The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Over you go, please, Nico. Take your boat and go after him. I’ll be on the bridge and I’ll bring her round at once.’

  Nico was in action as soon as she finished speaking.

  ‘You men,’ said Robin in the sort of tone she might have used to discuss pruning roses with her gardener, ‘cut the falls below that mess, but don’t let the boat break free.’

  Down the side of the ship from the main deck to Nico’s lifeboat was a Jacob’s ladder. Nico swarmed down it as fast as he could, almost shocked by the calm firmness with which Robin was handling the emergency. This was certainly the way to be proceeding: exactly by the book. She should be pounding up the companionway towards the bridge about now, walkie-talkie to her lips, commanding Sullivan to bring Clotho round in a Williamson turn and to sound ‘man overboard’. She could rely on Biggs and McTavish to get the other two boats up with a minimum of fuss.

  The Neapolitan stepped down into his boat. ‘Let go, all,’ he called to his men. Then he looked down to the second engineer crouching over the motor, ready to go. ‘Full ahead,’ he ordered, and caught up a yellow life preserver as he spoke.

  *

  Jamie Curtis exploded wildly to the surface and forced himself to calm down, lie still and float quietly, all too aware of the fact that he should have been wearing a life jacket, but he had been too excited to go to the bother of putting one on. It required an enormous effort of will to remain calm, which it never occurred to him was actually almost heroism. He had never realised that the sea could seem so big. That a ship as large as Clotho could become so small so quickly. That she could sail away so fast.

  He hung motionless in the water, looking after her, fighting to believe that this was actually happening. He gasped in a breath, knowing that his face would go under the water again during the next few seconds. He closed his eyes and went into convulsive movement once more. Three seconds later, he had kicked off his shoes and was hanging in the water again, waiting for his heart to slow. The next thing he should do, according to the theory, was to take off his trousers, tie knots in the legs and inflate them. But he was wearing a white boiler suit and a cursory experiment soon revealed that his water-clumsy fingertips couldn’t undo any of the buttons or even loosen the belt buckle. Any thought of taking it off and inflating it was out of the question. Thank God. Getting out of his shoes had been bad enough and they had been loose slip-ons.

  He was young for his eighteen years and this was his first long period away from home. His parents lived in Portsmouth and he had gone to school and college there. His cadetship with Heritage Mariner had begun with the year and Clotho was his first posting after four months of further training ashore. He was a quiet, sensible, reliable young man and was already establishing himself as a popular shipmate and something of a ship’s mascot. He was unaware of the way his shipmates viewed him, however, and his first thought after the initial panic had washed over him was anger at the stupid bravado which had made him do such a silly thing — and without a lifebelt, too! God alone knew what the captain would say when she got him back aboard. The fact that she was a woman only made things worse. Jamie’s father was a small, quiet businessman who rather tended to indulge his intelligent, clear-minded son, so Jamie’s mother had been left to exercise discipline in the Curtis household. It did not seem likely to Jamie, therefore, that his captain’s femininity would make her a soft touch.

  These thoughts all raced through his head in a very little time and many of them were barely conscious in any case. They hardly impinged on the enormity of what was happening to him; what he could see, hear, taste and feel was so overwhelming that it made what he was thinking seem utterly insignificant.

  He was looking after the Clotho, along the line of her wake, so he was facing the set of the sea. The surface of the water was just below his chin and he could only see beyond the face of the next wave during those few seconds when he was held up by each round, green crest. At these moments, he could see a seemingly endless series of turquoise waves washing up towards him from a horizon which was only a mile or two away — a horizon below which Clotho was already hull down and vanishing fast. Apart from her darkly silhouetted upper works, there was nothing else to see except for the endless ocean.

  From nowhere, a picture of the chart leaped into his mind. He saw it as he had seen it at seven thirty this morning when Nico Niccolo had showed it to him before breakfast. The tiny mark Clotho had been, one hundred and fifty-six hours out of Seascale, just over a hundred miles due south of Kap Farvel in Greenland. Cape Farewell indeed, he thought. Farewell Jamie Curtis.

  At least the water wasn’t too cold. That was a relief, and something of a surprise. But then he remembered what Nico had told him about the Gulf Stream and why the weather here was clear and so foggy so close to their starboard beam. A wavelet slapped him in the face and he tasted salt and choked, but it cleared his mind a little and it finally occurred to him to stop floating and to start swimming. If he followed Clotho’s course, he reasoned, then he would bring himself closer to the rescuers who must be coming back after him.

  As he took his first clumsy breaststroke, panic washed over him again. The ocean was so unimaginably enormous. So unutterably deep. Angling his body as though he were in his local swimming pool suddenly made him think that there wasn’t fourteen feet of water beneath him but more like two thousand metres down to the Eirik Ridge. That was more than a thousand fathoms; more than six thousand feet. The weight of these terrible figures all but pulled him under the surface.

  *

  The Williamson emergency turn was something of a turning point for Robin herself. She stood on her bridge, calmly quiet, eyes everywhere, but implicitly trusting Johnny Sullivan who held the watch and Sam Larkman who held the wheel to know what to do. The practice had gone well enough and even Jamie Curtis’s accident could not undermine that. In fact, it was the sort of thing that could happen all too easily and there was no sense in getting upset. If they got the snagged lifeboat up safely, if they got Nico’s boat back and, most importantly, if they got the cadet safely out of the water, then it would have been quite a satisfactory morning’s work. They would have proved themselves to be just the sort of crew she would be happy to lead through that mist wall into the ice-bound maelstrom of the Labrador Sea. For the first time since coming aboard, Robin got the impression of her command working under her quietly but efficiently, like the movement of Richard’s old steel Rolex watch.

  The thought of Richard caught her with unexpected force and she suddenly found herself trembling with desire for him. Literally knocked breathless by an overpowering need to feel his hands upon her. It was a feeling which was by no means new to her, but not since pregnancy had rearranged her hormone doses had she felt overpowering lust for him like this. It was most distracting.

  They had been in contact at least once a day and he had updated her on Harcourt Gibbons’ death and the fact that he had approached Maggie DaSilva. She knew and liked the young woman barrister, but the sudden, tragic death of her father’s old friend had only served to darken her view of the current situation further.

  Her contact with Atropos and its headquarters at Sept Isles had been hardly more satisfactory. The Canadian vessel had set sail late and then fallen further and further behind schedule as the weather closed in. The organisation in the small Canadian city seemed to be an utter shambles, one which had lasted far longer than it should have done, even after Dan Williams’ death. As for herself, she knew she had had an easy ride of it so far; she was well aware that things between here and her destination would all too likely be the exact opposite.

  Bill Christian stuck his head through from the radio shack and called her back to the present. ‘No ships near enough to help with the man overboard,’ he reported. ‘And Atropos’s eight o’clock report has still not come in. But the weather report has. That high pressure ridge over Greenland has a bitch of a storm trapped right over their heads. They’re in deep shit over there. And we’ll be in it
with them in four or five hours’ time. Ah. Sorry about the language, Captain.’

  ‘Okay, Bill, thanks.’ She was back to the present but still too distracted to be irritated by his embarrassment over his mild swearing — one of the few aspects of sexism currently extant aboard. She would check on Atropos’s situation when they had Jamie back aboard. She thumbed the SEND button on her walkie-talkie. ‘Nico?’

  ‘Here, Captain. No sign.’

  ‘I have a clear trace from the first officer’s boat, Captain,’ said Rupert Biggs from his position beside the collision alarm radar. It would be too much to expect him to see Jamie too, though the equipment was almost magically powerful.

  ‘Keep feeding bearings to the helmsman until it’s dead ahead,’ she ordered, and crossed to the watchkeeper’s chair. There was nothing she could do until Nico found Jamie and Atropos found Nico. She settled back into the black leather executive chair and let her mind drift a little.

  For the first time in two years she didn’t feel fat and dumpy. She hadn’t dictated any special diet, indeed she was eating like a pig. She hadn’t lost any weight. Her body hadn’t changed at all. She had simply ceased worrying — indeed, thinking — about it. She had had six nights of uninterrupted sleep — again, for the first time in two years. Although Nurse Janet slept on one side of the nursery, Richard and Robin slept on the other side and it was a rare event for the twins to sleep through. Or, once they were up, that they would be satisfied with anything less than being carried through to their parents’ bed. Only on the nights before the most important meetings did Richard and she let Janet try to handle the monsters on her own.

  And there had been quite a few important meetings for Robin as Richard seemed to have been convalescent in one way or another for the last eighteen months. Her father, Sir William Heritage, and the chief executive, Helen Dufour, had kept Heritage Mariner well on track, but times had been hard in the City and it could not have happened more unfortunately that both Richard and she had been pulled away from the office. Neither of them had been on a Heritage Mariner vessel for far too long. Richard had been ashore since the Gulf War and she had been beached since her involvement in the recovery of the Heritage Mariner flagship supertanker Prometheus more than two years ago. And, for the first time since then, it seemed, she felt wide awake, fit and confident. A different person to the woman who had examined herself so glumly in that mirror in a Belfast hotel bedroom three months ago, and yet the change had started in less than a week.

  It was simply wonderful to be back at sea.

  To be free.

  The walkie-talkie squawked. ‘Yes, Nico?’

  ‘I think we have him ... I think ... What is that?’

  A distant voice behind Nico’s came over the walkie-talkie faintly, but the words, and the tone in which they were said, were clear enough: ‘It’s a shark!’

  *

  At first Nico couldn’t believe it. A shark seemed so unlikely in these waters that he was about to dismiss the triangular fin as belonging to a dolphin or a small whale when he saw the telltale second point which told of a vertical fish’s tail. The tails of all whales and their cousins lie horizontal. This certainly was a shark.

  ‘What sort of sharks are there in these waters?’ he asked his crew. ‘Basking sharks? Whale sharks?’ Neither would harm the boy; they were both toothless and fed on krill or plankton.

  ‘That’s a tiger shark,’ said the man who had first seen it. And even as he spoke, one of the other lookouts called, ‘There he is, sir!’

  The only thing they could do was to go for Jamie as quickly as possible, taking care to keep the lifeboat between the man in the water and the shark. The man-eater’s senses were not so easily fooled, however, and it began to make a race of it, clearly attracted by the signals given out by Jamie’s attempts to swim. The boy was practically asleep by the look of things. His body appeared and disappeared up and down the backs of the rolling green waves, and it continued a slow, automatic breaststroke and gave no reaction at all to the chorus of shouts and warnings which all aboard the lifeboat were giving.

  Nico began to look around for a way to scare the fish off. ‘What the hell is a tiger shark doing this far north?’ he muttered as he worked, pulling out all the survival gear, looking for the packet of distress flares which were all he could think of that might help. But he wasn’t really asking, for he knew the answer well enough: it was the Gulf Stream. The shark had simply cruised up out of its normal home waters and been pulled north by the warm current. And that current was the only reason Jamie was still alive. He had been in the water for nearly ten minutes now and if he had been swimming ten miles north of here, in the waters of the Greenland Current, he would have been dead for some time.

  They were still twenty feet away when the shark began its first charge. It had been swimming parallel to the lifeboat and gaining on it slowly but surely, when it turned abruptly and cut across the bows, going straight for Jamie. The change of course was so sudden it took them all by surprise, but Nico was quickest on the uptake.

  ‘Full ahead,’ he yelled at the top of his voice. The lifeboat gathered way, its engine screaming. ‘Come left, left,’ he bellowed, waving his left arm wildly. The boat came round onto a convergent track, its sharp bow cutting towards the striped brown flank.

  The shark disregarded it utterly. It was homing in on Jamie and was even beginning to roll, its vicious mouth agape.

  Nico forgot all about looking for the flares and leaned as far out on the whaleback bow as he dared, using his weight to force the wooden blade down deeper into the water. So that when they came together, the lifeboat actually hit the thing right on the head, immediately behind the tooth-packed maw. The boat bounced up, and Nico was lucky not to be thrown into the water himself. The keel grazed the fish’s flank and there was a kind of thudding shock as the propeller bit into one of its fins. Then they were past it and looking back, praying one and all that the impact had been enough to scare it off. With a pettish flick, sending up a wall of water like an irritated child splashing in its bath, the fish turned away.

  Moments later, the fainting body of the cadet was safely aboard and the lifeboat was heading back towards Clotho as she pulled herself up over the low horizon.

  Nico was on his knees in the bottom, his face folded into a frown of confusion. He was the man in charge of the provisioning of these vessels, and he had checked this one, checked them all, less than two days ago. But someone else had been through these carefully filled lockers in the meantime, and they had taken a whole range of stuff.

  Who?

  Why?

  *

  ‘Abandon ship! We got to sound “abandon ship”.’

  ‘Don’t be such an asshole, Yasser. How the fuck are we going to abandon ship in this crap? The lifeboat wouldn’t last a second even if those morons below could get them out in the first place.’

  Another massive sea threw Atropos up into the air and Ann only stayed standing because of the grip she had on the edge of the chart table.

  ‘We got to do something! We’ll die.’

  ‘We won’t die, you schmuck, unless you fuck this up. Now shut the hell up and let me drive this son of a bitch!’

  It was eight o’clock in the morning and First Officer Timmins was trying to relieve Third Officer Reynolds. And Ann, for one, didn’t want him to. Reynolds was a sexist little shit, a porn merchant and a drug dealer. She had been in his cabin on one occasion only — in the spirit of accurate research — and she had seen the kind of pin-ups he favoured. Only those over the vile O’Brien’s bunk in the crew’s quarters were more explicit. And, during that visit, the cocky little officer had taken the opportunity to say that he could ‘fix her up’, though the precise meaning of the offer was something Ann had been happy not to think about. But still and all, from what Ann had seen, Reynolds was actually the closest thing they had to a genuine sailor aboard and she really did not want anyone else in charge of the wheelhouse just at the moment.


  Eight o’clock. It might as well have been midnight. There was nothing to see beyond the bridge windows, only the reflected brightness and their shadowy figures within them. They couldn’t even see the waves which were chucking their bows up at the skies every few minutes, or the troughs which pulled them halfway to hell in between. Hogg was leaning over the radar bowl and Ann hoped it was as robust as it looked because he kept throwing up into it — though, for the first time in years by the look of things, his belly seemed to be empty now so at least there wasn’t enough vomit to obscure his electronic view of the icy seas around.

  And ice was all there was to see; the ocean was otherwise absolutely empty. Empty of shipping, certainly. Every other vessel — every vessel blessed with even a half-sane captain — had run for port. Nobody in anything like his right mind wanted to get his ship stuck in a south-easterly gale six days out in the Labrador Sea with nothing to the lee downwind except millions of tons of ice. Ann understood little enough about ship handling, but the only good thing that seemed to have happened recently was that Reynolds had finally turned almost due south and tried to run out of the danger area. The black walls of water which had been thumping into their starboard quarter, forcing them north towards the ice and the forbidding, glacier-bound cliffs of the Greenland coast, were now punching the port, forcing them west back towards their all too distant home. And at last they were heading south towards safety.