The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  But Clotho was riding high and unladen. She looked arrogantly massive towering above the docking facilities around her, casting the power of her presence across the security fencing and over the protesters gathered at the wire-mesh gates. There was no singing here, only a silent stillness like the utter hush before a thunderclap. The Range Rover grumbled forward and the crowd fell apart. When the bumper touched the wire mesh, a line of uniformed security men appeared from a guard hut nearby. At once a sigh passed through the waiting mob and Richard’s mouth suddenly went dry. The prospect of just such a confrontation was what he feared most.

  Even as he gathered himself to jump from the vehicle and dismiss the guards at once, another line of uniformed men appeared: the crew of Clotho herself, come to welcome their new captain. Through the wire diamonds, behind the mob of cheerful sailors, he could see the square figure of Nico Niccolo, the first officer, sending the security guards away. Richard looked across at Robin and he saw that she too was watching the stocky Neapolitan with every sign of approval on her thoughtful countenance. But her glance rested on the officers and crew for only a moment before it was pulled up and away inevitably by the powerful magnetism of Clotho herself.

  They hadn’t seen much of the ships since the launching. In the interim, all the bomb damage had been repaired or hidden; the ships had been refitted and repainted in the house colours of Heritage Mariner, with that great eye instead of a figurehead on her forecastle. The only other ships in the world which looked like her were the massive supertankers of the Heritage Mariner shipping fleet and Clotho seemed to gain scale from the association though she was only one-tenth of their deadweight tonnage. But she was by no means merely a tenth of their size; she was more than five hundred feet from stem to stern and nearly a hundred wide from outside rail to the rail of her bridge wings. She was more than forty feet deep from deck plates to keel and nearly fifty feet high from main deck to radio mast. Her bridgehouse sat three-quarters of her length back from her forecastle head. Halfway down her deck sat a mobile gantry capable of moving on its rails from one end of the main deck to the other, carrying containers of pre-packed waste for lowering into her holds. On the top of the gantry, atop two great struts folded shut like an elbow, the control cabin could be extended out over the side to act as a dockside crane. But, from where they were looking, the crane, the gantry, the effulgent white of the accommodation and navigation decks were almost obscured by the high flare of her super-strengthened icebreaker’s bow.

  The gate in front of them opened and two white-overalled figures came towards the Range Rover. Neither wore any badges of rank, though they both had the air of men used to command. The way they moved, the unhurried calm of their steps and the air of authority they exuded made the the crowd fall back for a moment and Richard let the Discovery roll forward almost silently. The two men, First Officer Nico Niccolo and Chief Engineer Andrew McTavish, turned and fell in beside them, escorting the Mariners through the gate and across the dock to the foot of their gangplank. Only when the gates were closed did the people outside begin to call out and chant their protests into the faces of Clotho’s crew who proved cheerfully ready to reply.

  As Andrew courteously handed Robin out and then turned to help her and Nurse Janet with the twins, Nico aided Richard in his rather more laborious descent, then handed him his walking stick and slammed the door. ‘The dunnage is in the back, Nico,’ said Richard, easing himself gingerly onto his stiff joints. He usually needed two walking sticks — he was using one at the moment out of sheer bravado. He looked up the slope of the gangplank and poignantly regretted the decision.

  Janet and the twins went first — they unstoppably and she hurriedly. Robin and Andrew McTavish followed, deep in conversation — the chief engineer had been a fast friend for all of fifteen years. Last came Richard and Nico Niccolo. ‘Have you heard from Ann?’ asked Richard courteously, but his eyes, and his mind, were busy about the ship.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Italian. ‘She went aboard Atropos yesterday and came through on the radio last night. Very cagey about first impressions. She feels a bit isolated.’ He gave one of his minuscule, eloquent, Neapolitan shrugs.

  Ann Cable was coming across with the Canadians aboard Clotho’s sister ship, hoping to write a sequel to her best-selling book on the loss of Napoli. It was hardly surprising she felt isolated, thought Richard grimly. The sister ships were crewed and owned by different partners in the consortium. A fierce rivalry was developing between them, and there was Ann, all but engaged to Nico, first officer of the rival ship, close friends with the Mariners, masters and owners of the rival ship, and an investigative journalist apparently — and actually — looking for every failure of procedure and flaw of routine. She must be about as welcome as the plague aboard Atropos. No wonder Nico sounded concerned.

  As Richard reached the deck, all thought of Ann Cable left his mind. It was mid-afternoon now and the sun was beginning to creep down towards the western horizon. It was the first really warm day of spring and the whole of the Irish Sea seemed calm and turquoise under the pale blue sky. Only the shadowed faces of the larger waves took a really green tinge and their crests were a cheerful riot of silver and gold as far as the eye could see. There was little discernible pattern, but the waves roared against the dockside in steady series and there was a swell just regular enough to make Clotho stir at her moorings. The Point of Ayre, the northernmost point of the Isle of Man, lay just below the horizon, and beyond that lay Ulster. Richard’s knees gave a twinge at the thought of it and he returned his mind to the ship.

  Robin and Andrew McTavish were halfway to the bridgehouse, in the shadow of that massive central gantry, and the twins had already vanished into it. Richard turned and followed, with Nico still by his side. ‘What do you think of her?’ asked Richard.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ said the first officer but Richard seemed to hear something below the bland answer. Some criticism or reservation implied. He frowned.

  ‘Everything up to scratch?’ he probed.

  ‘You’ll go all over her. You’ll see. I never been on a ship fitted like this one. She’s like a palace. A very practical palace.’

  Again, just a shade of reservation, like one of his tiny, telling shrugs.

  ‘So there’s nothing wrong?’

  ‘Niente. Nothing.’ But the double negative was just not quite satisfactory.

  Richard thought about Nico Niccolo — the typical Neapolitan, cool, worldly-wise, cynical, a shade sarcastic and utterly superstitious.

  ‘You think she’s bad luck?’

  Nico held the A deck door open for him. ‘Are you mad to say such a thing, Capitan?’ he asked quietly as Richard stepped past him into the bridgehouse. And it was not until they were in the lift, purring up towards the bridge deck, that Richard realised that there was more than one way to take that remark.

  The wheelhouse and navigation bridge were sparse but not spartan. The equipment stands seemed barely adequate for the safe navigation and control of such a vessel, and yet closer inspection showed how well-equipped Clotho actually was.

  There was a complete communications stand, quite apart from the radio equipment. The bridge could at any time be in communication with head office through the fax machine. At the same time it could be in communication with one of the low-flying weather satellites, receiving detailed weather information for their immediate area. The collision alarm radar had three settings, at radiuses of five, ten and twenty miles, as well as a ‘big picture’ facility. It was specially enhanced to see almost as far both beneath the water and in the upper air. And it was super-sensitive, to pick up the slightest trace of ice at the earliest moment.

  Below the broad, angled clearview, in the centre of the forward bank of instruments, stood not one steering control system but three: one to control the rudder and the pitch of the great single screw at the stern; another to control the smaller manoeuvring screws beside it and at the bow; a third to control the extra thrusters on the sides.
Even the binoculars which sat so snugly in their pouch by the comfortable black leather of the watchkeeper’s chair on the port side of the bridge had electronic rangefinding facilities and image intensification systems for enhanced watchkeeping in poor light.

  The whole ship was the same: all glittering, spacious work areas whose size was emphasised by the miniaturisation of the high-tech work aids. The engine control room seemed to have nothing more than a couple of computer screens in it. Yet those screens could call up a graphical representation of every working part of the engine, together with a readout of its efficiency, past, present and projected. And within the invisibly mounted but massively powerful computers, all such monitoring went on constantly so that any failure likely to occur could be foreseen and an automatic warning given before anything actually went wrong.

  While the twins ran riot around them, Richard and Robin went with Nico and Andrew all over their ship. They examined everything from the exquisitely fitted galley to the massively strengthened bow, from the spare propeller clutched in its clamps behind the forecastle head to the weight-training facilities and the sauna in the gymnasium which overlooked the swimming pool area currently covered over aft of the bridgehouse. As the inspection proceeded, Nico and Andrew fell back and allowed them to walk together side by side. After a while, Robin slid her arm round Richard’s slim waist and took a little of his weight on her shoulder — she too had been worried about the bravado which had left his second walking stick behind. And he was glad to wrap his arm round her shoulders and hold her close.

  At last he slowly turned their steps through the now familiar passageways back towards the main deck and the companionway. It was time for Clotho to set sail.

  ‘All ashore who are going ashore,’ he said quietly, and Robin’s eyes caught Nurse Janet’s. The nanny hustled the twins away towards the dockside and the Range Rover.

  They stepped out onto the main deck and into the first truly beautiful sunset of the year. There was not a cloud to spoil it; simply the dying fire of the westering sun half drowned in the vivid waves. Far to the east, immediately above the sullen crags of the Lake District, stood the evening star like a lighthouse on a distant shore, casting its steady gleam across a sea of shadows. The evening wind stirred against them as they walked across the deck together, still with their arms wrapped round each other, and their quiet words were all but lost beneath the low rumble of the surf and the high, sad keening of the black-backs and the herring gulls.

  At the top of the companionway they stood alone, lost in the sadness of their parting.

  ‘I love you, Richard,’ whispered Robin, her grey eyes like still pools, brimming.

  ‘I’ll miss you, darling, more than I can say.’

  ‘The case ...’ she was reluctant even to name the Napoli and the vicious court case Heritage Mariner was so deeply embroiled in over her loss. It was yet one more thing which she feared would go wrong and do them irreparable damage.

  ‘Sir William and Sir Harcourt have it all sewn up, don’t worry,’ he said quietly.

  They exchanged one last, crushing embrace before surrendering to the demands of time, tide and duty.

  Then Captain Mariner came up to full height and turned away to stride back across the deck towards the bridgehouse and the navigation bridge. Already, family was being thrust aside by thoughts of the North Channel, the Western Ocean and the St Lawrence Seaway.

  But when the tears on her cheeks called her back to the present for a moment, she turned and looked at Richard still standing at the head of the companionway, watching her walk away. ‘Don’t forget to kiss the twins “Good night” from me every night,’ she said.

  It was her first command as master of Clotho.

  *

  The control room of the gantry, nestled on its folded arm nearly fifty feet above the main deck, was exactly that: a room. It had a wide window through which could be seen the wheeling horizon and the sun setting beyond it. Below the window was a complex control console, the controls idle and useless now because the ship was sailing unladen, but vibrating slightly with latent power as the ship got under way. Behind the console was a bench seat long enough to accommodate four people easily. On the padded seat lay a sleeping bag, unrolled and unzipped. Behind the seat, hidden from the eyes of all except the circling, incurious gulls, was a small work area. Here was set up a kind of camp: a small primus stove surrounded by pans of food and water. There were tins and packages of all kinds. They looked plentiful but in fact they would have fitted comfortably in a well-filled backpack, leaving plenty of room for the sleeping bag and the plastic containers full of Semtex high explosive neatly piled beneath the bench with the detonators and timer in a little Tupperware box beside them. The detonators and the timer took up hardly any room at all. There had even been room for the stowaway to bring aboard a book with her when she had climbed, unobserved, up from the seaward side while all that excitement on the dock had been going on. She got it out now and began to read, contentedly. It was Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and it was in the original French.

  After a few moments, however, she set the novel down and pulled out some blank paper and a pencil. ‘My darling,’ she wrote in French, ‘I know that you will never read these words because they must never fall into the captain’s hands and so I must destroy them almost as soon as I have written them, but it will be so lonely here without you that I must write them down or I shall go insane.

  ‘Simply to think of you so far away makes my heart ache. But when I think that you are coming ever closer to me, and that soon I too will be coming towards you, I can feel such a passion building in me that I find it hard to breathe. I have never known anyone like you and only a mission such as this could ever separate us. Oh, my love, do you remember that first night we were together on Avalon and we swam in the sea at high tide? How the whole of that coast of Newfoundland out to the Grand Banks themselves seemed to be alive with those tiny fish that night so that we, swimming naked like seals, were caressed by them in their millions? You were so angry because of the danger. So many fish, you said, would bring whales and sharks, and so they did. But not to us. Not to us, my beloved, because we are beloved of Nature. Gaia is our goddess and she keeps us safe from harm as she did that night when the silver fish cooled our burning flesh with their teeming numbers but lit other hotter fires within. Who would have thought that a life such as mine, of killing and maiming, could have come to such a fruition as this? Did you know that all those tiny fish had come there to give birth and to die? Do you know that we, too, will give birth soon? I found out just after you had returned to Canada and I cannot wait to tell you. How soon will I see you? Let me count the days until we meet at Farewell ...

  ‘I must break off soon because it is growing dark and I cannot risk a light. Tomorrow I will reconnoitre and soon I will set the bomb. Our friends covered things well at Seascale and I was able to bring aboard even more than we managed to set in Belfast. When Clotho goes up, it will destroy Sept Isles and stop this foul traffic. And when I set the charges you have aboard with you, Atropos will close things down in England.

  ‘Our friends in London and New York will send the publicity material within the week and Heritage Mariner will feel the weight of our wrath.

  ‘We cannot allow these beings to pollute our beautiful world. We cannot rest from trying to destroy these people who have already put our magic Avalon at risk with the filth on Napoli.

  ‘But the thought of you so far away hurts me more than I can say. Tonight I will dream of your hands and your lips upon me. It is all that stops me going mad. We will be together in six short nights. Six short nights and no longer. Then the two of us will go back to Avalon until we are no longer two, but three.’

  CHAPTER FOUR - Day Three

  Friday, 21 May 16:00

  The seventh tee at Brampton golf course, halfway between Cold Fell and Carlisle in Cumbria, was called Cardiac Hill. Neither of the two men currently considering it needed to worry abou
t its reputation. They were both slim men, light but strong, and they were both fit; they carried the weight of their responsibilities well, no matter what the burden of their years.

  Sir William Heritage, Robin Mariner’s father and chairman of Heritage Mariner, was coming up for his middle eighties but he was wiry and strong enough to be pulling his own golf clubs. Sir Harcourt Gibbons hoped that in ten years’ time he would be as hale and hearty as his friend — and as able to slam more than two hundred yards out of his drives with such consistency.

  But the slope of this hole was a challenge to intellect as much as to technique. It was Harcourt’s honour, though he would gladly have traded the privilege to see what club Sir William chose. He squinted up the hill and wondered. At last he pulled a number two wood out of his bag and began to set himself up to drive off. He was acutely aware that this was his friend’s local course and he was very much the stranger here. It seemed to him that distance would be preferable to height at this stage.

  The conversation between the two men had been going on since Harcourt arrived at Cold Fell just before luncheon. He had caught the train up early on Friday morning and had been ensconced snugly in one of Sir William’s guest rooms at Cold Fell by drinks time at noon. But the topic of conversation had been of such importance that it had interrupted the social chit-chat at lunch and undermined the sporting talk over pudding. And this afternoon, between the comments about what wood and what iron, it had dominated the golfing conversation, too.

  ‘Look, Bill,’ said Harcourt as he bent and drove his tee deep into the ground. ‘The law is like the Savoy Hotel. It’s open to anyone.’ He balanced his ball on top of the tee and straightened, looking up the hill in front of him. ‘Anyone who can afford it,’ he added, pleased to have found a use for the famous old saying.