Revelation

3 Berg

The rungs were covered with smooth, hard ice and the spikes on Findhorn's boots meant that he had to raise his boot away from each rung before placing it on the one below.

Below about twenty feet the blizzard's scream was a whisper. At forty feet there was a sepulchral silence broken only by the metallic clatter of boots on rungs, and Watson's wheezy breathing above. The man seemed in a hurry, his boots sometimes just inches from Findhorn's head.

But then, starting at about sixty feet, Findhorn started to hear new sounds. They were coming up from below, and there were several components. There was something like an intermittent hissing. There were what might have been human voices. Most of all there was an occasional boom, so deep it was almost felt.

The ladder was tilting, a slow, pendulum-like oscillation. It had a period of maybe two minutes. Findhorn thought he could use the period of oscillation to work out the depth of the berg, started the calculation in his head, but another deep Boom! scattered the numbers away like crows from a farmer's shotgun. A few seconds after the boom, a blast of cold air swept briefly up the tunnel. The berg was breathing.

In the glare of the lamps, far below, Findhorn saw that the tunnel curved slightly, the ladder disappearing from view. Two hundred feet into the climb, the hissing was loud, and there was the occasional buzz of a chain saw. And then, about three hundred feet down, the shaft was opening up and Findhorn jumped onto flat ice at the end of a short tunnel. Watson pushed past and, bent double, led the way. It opened out to an amazing sight.

The cavern was fifty or sixty feet wide and as high. It was lit up by harsh blue spotlights, some on tall tripods, like a film set. Four men were directing hot, steaming water into a tunnel from a thick white hosepipe connected to a second generator. They were enveloped in the condensing fog which poured out of the tunnel mouth. Two others were shovelling icy slurry into a hop attached to the generator. In the confined space of the cavern, the noise was deafening. Findhorn's arrival created a sensation. A cheer went up, but it died out as the floor continued to tilt.

Findhorn thought, we're under the Arctic Ocean. He fought off a panicky moment of claustrophobia.

Watson waved his hands to encompass the cavern. 'We excavated this with hot-water cannons.' One of the men approached, chain saw swinging; in the cavern's weird illumination he looked like a troll stepped out from a Grimm fairytale. He had the wrinkled face of a heavy smoker and he was unconsciously licking his lips in fear. 'How're you doing?' he asked in a tough Dublin accent. 'Right, are we getting off this bloody coffin?'

Findhorn turned to Watson. 'How long has it been like this?'

'Since it calved. It's getting worse. In the last hour it's been tilting an extra five degrees. Look, I've a pension to collect, can we get a move on?'

'Where's Roscoe?'

'Like I said, there was an accident.'

In the circumstances, Findhorn let it pass.

'Along here. Look, we don't have much time.' The fear in Watson's voice was infectious. He led Findhorn towards the end of the cavern. They passed a tall, vertical wall with a six-inch fissure running from floor to ceiling. Findhorn was met with a strong, icy breeze as he passed the crack. To his surprise and horror, another tunnel led from the end of the cavern further down into the bowels of the iceberg. Rough steps had been hacked out of the ice. Watson started down. Findhorn almost refused to follow, felt something close to panic.

The deep, rhythmic bang was coming up from this second tunnel. At intervals along it, long metal rods had been driven into the ice, to various depths. Intense lights shone at the end of the rods, and the ice glowed a brilliant aquamarine blue from within. Each light had melted a little sphere of ice around it, and meltwater was trickling back along the rods and on to the icy floor, making a treacherous, almost frictionless surface.

But the blue glacier ice was far from pure. Stones, boulders, gravel and dust were scattered through its interior. Beyond about fifty feet, their cumulative mass acted as an optical barrier like a wall. Imbedded about thirty feet into the compressed ice, within reach of the powerful arc lamps, were larger, dark shapes. One of them was recognisable as a propellor, its blades twisted backwards. Beyond it, on the edge of visibility, was a jagged section of fuselage, still with its windows, one of them, remarkably, with its glass still intact. Two long strands of cable wound into the blackness.

A man was standing with his face to the ice. As Findhorn approached the man turned. 'Admiral Dawson, US Naval Research Office. What the hell are you doing here?'

'Just passing by. Thought you might want your life saved or something.'

The berg was levelling out.

'Thanks but we're doing just fine.'

Unexpectedly, Watson let forth a stream of profanity. 'This fucking maniac wants us here until the berg overturns. Get us out of it, Findhorn.'

Findhorn pointed at the dark shapes. 'What's that?'

'A Yak Ten. A nineteen fifties Soviet light aircraft.'

With a row of elongated bullet holes along the side of the fuselage.

'What are you trying to do, Admiral?'

'We were trying to cut towards the cabin area. Another hour would have done it, only the way this is going I don't believe we have an hour. The sonar shows more fuselage just in the dark over there. And a wing. And since you're here, you may as well come and see this.'

The berg was beginning to tilt in the opposite direction. It was minus twenty degrees but Watson's face was beaded with sweat.

Findhorn followed Admiral Dawson further down the sloping tunnel, gripping a red nylon rope which acted as a handrail. Watson took up the rear. The tunnel was narrowing and tilting more steeply down. Findhorn had a brief vision of a grave passage deep inside a pyramid, and as they descended he felt his nerve beginning to crack. But then, a hundred feet down, Dawson stopped at a brilliant blue light. It had been driven a couple of feet into the ice and steam was hissing off it and billowing along the shaft.

Findhorn cleared a covering of frost away to reveal clear blue ice. It was a moment before he recognized the shape.

The corpse had partially mummified. Evaporation had turned it into little more than a skeleton covered with white, smooth, hard-looking flesh. Some of the flesh had transformed to grave wax. The corpse had been partially dismembered, pieces of arm being sheared off, the flesh more or less separate from the bone. Clothes had largely been stripped away. The abdominal wall was opened and the intestines, surprisingly intact, looked as if they were made of brown parchment. He found himself not a foot from a face the size of a soup plate. Dark matter had been squeezed out of the skull and the glacial drift of fifty years had spread it into a fan which stretched beyond the sphere of illumination about six feet in radius around the arc light. An eye was recognizably blue; the other, Findhorn thought, was probably round the back of the squashed face. Teeth had penetrated the leathery skin and the jaw had sheared sideways. The nose was flattened almost down to the gaping mouth. The torn remains of a grey suit were scattered amongst darker chunks of matter.

Findhorn peered closely at the hideous sight. In his imagination, the blue eye stared back at him.

'There's another body in the pilot's seat,' said Dawson. 'No way can we reach it.'

'Why couldn't they have crashed further up the glacier?' Watson complained.

Findhorn was peering into the ice. There was a metallic glitter from a black, rectangular shape about four feet into the ice. 'What's that?'

'It's what this is about, pal,' said Dawson. 'As if you didn't know.'

The awful tilting of the berg had stopped; but neither was the ice mountain righting itself.

Findhorn said, 'Tell your men to get out of here and leave me a chain saw.'

Watson disappeared round a corner and returned with the troll. The Irishman half-slithered down the tunnel, his free hand waving a chain saw and looking like a big crab's claw. Watson pointed his torch and without delay the man started on the ice. The noise in the narrow tunnel was deafening but the saw was cutting quickly into the wall, ice spraying around the tunnel.

'Get your men out of here, Watson,' Findhorn said again.

The berg was beginning to move again, but instead of levelling out, the tilt was increasing. 'Oh Holy Mother of Christ she's going,' Watson wailed, his eyes wide with fear.

The Dubliner was in to the depth of his elbows. The tunnel had levelled and was now beginning to tilt in the opposite direction.

Now the chainsaw man was in up to his shoulders.

There was a tremendous bang, deep and powerful. The berg shook. Watson shouted, 'What the hell?'

Findhorn slithered back to the main cavern, which now lay below them. A wall had split. The fissure was now a foot wide and as he looked it continued to widen with a horrible cracking noise. Men were at the shaft entrance, fighting and punching to get on the ladder. He ran back to the side tunnel, hauled himself up by the red nylon handrail.

'Abandon ship,' he called out, his voice thick with fear. But Dawson was pushing the Irishman further in.

The Irishman's feet were kicking frantically. He wriggled back out, his face grey. 'Feic this, I'm out o' here,' he said harshly. He promptly slipped, landed with a gasp on his back, and slithered down the tunnel, the chain saw tobogganning ahead of him.

'Give me your ice axe,' Dawson snapped at Findhorn, gripping the handrail.

'Don't be a fool, Admiral. She's splitting. Get out of it.' But Dawson grabbed the axe with his free hand and leaned into the shaft, hacking furiously. Findhorn, gripping the nylon rail with both hands, waited in an agony of impatience and fear.

There was another bang. The berg suddenly lurched.

'She's going!' Findhorn shouted.

The admiral was tugging at something. 'Get me out! Quickly!'

There was a third tremendous Crash! from the direction of the main tunnel. Findhorn's feet gave way. He thumped heavily on to the ice, tumbled into the cavern. The fissure was now six feet wide and he tobogganed down towards it. Boxes, lamps, drills, chain saws, men were slithering down out of control into its mouth. Water was surging down the shaft, carrying men with it. The lights failed. In the blackness someone was screaming, high-pitched. Findhorn, on his back and accelerating out of control, felt a freezing wind rushing past him. The screaming was now above him, receding as if it came from a man shooting upwards. From below came a deep, powerful Bang! like an explosion. It filled Findhorn's world: and at last he recognized it as the sound of water slamming into a cavity. He was now in near free-fall.

And then he felt a giant hand pushing him up from below, as if the tunnel was accelerating skywards, and ice gouged a painful furrow in his brow, and a patch of light grew rapidly overhead, and in a moment the approaching grey had lightened and bleak daylight was streaming into a crevasse and he was out and fifty metres up and arching through the air, arms waving helplessly. He had time to glimpse a tiny boat with two petrified faces looking up, and beyond it the misty outline of the icebreaker, and dominating all a massive, ice-speckled black wave, a malign, living entity taller than the ship, and in the seconds while he somersaulted towards the Arctic water, Findhorn knew he was about to die.