The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  So Timmins wanted to abandon ship.

  ‘Get that goddamned woman off my bridge!’ said a cold voice, quivering with outrage. Captain Black had arrived. Ann stared at him.

  ‘Captain —’

  ‘Reynolds, your watch is over. Get her out of here.’ He stood just inside the chart room door, tall but tubercular, a grey vision in an old uniform, refusing to acknowledge that she even existed, except as a thing he wanted removed from his bridge.

  For a moment, Ann thought the Wide Boy was going to stand up to him, but that was never really going to happen.

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ answered Reynolds and crossed towards her. She met his eyes and shrugged. They both knew when they were beaten.

  As they exited through the door into the bridge deck corridor, a lull in the banshee screaming of the wind allowed them to hear Tightship say to Timmins, ‘Now, how’s she heading?’

  The next few seconds of conversation vanished under the sound of the next squall, but there was no mistaking the captain’s scream of ‘Reynolds!’ a moment later. The third officer gave Ann a weary shrug and went back into the wheelhouse.

  Ann was a reporter. She stood outside the door and spied. There was nothing to hear because of the wind, but there was no mistaking the fury in Captain Black’s gestures as he berated the young officer. This was the sort of thing Ann had come to expect. Her experiences in the gym four long, dark days ago had showed her the kind of people she was dealing with, but it had come as something of a shock to discover that they all treated each other with the same lack of respect, trust and courtesy with which they treated her. She had fondly imagined a ship’s crew to be like a team led by an echelon of officers who were a unit almost combat-hardened by their experiences of the sea. What Atropos had was a group of self-important, arrogant individuals who tried with a marked lack of success to disguise their own shortcomings by picking on everyone else’s. So Reynolds’ bold attempt to get the ship out of trouble had had to be done without the captain’s knowledge, for it contravened the captain’s orders.

  As Reynolds came back across the wheelhouse towards her, she turned away and walked to the head of the internal companionway. Halfway across the corridor she felt the movement of the deck beneath her feet begin to change as Atropos came round onto her original course due east towards Kap Farvel.

  She had seen Reynolds take a dressing down from the captain before and shrug it off easily enough, but now his mood was as foul as the weather. They ran down the stairs side by side until she could take his thunderous silence no more. ‘What is it?’ she asked, betrayed by concern for him because he was young and good-looking and because he had seemed to be doing the right thing when he changed onto the safer course.

  ‘I got to check the fucking cargo,’ he spat.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because old Tightshit up there says I might have shifted the fucking filth when I came round onto the new heading! Bastard son of a bitch knows better than that. He’s just rubbing my nose in it.’

  ‘Are you going out onto the deck?’ On Napoli, this had been the only way to check the holds to see if the cargo might have shifted.

  ‘Are you out of your mind? Out on the deck in this? Not even for the best lay in Las Vagas, honey.’

  She hated it when he did that. He thought it was smart and it set her teeth on edge almost more than she could stand. It was little enough among everything else that was going on around her, but he just kept on and on and it was sending her insane — not for the best ass in Albuquerque, the best tits in Toledo, the best tail in Tallahassee.

  ‘So, how do you do it?’

  ‘There’s an inspection tunnel. Under the weather deck. I’ll get that idle son of a bitch LeFever and we’ll go in from the engineering section. Sure as hell be no fucking engineers down there.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  That stopped him dead in his tracks. ‘Well, I don’t know. Ain’t no fucking picnic down there. Though if the cargo’s broken open it might just be a barbecue!’ He thought that was extremely funny.

  The idea of being roasted alive by nuclear radiation did not amuse her, but she had been closer to the reality of it than most.

  ‘Come on, Reynolds, I won’t tell.’

  ‘It’ll be like screwing in a coal sack on a roller coaster.’ He was weakening. Her carefully chosen phrase had reminded him how much it would upset the captain if he let her come.

  *

  LeFever was in his cabin, and when he saw who had come calling, his long face crinkled into an engaging grin which seemed to touch something rather too deep within her for comfort. He had no station to be at in an emergency and until Yasser Timmins actually convinced Tightship to sound ‘abandon’ there was nowhere else he had to be. He took surprisingly little convincing to come with them. ‘I didn’t know whether to die of boredom or have a nervous breakdown,’ he cheerfully informed Ann. ‘It’s too rough to read — can’t hold a book steady. Can’t even write a letter. I have to tell you, Reynolds, I don’t like the way you’ve got your boat here going up and down!’

  ‘Hey, me neither. And you can lay your linguini on that.’

  If anything, the dipping and swooping was getting worse. The three of them were bouncing off the stairwell walls with bruising force as they stumbled down into the engineering areas. As Reynolds had surmised, they were deserted. The engine was set on automatic. Chief Lethbridge and his men would be here from nine to five, as per contract, but it was nowhere near nine yet, so, as the cook had announced there would be no hot meals until the storm calmed, the engineers were either eating bread and butter or they were doing whatever idle engineers did for fun. Ann hadn’t got to know them as quickly as she had got to know the deck officers. She just knew that one set seemed to loathe and despise the other. It never ceased to amaze her how hard the men of this crew worked against each other.

  At least Reynolds and LeFever seemed able to co-operate. And they needed to. A big bulkhead door at the front of the first engineering deck opened into a short tunnel which ended in another heavy door. It really required two to open this door, and the reason it had been sealed so carefully was apparent as soon as it was open and the first set of lights was switched on. It led onto a walkway suspended from the ceiling of the first cargo hold, illuminated from high on the port side by the harsh glare of practical, low-maintenance, shatter-proof lighting. Wedged into the angle of the deck above and the starboard side on their right, the walkway was like an enormously long gallery with a see-through grating for a floor, opening on the left over a safety rail to a view across the tops of the cargo containers which nearly filled the hold. Walking along here would have been a cramped, uncomfortable affair in a dead calm with nothing so potentially dangerous just beneath their feet. As it was, Reynolds was quite right: this was no picnic. The gallery was too low for them to walk upright. This fact was further emphasised by the sharp-edged cable conduit which stuck out of the angle where the deck met the wall — perfectly designed to brain the unwary. There was nothing on the cold metal to protect their heads and bodies as Atropos pitched and heaved. There was nothing to hold on to with the right hand and the waist-high railing on the left seemed more interested in breaking their ribs than in protecting them.

  Immediately inside the door, above the light switch, a Geiger counter had been clipped to the wall. After he and LeFever had closed the door behind them, Reynolds made things worse for himself by carrying this forward and checking the cargo as he had been ordered. LeFever had brought his own and he checked the third officer’s readings. They communicated satisfaction with the results in a kind of pantomime, for the sound of the sea on the side of the ship by their head and the weather deck immediately above them was overpowering. Ann shoved her lips to LeFever’s ear and yelled, ‘Isn’t there an automatic system to check this?’

  ‘Sure ... Captain ... Reynolds ... Checking the system ...’ was all she got by way of reply.

  At the far end of the gallery was a solid steel wall
stretching from side to side and deck to keel, with a heavy door in it leading through to the next hold.

  The two men wrestled with this door, which seemed, if anything, more securely fastened than the first. A particularly foul sea threw Ann up onto LeFever’s back, as though she were playing leapfrog with him. Only the unforgiving steel of the conduit beneath the roof stopped her going right over him — at the cost of a dizzying headache.

  And all for nothing, it seemed. Or nearly so. The only thing they found amiss was a section of that lethal, sharp-edged conduit partially adrift. It was a pathetically little thing to have come all this way to fix, which was why the two men almost fought each other for the privilege of doing it, Ann supposed.

  From hold to hold they went, along the length of the ship. And not a container had shifted. The needles of the counters remained safely in the green. The captain’s petty punishment gained its point from being pointless. But then, back in the first hold, in the very spot where Ann and LeFever had had their brief conversation, they stopped again and this time there was something to look at, some point to their being here after all. From beneath the edge of the hatch above their heads a waterfall of water was cascading into the hold. It hadn’t been there when they came through this way the first time.

  So far, Ann had been subconsciously impressed by the dryness of the holds; by the reassuringly waterproof nature of the good ship Atropos. She looked at the leaking water with something akin to horror, mesmerised by the unsteady fall of it swinging left and right according to the pitch and heave. She was fascinated by the apparent silence of its impact exploding balletically into misty rebound against the drenched tops of the containers and vanishing like quicksilver into the cracks between them. Then she shook herself free of the hypnotic power of it and turned to look at LeFever. His normally open countenance was scored with frown lines. Reynolds looked furious and his lips were moving. Ann was very glad indeed that she could not hear what he was saying.

  She heard soon enough as they climbed out into the relative quiet of the engineering areas, however.

  ‘... out onto the fucking deck and batten it down!’ he was yelling at LeFever.

  ‘Why you? Report it to the captain. He’ll send a work crew.’

  ‘The hell he will. He’ll send me. Only by that time it’ll have opened up some more and it’ll be really fucking dangerous.’

  ‘Take an engineer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust Lethbridge’s lot to piss in a pot.’

  ‘You can’t go alone.’

  ‘It’s the nearest hatch cover. I rigged good safety lines. I’m a first-class fucking deck officer and that is no damn shit.’

  Ann felt like screaming at him, ‘Can’t you even be brave without all this foul-mouthing?’

  ‘Okay,’ said LeFever, ‘I’ll come and watch your back.’

  ‘In and out. Quick.’

  ‘Quick,’ said LeFever emphatically and Ann found she was suddenly feeling sick.

  They seemed to have forgotten all about her. She followed doggedly as they fought their way back up towards the weather deck. The three of them paused inside the huge bulkhead door at the starboard end of the long, lateral, A deck corridor. Inside it, there was a pile of safety harnesses and the two men caught them up and buckled them on as they waited for a lull in the wind long enough to let them swing the heavy portal open. Numbly, Ann found herself mimicking their action, as though she, who had followed this far, was also going out onto the deck. LeFever saw what she was doing and caught Reynold’s gaze. All at once Ann found the third officer’s face thrust into her own. His dark, Latin eyes were almost black. ‘When we open the door, clip on to the safety line, but stay inside,’ he bellowed at her.

  ‘I —’

  He shook his head. He didn’t have time for this. ‘If we don’t come back in in three minutes, you go tell the captain. It’s important. Vital. We’re relying on you, Gottit?’

  ‘Yes!’ she screamed. And her scream was suddenly loud. The wind had died.

  The two men threw themselves at the door and it burst open to slam back and catch on a hook against the outer wall of the bridgehouse. They paused in the doorway for an instant, hands busy, then they were gone.

  Ann stepped unsteadily forward and fastened the quick-release of her harness where the others had snapped theirs on, then she wedged herself in the doorway as best she could with spread legs and crucified arms. She was not a moment too soon, for the icy fury of the wind returned and all but tore her free. The freezing cold of it blinded her with tears but she would hardly have had leisure to look around during those first few moments in any case. It took all of her concentration and will simply to stand up in the face of it. Then it moderated for a moment and she could blink the hot tears away to roll freezing down her cheeks and look out into the dark heart of it. There was just enough light to see the flat coal-faced clouds seemingly as near her head as the deck had been on the walkway. The waves loomed, every bit as dark as the clouds, like a range of obsidian mountains rushing in towards her. Atropos reared back, almost as though her bows would pierce the scurrying whirl of the clouds, and white water boiled past the doorway to cascade in over Ann’s feet, shockingly cold. Then the long ship threw herself forward, seeming to twist her right shoulder down into the massive seas.

  A towering wave washed past, much taller than the tall bridgehouse on whose ground floor she was standing. It was so close she could see into the glassy heart of it. The angle of the ship as the wave rolled by brought the quivering curve of water almost to the rail a metre or two in front of her. She even heard the hissing whisper it made against the side of the ship and the distant thunder of its crest against the bridge wing five storeys above her head.

  And, that close, that close, she found herself looking into a face. She stood, crucified in the door, looking out across little more than a metre of quiet air at a cliff of water sliding past her, seemingly as solid as an iceberg. And standing in the wave, exactly level with her, staring out through it, as clear as a reflection in a looking glass, stood a man. Suspended, frozen, like a fly in amber.

  It was Reynolds.

  She never knew whether he saw her when their eyes met. Or if he was capable of understanding what he saw. He seemed to know her when he saw her looking at him, but that must have been a trick of that frozen stare. He must have been dead already, she thought; please God let him be dead already.

  She screamed with all the strength in her lungs. Then he was gone.

  LeFever came in through the door in an avalanche of foam with so much power that their safety lines snapped off. Writhing together like lovers in flagrante, they were washed along the corridor floor, choking and drowning, in a deep river of salt water. The stem of the ship swung round viciously and the whole hull seemed to plunge backwards as though Atropos had reversed off a cliff.

  The movement threw Ann and LeFever down the stairwell into the engineering section where the water, at least, washed away.

  But the movement was short and came to an abrupt cataclysmic halt. The stem of the ship slammed into something solid with almost unimaginable force. The two bruised bodies found themselves hurled across the corridor towards the engine room. The sound of the engines — and it had been there, in among the cacophony of the storm —stopped. The ship hesitated in her forward passage and slid back again. The second impact made the first one seem like nothing at all.

  Ann was in deep shock. She was badly bruised and mildly concussed. She was almost insensible, but the words that the young third engineer yelled as he ran past them to alert the crew cut through the icy fog in her head. His face was almost as white as Reynolds’s face had been in the heart of the wave. His eyes had the same glassy stare of shock. And his words were babbling out of him, almost beyond his control, nearly drowned by the terrible noise going on around them. But what he said brought her out of her shock more quickly than anything else could have done.

  ‘The propeller’s gone!’ he screamed. ‘We’ve hit ha
rd ice and the propeller’s gone!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Day Six

  Monday, 24 May 11:00

  The solicitors’ chambers were on the second floor of Viscount Astor’s tiny Gothic gem of a building at No. 2, Temple Place, and Brian Chambers’ office occupied a corner. One window looked south over the Embankment and across the Thames. Another looked eastwards over a tiny car park full of Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes Benzes toward the red-brick façade of Queen Elizabeth Buildings in the Middle Temple, where the maritime sets of barristers worked. Richard stood moodily at the second window looking towards the Temple as though if he looked hard enough he could see into Magdalena DaSilva’s office. Brian’s phone jangled. In this as in so much, Brian was militantly old-fashioned. Until Maggie made the point at dinner, Richard had never noticed. Brian lifted the black Bakelite handset and listened for a second or two before hanging up.

  ‘We’re off,’ he said crisply and stood up. His military bearing, emphasised by a clipped salt and pepper moustache and a short back and sides haircut, gave added inches to his slim, bantam-weight frame. Even when he came very close to Richard, he was not dwarfed by the size of his client, and would not have cared a damn if he had been.

  Coming out onto the street, they turned left and went through the gate and across the car park. The door into Queen Elizabeth Buildings gave on to a narrow, slightly dingy corridor with stairs rising on their left and a wall on the right covered with lists of names. These were the names of the barristers practising in each set of chambers in the building.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Brian in disgust as they passed. His finger traced a line of fresh paint where a name had been painted out. ‘They used to end these lists with the names of the judges associated with each practice. They’ve had to paint them all out. Security. Bloody terrorists everywhere.’

  For once, Richard was not concerned about terrorists. Magdalena DaSilva had only agreed to take the case if she could apply for an adjournment. Even if she worked every waking hour, she felt that she would not do justice to such a potentially complicated action in the time she had left to prepare for it — particularly as Sir Harcourt’s agreed submissions had already tied her hands to such a great extent. They were going up to the law courts to apply for that adjournment now.