by Peter Tonkin
‘Excitement,’ answered Nic without hesitation, his eyes sparkling.
‘What kind?’ Richard probed gently, and popped in a mouthful of duck and avocado, hoping for a long reply.
‘Any kind.’ Nic’s expression was open, apparently ingenuous.
‘Sounds risky. I knew a fellow once whose idea of excitement was jumping out of helicopters at the top of virgin snow-slopes wearing skis - and a parachute in case things got too rough,’ said Robin, coming to Richard’s aid as he chewed a little desperately.
‘Extreme skiing. Base jumping,’ said Nic. ‘Yeah. I tried all of that when I was younger. Went off-piste at Aspen, came down the Matterhorn. Jumped off Angel Falls. Got the T-shirts somewhere.’
‘That was this chap’s nickname,’ continued Robin, allowing Richard a moment or two more alone with his spiced duck salad. ‘T-shirt. Everyone called him that because no matter what you mentioned, he’d been there, done it, got the T-shirt. We met him skiing down glaciers at the South Pole.’
‘I go for a different kind of excitement now, mostly,’ said Nic. ‘Something where the risk is more intellectual, less physical.’
‘Ah. Perhaps that’s the problem with Dr Hirai,’ probed Richard, round a more modest mouthful of bamboo shoots. ‘His talk on Krakatoa is on at the same time as the casino’s open.’
‘They call it Krakatau down here,’ corrected Nic gently - though Richard made a mental note that he hadn’t corrected Robin earlier. ‘And no. Not that kind either. Though I do play a mean game of backgammon. And anyway, the slot machines are open 24/7.’ His lean Santa Claus face clouded with an instant of disapproval. Or perhaps of something deeper.
‘It can’t be hunting,’ observed Robin. ‘Not a man of your green credentials - though you do look a little like Ernest Hemingway in certain lights.’ She caught Richard’s eye in one of those moments of intimate communication that some married couples share. He had been about to start on Nic’s reputation as a bachelor. According to the gossip columns, Nic derived a great deal of excitement from playing the field. Everything from Hollywood film stars to Hoboken fishwives, it seemed. From aristocratic European debutantes to exotic Eastern dancers.
Nic focused his attention back on her for a moment, his eyes crinkling with wry amusement. Explaining to Robin at least why he seemed to have managed so many conquests with so little bitterness and recrimination. So many speculative gossip columns, so few banner headlines. ‘You can see right through a guy, can’t you?’ he purred. ‘Yeah. Given only that I use a camera rather than a gun, yeah. The thrill of the stalk, creeping up on something magnificent and wild...’ Nic paused thoughtfully, suddenly aware that he too had strayed into double meaning here. He glanced at Robin again, something almost dangerous in his eyes.
Richard’s nostrils flared as though he was scenting the air.
‘Something big and dangerous...’ purred Robin in return, bringing the conversation firmly back to hunting animals.
‘OK, I admit it.’ Nic’s tone became less seductive but he stayed right on the narrow path between double meanings. ‘Getting into position. Going for the perfect shot. Then mounting ... pictures instead of heads up on the wall. I still get a kick out of that. But I hardly ever do it any more. Can’t afford the insurance - even in MNO mode. That’s part of the problem with fast cars too ... Formula One is out of the question nowadays. Even Nascar.’
‘It must be business, then,’ concluded Richard. ‘That seems to be all that’s left. Mergers and acquisitions. Hunting in the financial jungle. Taking on the big corporate beasts and out-thinking them. Going for the perfect deal. Mounting yet another company scalp in your business portfolio.’
Nic’s full focus rested on Richard now. Like a duellist unconsciously mimicking his opponent, the Texan picked up his fork and attacked his recently discarded spring roll. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted after a moment. ‘Something like that.’
Richard opened his mouth to take things further, though he was not absolutely certain what he was going to say, especially as Robin caught his eye and gave a warning frown whose message he could not quite read. But Captain Olmeijer arrived at that moment. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, as though the three of them were a considerable crowd. ‘Mr Nordberg has suggested that you might like a tour of the ship. I am about to perform my full captain’s inspection. Would it amuse you to accompany me?’
Richard and Robin had conducted more captain’s inspections than they cared to recall and even Nic had been round a ship or two in his time, but none of them had been even faintly like this one, so the guided tour was something of a revelation to all of them. Revelation leading to life-or-death action, as it turned out. At least it began on the bridge - territory that should have been familiar enough to the Mariners. But Tai Fun’s bridge was like nothing that either of them had ever commanded. It was an open, airy, popular and bustling place, as full of passengers as it was of officers. Its clearview windows commanded a breathtaking view past the foremast and over the bowsprit to the awesomely distant almost indigo horizon, with everything, including the edge of the world, sitting at a little less than five degrees of angle. The roof of the bridgehouse was glazed as well but rather than let the sun steam in, the skylights were shaded by blinds hand-made of rattan rolled in hemp twine. It was just possible to see through the long thin splinters of cane to the belly of the sail on the second mast, whose trunk reached down through the after section of the charthouse, where the sail-handling computers were located.
Larsen was standing at the helmsman’s shoulder, like Erik the Red in tropical whites, every inch the sailing master, relaxed and confident, chatting to Navigating Officer Eva Gruber about their speed and heading, their progress towards their destination. And then, with hardly a breath, passing the same information on to the passengers who flocked here, eager for the experience of seeing a ship handled under sail.
Even Captain Olmeijer was not above pausing to pose for a photo with what he grandly called ‘his guests’. Likewise, the crewman in charge of the helm - a wheel that might have graced a Mississippi paddle-steamer - was content to settle eager hands upon the spokes. And explain how to hold her on a heading, gesturing with a straight-faced frown towards the compass in a big brass binnacle that might have come from the Titanic.
Richard was highly relieved to see that Eva Gruber at least consulted a series of screens that seemed at a glance to combine state-of-the-art GPS system, Kelvin Hughes Coursemaster and the most advanced radar sets - both under-sea and collision-alarm - that he had ever seen. But she only did this in passing, so to speak, as she conducted eager tyro navigators to her chart- room, where she showed them their position marked with chinagraph pencil on a Perspex sheet over the white, sand and blue of the relevant British Admiralty Chart. Those that were really keen double-checked in the Admiralty Pilot NP 36, for the Waters off Indonesia (Volume 1). She glanced up and caught him watching. ‘A pity you weren’t here an hour ago,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’d have let you use my sextant.’
He grinned. ‘Sorry to have missed that. Maybe tomorrow.’
She made a moue of almost Gallic regret. ‘Tomorrow we shall be in Pontianac. It is no fun to shoot the sun at anchor. It must be done...’ She made an expansive gesture which took in the limitless sea, the infinite sky and the black-hearted sails straining across the winds between.
Larsen bustled in then, with Olmeijer at his side. ‘The sail-handling computers are fine, Captain,’ he was saying. ‘If you wish, I shall demonstrate, though it seems a pity to lose the wind. There has been no repetition ... The work at Singapore has settled everything perfectly, I think.’
‘Very well,’ Olmeijer acquiesced, but Richard suddenly got the impression that had Robin, Nic and he not been there observing, the sails would have come off and gone on again a couple of times, and let the wind go hang. For there was something not quite right here after all.
‘I expect,’ said Olmeijer pleasantly to Robin, ‘that when you have completed your ins
pection of the navigation on the bridge of one of your famous supertankers, you would proceed to your engine room. Well, I have done this, you understand, by consulting my sailing master. What would be next?’
‘The cargo,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘Cargo and stowage.’
‘Precisely. And so it is aboard Tai Fun. Except that our cargo is comprised of the passengers aboard. And they are stowed, if I may use the word, in our leisure and entertainment facilities!’
‘Good,’ said Nic. ‘This is what I came to see.’
Chapter 10: Fire Down Below
‘Very well, then.’ Captain Olmeijer led the way out of the bridge and into the bistro, quiet now and preparing for afternoon tea followed by sunset drinks and starlight dinner. Out of the bistro and towards the forecastle instead of sternwards into the forward sections of the aft accommodation. There was a lift here - the forward lift - that opened just behind the charthouse. The captain pushed the button and the doors wheezed open as though they were as much at his command as the rest of the vessel they were inspecting. The lift-car was big enough for all of them. The captain pushed more buttons and they slid down - that one or two disturbing degrees off the vertical. ‘Two decks down to the main public areas,’ he explained. ‘Two more down to the main work areas, where we will find the most important crew-members. We will check with the purser, the chief steward and the chefs in due course. And, eventually, two decks further down again, with the computing and engineering officers in charge of the main computer systems, the electric motors and the engines themselves. But my next most important conference must be with the casino manager and the entertainments officer.’ Both of whom were waiting for them at the lift doors, each equally keen to show all of them over their respective domains.
During the next two hours, utterly ignorant of the impending crisis, the four visited all of Tai Fun’s interior recreational areas and talked to the men and women in charge. The entertainments officer and the casino manager came and went. He was succeeded by the purser, whose main function seemed to be to oversee the little shops and concessions that sold everything from perfumes to bikinis at prices that might have shamed Harrods or Bloomingdales. She was temporarily replaced by the fitness consultant, then by the physiotherapist. Then came the theatre manager and his director, the chief steward, the coiffeur and make-up consultant, the salsa coach and line-dancing instructor, but both the casino manager and the entertainments officer still succeeded them from time to time.
Apart from the view through windows and portholes, the angle of the floor and the sense of surging motion, they might as well have been looking over a modest but expensive hotel in Las Vegas, thought Richard, awed. A hotel catering almost exclusively, it seemed, for the leisured in their later years. He saw no faces that looked as though they were naturally aged less than seventy at any of the facilities they visited. And every step they travelled seemed to emphasize to the tanker-man just how thinly populated the vast vessels in the Heritage Mariner fleet really were. The only amusement really afforded the frowning man was the sight of Fritz the casino manager archly flirting with Robin while Nic the hunter got further beneath Gabriella Cappaldi’s obviously weakening defences as she came and went and came again.
Richard’s interest was not really re-awoken until, leaving the crowded casino, empty cinema, bustling gym, aerobics room (complete with over-eighties’ Pilates class), health spa, beauty salon and hairdresser’s, ship’s hospital staffed by two nurses apologetic for Dr Hirai’s absence, massage parlour, Internet café for those with more modestly equipped cabins, library where the good doctor was discovered reading up on Krakatau for tonight, the theatre (with rehearsal for the Follies that would follow the doctor’s lecture), the gourmet restaurant and galley replete with not one chef de cuisine but two, they went down the next two decks into the heart of the vessel. Leaving their two guides reluctantly behind and falling more formally under Captain Olmeijer’s command again.
And yet even here Richard found it hard to maintain his interest for long. In the relatively untenanted corridors too boring even to tempt the passengers, a series of nerds and geeks it seemed to him oversaw the vital computers whose programs did everything that general-purpose seamen and sail-hands ought to be doing aboard, from deploying and finding the sailing master’s sails to monitoring the navigating officer’s screens. It was as though they had passed from the Montecito Hotel to the headquarters of Microsoft. It made Richard increasingly uneasy that there seemed to be almost no actual sailors aboard - simply computer whizzes and glorified hotel staff. But he held his tongue. And Robin, clearly, was holding hers. Nic was seemingly interested, however; and so he might be, thought Richard. Here, it seemed, was a vessel that could be run by half a dozen seamen and a hundred landsmen trained in greeting, gambling, catering and general service.
But in the lowest inhabited sections of the vessel Richard at last found what he was looking for - someone whose responsibilities seemed familiarly nautical to him. An engineer whose main concern was with engines. Just the simple diesel smell of the tiny engine room filled him with nostalgia, and the hairy and lugubrious little Frenchman who worked there really was a chef, but a chef de marine, not a chef de cuisine.
‘The motors are one hundred per cent, Capitaine,’ he insisted, dismissing his visitors from his mind the instant introductions were complete, maintaining courtesy only in that he spoke in rushed English with a near-impenetrable accent. ‘They worked perfectly as we manoeuvred out of Singapore, did they not? And they will answer perfectly when we take aboard the pilot at Pontianac in the morning. In the meantime, I am using them to power the hydraulics. I realize we can move the platform with the electrical system and needless to say the batteries are charged to optimum. But it will be a good test, you understand? And we have more than enough bunkerage, even allowing that I have used it to fuel all the water-ski boats.’
‘We will take on bunkerage along with everything else we need in Pontianac in any case,’ allowed Olmeijer. ‘But you do not want anyone from ashore to double-check?’
‘Who will there be? No one who knows the system as well as I! You may rest assured, Capitaine.’
‘Very well.’
‘Trouble with your motors?’ asked Richard as they hissed upwards once again in the aft lift that he and Robin had used last night.
‘No. The chef believes there was water in the bunkerage. That is all. Power fell away unexpectedly as we came into Singapore. It was nothing...’
Captain Olmeijer’s words were lost suddenly beneath the hissing of heavy hydraulic movement. It was sudden enough to make the three passengers look around in some concern, but the captain hardly seemed to notice it. The angle and surging motion of the hull around them straightened and slowed, making things seem even worse for an instant. Captain Olmeijer simply raised his voice over the hydraulic clatter. ‘Ah, good. Now we will see the after sections in their fullest working order. And meet the rest of our passengers. The ones who do not yet need to lift their faces - or anything else, indeed! So your first impressions may be reversed a little, I think, Captain Mariner!’ and the moment he completed this little speech, the lift stopped.
More like a conjurer than a commander, Captain Olmeijer pressed the button to the lift doors and they sighed open, revealing what seemed disorientatingly like a completely different ship full of utterly different passengers. They were looking out over the sun-bathing area surrounding a sizeable swimming pool. The deck swept away under the stepped cliffs of two U-shaped terraces, the uppermost of which contained Richard and Robin’s balcony. The open end of the U faced sternwards and here the pool deck stepped down again to a hydraulic platform it was just possible to see at sea level, all a-bustle with young and active figures. The chef must just have completed lowering it into the optimum position to allow some serious water-sporting to commence. One group of figures was pushing a big black-sided Zodiac inflatable into the iris-coloured water where it sat among the indigo and golden wavelets on a sho
rt line. Beside these, more youngsters were shoving the jet-skis le Chef had just fuelled into the gently heaving water, flinging themselves astride and starting to power away from Tai Fun into the featureless vastness of the Java Sea. A third group was pulling scuba gear free of its restraints, and strapping it over wetsuits or swimwear, ready to explore the mid- and lower reaches of the apparently untouched and timeless waters.
But just for an utterly distracting moment, Richard saw nothing of this at all. What he saw was the three tiny handkerchiefs of Inge Nordberg’s bikini. Or rather what they so spectacularly failed to cover. ‘Ah ha!’ she called to him, bouncing forward and taking his hand as he was nearest to the door. ‘Welcome to the Youth Club!’
Richard stepped out into the disorientating dazzle and bustle. He had just got used to feeling that he was - by the better part of a generation - amongst the youngest aboard. Now he felt positively geriatric. Inge was by no means the only young woman nearby. In fact there seemed to be nothing much else to look at between here and the Java Sea. The only man he could see above the hydraulic platform was the lifeguard, who seemed to have just stepped out of Baywatch. And Inge was certainly the most modestly dressed person there - by a long chalk!
‘Stop gaping, dear,’ said Robin helpfully. ‘Did you realize that your eyes were out on stalks?’
