by Peter Tonkin
Somewhere in his reeling mind he remembered that salt water weighs sixty-four pounds per cubic foot. The top of the wave was a hundred feet long, twenty feet high and say fifty feet thick. With typical seaman’s acuity and the shock sharpened sense of irrelevance granted to men staring death in the face, he realized that this would be about a hundred thousand cubic feet.
That was 6,400,000 pounds of water.
And all of it was coming down on him.
Chapter 6: The Reef
Richard jumped. Holding his body stiff, with his arms crossed over his chest and his legs straight, he plunged directly into the shrinking space between the ship’s side and the SuperCat’s heaving bow. It was a gamble based on several factors, the first of which was his knowledge of Robin’s seamanship. She, like he, would have seen the oncoming monster; would have made some assessment such as his - and come to the same conclusion. Six and a half million pounds of wave would be enough to turn the ship right over. Robin would have called for full thrust from the bow thrusters. That fact alone made the overturning of the Goodman Richard more likely, for the weight of the wave pushing forward on top of her would be supplemented by the force of the waterjets pushing away beneath her.
And he was right on the first count at least. His lifeline was six feet long and his body longer still. By the time all twelve feet of their combined length had reached the end of the tether, the lower four feet were being thrust back forcefully by the power of the water jets as Lionheart backed away. Richard felt his body being blasted westwards, the pendulum motion of still being anchored by the clip beginning to swing him upwards. He was thinking of nothing much, too overwhelmed by action and experience even to send up a prayer. The only thing in his mind was the heading. He was being pushed exactly along the line Lionheart was holding at his order: 262 degrees. At right angles to the drift of Goodman Richard along 82 degrees due east on to the Wolf Rocks behind. Had he been able to pray or calculate he would have been trying to work out whether the power and weight of the wave would be sufficient to turn the boat right over - and to pray that it would.
For it was the energy of the wave that was most dangerous to him now. The weight of it would dissipate rapidly in the water above his head - but as it did, so it would release massive amounts of energy, which would be expressed in currents, cross currents, downdraughts of water that would suck him down to where his lungs would burst and throw him up so fast his blood would boil and tear him limb from limb. But the good ship Goodman Richard would soak up all that energy - or most of it at least - if she allowed the wave to turn her right over.
And, were he able to think at all, let alone calculate, he would have seen that there was a fair chance that the greatest part of all that weight and energy would be thrown forward towards Wolf Rock - and Lionheart. That it might well simply roll over the top of the rolling hull of the dismasted sailing ship leaving a little area of quiet water immediately beneath - like the calm at the eye of the storm.
When the lifeline tightened behind him and hauled him backwards through the water with bruising force, he thought, Christ, I hope Robin’s well clear of this, and that was all.
For once in her life Robin was not thinking about Richard even though her last sight of him jumping straight under the flare of Lionheart’s forecastle would likely be her final view of him alive. She and Tom were reaching forward side by side, with the controls of the bow thrusters set at maximum and the reverse thrust on the main engines right up there with it, tearing Lionheart in full reverse along 82 degrees, though the automatic compass still read her heading as 262 - the way she had been facing since Richard gave the command. Paul Ho and Doc were standing, breathless and dripping, looking back out of the aft sections of the bridge wings with their night glasses, ready to bellow warning if it looked as though they were reversing the SuperCat up on to either section of the channel-split reef.
But all of Robin’s concentration was taken up with the wreck that was falling down upon them. Millions of pounds of water were tearing through the sails as though the strengthened canvas had been tissue paper, turning the last of what the lesser waves had left into shreds. Spars were sticking up out of the mess like the fangs of a palisade. But underneath that deadly, foaming crest, the rest of the square-rigger’s deck was coming at her like a collapsing wall.
Then the first of the foam hit and washed away the terrifying view. It hit so hard it cracked the windows and ripped away the wipers of the clearview system. It came close to ripping the whole bridge off its footing in the deck and chucking it over the Cat’s square stern, throwing everyone aboard flat on the floor except for Robin, Tom and Sparks, who were all strapped in tight. But it still hit hard enough for Sparks to flatten his nose and Tom to bite the tip of his tongue right off and for Robin to crack her jaw on the console in front of her as Lionheart leaped back a good twenty feet through the water.
So that the next thing Robin saw - other than stars - was the wall of foam thrown up by the foundering of the spinning hull as it came roaring out towards them. She just had time to reverse the positions of her hands - so that when the wall of raging foam arrived, the power of the thrusters was dying and that of the great water-jets behind was just beginning to grip. Robin felt the SuperCat’s head fight to turn as she was forced up that avalanche of foam. She saw Tom’s knuckles whiten as he held her straight and true, knowing as well as she did that if they turned they would be overwhelmed more easily even than Goodman Richard had been. And they would not right themselves or stay afloat at all, because they were made of heavy metal not of buoyant wood. For an instant it hung in the balance, but the great motors just had enough green water to bite on and their power gathered as Robin’s fists - as white as Tom’s - remained relentlessly holding the handles of the throttles at Full Ahead and the heading still held at 262 - though the weight of the wave continued to push her back along the reverse heading.
The moment passed. Her head stayed up and did not waver. The wave passed under her and she began to overcome it. And immediately, she began to leap ahead. The instant Robin felt the sturdy hull settle and set to work, her hands slammed back with sufficient force to tear her shoulder-muscles, into the original positions. The game vessel faltered, almost wallowing, and even Tom looked across at her in some confusion. But the grey eyes glared with steely certainty while the shaking, sweating fists stayed exactly where they were and the bow thrusters began to push once more, while the great engines fought with the last of the departing foam to suck her back towards the reef again.
And not a moment too soon. The heaving water immediately in front of them parted as the Goodman Richard’s copper keel thrust up into the storm, astonishingly clean and colourful. Like the back of Nemo’s Nautilus surfacing. Robin continued to back away as fast as she could all too well aware that, with the hull’s position in the water now reversed, all the mess of sail, spar and cordage would be on this side now, washing towards them in the grip of the current. And it wouldn’t take much of it to foul them, render them powerless and link them with fatal inevitability to the whole wreck drifting helplessly down on to the Wolf Rock.
Completely unbidden, there rose in her mind the nightmare possibility that it might be Richard, lost under the heaving hulk, and secured there by his lifeline, who fouled them and dragged them down to death with him. The thought was doom-laden madness, but it had force enough to wind her. Especially as it was her first conscious thought about him since he jumped off the ship in the instant she turned turtle.
But in fact both of Robin’s nightmare visions were unfounded. The steepness of the incoming seas - as she would have realized had she been allowed an instant’s clarity of thought - bore testimony to the strength of the outgoing tide, still stripping bare the fangs of the Wolf so close behind her. And that tide, ebbing at full force westward into Biscay, was taking the mess of rigging with it. And, away before the first of the grasping serpentine coils of it, coils which writhed like the arms of an army of octopi embracing the wrec
kage of wooden stockade, went Richard, pulled by his lifeline towards the westfacing port side, and pushed by the westering tide.
At the instant he felt the lifeline snap taut again, jerking him upright just beneath the reach of the turbulence on the surface, Richard pulled the toggle of his life-preserver and heard the hiss of the CO canister beside his ear as it inflated. He had waited until now because he - like Robin - had entertained lively but instantaneous nightmare visions. Of getting caught by Lionheart’s motors and sucked into her. Of becoming entangled in the octopus coils of submerged rigging. Of inflating his life jacket too soon and getting trapped under the hull itself.
But he was out of air, beyond thought and acting on impulse now. Up he came towards the surface, and into the rolling restlessness of the waves. Upwards with surprising force and speed, heading for the life-giving air. The stygian element around him lightened abruptly by the brightness of the emergency beacon at his shoulder and the promise of moonlight at the surface as the eye of the storm approached - just as Doc had predicted that it would.
When he jerked to a halt three feet short he came dangerously near to giving up. Only the shock of it, actually, jolted him awake. The line stretched beneath him to the submerged deck of the upturned hulk and there was no way there was enough length in it to see him to the surface. A lesser man might have panicked then. He had come so far and achieved so much. And he was only a yard or so short. It was so unexpected. So unfair. He floated on his back, looking up at the silver string of bubbles that were the last of his breath and he thought of the black shaft of the lifeline leading, straight as a spear, to the upturned deck below him. The top of his head slammed into the side of the ship. Pain lanced through him. And frustration. And simple, white-hot rage.
And revelation.
His shaking fingers slipped beneath the fat bulk of the inflated life preserver to the ruin of the chart-pocket at his breast. Along the lanyard there to the handle of the knife still trapped in his wet-weather gear. It needed all his nerve to draw it out, for it was wedged tightly in place by the all too fragile bulge of the gas-filled material. He was tempted to turn the sharpness down, trusting the feeling of it slicing through his chest rather than risk a puncture. If the lifebelt failed now, the weight of his clothing would take him down like a stone. The risk did not bear thinking about. But he was thinking, dreamily, floating with his hand on the handle, slipping away into death, when Goodman Richard smacked him on the head again. The rage rekindled. He pulled the knife out and reached behind him for the line. A moment later he was free. He exploded through the surface into both storm-swell and moonlight and began being thrown against the great hull with a vengeance. But in the thick air and the thin moonlight, the arresting brightness of his emergency beacon was joined at once by the insistent pulse of the emergency radio locator signal.
Only then did he begin to surrender, so that it seemed to him a mere instant later that there was someone in the water beside him. It was Doc and he had a long line ready to clip on to Richard’s harness. A heartbeat or two after that Richard was aboard Lionheart.
There was no doctor aboard. There was a sickbay but it was over-filled already. Robin hid her massive relief at finding him so swiftly and getting him aboard so easily by a robust refusal to mollycoddle him. Wrapped in dry towels and clutching a warm drink, therefore, he found himself almost dreamily strapped in the seat beside Tom’s shoulder as the SuperCat eased herself round the end of the wreck and began to head for the south-west end of the shoal on her way in to the safety of the Cornish coast.
But the awful grandeur of what the pale full moon revealed slowed them, almost made them turn aside. For no sooner were they clear of Goodman Richard than the outwash of the reef took hold of her. Tom took them south of the spreading turbulence, but just as the Bishop’s Rock Light had stood at the point of their turn at the beginning of this, so the Wolf Rock Light remained a fixed point now. And on the reef at its feet, like some kind of ritual sacrifice, the sea offered up the ship.
The outwash disturbed the brief equilibrium that had held her upside down, buoyant deck- boards lowest and ballasted, copper bottom uppermost. No sooner did the boiling water touch her than she heaved herself over again. But the reefs were not an even-sided sea-wall. They were uneven, inconsistent, the spine of a little underwater mountain range with that gully Richard had noted running through the midst of them. The outwash, carried down the falling tideway, took hold of some parts of her but not some others. Her rigging remained a potent drogue. And the last two masts, which had stood by her so well so far, let her down in the end, catching on the black-rock bottom as she turned.
So that she not only heaved herself upright, she swung herself around to meet the foaming destruction bow first. There wasn’t much left of her bowsprit any more. And there had never been much of a figurehead beneath. But it was with these she faced the inevitable end. The waves did not abate. Even under the falling wind, the brief calm at the heart of the storm, they marched eastwards in terrible series, their white fangs gleaming in the moonlight seemingly away as far as Finisterre.
And each set beat against her high square poop, thrusting her onward and upward through the foam, seemingly on to the Lighthouse itself. The foghorn had stopped its howling now, but the swinging of the light-beam seemed to count the lingering seconds of her death with the steady inevitability of a hangman’s clock.
They were pulling away when she struck. And even though the wind had fallen there was still so much noise from the surf and the engines that none of them actually heard anything else. But they saw it clearly enough. A sight that none had seen in their millennium and few enough had witnessed in the century before its turn. The sight of a full sized, four-masted sailing vessel being driven on to the rocks. The shock of her first strike stopped her in the water and brought down what little was left of her rearmost masts. She backed off, shaking her head, like a stag brought to bay by a bigger stag. Then she lunged in again, tossing her head up this time, lifted by some vagary of the foam beneath her, to smash down on to the black and unforgiving rock.
Robin cried out and Richard was shocked out of his lethargy by the lively horror of it. She rolled on to one side a little and seemed to be trying to slide back again. But the rocks had her now and there was nothing else for her to do. The next sea lifted her again and swung her as it pushed her higher still. It swung her right across the narrow channel Richard had noticed. They all saw it now. Little more than a tenth of her length, it came almost perfectly halfway along her, and when the next wave slammed her down like a wrestler performing some terrible blow, it simply broke her back. The middle of her deck, right along the line where Richard and the others had centred their rescues, simply folded downwards like a closing hinge. The pale side of her, even to the very point where his safety clip still hung, burst. Bow and stern sections lifted and she simply exploded open.
As though it too had seen enough, the moon pulled a black veil across its white face then. The wind backed viciously as the next storm front swept over them and what had been an even sea full of parallel combers coming up behind them was suddenly full of sharp, triangular sharks’ fins thirty and more feet high.
‘Time to go,’ said Tom, easing the throttle wider still, and seeking for that safe, easterly 82 degrees. But instead of rising, gull-like, above the nasty-looking waters, the SuperCat stuck her nose into the back of the nearest wave like a porpoise, and green water swept up towards them.
‘Oh shit,’ said Doc. ‘That’s not supposed to happen is it?’
Chapter 7: The Time
‘No it’s bloody not,’ answered Richard, shortly. ‘Better ease back on the throttles, Tom, while we go and take a look.’
‘No,’ said Tom with unexpected authority. Then, incongruously, he eased back on the throttles after all and the SuperCat’s head came up, shouldering aside water like a breaching whale. But he continued speaking as he acted. ‘Robin, you hold her on the heading we agreed and just where she is at h
alf power, please. I’ll go with Richard. She’s my command after all.’ Richard, Doc and he left the bridge together. Richard glanced back from the doorway to see Paul Ho ease himself into the left hand seat. He hesitated fractionally as the young man introduced himself. ‘This is all a bit of a shock after sailing a vessel that’s a century or so out of date,’ he said dryly. ‘But just tell me if there’s anything an old fashioned foursquare man can do to help...’ Yet another sailor happy to flirt with the other Captain Mariner, thought Richard wryly and he closed the door and left them to it.
Richard, Doc and Tom came side by side on to the pulpit that looked down into the main accommodation area and were stopped by a wave of applause. It was weak but it was heart-felt. The better part of half of the seats were occupied now, by pale, seasick, but very grateful survivors from Goodman Richard, all of whom had seen her terrible end from the port-side windows and knew exactly what they had been rescued from. The Chief Steward and a couple of sailors were moving amongst them with warm drinks. Nobody there, apparently, had noticed Lionheart’s strange behaviour just now. Or, if they had, they were confident that these three could sort it out.
Side by side, after the briefest modest acknowledgement, they hurried down the forward companionway to the door marked CAR DECKS. Then they ran on, this time with Tom in the lead, for as he had said, it was his command. The topmost of the three car decks seemed fine. Tom opened the door into the huge cavern, stepped over the metal sill into the dim-lit echoing cavern and looked around. Richard caught up almost instantly, stepped through on the slighter man’s heels and stood at his shoulder, all his senses on the alert.
