Hungry as the Sea by Wilbur Smith

beside him, and then caught himself. It was an unnecessary speech, inviting familiarity, and before the Mate could answer, Nick turned quickly away to the radar-repeater and lowered his face to the eye-piece in the coned hood.
    For a minute he studied the images of the surrounding ice in the darkened body of the instrument, then went back to his seat and stared ahead impatiently.
    Warlock was running too fast, Nick knew it; he was relying on the vigilance of his deck officers to carry her through the ice. Yet still this speed was too slow for his seething impatience.
    Above their horizon rose another shoreline, a great unbroken sweep of towering cliff which caught the low sun, and glowed in emerald and amethyst, a drifting tableland of solid hard ice, forty miles across and two hundred feet high.
    As they closed with that massive translucent island, so the colours that glowed through it became more hauntingly beautiful. The cliffs were rent by deep bays, and split by crevasses whose shadowy depths were dark sapphire, blue and mysterious, paling out to a thousand shades of green.
    “My God, it’s beautiful,” said David Allen with the reverence of a men kneeling in a cathedral. The crests of the ice cliffs blazed in clearest ruby; to windward, the big sea piled in and crashed against those cliffs, surging up them in explosive bursts of white spray. Yet the iceberg did not dip nor swing or work, even in that murderous sea.
    “Look at the lee she is making,” Dave Allen pointed. “You could ride out a force twelve behind her.” On the leeward side, the waters were protected from the wind by that mountain of sheer ice. Green and docile, they lapped those mysterious blue cliffs, and Warlock went into the lee, passing in a ship’s length from the plunging rearing action of a wild horse into the tranquillity of a mountain lake, calm, windless and unnatural.
    In the calm, Angel brought trays piled with crisp brown baked Cornish pasties and steaming mugs of thick creamy cocoa, and they ate breakfast at three in the morning, marvelling at the fine pale sunlight and the towers of incredible beauty, the younger officers shouting and laughing when a school of five black killer whales passed so close that they could see their white cheek patterns and wide grinning mouths through the icy clear waters.
    The great mammals circled the ship, then ducked beneath her hull, surging up on the far side with their huge black triangular fins shearing the surface as they blew through the vents in the top of their heads. The fishy stink of their breath pervaded the bridge, and then they were gone, and Warlock motored calmly along in the lee of the ice, like a holiday launch of day-trippers.
    Nicholas Berg did not join the spontaneous gaiety. He munched one of angel’s delicious pies full of meat and thick gravy, but he could not finish it. His stomach was too tense. He found himself resenting the high spirits of his officers. The laughter offended him, now when his whole life hung in precarious balance. He felt the temptation to quell them with a few harsh words, conscious of the power he had to plunge them into instant consternation.
    Nick listened to their carefree banter and felt old enough to be their father, despite the few years difference in their ages. He was impatient with them, irritated that they should be able to laugh like this when so much was at stake - six hundred human lives, a great ship, tens of millions of dollars, his whole future. They would probably never themselves know what it felt like to put a lifetime’s work at risk on a single flip of the coin - and then suddenly, unaccountably, he envied them.
    He could not understand the sensation, could not fathom why suddenly he longed to laugh with them, to share the companionship of the moment, to be free of pressure for just a little while. For fifteen years, he had not known that sort of hiatus, had never wanted it.
    He stood up abruptly, and immediately the bridge was