excessively dangerous - and speed was vital. The ghost berg still loomed to their right, stretched away beyond them to the south, went on for ever it seemed as Beaumont kept the throttle wide open and wrestled with the wheel.

A single light glowed at the Elroy's distant stern, the only light showing aboard the icebreaker since Schmidt had ordered all lights turned out, the light kept on to guide the launch back to the ship. The greyish spume of her vanishing wake showed to their left, the bitter air whipped at their faces, the launch zig-zagged wildly to avoid more floes. And behind them the Revolution came on, was now moving alongside the ghost berg - because everyone had underestimated its speed.

That gate's closing,' Langer said in Beaumont's ear. In the distance beyond the Elroy's silhouette the view was changing. It looked as though Schmidt was going to be too late. The two great bergs which flanked the exit from the channel were moving closer together, caught in a crosscurrent. By the time Schmidt reached them there would be no way out. As Langer had said, the gate was closing.

Beaumont swerved to avoid a large growler, an ice floe large enough to smash in the gunwale if they struck it, then he was swerving in the opposite direction to avoid a second one, using the launch like a powerboat. It was only a matter of time before they hit one of them, but the stern light of the Elroy was a little larger, was coming closer. When he glanced to starboard again he was surprised: they had moved past the end of the ghost berg, were speeding well beyond it.

'More power!' Papanin fumed. 'Overtake her!'

Tuchevsky said nothing. He was no longer in command of his own ship. Beyond the starboard window the huge iceberg reared up, towered over them, and for the first time Tuchevsky noticed the arched openings at her waterline.

Behind the ice cliff the Carley float had left the tunnel, had emerged into the dark lake beyond, was drifting round the edge, bumping up against the ice, covered with frost which had descended on it inside the tunnel. It caught a spur of ice and hovered. Above it the eroded ice tower sheered up, the tower which held up the overhang.

Close to exhaustion, Beaumont missed the floe, but the floe didn't miss the launch. The prow struck the ice spar floating underwater, leapt into the air, and the launch soared over it. As they went up Beaumont's heart stopped - the screw was going to catch the ice, would be buckled, maybe even torn out of the craft. The launch continued its arc, the spar cracked under the pressure, went down as the screw flew over it intact and thrashed back into the sea. Behind the ice cliff the floating mine detonated.

The ice tower holding up the overhang began to collapse. The honeycombed pillar collapsed slowly, disintegrating chunk by chunk, dropping great masses of ice into the lake below, then it sagged, settled, broke. And when it broke the enormous weight of ice above it came down, falling three hundred feet, shattering into thousands of pieces at the edge of the lake, sending an avalanche of ice over the brink. The tower was gone, the vast overhang above was gone, all support which had helped to hold up the ice cliff was gone. The ice cliff itself started to come down and one of nature's most terrifying spectacles unfolded.

The cliff fell inwards - away from the Revolution - and the sight from the bridge of the Russian ship stunned the men aboard. The entire cliff, which a moment earlier had climbed sheer above them, fell backwards. For a moment Papanin could hardly believe his eyes, then he saw the captain's petrified expression. 'It's a ghost berg . ..' The continuing roar of its crash was still resounding when Tuchevsky took a grip on himself, turning on the tannoy system which would relay his message throughout the ship, 'There is no cause for alarm ... no cause for alarm . . .'

He was wrong, and Beaumont who knew Iceberg Alley as well as any man alive could have told him how terribly wrong he was. The tremendous spectacle the Russian had witnessed was a mere prelude to what was coming.

'The damned thing fell the wrong way!' Grayson shouted. 'It fell backwards . . .'

'Hang on!' Beaumont yelled.

The water was turbulent now, swelling with waves the iceberg had caused as it vibrated at the waterline. This didn't worry Beaumont: it was the tidal wave which haunted him as he desperately tried to coax more speed out of the roaring engine, the tidal wave which would come sweeping up behind them when the major catastrophe broke. If they didn't reach the ship in time they'd be overwhelmed.

The Revolution was still on course, moving past the wrecked berg, when the giant lost its equilibrium. The cliff which had reared up at one end of the berg was now gone, spread out over a vast area, so the immense platform which was left - half a mile long - began to turn turtle. The cliff which had stood above its surface had seemed vast, but this was nothing compared with the bulk which lurked beneath its surface, and this submerged cliff now came up out of the sea like some primeval upheaval when the very surface of the earth is transformed, dripping huge cascades of water which poured off it like a Niagara.

The sea itself began to boil, to churn as it felt what was coming up from the depths. Great dripping cliffs of ice began to tower, mounting high above the bridge of the Revolution where Papanin and Tuchevsky stared in horror. The Niagara of sea flooded down on the vessel. Chunks of ice larger than houses crashed down on the hull, tore away rails, left them like jagged rows of teeth. And still the berg continued to revolve, tens of millions of tons of ice on the move, mounting up as the berg continued turning its mass through a hundred and eighty degrees.

'God! It's like the earth coming up from the sea bottom!'

Grayson was staggered by the sight as the launch sped closer to the Elroy and Beaumont glanced back, glanced back only once and then concentrated his whole mind on reaching the Elroy. The tidal wave would be coming any second now. They had to reach the ship in time. Behind them the ghost berg overturned.

It swivelled, loomed above the Revolution, then millions of tons of ice descended, came down like the fall of an Alp. On the bridge of the Russian ship they saw it as an enormous shadow, a revolving shadow. Papanin was still on the bridge when the shadow struck, dropping a solid ice wall on top of the radar dome. The dome deflated, disappeared, the bridge was levelled to the deck, the deck was submerged. The bows went down, straight down, and the stern tilted up as though turning over an invisible fulcrum.

The stern went on climbing at an acute angle until it was vertical with the screws still spinning like a helicopter's rotors. Two-thirds of the ship had vanished, buried under the falling cliff, but the stern paused with the screws turning more slowly as the power died. Grayson saw it hovering, like a ship about to plunge to the bottom, although the rest of the ship had already gone. Then another arm of the berg came down on it, hammered it down with one gigantic blow which drove it nine thousand feet to the bed of the Arctic. Then the wave came.

'Jump!' Beaumont shouted.

The launch had passed the Elroy's stern, throttled back, had drawn amidships and bumped the hull as Beaumont tried to keep pace with the slow-moving vessel. Schmidt had seen them coming a long way off, had reduced speed even before the destruction of the Revolution. Men peered over the rails above them, pointing to rope ladders slung over the ship's side. 'Jump!' Beaumont shouted again.

Langer grasped a dangling ladder, started climbing it while Grayson grabbed another swaying rope. Beaumont waited by the wheel, keeping the launch alongside the moving hull, and beyond the Elroy's stern the ocean was wild, turned in seconds from a milk-calm sea into a raging tumult. A fresh ladder thrown with skill by DaSilva slapped against Beaumont's chest. He let go of the wheel, grasped the ladder, felt the launch moving away under him, rammed his boots into swaying rungs. Above him by the rail DaSilva was screaming at him to hurry.

The tidal wave which was coming, about to pass the stern, was already twenty feet high and climbing every second. And it was composed not only of water - on its passage down the channel it had gathered up a collection of huge ice floes, floes which toppled at its crest, great rams of ice which could crush a man with one glancing blow. Langer was over the rail, followed by Grayson, when DaSilva shouted his last warning, knowing it was too late to do anything for the doomed man hanging from the side.

Halfway up the ladder Beaumont looked towards the stern, saw a foaming wall of green climbing above his head, saw the nose of a huge growler projecting through the froth. He was going to be mashed to a pulp, swept off the hull. The tidal wave hoisted the stern, lifted it high with an awful violence, and the bows went down. Beaumont clenched his gloved fingers round the rope, buried his elbows hard into his sides, squeezed his head between his forearms as he felt the stern going up like a lift.

An inundation of freezing water fell on him, a great weight pressing down on his shoulders, trying to rip him loose from the ladder. There was a roaring in his ears and then something slammed with immense force against the hull beside him. He shuddered with the impact, felt ice splinters shower against his face like a thousand tiny knives. The force of the water swept the ladder sideways, whipped him towards the bows where the launch had just been hurled and broken open.

Beaumont was frozen, the breath he held in his lungs bursting, petrified by the floe which had smashed so close to him, sodden with sea, scraped and swung up almost to the rail by the sway of the rope ladder. The roaring in his ears increased, he felt his strength going, his grip on the ladder weakening as the sea tugged and tore at him. Then the bows climbed and the ladder was swinging back in the other direction, banging his body brutally against the hull. Only extreme fear, a spark of self-survival, kept him conscious, aware that his numbed hands were still locked round the ladder. Then the sea dropped away and he felt himself falling, turning over and over. It's your mind, you're still on the bloody ladder . . .

A long way off an American voice was shouting, shouting again and again. 'Hold on! We're hauling you up! Hold on!' Then he hit something very hard and hands were pawing him, fiddling with his hands, trying to unlock the fingers still clamped round the rope. He opened his eyes and saw a broken mast silhouetted against a moonlit sky, a mast whipping backwards and forwards. Something fell from it, came whirling down towards Beaumont's face and hit the deck with a horrible thud only two yards away. The lookout had fallen. Beaumont thought he was imagining things but there was a dead American seaman on the deck two yards away, his skull crushed in.

He was still unable to move as hands hauled his bruised and blood-stained body upright and started carrying him towards a staircase. He was muttering something as they carried him, and DaSilva had to ask him to repeat it before he understood. 'Grayson and Langer are safe,' the mate told him. 'We're OK. We're on our way home.' It was not a sentiment shared by Commander Alfred Schmidt at this moment who was asking for full power at all costs. The icebreaker was heading for almost certain destruction.

Everywhere the icebergs were coming together, caught in the cross-currents, closing in on the Elroy as her engines beat faster. But it was the two huge bergs dead ahead that Schmidt was watching with great anxiety. The silhouettes of the bergs rose to port-and starboard, castles of ice in the moonlight, castles converging on each other across the perilously narrow channel the Elroy was steaming down. Another five minutes and they would know whether they had made it. Another five minutes and they would be through the gate or crushed between the closing bergs.

'Full power ...'

DaSilva came on to the bridge as the commander repeated the order, something which he had never done before, something to drive home to the chief engineer below that this was a terrible emergency. In front of DaSilva Schmidt's head was constantly swivelling on his neck as though supported by ball-bearings. Port, ahead, starboard. The view was always the same - icebergs, moving icebergs, and every time Schmidt looked they seemed to have moved closer. The bows thrust forward, brushing aside huge floes, pointing towards the ever-narrowing gate.

The repetition of the same order had communicated its message to the engine-room, and without being told the men below guessed what was happening. The chief engineer stared at his bank of gauges but his mind was outside the ship, imagining cruel jaws of ice coming towards him. He sensed the tremendous impact when ice met steel, saw the hull coming in on him, first a spur of ice, followed instantly by an inundation of water. The engine-room crew watched him and he tried to maintain a bored look. They would never get out in time, of course. The engine-room was the ship's graveyard. As he had done on other occasions, he swore to himself that if he got out of this one he would never go to sea again.

The icebergs were on either quarter of the bows, so close it was like entering a deep cutting, like proceeding inside the Corinth Canal with rock walls towering on either side - but these were walls of ice, moving walls. Schmidt stared in front of him, refusing to look sideways any more, knowing that DaSilva, the helmsman and the officer of the watch were glancing at him in terror. Then he took out his handkerchief, mopped his forehead, and spoke in a casual voice. 'Getting a bit warm in here.5 From the bridge window he could have thrown out a bottle and hit the iceberg on the port quarter. And no moonlight shone on the fore-deck which was dark with the shadows of the icebergs. DaSilva, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, could have screamed with the tension, but Schmidt's erect figure, his recent remark, his refusal to look to port or starboard, kept him under control. Like the captain, the other men on the bridge stared stonily ahead.

'Take a look through the rear window, Mr DaSilva.' Schmidt suggested.

'We're through! We're through the gate!'

'Maintain your present course.'

Ahead there was a pale cold light in the distant sky, the sun returning to the Arctic, the sun whose palest glimmer had been blotted out by a heavy cloud bank for days. DaSilva looked back through the rear window. The gateway between the bergs was so narrow that even a launch could no longer have passed through. The silhouettes merged and across the ocean rang the appalling crack of collision, a terrible rumbling crack followed by a roar as the bergs ground up against each other. Then an echoing boom which went right out across the Arctic. DaSilva jumped when he heard Schmidt speaking.

'Clear water ahead, Mr DaSilva. We're going home.'

On Wednesday, 7 March, Beaumont went ashore at Quebec, limping as he moved down the gangway with the aid of a stick, and his face was so covered with bandages that only the eyes showed, eyes which were bleak and remote. Schmidt, Grayson and Langer leaned out of a bridge window to watch him go, but he didn't look back as he hobbled on to the dockside. Seamen lined the rails in silence, ready to wave, but he didn't even glance in their direction.

It was cold on that March day long ago, and ice drifted in the St Lawrence while snow glistened on the rooftops of the Chateau Frontenac as the sun came out. Lemuel Dawes and Adams were waiting for him, hurried forward, and then hesitated as the tall, heavily-built Englishman stared at them from between his mask of bandages. Beaumont shook hands formally and quickly. 'I have to get away,' he growled. 'Grayson can give you any details you need — and I've written you a report.'

He took the core tube out of his parka and gave it to Dawes. 'What you want is inside this core - take the top bit of rock out with a knife and you'll find it.' He paused as Dawes took the core. 'I hope it was worth it - a lot of men died.'

He hobbled away before Dawes could reply, hobbled past the official car and got into a taxi. 'Airport,' he told the driver. He was silent for most of the drive, staring out of the window without taking in anything he was passing. As they came close to the airport he asked a question. 'Any idea when the next flight for Miami takes off?'

The ice island, Target-5, continued its drift south into Iceberg Alley - into destruction. On 7 March, the day Beaumont went ashore at Quebec, a C130 transport landed safely on the airstrip, stopping a few yards from the burnt-out wreck of its predecessor. It was in no danger of repeating the earlier aircraft's suicidal performance because the rocks had disappeared off the airstrip.

The men who came out of this plane hurried to take on board the crated equipment - nervous about the island's nearness to the sea and worried because the fog was closing in again. When they found Matthew Conway's body under the wrecked Sno-Cat they assumed he had driven off the ramp in the fog; they hurried to put the body aboard the plane and later it was flown to Cincinnati for burial. What did puzzle these anxious men was that they could find no trace of Rickard, the wireless operator, or Sondeborg, the gravity specialist. Their disappearance became a mystery.

In May the American President visited Moscow and among the many agreements concluded was one which promised there would be no more close-shadowing - which might result in collision - of American vessels by Soviet ships and vice versa. No one outside government circles wondered why this particular moment was chosen to make this pact when near-collisions between American and Soviet vessels spying on each other - although rarely reported in the press -,had been commonplace for years.

Also in May, Target-5, which had earlier broken into four pieces, further fragmented into eight separate slabs between Greenland and Iceland, and American planes from Keflavik kept a special watch on the slab supporting the huts. Then, while it was hidden from them by dense mist, they lost it for two months.

In July, a Danish liner cruising off Frederikshaab on the west coast of Greenland, reported sighting an ice floe which carried buildings. Police boats were sent out from port and passengers on board the liner watched from the rails as the police entered the still-intact huts. It was an Inspector Gustaffson who went inside the research hut and examined it thoroughly. When he lifted the floorboards covering the hole where the core drill had once been lowered a four-month-old mystery was solved.

Jeff Rickard and Harvey Sondeborg were lying frozen on the lower platform of floorboards, the platform which covered the hole going down into the Arctic. An autopsy was carried out and it was concluded that Rickard had probably been murdered by Sondeborg, who was still clutching an ice pick when the bodies were found. Gustaffson then suggested - he had no proof- that Sondeborg had killed his fellow-American and had tried to hide the body inside the hole.

In Gustaffson's opinion Sondeborg had intended dropping the corpse below the second platform into the Arctic, but he slipped and fell himself, dying beside his victim from injuries received during his fall. In Washington Gustaffson's report was disbelieved and filed. Probably no one will ever know positively how these two men died.

It was in July that a shipping correspondent in London made a routine inquiry at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. Looking for copy for a projected article on modern ships, he asked for information as to the present whereabouts of the Revolution, nursing a faint hope that one day he might be shown over this showpiece vessel. The Soviet official he met consulted a more senior official, then told him that the Revolution had returned to a Black Sea port for an extensive refit. Apparently she had collided with an iceberg while undertaking research in Arctic waters.

And it was in July 1972 that the Fischer-Spassky world chess contest opened at Reykjavik in Iceland, the contest a certain Igor Papanin was to have attended, officially as one of Spassky's chess advisers, unofficially as chief of security for the duration of the contest. Another man, less qualified in both fields, quietly took his place.