Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘The gist is accurate.’ Even to myself the repetition of the words sounded mechanical and I had to make a conscious effort not to shiver as an ice-shod centipede started up a fandango between my shoulder-blades.

‘Well, we can call for help till we’re blue in the face, this transmitter here can no longer reach as far as the galley.’ For once, almost unbelievably, Smithy’s face was registering an emotion other than amusement. His face tight with anger, he produced a screwdriver from his pocket and turned to the big steel-blue receiver-transmitter on the inner bulkhead.

‘Do you always carry a screwdriver about with you?’ The sheer banality of the question made it apposite in the circumstances.

‘Only when I call up the radio station at Tunheim in north-east Bear Island and get no reply. And that’s no ordinary radio station, it’s an official Norwegian Government base.’ Smithy set to work on the face-plate screws. ‘I’ve already had this damned thing off about an hour ago. You’ll see in a jiffy why I put it back on again.’

While I was waiting for this jiffy to pass I recalled our conversation on the bridge in the very early hours of the morning, the time he’d referred to the radio and the relative closeness – and, by inference, the availability – of the NATO Atlantic forces. It had been immediately afterwards that I’d looked through the starboard screen door and seen the sharp fresh footprints in the snow, footprints, I’d been immediately certain, that had been made by an eavesdropper, a preposterous idea I’d almost as quickly put out of my mind when I’d appreciated that there had been only one set of footprints there, those which I made myself. For some now inexplicable reason it had never occurred to me that any person clever enough to have been responsible for the series of undetected crimes that had taken place aboard the Morning Rose would have been far too clever to have overlooked the blinding obviousness of the advantage that lay in using footsteps already there. The footsteps had, indeed, been newly made, our ubiquitous friend had been abroad again.

Smithy removed the last of the screws and, not without some effort, removed the face-plate. I looked at the revealed interior for about ten seconds, then said: ‘I see now why you put the face-plate back on. The only thing that puzzles me is that that cabinet looks a bit small for a man to get inside it with a fourteen pound sledgehammer.’

‘Looks just like it, doesn’t it?’ The tangled mess of wreckage inside was, literally, indescribable. The vandal who had been at work had seen to it that, irrespective of how vast a range of spares were carried, the receiver-transmitter could never be made operable again. ‘You’ve seen enough?’

‘I think so.’ He started to replace the cover and I said: ‘You’ve radios in the lifeboats?’

‘Yes. Hand-cranked. They’ll reach farther than the galley but a megaphone would be about as good.’

‘You’ll have to report this to the captain, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then it’s heigh-ho for Hammerfest?’

‘Twenty-four hours from now and he can heigh-ho for Tahiti as far as I’m concerned.’ Smithy tightened the last screw. ‘That’s when I’m going to tell him. Twenty-four hours from now. Maybe twenty-six.’

‘Your outside limit for dropping anchor in Sor-hamna?’

‘Tying up. Yes.’

‘You’re a very deceitful man, Smithy.’

‘It’s the company I keep. And the life I lead.’

‘You’re not to blame yourself, Smithy,’ I said kindly. ‘We live in vexed and troubled times.’

When the Norwegian compilers of the report on Bear Island had spoken of it as possessing perhaps the most inhospitably bleak coastline in the world, they had been speaking with the measured understatement of true professional geographers. As we approached it in the first light of dawn – which in those latitudes, at that time of year, and under grey and lowering skies which were not only full of snow but getting rid of it as fast as they could, was as near mid forenoon as made no difference – it presented the most awesome, awe-inspiring and, in the true sense of the word, awful spectacle of nature it had ever been my misfortune to behold. A frightening desolation, it was a weird combination of the wickedly repellent and unwillingly fascinating, an evil and dreadful and sinister place, a place full of the terrifying intimation of mortality, the culmination of all the terrors for our long-lost Nordic ancestors, for whom hell was the land of eternal cold and for whom this would be the eternally frozen purgatory to be visited only in their dying nightmares.

Bear Island was black. That was the shocking, the almost frightful thing about it. Bear Island was black, black as a widow’s weeds. Here in the regions of year-long snow and ice, where, in winter, even the waters of the Barents Sea ran a milky white, to find this ebony mass towering 1500 vertical feet up into the grey overcast evoked the same feeling of total disbelief, the same numbing impact, although here magnified a hundredfold, as does the first glimpse of the black cliff of the north face of the Eiger rearing up its appalling grandeur among the snows of the Bernese Oberland: this benumbment of the senses stemmed from a dichotomous struggle to accept the evidence before the eyes, for while reason said that it had to be so, that primeval part of the mind that existed long before man knew what reason was just flatly refused to accept it.

We were just south-west of the most southerly tip of Bear Island, steaming due east through the calmest seas that we had encountered since leaving Wick, but even that term was only relative, it was still necessary to hang on to something if one wished to maintain the perpendicular. Overall, the weather hadn’t changed any for the better, the comparative moderating of the seas was due entirely to the fact that the wind blew now directly from the north and we were in the lee of whatever little shelter was afforded by those giant cliffs. We were making this particular approach to our destination at Otto’s request for he was understandably anxious to build up a library of background shots which, so far, was completely non-existent, and those bleak precipices would have made a cameraman’s or director’s dream: but Otto’s luck was running true to form, those driving gusts of snow, which would in any event have driven straight into the camera lens and completely obscured it, more often than not obscured the cliffs themselves.

Due north lay the highest cliffs of the island, the polomite battlements of the Hambergfjell dropping like a stone into the spume-topped waves that lashed its base, with, standing out to sea, an imposing rock needle thrusting up at least 250 feet: to the north-east, and less than a mile distant, stood the equally magnificent Bird Fell cliffs with, clustered at their foot, an incredible series of high stacks, pinnacles and arches that could only have been the handiwork of some Herculean sculptor, at once both blind and mad.

All this we – about ten others and myself – could see purely by courtesy of the fact that we were on the bridge which had its for’ard screen windows equipped with a high-speed Kent clear-view screen directly in front of the helmsman – which at this particular moment was Smithy – while on either side were two very large windscreen-wipers which coped rather less effectively with the gusting snow.

I was standing with Conrad, Lonnie and Mary Stuart in front of the port wiper. Conrad, who was by no means as dashing in real life as he was on the screen, appeared to have struck up some kind of diffident friendship with Mary, which, I reflected, was as well for her social life as she’d barely spoken to me since the morning of the previous day, which might have been interpreted as being a bit graceless of her considering I’d incurred a large variety of aches and cramps in preventing her from falling to the floor during most of the preceding night. She hadn’t exactly avoided me in the past twenty-four hours but neither had she sought me out, maybe she had certain things on her mind, such as her conscience and her unforgiveable treatment of me: nor had I exactly sought her out for I, too, had a couple of things on my mind, the first of which was herself.