Witi Ihimaera - The Thrill of Falling - Stories

Had he awoken the monster? Was that when the vendetta between them both had begun?

Drake looked at Queequeeg, his mouth dry. ‘You saw Moby Dick?’

Queequeeg nodded. ‘As God is my witness, aye Sir, I saw the monster. He came up right beneath me. Breaching the surface, he was ready to snatch me out of the air and roll me back down with him to my death in the briny sea below.’

‘How did you know it was him?’ Drake asked.

‘By the single eye and the battering ram of the bastard’s icy head,’ Queequeeg swore. ‘And also by the gigantic profile, the hump of the beast which rose ever upward, endeavouring to buck me into the air. Then, in sounding, he showed me his peculiar yellow underbelly and the cluster of harpoons embedded in his flukes. Oh, it was him all right.’

On Crozier Dalrymple’s death, Drake took over the squadron. His age hadn’t told against him, or his lack of experience. Kuia, CEO of the consortium, saw in him an utter fearlessness and an ability to lead men. Even more telling, pilots followed him and trusted in him.

Drake, for his part, couldn’t wait for his second meeting with the rogue berg. He studied the reports of other pilots who had tried to capture Moby Dick. Some had successfully harpooned the berg, but the cables had been too short or they’d had to wheel away from his implacable rage. Even when he was harpooned and in tow, the death roll could wrap towing tugs and mini-subs in flailing hawser lines and down they would go with him.

Drake’s obsession with Moby Dick grew. How could the berg appear and disappear at will? Was it because of that freak buoyancy mass, those chambers which, sometimes filled with air and sometimes with water, enabled the entire berg to tilt, flick at the sky, plunge fathoms deep and stay there? From where, then, did the air come to allow Moby Dick to surface again? And how could he appear in places where he should never have been? How could he get there if he hadn’t swum against the tide?

The fact was that anything, even the impossible, could happen in a world where climate change played havoc with the sea. Traditional ocean movements could no longer be counted upon. The Antarctic Ocean had turned into a place driven by solar bursts one moment and icy weather fronts the next. In the early days, confused pods of whales had trapped themselves, circling around and around within the clashing tides. Later, entire fleets of ships found themselves unable to break free of immense tsunami, rushes of waves that drove them into huge whirlpools until they sank with the other detritus of a decaying world.

It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that an iceberg could float, at the whim of sun and wind, along corridors of clashing currents and even against the prevailing tides.

And it was only a matter of time before Drake encountered Moby Dick again.

The sun had been a cartwheel in the sky and the sea was black. But the water was sending frost-smoke across the surface and, as the Pequod flew deeper into the mass, all vision was lost.

‘Captain?’ young Anders Yates asked.

‘We can’t turn back,’ said Drake. Nobody returned to the base empty-handed. Somewhere out there, Rangi had sighted bergs. Somewhere …

Vicious hail began to fall, rapping at the windscreen of the chopper. It was in the middle of the hailstorm that Moby Dick chose his moment to attack.

If Drake hadn’t been alert he would not have seen the dark mass lurking below the surface of the sea. Only good fortune made him look down and there — there! — was that huge baleful eye staring back at him.

Moby Dick leapt into the sky.

‘Hold tight!’ Drake cried to Anders Yates as he threw the chopper away from the ascending berg. Sweat beaded his brow as Moby Dick showed an underbelly ghastly with embedded ropes and hawsers, evidence of earlier encounters. ‘Take the shot!’

The harpoon zinged through the air, but somehow, while the chopper bucked, Anders Yates was caught in the cable and yanked out of his seat. ‘Oh Captain, my captain!’ he screamed.

All Drake could do was to watch, helpless, as the young boy disappeared into the hail.

In that same moment, a contrary current created a perilous downdraught. The Pequod slid against one of Moby Dick’s icy sides and would have plunged into the sea had not the chopper, with a sudden loud explosion of metal and glass, lodged on a jutting fluke, which punctured it — and that was when Drake’s shoulder had been scored. Screaming with shock and fear, he managed to lever the helicopter off the fin before Moby Dick could take him in the death roll. He lifted the chopper into a shuddering climb and away.

Next time, e hoa.

Liftoff at 0100; two hours away.

Rather than go back to his room, Drake decided to take the elevator to the water processing operations centre on the skyline. No sooner had he pressed the button than the old lift began to shake, rattle and roll.

‘Welcome to Lubjanka by the Sea,’ he muttered to himself as he held on for dear life. This was more like some deteriorating base on the Gulag Peninsula than a supposedly high-tech operation in New Zealand.

Kuia, otherwise known as Boss Lady, was in the main operations room, wearing dark glasses and looking down at the fiord, now crowded with icebergs, glowing in the southern light. ‘Kia ora, Francis,’ she said, greeting him by his real name.

Whenever Drake was with Kuia, he felt an incredible sense of peace. ‘Kia ora,’ he returned. Kuia was his substitute Huppapuppa — maybe his Huppamama.

‘You be careful out there today,’ she warned. ‘The weather looks as if it’s closing in.’ Above, the sky was heavy and grey with boiling clouds; within the fiord, everything was still.

For a while, Drake and Kuia watched in silence as, below, the crews of the tugs and mini-subs — the consortium’s honcho group of young thrill-seeking wave surfers, hang gliders, bungy jumpers and kamikaze scuba divers — continued disengaging the last tow lines of kites and sails from the bergs. Everybody at the base affectionately called them the Yahoos, this being their favourite word. Danger was their desire, as they winged their ways over the bergs checking out the cables, skimmed around them like butterflies to ensure trim, or even dived beneath them to secure them even further from rolling.

‘The guys are complaining about the helicopters,’ Drake said.

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Kuia sighed. ‘I saw Queequeeg almost crash on the helipad. Okay, I’ll put in another requisition order, but it’s hard enough getting black market fuel these days to keep you all flying, let alone purchase modern air support.’

She turned to Ralph, the chief technician. ‘Looks like the Yahoos have finished their job.’

‘On with the show?’ asked Ralph.

‘Yes.’ Kuia nodded.

‘Goody,’ said Ralph as he turned to the comms system: ‘Clear the processing area.’ The Yahoos scattered like flies.

Ralph started to do a dance around the mainframe, whizzing from one control panel to the next. Immediately, the whole operations centre began to jiggle and jump. ‘Better hold on to something,’ Kuia said. ‘And here, you might need this.’ She gave Drake a sun visor.

‘Come on, baby,’ Ralph said to the computer. ‘Give me more power to the grid.’

Drake heard the huge, protesting whine of turbines as the platforms on which the icebergs were resting ascended from the waters of the fiord. Each platform was lined with siphons leading to reservoirs deep within the surrounding hills.

Next moment huge solar reflectors, designed to concentrate every beam of available light like a row of silver plates, slid up from all sides of the fiord. Ralph manoeuvred them so that their power was focused onto the icebergs at rest. ‘I need more, baby,’ he yelled to his turbines.