Alistair MacLean: Bear Island

"What!"

"Yes, indeed."

"The Morning Rose?"

"None other. That is to say, I hope. But later. Those stacks were caused by erosion which in turn were caused by tidal streams, storm waves, and frost-island used to be much bigger than it is now, bits of it are falling into the sea all the time. This same erosion also caused caves to form in the cliffs. But it formed something else-I knew nothing about it until this afternoon-which I think must be unique in the world. Two or three hundred yards in from the southern tip of this bay, a promontory called Kapp Kolthoff, is a tiny horseshoe-shaped harbour-I saw it through the binoculars this morning."

"You did?"

"I was out for a walk. At the inner end of this harbour there is an opening, not just any opening, but a tunnel that goes clear through to the other side of Kapp Kolthoff. It must be at least two hundred yards in length. It's called Perleporten. You have to have a large-scale map of Bear Island to find it. I got my hands on a large-scale map this afternoon."

"That length? Straight through? It must be manmade."

"Who the hell would spend a fortune tunnelling through two hundred yards of rock from A to B, when you can sail from A to B in five minutes.

I mean in Bear Island?"

"It's not very likely," Conrad said. "And you think Heissman and his friends may have been here?"

I don't know where else they could have been. I looked every place I could look this morning in the Sor-Hamna and in this bay. Nothing."

Conrad said nothing, which was one of the things I liked about a man who I was beginning to like very much. He could have asked a dozen questions to which there were as yet no answers but because he knew there were none he refrained from asking them. The Evinrude kept purring along with reassuring steadiness and in about ten minutes I could see the outline of the cliffs on the south of the Evjebukta looming up. To the left, the tip of Kapp Kolthoff was clearly to be seen. I imagined I could see white breakers beyond.

"There can't possibly be anyone to see us," I said, "and we don't need our night sight any more. I know there are no islands in the vicinity. Headlamps would be handy-"

Conrad moved up into the bows and switched on two of our powerful torches. Within two minutes I could see the sheer of dripping black cliffs less than a hundred yards ahead. I turned to starboard and paralleled the cliffs to the northwest. One minute later we had it-the eastward facing entrance to a tiny circular inlet. I throttled the motor right back and moved gingerly inside and almost at once we had it-a small semicircular opening at the base of the south cliff. It seemed impossibly small. We drifted towards it at less than one knot. Conrad looked back over his shoulder.

"I'm claustrophobic."

"Me, too."

If we get stuck?"

"The sixteen-footer is bigger than this one."

"If it was here. Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound."

I crossed my mental fingers that Conrad would have cause to remember those words and eased the boat into the tunnel. It was bigger than it looked but not all that bigger. The waves and waters of countless aeons had worn the rock walls as smooth as alabaster. Although it held a remarkably true direction almost due south it was clear, because of the varying widths and the varying heights of the tunnel roof, that the band of man had never been near the Perleporten; then, suddenly, when Conrad called out and pointed ahead and to the right, that wasn't so clear any more. The opening in the wall, no more, really, than an indentation hardly distinguishable from one or two already passed, was, at its deepest, no more than six feel?, but it was bounded by an odd Hat shelf that varied from two to five feel? in width. It looked as if it had been manmade but, then, there were so many curiously shaped rock formations in those parts that it might just possibly have resulted from natural causes. But there was one thing about that place that absolutely was in no way due to natural causes: a pile of grey-painted metal bars, neatly stacked in crisscross symmetry.

Neither of us spoke. Conrad switched on the other two torches, pivoted their heads until they were facing upwards and placed them all on the shelf, flooding the tiny area with light. Not without some difficulty we scrambled on to the shelf and looped the painter round one of the bars. Still without speaking I took the boat book and probed for bottom: it was less than five feel? below the surface and a very odd kind of rock it felt, too. I guddled around some more, left the hook strike something at once hard and yielding and hauled it up. It was a half-inch chain, corroded in places, but still sound. I hauled some more and the end of another rectangular bar, identical in size to those on the shelf and secured to the chain by an eye bolt, came into sight. It was badly discoloured. I lowered chain and bar back to the bottom.

Still in this uncanny silence I took a knife from my pocket and tested the surface of one of the bars. The metal, almost certainly lead, was soft and yielding, but it was no more than a covering skin, there was something harder beneath. I dug the knife blade in hard and scraped away an inch of the lead. Something yellow glittered in the lamplight.

"Well, now," Conrad said. "Jackpot, I believe, is the technical term."

"Something like that."

"And look at this." Conrad reached behind the pile of bars and brought up a can of paint. It was labelled Instant grey.

It seems to be very good stuff," I said. I touched one of the bars. "Quite dry. And, you must admit, quite clever. You saw off. the eye bolt, paint the whole lot over and what do you have?"

"A ballast bar identical in size and colour to the ballast bars in the mock-up sub."

"Ten out of ten," I said. I hefted one of the bars. "Just right for easy handling. A forty-pound ingot."

"How do you know?"

"It's my Treasury training. Current value-say thirty thousand dollars. How many bars in that pile, would you say?"

"A hundred. More."

"And that's just for starters. Bulk is almost certainly still under water. Paint brushes there?"

"Yes." Conrad reached behind the pile but I checked him.

"Please not," I said. "Think of all those lovely fingerprints."

Conrad said slowly: "My mind's just engaged gear again." He looked at the pile and said incredulously: "Three million dollars?"

"Give or take a few percent."

I think we'd better leave," Conrad said. "I'm coming all over avaricious."

We left. As we emerged into the little circular bay we both looked back at the dark and menacing little tunnel. Conrad said: "Who discovered this?"

I have no idea."

"Perleporten. What does that mean?"

"The Gates of Pearl."

"They came pretty close at that."

"It wasn't a bad try." The journey back was a great deal more unpleasant than the outward one had been, the seas were against us, the icy wind and the equally icy snow were in our faces and because of that same snow the visibility was drastically reduced. But we made it inside an hour. Almost literally frozen stiff but at the same time contradictorily shaking with the cold, we tied the boat up. Conrad clambered up on to the jetty. I passed him the black box, cut about thirty feel? off. the boat's anchor rope and followed. I built a rope cradle round the box, fumbled with a pair of catches and opened a hinged cover section which comprised a third of the top plate and two-thirds of a side plate. In the near total darkness switches and dials were less than half-seen blurs but I didn't need light to operate this instrument which was a basically very simple affair anyway. I pulled out a manually operated telescopic aerial to its fullest extent and turned two switches. A dim green light glowed and a faint hum, that couldn't have been heard a yard away, came from the box. I always think it's so satisfactory when those little toys work," Conrad said. "But won't the snow gum up the works?"