spluttered and streamed acrid white smoke, then burst into the dazzling
crimson fire that denotes distress at sea. She stood like a tiny statue
of liberty, holding the flare aloft in one hand and peering with
streaming eyes into the sullen fog-banks.
Again the animal bellow of the siren boomed through the milky, frosted
air; it was so close that it shook Samantha's body the way the wind
moves the wheat on the hillside, then it went on to collide solidly with
the cliff of ice that hung above her.
The working of sea and wind, and the natural erosion of chancing
temperatures had set tremendous forces at work within the glittering
body of the berg. Those forces had found a weak point, a vertical fault
line, that ran like an axe-stroke from the flattened tableland of the
summit, five hundred feet down to the moulded bottom of the berg far
below the surface.
The booming sound waves of Warlock's horn found a sympathetic resonance
with the body of the mountain that set the ice on each side of the fault
vibrating in different frequencies.
Then the fault sheared, with a brittle cracking explosion of glass
bursting under pressure, and the fault opened. One hundred million tons
of ice began to move as it broke away from the mother berg. The block
of ice that the berg calved was in itself a mountain, a slab of solid
ice twice the size of Saint Paul's cathedral - and as it swung out and
twisted free, new pressures and forces came into play within it, finding
smaller faults and flaws so that ice burst within ice and tore itself
apart, as though dynamited with tons of high explosive.
The air itself was filled with hurtling ice, some pieces the size of a
locomotive and others as and as sharp and as deadly as steel swords; and
below this plunging toppling mass, the tiny yellow plastic raft bobbed
helplessly.
There/ called Nick. On the starboard beam. The phosphorus distress
flare lit the fog-banks internally with a fiery cherry red and threw
grotesque patterns of light against the belly of lurking cloud. David
Allen blew one last triumphant blast on the siren.
New heading 5 ,1, Nick told the helmsman and Warlock came around
handily, and almost instantly burst from the enveloping bank of fog into
another -arena of open air.
Half a mile away, the life-raft bobbed like a fat yellow toad beneath a
glassy green wall of ice. The top of the iceberg was lost in the fog
high above, and the tiny human figure that stood erect on the raft and
held aloft the brilliant crunson flue was an insignificant speck in this
vast wilderness of fog and sea and ice. .
Prepare to pick up survivors, David/ said Nick, and the mate hurried
away while Nick moved to the wing of the bridge from where he could
watch the rescue.
Suddenly Nick stopped and lifted his head in bewilderment. For a moment
he thought it was gunfire, then the explosive crackling of sound changed
to a rending shriek as of the tearing of living fibre when a giant
redwood tree is falling to the axes. The volume of sound mounted into a
rumbling roar, the unmistakeable roar of a mountain in avalanche.
