I stepped back and the grip on my arm relaxed. ‘When will Dillon be here?’ I asked.
The man with the beard glanced at his watch and said in a voice that was as gentle as his manner, ‘Any minute now.’ The engineer brushed past me. ‘I got to get the engine warmed up.’ And he disappeared down the after-hatch. The other two began humping the stores below and I went with them to the little galley. The diesel started into life as I was cutting myself a hunk of bread and some ham.
I was still eating when I heard the outboard alongside and the clatter of feet on deck. I poked my head up out of the after-hatch to see the Swede making fast. The outboard stopped abruptly and a dark face with lank black hair appeared above the bulwarks. He might have been a South American Indian, or perhaps he was Arab – it was difficult to tell against the leaden glimmer of the water as he vaulted on board. And then he leaned over to help my father up.
The old man steadied himself against the wheelhouse, looking at me and breathing a little fast. ‘I was told you were here.’ The grimace of a smile came and went. ‘I’m glad.’ And for the first time I saw a glimmer of warmth in his eyes. He turned at the sound of a voice and his hand reached out to my arm, a restraining gesture. I could see Paddy’s face as he stood holding the boat alongside and another man just swinging his leg over the bulwarks, his back towards me. He was wearing a dark blue anorak with a Shetland wool cap on his head. ‘Dillon,’ the old man murmured in my ear, and there was a note of warning. The man turned and I was looking at the hard set face, the cold elusive eyes I had last seen at Foula. ‘You know each other I think,’ my father said.
Dillon nodded, staring at me stonily, and I thought he smiled, but I couldn’t be sure, the tight-lipped mouth compressed. ‘So you’re coming with us?’
My mouth was dry and I didn’t answer, wondering if he knew how the sight of him affected me – the feeling of being trapped.
His wandering gaze appeared to fasten on my father. ‘He’s your responsibility,’ he said. ‘Not mine.’ There was a note of censure in his voice. Then he turned to me, the hard mouth smiling grimly as he said, ‘No doubt we’ll find a use for you.’ He seemed amused, but there was a tenseness about him, and then the engineer was there and the two of them went into the wheelhouse. In less than ten minutes the inflatable was lashed to the stern, the anchor up, and we were moving down the firth, the man with the dark Indian features in the wheelhouse connecting up the electronic gear.
Just beyond The Fidd they streamed the little torpedo like a tin fish from the stern, letting it out on a Terylene line and unreeling the wire connecting it with the transmitter. We motored almost to the entrance, then slowed to take bearings.
The old man came and stood beside me. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’
The straight line of our wake was bending now as the Mary Jane swung away in a wide circle. ‘No,’ I said.
‘You should try to hide your feelings more.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s one of our top men.’
We were standing in the shelter of the wheelhouse facing the stern and I watched as we completed the turn. ‘What’s his background?’
‘A professional, like myself. But the right age. And the right time, too – democracy finished, all the countries of the West, even America, degenerate and vulnerable.’
We were headed north again, the speed picking up and the beat of the engine increasing. ‘Where’s he come from?’ I asked. ‘What nationality?’
‘Scots-Irish. Started in the Midlothian coalfields. Moved to Liverpool docks. He’s politically astute and quite ruthless. Remember that and do what he says.’
I thought I detected a note of respect, of envy even, as though in the pecking order of that shadowy world to which they both belonged my father knew his place.
The wake was straightening out now and I kept my eyes on the pale taut line to the submerged torpedo. Somebody joined us from the wheelhouse, but I didn’t shift my gaze. If the marine electronics gear was some sort of an impulse transmitter, then I knew what to expect and I wanted to see it. The light was fading, the clouds very louring, and suddenly our wake erupted in a jet of spray, the sea heaving beneath it. Then the shock wave of the seabed explosion hit the soles of my feet as it had done that night in the Duchess out by No. 2 buoy.
I turned my head. It was Dillon standing beside me, a quiet look of satisfaction on his face. Our eyes met and he nodded. ‘North Star,’ he said, and there was tension in his voice. ‘The charges are already laid.’ And he added sharply, ‘A job you could have done.’
‘The anchor cables again?’ I was thinking of the rig adrift in a big sea and the driller working in a frenzy to disconnect the marine riser. ‘There are safety devices,’ I said.
‘Pipe rams, blind shears, the whole emergency disconnect drill.’ He nodded. ‘I haven’t wasted my time in Aberdeen. I guess I know almost as much as a driller about how the blowout preventor works. But it takes time, and there’s always the human factor.’
‘So you’re going for pollution. You’re going to try and flood the whole sea with oil.’
He looked at me, that thin-lipped smile, and a sardonic note in his voice as he said, ‘Still worrying about moral principles?’ He clapped me on the back, the only time I had seen him in high good humour. ‘With luck we’ll set that rig adrift at the critical moment when they’re testing for pressure, and you can watch it.’ The smile vanished, tension in his voice again. ‘But don’t try to interfere. And stay out of the wheelhouse.’
Darkness was falling as we turned west under Muckle Flugga. We were very crowded with only two on watch and the tiered bunks all occupied. I couldn’t sleep for thinking how utterly defenceless that rig was, a sitting duck to the heterogeneous group we had on board. The forecast had not been very good, a cold front passing through and a deepening depression moving in from the Atlantic. About 02.00 I went up on deck. The wind was nor’nor’-westerly Force 4, a beam sea and the old girl rolling like a cow.
I found the man with the dark Indian face clinging to the rail capping of the bulwark and shivering uncontrollably. He was moaning, and when I asked him if he was all right, he only groaned and retched with a rasping empty sound into the back of a breaking wave as it rolled under us.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
‘Paulo,’ he gasped.
‘Where’s your home?’
‘Mexico.’ He pronounced the ‘x’ as an ‘h’ so that I didn’t get it at first. And when I asked him what he was doing over here, he looked up at me, his face green in the starboard navigation light, his teeth showing in the flash of an exhausted smile. ‘You are not a freedom fighter or you know. We are international, like a – a club, eh?’ The boat swooped sickeningly on the long Atlantic swell, twisting and rolling as her bows ploughed into the sea, white water creaming past. Stars showed through ragged gaps in the clouds and it was cold.
I got him into the wheelhouse and he leaned shivering against the side of it. Paddy was at the wheel, nobody else there. ‘This your first trip?’ I asked him.
He shook his head, speechless.
‘You’re the electronics expert, are you?’
He stared at me uncomprehendingly. The bows slammed down, spray slashing at the windows, and above the roar of the water I heard Paddy’s voice – ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’
I looked at him, at the tough, low-browed, unimaginative features. ‘He might have gone overboard.’
‘Sure and he never has. He’s always sick the first few hours.’
‘He’s done this trip before, has he?’
There was no answer and I turned to the Mexican. ‘How many times?’
He was still shivering, his brown features a sick grey. ‘Two times,’ he murmured.
‘Why? What do you do?’ He frowned in concentration. ‘You’re an expert – at what?’
‘Ah, si.’ The teeth flashed. ‘Explosives. I am trained in explosives.’
I glanced at the imp
ulse transmitter at the back of the wheelhouse and the vessel yawed as Paddy left the wheel. ‘You better get out now.’
We stared at each other, but he was a compact, powerfully-built man. ‘Watch your helm,’ I said as the bows fell away in the trough, the top of a swell breaking against our starboard side, solid water crashing against the wheelhouse.
‘Okay. You steer then.’
I took the wheel and he lit a cigarette, standing right behind me.
‘You’ve been a trawlerman, have you?’ I asked.
‘Coasters.’ But he wouldn’t say what run or where he came from, and after a while I handed the wheel back to him and went below to my bunk. That short spell at the helm, the feel of the boat under my hands, had relaxed me and I slept.
I woke to a change in the motion. It was just after 06.30 and we were hove-to. The light was on and I heard somebody moving in the bunk below me. I stayed there, wrapped in the cocoon of my blankets, my eyes closed and unwilling to stir. Twelve hours. Just about the time we should reach North Star. But there was no movement on deck and when I did open my eyes all the bunks were occupied, only my father getting into his clothes. ‘Are we there?’ I asked him.
‘Not yet. We wait here till nightfall.’
‘And then?’
‘We relieve Island Girl.’
So I still had a whole day. I closed my eyes again, sleepless now and wondering what the hell I was going to do. What could I do? And cutting the rig adrift wouldn’t necessarily result in massive pollution. I didn’t know much about drilling operations, but I had seen the blowout preventor panel in the toolpusher’s office. I had seen how quickly they had been able to operate the pipe rams to hold the drill string suspended in the hole that night the windward anchor cables had been cut. There had been a strong wind then. Now there was very little. I knew that by the feel of the boat. She was rolling to the swell, but that was all. I turned over, away from the light, and dozed for a while.
It was eight-thirty when I finally got up, only two of the bunks occupied now and the ship still hove-to with the engine running slow. There was coffee on the galley stove, eggs and bacon beside the pan. I was just sitting down to my breakfast when Paulo came down.
‘Feeling better?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘Okay now.’
‘What’s happening on deck?’
‘Nothing. They wait to make a radio telephone to the other sheep.’
‘What time?’
‘Nine-thirty.’ He went past me, through the door we had cut in the bulkhead to the hold. He had a torch and a plastic case that looked as though it contained tools. I finished my breakfast, then went through into the hold to see what he was up to. He was crouched over a butane gas cylinder, screwing a plug into the head of it where the control valve is normally sited. Just behind him was another cylinder with two wires trailing from it. ‘What is it – a depth charge?’ It had to be something like that.
He looked up at me, puzzled. ‘Detonator,’ he said, pointing to the head of the cylinder he was working on.
‘An underwater bomb?’
His eyes shifted nervously, the whites showing in the torchlight. ‘Bomb – yes.’
‘What’s it for?’ I was thinking of the force that would be generated by gelignite, or even a home-made explosive, packed into such strong containers, and the inflatable still with us, lashed to the stern. They could float the cylinders down in that, and if they were detonated against the riser when oil was coming up the pipe on full pressure … I was suddenly very scared, seeing in my imagination the vast explosive burn-up, the whole rig engulfed in a searing mass of flame. ‘Christ Almighty,’ I exclaimed. ‘You can’t. Just think …’ I had reached down, gripping hold of his shoulder. ‘There are more than sixty men –’
But he had leapt from under my grasp, a reflex action like a coiled spring triggered at the touch of my hand. The torch blinded me, but I saw the knife in his hand, heard the tension in his voice as he hissed, ‘You go please.’ He was poised like a man cornered.
‘It’s all right,’ I said soothingly. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’
But he just stood there, the steel blade of the knife glinting in the torch beam, and in the silence I could feel the tautness of his nerves. I turned with deliberate slowness, anxious not to upset him further as I moved to the bulkhead door, the skin crawling between my shoulder-blades.
Back in the galley I glanced at my watch. It was almost nine-thirty and I got my anorak and went up on deck to find the sun glimmering through a layer of cirrus. The wheelhouse door was closed, but through the glass side-panel I saw they were all there and Dillon with the mike of the R/T transmitter to his mouth. I slid the door open and heard his voice: ‘… Island Girl. Mary Jane to Island Girl. Come in, please, Island Girl. Over.’
No answer. He tried again, and then loud and clear over the loudspeaker came a Shetland voice identifying himself as Island Girl and asking why the hell they hadn’t been relieved that morning.
‘We’ll be with you some time tonight,’ Dillon said. ‘I’ll call you again at 19.00 hours. What’s the weather like out there? Over.’ He knew damn well what the weather was like, for we must have been just over the horizon from the other boat, but he waited while Island Girl’s skipper talked about a heavy swell with a layer of cirrus overhead and the morning’s weather bulletin forecasting a series of depressions moving in from the Atlantic. Then he asked what was happening on the rig. ‘There’s rumours ashore that they’ve struck oil. Over.’
‘Aye, there’s been a great coming and going these last two days. They’ve been running an electrical log and getting ready for what they call a drill stem test to check the pressure and rate of flow of the oil. Did you not listen to the news this morning? It seems the Company announced the strike officially late last night.’ But when Dillon asked him whether they had started testing yet, he answered, ‘Not yet. But there was a helicopter flight came in yesterday with service company lads. They’re running a gun down the hole and there’s a bloody great steel boom rigged out over the side, Ed Wiseberg was on the R/T to us a few minutes ago warning us to keep clear of it from noon onwards, so I reckon you’ll see some fireworks when you arrive this evening.’ And he added, ‘Who’s that I’m talking to? It’s not Jamie?’
‘No, it’s his relief,’ Dillon said. ‘Jamie and his lads were due for a bit of a break.’
‘So you’ve a different crew, eh?’ And the voice went on, ‘Have you a man called Randall with you? I heard there was, ’cos the trawler Duchess of Norfolk arrived last night with Gertrude Petersen on board asking for him. Is he there now? Over.’
The mention of Gertrude, the memory of that explosives expert crouched over the cylinders … I flung the door back, Dillon denying my presence and my voice shouting, ‘I’m here. Randall. Tell Ed Wiseberg …’ But Dillon had dropped the mike.
‘Grab him.’
I saw Paddy with his head low and out of the corner of my eye the big Swede, and I leapt at Dillon in the grip of fear and a sudden terrible desire to smash him before they got me. I saw his hand reaching into his anorak, his eyes widening, and then he ducked. My fist caught him on the side of his head, slamming him back against the radio. I saw him fall, a shocked, surprised look on his face, and then a hand gripped my shoulder, swung me round and something exploded in my belly. The Swede was a blurred image as I doubled up with the pain and then his fist crashed into my jaw and I lost consciousness.
The next thing I knew I was being dragged to my feet and a voice, Dillon’s voice, said something about the chain locker. I saw my father, the twisted side of his face, and his eyes hurt, as though in doing what I had I had done him a personal injury. He looked at me and didn’t say a word. No attempt to stop them as I was dragged out of the wheelhouse. Unconsciousness closed in on me again, the pain in my guts overwhelming, and when I came to it was in darkness with the hard feel of the anchor chain under me and the occasional slam of the bows reverberating through my head, a hanging le
ngth of chain sliding across my body.
I don’t know how long I lay there in a half coma, dimly conscious of the salt sea smell of the stowage locker and of the links damp and hard against my limbs. It was freezing cold and I thanked God for my anorak, conscious of the roll and swoop as the boat lay motionless, head-to-swell, but conscious of little else until I had recovered sufficiently to drag myself to my feet.
And with consciousness I cursed myself for my stupidity, for the blind rage which had sent me for Dillon. I should have gone for the impulse transmitter. I should have found something with which to smash it. And I cursed myself for not having thrown those cases overboard. Guessing what they were, why in God’s name hadn’t I got rid of them when I could, instead of delivering them to Burra Firth? The excuse of time. Time on my side. Christ! All my life I seemed to have been living on borrowed time, and Wiseberg, Stewart, men I had met – a total of more than sixty – all at risk. And myself to blame, their executioner. No, not their executioner. But a party to it.
I stood there, in the blackness of the sea-stinking hole, the chain coming down through the hawsepipe, coiled like a cold steel snake under my feet. And nothing I could do. Nothing. Nothing. Shut in behind a thick barred wooden door, in a space I couldn’t even stand up in properly, my head bowed by the wooden deck beams.
I sank back on to the dank hard bed of the steel links, breathing deeply, easing the pain until it was no more than a numb ache. Time passed slowly, the luminous dial of my wristwatch the only visible companion in the darkness, and nothing there that I could use on the door. Nothing to do but wait. And waiting, my mind focused incessantly on that scene in the hold, the cylinders with wires trailing from the detonators. A freedom fighter – my God! What sort of freedom was that, to roast sixty innocent men alive! Increasingly, as the power to think returned, my mind dwelt on the Duchess, the knowledge that she was out here, fishing in these waters – and Gertrude asking for me.
North Star Page 26
