Deadly Impact (2014)

by Tonkin, Peter

  But just as it did so, the largest wave so far came thundering in from the port side. Sayonara gave that strange, unsteady swoop again. Her forecastle slid down and to the left into the trough in front of the oncoming giant. The whole hull yawed and rolled to the left, then heaved off the back of the last wave and surged down after the forecastle head. Rikki Sato, completely thrown off balance, came crashing across the deck and cannoned into Richard. The collision was so unexpected, coming at a time when Richard was so focused on handling the ship, that he was knocked sideways. He lost his grip on the helm and was bizarrely replaced there by the sagging, winded body of the Japanese computer expert. He fell heavily and went skidding and rolling painfully across the non-slip surface of the bridge’s deck. But he pulled himself to his feet the instant he stopped rolling and turned, staggering, just inside the bulkhead door that opened on to the port bridge wing. So he was able to see what happened, even though he was unable to do anything about it.

  Still turning hard to port, driven by the push of one engine full ahead against the suck of the other full astern, helm held hard over, wedged by Rikki’s considerable paunch, Sayonara turned into the oncoming wall of water. Her forecastle tried sluggishly to ride up the near-vertical green cliff, but almost immediately there was white water boiling on to the forecastle head so recently occupied by the waterspout. Then, as the bows dug deeper into the oncoming wave, green water thundered on to the forecastle and the whaleback above it. White water was largely foam. Green water was much more substantial. Moving at this speed, it was effectively as solid as ice, and nearly as deadly. As though channelled by the pipewalls secured along the top of the tall white metal construction, the topmost five metres of the wave surged back towards the bridge like a battering ram.

  Richard took a step towards the helm, thinking that there might be something he could do. But an explosion of sound behind him made him look back. Behind and below, oddly. The bridge wing seemed to leap upward as though a giant was trying to kick it into touch. The door to the bridge wing twisted in its frame. Jets of water sprayed in as though the most powerful of fire hoses was playing on the outside. Richard slipped in a puddle that seemed to have formed out of nowhere and in no time at all. He went down on one knee.

  And the wave came in through the clearview. It smashed the thick glass panes and hurled them inwards as though some huge bomb had exploded on the foredeck. Solid green water came in so hard that it swept everything and everyone to the back of the bridge. Because he was on his knees already, Richard escaped the worst of it, but he was still tumbled helplessly against the bridge’s aft wall, and was all-but drowned as the water surged over him, minute after minute, and nearly deafened as the pressure flexed his eardrums as though he were deep under water. He was lucky, in fact, not to be swept into the deadly waterfall that the companionway had become as hundreds of tons of water went roaring down on to the lower decks.

  But then, after some uncounted time, he found he was able to move – to pull himself across the dripping wilderness that had been an orderly command bridge, into the howling gale that burst in through the gape of the smashed bridge windows. He wiped the water from his eyes and grasped the helm, thanking God that it still seemed to be alive. Thanking whoever had designed Sayonara that they had made sure the propulsion and conning systems were more robust than the computer systems, at least, for they were still working. He still had command and control of the ship. But he had realized the moment he staggered erect and began to push through the howling darkness towards the helm that all of the computer equipment was dead. As far as he could see, the water had shorted out every electrical circuit on board.

  32 Hours to Impact

  The next hours passed in a kind of blur for Richard. It seemed brutal, but his one focus was to save the ship. Nothing else mattered to him. Not who was where, or how they were. Not who was captive and who was free. Not who was sick and who was getting their sea-legs. Not who had survived the destruction of the bridge unscathed and who had not; who was alive or who was dead. Had they been his crew it might have been different. But even those he had brought aboard with him were the responsibility of other companies and corporations – of other countries. As long as the helm was responsive, and the engine room answered the telegraph and gave him power as and when demanded, he was content. What was going on around him was of very secondary importance and he hardly allowed it to impinge upon his thoughts and calculations at all. He was not a man given to second guessing himself, and even had he been tempted by the alternative to his plan – to try and face the storm head-on – the state of the glass-strewn bridge around him showed the mortal danger of heading into the wind. So he settled to the business of turning Sayonara so that she could run before the storm.

  To begin with, as he planned how best to get the weather on his aft port quarter and full on his stern, it seemed to Richard that he was alone on the bridge. But the whole windswept wreck was now in darkness, alleviated only by the lights of the basic emergency control systems, which did not at this stage include radar, sonar, or other communications – merely the helm and engine controls, which gave almost no illumination. Apart from the power to move and to steer, the vessel seemed, for the moment, dark and dead. The shadows were occasionally brightened by bolts of brilliant white pouncing down from cloud base to wave top, or by flickers of sheet lightning that lit the madness above in neon. But the brightness was too brief for him to make out any details even had he been willing to look around. Which he was not; he was far too busy.

  Nor was he able to judge who was there from the sounds they were making. All he could hear was the raving of the mad wind, the thunderous roaring of the seas and the occasional cataclysmic detonations of the thunder. And yet even these slowly sank into the back of his consciousness as he tried to nurse his ship on to the safe course he had planned for her. This was particularly true because the first part of the manoeuvre he proposed to undertake was the most dangerous. And yet it could not be put off, for conditions would only worsen – the wind would get stronger and the waves would grow higher the nearer Sayonara came to the eyewall defined by that line of thunderstorms dead ahead. In order to move from her present heading, leading into the waves with her port forequarter, to her optimum position, stern-on to wind and sea, she would have to turn broadside-on to the storm. And that was the position in which the brunt wind and the relentless waves were most likely to roll her over altogether.

  Richard’s first action, therefore, was to ease the port-side engine room telegraph up from full astern. He then eased the starboard down from full ahead. Little by little, as he began to swing the helm over towards dead ahead and then starboard, he juggled the two levers, feeling the speed at which the ship responded, judging how far he could rely on the reactions of the men in the safety of the engine control room far below – and how fast they could answer his commands. And, when they did react, how swiftly their reaction resulted in a response from the engines and, in turn, from the propellers thrashing the heaving waters in her wake. Ensuring as best he could that, no matter where the levers of the telegraph stood, Sayonara never lost her way. To slow and lose one iota of steerage way would kill her as quickly as rolling her over or running her on to a reef.

  As soon as he resumed control of the helm, even as he eased the icy engine room telegraph handles forward and back a little while he kept as much way on her as he could, Richard felt Sayonara’s head begin to come round, bashed sideways to starboard by the huge seas, blown sideways by the pressure of the typhoon winds on the whaleback and, no doubt, by the sloshing of the cargo in those mercifully spherical Moss tanks. The motion of the hull changed surprisingly rapidly. The swooping heaves were replaced by a more regular rolling motion that Richard calculated would add to the misery of anyone on board who was seasick. It was at this point that he wondered for the first time who else was on the bridge. He glanced over his shoulder, searching the shadows for an instant. Then turned back to the job in hand.

  He wa
s tempted to just think, Sod it! Reverse the telegraph handles at a stroke, wrench the helm over as hard as he could and swing Sayonara’s long hull round as hard and fast as she would let him. But that meant passing the ultimate control over to the vagaries of chance and the whims of the storm. And Richard was not a man who gave control away lightly. All his adult life he had taken command of situations, some of them almost as dangerous as this one – and he had come through them because of what he did, not what he gave up doing. He simply could not find it in his nature to close his eyes and hope for the best. Live or die, he would do it by keeping command and by exercising control from one second to the next. Or, as it turned out, from one minute to the next. In the final analysis, from one hour to the next.

  The moment he completed his initial series of actions, the navigation lights instantly came back on. Richard felt a growing awareness that even if he were alone on the bridge, there were others on board as committed to the survival of the vessel as he was. He had his teams in the engine control and cargo control rooms, the latter led by Steve Penn, who was hopefully more trustworthy than Dom DiVito. The electricians, probably led by engineers Esaki and Murukami, were also clearly hard at work, and he hoped that more circuits would soon be restored. And, he assumed, Rikki Sato would be fighting to get the computer systems up online again, though what state the programmes would be in he hesitated to guess. Just as he also hesitated to guess whether Macavity and his pirates were allowing complete freedom to the men fighting to restore as much power and control to the vessel as possible.

  While these thoughts flickered through his head the deck lights switched on and he continued to reverse the disposition of the engines – an exercise complicated by the fact that he wanted one to go from full ahead to full astern while the other did the opposite, without ever allowing them both to reach ‘stop’ at the same time. The speed with which he was able to achieve this delicate operation was further dictated by his attempts to read the state of the seas coming in from the port side as they swung slowly and inevitably from port forequarter towards broadside-on. It was crucial that Sayonara remained at right angles to the wind and sea for the shortest time possible; that she was moving forward at optimum speed to allow the fullest manoeuvrability, so that she was ready to emulate the agile frigate she most certainly was not – and change her heading the instant Richard asked her to.

  Richard went into himself – into feeling the very fabric of the ship, just as he had when he was sitting in the darkness down in engineering, feeling her disposition and movement through the nerves of his hands, legs, shoulders and spine. Most of all he felt the sway of his ship as she slowly swung round to full broadside-on to the storm. He had timed it so that the instant she arrived in this situation, Sayonara was tilting steeply to port as she slid down the back of a long surf and into the trough of the next one coming in. The moment he felt the deck tilt to his left, Richard completed the setting of his telegraph so that the starboard screw was in full reverse while the port was full ahead, the combination of thrust and drag swinging the long hull to starboard. He already had the helm hard over, feeling his nerve ends seeming to run into the fabric of the vessel as the physics he had committed her to fell into place.

  It was impossible that the pounding engines would push Sayonara up the wave’s rear slope from this angle, but the way he had positioned the rudders meant that the stern offered less resistance to the water than the bulbous, equipment-packed bow. The weight of the stern helped too, while the bridge became less of a sail as it dropped into the wind shadow of the oncoming second wave. And so, even as she slid down the back of the first wave, Sayonara’s stern was moving faster than her bow and gathering momentum. The rear of the vessel reached the trough of the wave first, therefore. Because of the new angle of the hull, the weight and the momentum, it sank deepest, giving most purchase to the racing screws – allowing them to react most powerfully against the angle of the huge rudder fins which were also plunged deep beneath the surface where they too could find most purchase and do the most good. Spume boiled in over the poop, foaming up to thunder against the keel of the lifeboat suspended there. Then the oncoming face of the second wave took her. She was already coming round from broadside-on, so that the thrust of the rising water came under her aft starboard quarter and pushed her up while the deeply buried propellers thrust her forward and round. For a moment she behaved almost like a surfboard, riding the big wave forward, still turning, coming up by the stern until the wind took the top of the bridge house like a sail once again. But now it was blowing from behind, pushing against the starboard aft quarter.

  This was the moment of crisis, Richard knew. Sayonara was still almost broadside-on to the power of the storm. She had heeled over to starboard during the manoeuvre, but now she was heeling to port once again as the angle of the wave was enhanced by the power of the wind against that long, dangerous whaleback. She heeled further over to port as the wave rose under her, coming closer and closer to sitting on her beam ends. That would be the last thing she would do before she rolled over, turned turtle and headed for the bottom of the Kuril Trench. Or the Japan Trench, Richard realized. For she had come so far south that she had passed the point where the one abyss led into the other.

  But there was one last element that Richard had calculated on. On which, in the final analysis, he had gambled the life of the ship. As the stern came up on to the crest of the wave, albeit at a crazy angle, tilted so far over that Richard no longer dared look at the clinometers, so the stern burst out of the water first, propellers whirling madly in the air. He had been watching for the moment and pulled both levers back to ‘stop engines’ an instant before they tore themselves to pieces, racing madly without any water resistance. The long hull balanced on the crest of the wave. But ‘balanced’ was the wrong word. For the weight of that bulbous, equipment-laden bow was still in the grip of the wave-front downhill. And all the weight of the cargo in the five spherical tanks surged forward as though the big seas were passing through them. And that great burden twisted the hull right round as though an elephant had jumped on one end of a see-saw.

  By the time the wave was passing beneath the forward section of the ship, the bow was pointing uphill but downwind and the stern was swinging upwind in a counter-movement while it buried itself deep beneath the water once again. As the poop deck settled into the trough behind the passing wave, Richard pushed both levers to full ahead and brought the helm back to midships. The wind stopped blowing rain and spray in through the gape of the clearview as though someone had somehow managed to close all the windows. Sayonara surged forward obediently, slowly settling on to her new course as the waves continued to come in under her poop. But the crests pushed her forward now and even the wind helped her gather way as it blew on to the rear sections of the bridge house, using the square metal construct as though it were a sail. The LNG tanker settled into a see-saw motion, throwing up her heels instead of her head, but the motion eased quite quickly as she continued to speed up, beginning to catch up with the waves; her rocking motion growing slower and slower until she was moving just a little more swiftly than the seas, under full control and safe at last.

  Richard suddenly realized that Macavity was standing behind him with one of the pirates at his shoulder. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Richard. ‘I think she’s safe for the moment. We have enough sea room to run west for more than a day. Now what about my men? We still need them to keep the ship safe. If Esaki or Murukami and the engineers can get power to the collision alarm radar it would be good. We won’t need the sonar; we’re over one of the deepest trenches in the Pacific. I don’t know how far south we are at the moment. GPS would be good as well. Tell Rikki Sato …’

  Macavity broke in then. ‘You can tell him yourself for all the good it’ll do. He wants to see you and I said OK. He’s in the mess.’ Something about the word ‘mess’ seemed to give Macavity grim amusement.

  ‘Wha
t about all this?’ Richard’s expression and gesture took in the storm, the state of the bridge, the helm and the necessity of keeping it under control.

  ‘Verrazzano here can take over,’ insisted Macavity. ‘He’s a US-registered Able Seaman Unlimited. I can stand watch. There isn’t much navigating to be done. And between us I guess we can keep just ahead of the following seas. That was your plan?’

  ‘Yes. You have the papers?’ demanded Richard without thinking.

  ‘I had my naval lieutenant’s papers before I took the Ultimate Challenge,’ said Macavity. ‘I served on the Warriors. I was specially selected to come aboard and I personally selected the men who came with me. We know what we’re doing, Captain. More than the poesdom crew you brought with you! And now I have all the guns and you need to do what I fucking say, man.’

  Richard hesitated for an instant. That settled the question of accent, he thought. Warrior Class were fast-attack craft used in the South African navy. Poesdom, as far as he knew, was Afrikaans for ‘dumb pussy’. And only South African citizens were allowed to take the Ultimate Challenge and join the special forces. Very few passed the challenge and most of them were soldiers. That made Macavity either a liar or a superman. But this was not the moment to push matters further. Normally, in any vessel Richard actually commanded, he would briefly discuss with the officer relieving him on watch such matters as the ship’s position, the set of the sea, weather and visibility, course and speed, compass heading and errors, if any, navigational equipment, communications and traffic in the immediate area. All of which, under the circumstances, were almost utterly redundant. ‘Very well, Lieutenant, you have the bridge,’ he said formally. And you’re welcome to it, he thought. He suddenly registered that he needed to empty some parts of himself quite urgently. And he needed to fill others – preferably with something substantial, hot and savoury. But apparently he had to see Rikki Sato first. It didn’t occur to him to wonder why, which was a measure of how exhausted he was finally becoming. Leaving American-registered Able Seaman Verrazzano holding the helm and South African Naval Lieutenant Macavity in charge of the bridge, therefore, Richard walked carefully back across the drenched upper weather deck, crunching broken glass underfoot and registering for the first time that there was blood as well as water in pools among the sheets and shards.