by Peter Tonkin
Clotho’s bow, like that of her sister, was of a slightly unusual design. The rest of her hull was based on the standard container design with its cruiser stern, all-aft bridgehouse and its long weather deck, distinguished only by the tall travelling gantry perfectly amidships. Instead of the raked and bulbous bow which would normally have completed the design, however, the sister ships both had Maier-form bows which cut back sharply below the waterline. Above and below the waterline, the bows had been massively strengthened to work in ice and they were broader than usual, too. At the base of the bow, where it curved back onto the keel, there was a manoeuvring propeller or fore screw, fitted aquadynamically into the hull so as not to detract from the vessel’s overall performance. The bow was designed to smash through thin ice and to ride over thick ice. In the hull, above the slope of the bow, was the forward water ballast tank. This was unusually large because the designers of the hull had calculated that the weight of the water in it would crush all but the thickest ice once the bow had ridden up over it. Clotho was not really an icebreaker, however. She was not designed to clear long channels through thick ice. Her beam was not particularly wide and although there had been some changes to her ballast tank system, she did not have the side tanks which allow a real icebreaker to rock itself out of trouble. The bow was designed to smash in and out of ice-bound harbours. It was not really made to break heavy sea ice at all.
So big was the forward water ballast tank that it was only three-quarters full even now, when Clotho was running in ballast anyway. The tank was normally sealed, but there were inspection hatches, accessible from the deck, which led down into it, and, if there was a design fault at all in the big vessel, it was that these hatches could be opened without any warning lights flashing on the bridge. One of them was open now, though this fact would only have been apparent on close inspection. It was the hatch exactly at the forepeak, precisely between the pair of machines comprising the split windlass there, and very near the most forward point of the deck. The hatch led down to a long iron-ranged ladder which plunged into the bowels of the ship, at first vertically, then at an angle following the rake of the slightly rounded cutwater. It was, in fact, an iron-sided tube reaching down the forward wall of the chain locker until it reached a tiny room just above the waterline. In the floor of the tiny, icy, iron-smelling room was a second hatch. This hatch opened directly into the forepeak’s water ballast tank itself. Below it, the ladder continued to follow the slope of the bow down until it was covered by the restless, filthy surface of the ballast.
The hatch in that tiny room stood open now and on the studded metal of the floor there rested a small but powerful waterproof lamp. The lamp should have been stowed safely in the lockers under the whalebacked after section of the forward port lifeboat. Now it cast its steady light downwards onto the head and shoulders of the stowaway as she stood with her feet just clear of the restless water, carefully moulding Semtex against the forward plates.
She had been careful to remove the things she wanted from one lifeboat. This had required two midnight expeditions to the stern of the ship so far. If nothing happened within the next few hours, she would have to do something more obvious so that at least one officer would be certain there was someone unaccounted for aboard. She didn’t actually want to give herself up: that would be too obvious. It might prompt a detailed search of the vessel, which she wanted to avoid if possible, though it was inconceivable that anyone would think of looking down here in the least accessible place aboard that she had been able to find. Once the Semtex was placed and the detonators primed, her simple plan required that she be found and taken to the captain before Clotho and Atropos met near Kap Farvel. She proposed to pose as some brainless, penniless student trying to hitch an illegal lift to the United States. She would have no trouble in angering everyone, especially the captain, so much so that, when the two ships passed one another, she would be transferred onto Atropos and sent ignominiously back to England. Once on Atropos, she would meet the man she had written that letter to last week and they would have no trouble in setting the second bomb using the Semtex he would already have smuggled aboard in Sept Isles. By the time the sister ships exploded in the nuclear waste shipping facilities on either side of the Atlantic next week, she and her lover would be long gone.
As she worked, she hummed the old French air called ‘Frère Jacques’. She had just reached the stage where the timing mechanism was being backed up by a makeshift impact detonator made of safety flares — the only really telltale theft of all the ones she had made. But then the flares were so rarely required it would be a miracle if anyone noticed they were gone before she was gone herself. She was concentrating so fiercely that she noticed nothing of the ship’s changing movement through the water nor the new sound the waves were making as they burst against the far side of the steel in front of her face. As she was not a sailor, nor an expert in the design of ships or the behaviour of metal, she also failed to notice that the solid curve of alloy was behaving in a way it should not have been behaving at all.
*
Robin stood at the front of the bridge, looking through the angled clearview at the fast approaching wall of fog, grey eyes narrowed fiercely as though she could see into it if she looked hard enough. Sam Larkman had relinquished the wheel to Errol and the massive shoulder of his boiler suit was the only thing between Robin and the terrifyingly abrupt change in sailing conditions.
‘Steady,’ she growled at him. ‘Watch for a strong westerly drift as soon as we get in. Sing out if you feel it’s pulling her off course.’
The engine room intercom buzzed. ‘Coming to full ahead now, Captain,’ said Andrew McTavish’s quiet Scottish voice. Behind him the whine of the two gas turbines running in tandem could be heard — compact, specially adapted Rolls-Royce RB211 aeroengines, each delivering forty thousand pounds of thrust to the single, massive, variable pitch screw. Charging into the fog wall at 30 knots in any other vessel would have been close to suicide, but Clotho’s high-tech equipment promised clear seas up to five miles ahead and so versatile was the propulsion system that Clotho could come to full ahead or to a dead stop on less than a mile. And any slight risk was more than offset by the overriding necessity of getting to Atropos at the earliest possible moment.
There would be no help nearer in the Labrador Sea; the storm had sent almost all shipping scurrying for port and according to reports from station after station, the working of the currents up and down the coasts was closing everything in with drift ice. Except for the tip of Greenland. Kap Farvel itself, it seemed, was unseasonably clear. In the clear waters they were just leaving, there was a great deal more shipping, but they were the nearest vessel and, in any case, the best adapted to the conditions.
Robin’s only thought of hesitation arose from the horrifying possibility of both Heritage Mariner ships being lost on their maiden voyage. That would be a disaster to put even Titanic in the shade. But, typically, the hesitation had lasted for mere microseconds and not even Niccolo, who had been watching her like a hawk since the distress call came in, had noticed anything at all.
‘We’re going in,’ she said, as the forepeak disappeared. ‘Log that, please, Mr Sullivan. Entered the fog wall at twelve hundred hours local time exactly.’
Sullivan, as watchkeeper, crossed obediently to the log book. Because he was busy following her orders, Robin herself crossed to the console on Errol’s left, hesitated for an instant, and sounded the siren as the opaqueness hit the clearview and Clotho was struck blind.
‘Mr Niccolo,’ she said as soon as the first peal of banshee wailing died, ‘we have perhaps an hour of this weather before we come out into the storm. Would you please take out a team and check the weather deck. I don’t want to have to worry about any of our fixtures or fittings. We’ll probably be offering a tow. When you’re happy we will be able to handle the weather, make sure the cable is free and easily available. Make sure the windlasses and the capstans are working. The storm is supposed t
o be moderating but it’ll still be rough when we get to Atropos in ten or so hours’ time and I don’t want to wait until then to discover the deck auxiliaries aren’t up to scratch. Mr Curtis, go with the first officer and watch him. You’ll learn a lot. If you can stay aboard.’
‘She’s pulling west hard, Captain,’ growled Errol.
‘Mr Biggs, do we have an estimate on the current?’
Biggs, looking for all the world as though he was working at NASA control, called up the information on one of the screens in front of him. ‘Strong westerly drift, Captain, moving at a mean of five knots. I say again, five knots. Still no ice heavy enough to show up on the radar. Clear for five miles ahead.’
Robin crossed to Errol’s shoulder and looked at the digital compass. The heading clicked another degree to the west. The massive power of the current was forcing her round off course already. Robin turned, her mouth open, but Biggs was already checking their proposed course against the reading from the satnay. The satnav system gave a constant read-out broadcast from a series of satellites in low orbit overhead, placing Clotho to within a few yards of the surface of the earth. These readings could be married up with Robin’s directions as to speed and heading, to ensure that the ship stayed on course in spite of the sudden change in the movement of the water beneath her racing hull.
Robin walked past the third officer to the door into the radio room. There she paused and looked back. ‘Make sure everyone has caught up on their breakfast,’ she ordered Sullivan. ‘I don’t want anyone going into this hungry.’
Sullivan grinned and nodded, then he crossed to the bridge telephone to pass the orders down. Not many captains would have thought of that, he mused happily.
‘Tell Atropos we’re on our way,’ Robin ordered Bill Christian. ‘Then get me Heritage House. I’d better tell one of my men what I’m up to.’
*
Young Jamie Curtis had never realised that the air could be quite so thick. His hand held out arm’s length in front of his face came and went like a ghost. Niccolo had picked Sam Larkman and Joe Edwards to assist them, but Jamie could only guess at their whereabouts. Anyone out of reach was out of sight. But, as though to make up for the lack of vision, sound was unnaturally amplified. While testing the McGregor hatch on number one hold, furthest forward, nearest the forecastle, he had carried on a conversation with the invisible Niccolo, believing the first mate to be standing at his shoulder, only to discover that they had been many yards apart. It was strange to be out here where the breeze seemed solid. It only existed because Clotho was moving so quickly through the fog-bound dead calm. And whereas a real wind actually moving through a fog would thin it, this phantom wind only seemed to intensify it. It was as though the suspended condensation in the air was piled up ahead of Clotho as the ship ran through it, heaving and thickening, like waves.
When they had checked that nothing was likely to tear free or blow loose on the expanse of the main weather deck, they went back behind the bridgehouse to check the deck auxiliaries. There were two double capstans, one pair on each side of the square stern. The capstans were not solid, but designed so that the upright cable lifters could be rotated by big motors on the deck below. The machines had been the only ones to give any trouble so far in the voyage and Niccolo wanted to check them over first, especially as, all things being equal, they would be doing most of the work. True to form, the port-side winch fired and snarled. Nico went down on his knees beside it, as though worshipping the thing, and made a slow pantomime of banging his head against it. ‘Jamie,’ he said quietly, but his voice carried to the anxious youngster hovering over him — it was less than six hours since he had saved the cadet’s life, after all — ‘Jamie, go and ask Chief McTavish if I can have an engineer up here. A competent engineer; no, a consultant among engineers, not one of his mad axemen. Comprende?’
‘Yes, Nico.’
‘Bene. You tell this engineer where to come. Then I want you to go and fire up the split windlass. One motor at a time. Take Sam and Joe here to help. It’s been running like a Maserati so it shouldn’t give any trouble. Just run them. Don’t engage the cable lifters on them or you’ll pull the anchors in through the sides. If I have to use them I’ll disengage the anchor chain. Run the independent mooring drums and the warp ends, though. Can you do all that?’
‘Yes, Nico.’
‘Bene. Off you go, then.’
The cadet and the two GP seamen set off together. Leaving the two men in the A deck corridor with orders to await him at the port side bulkhead door, Jamie ran on down to the engine room. He was unwise enough to relay Nico’s message verbatim to the chief and was very lucky indeed that the Scot had a lively sense of humour. An engineer was despatched to the poop, with a fire axe, to help the first officer. Jamie went back up to his rendezvous, then the three of them went out through the A deck door onto the weather deck and began to walk forward into the murk.
The forecastle head was a little wider than usual, but Jamie had been on so few ships so far that he didn’t really notice. As he had been walking down the port side, he led the little deck crew up the port side steps onto the raised level of the forecastle head itself. The tall cowls of the forward ventilators came and went in the mist beside him like spectral hooded monks waiting to steal a soul or two. The fog horn bellowed out and its terrible, lonely sound completed the doomladen atmosphere.
A sudden chill puff of air slapped Jamie on the cheek hard enough to make him jump. He realised that the silence out here, scarcely disturbed by the rumble of the bow wave at her teeth, was strangely underpinned by a distant raving, as though in the far distance ahead a great battle was going on. Had he been close enough to see Sam and Joe more clearly, he would have remarked the long, foreboding stare that passed between them at the sound.
The split windlass consisted of two motors which worked independently to raise or lower each anchor. They were heavy, powerful machines, each in three sections. No doubt Nico’s plan had been for each of the experienced seamen to run one machine while the cadet oversaw the activity, and learned from it. But Jamie had other ideas. He sent Sam and Joe to the starboard windlass and took over the port one himself. The motor started with no trouble. He checked the cable lifter without pulling the port anchor aboard. He ran the mooring drum successfully and touched the spinning valley of the end warp with one wet finger to be sure that it was rotating as required. Then, pleased with what he had achieved in the way of supported self-study, he closed it down and crossed to the port rail away from the sound of the port windlass engine, the better to listen to that distant, disturbing cacophony of sound.
Another unexpected gust of wind spat a little rain in his face and jerked the veils of fog to one side. As this happened, something made him turn just in time to see a figure running back down the deck, blundering in apparent confusion. ‘Sam?’ he called. The figure hesitated and began to turn. A feeling of unreality suddenly gripped him. No way was that a GP seaman in wet-weather gear. ‘Joe?’ The fog was still thick enough to be deceptive, but surely that figure was a girl. He took a step towards her. She turned towards him and her right arm moved, lifting something from her waist, pulling something out of her belt. There was the quietest, most sinister, hissing sound.
Just for a second, he was riven with terror.
‘Jamie?’ bellowed Sam Larkman. ‘What is it, lad?’ The fog closed down again and the figure was gone, with the slightest whisper of sound.
‘Jamie,’ called Joe Edwards’ voice and immediately his big square body loomed up behind it.
‘Joe, did you see a ...’
‘A what?’
‘A ... Nothing.’ Already Jamie was wondering whether what he had seen had been a figment of his imagination. He certainly wasn’t going to run the risk of looking silly in front of these men. ‘Nothing,’ he concluded lamely.
‘Yup. That’s what I seen, nothing.’
Thank God he hadn’t asked, he thought. He changed the subject. ‘Your windlass running
all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine,’ agreed Sam, heaving into view beside his big friend. ‘And just as well. Let’s get in before that wind out there gets any closer.’
And Jamie realised that that was what the distant sound had been. The wind, far ahead. And it was getting closer all the time.
*
‘We’ll be in it in about ten minutes, I guess,’ said Robin to Richard over the static-laden radio link. She put down her cup of coffee then picked it up again at once; the movement of the ship was getting lively. ‘I’ve never come across weather quite like it so it’s difficult to be sure. If the calculations Nico and I have made are correct, we’ll be coming into a strong crosswind along our starboard side which will tuck in under our stern after an hour or two and push us on up towards Atropos quite quickly. I’ll be cutting speed as soon as we get in until I have a better idea of the conditions, but with a tail wind I’m still expecting to be up with them within twelve hours. Captain Black says the wind has swung them round and they have the seas to their back. They haven’t any steerageway, and it’s not too comfortable, but they’ve slung a sea anchor over the stern and that’s holding them steady. There’s ice around — it was ice that smashed their screw — but they’re not in immediate danger. And they don’t seem to be icing up either, thank God. They can hang on till I get to them all right. I’ll report back then, and before if there’s anything I think you need to know.’
‘Good luck,’ he said distantly. ‘Nothing more to say.’
‘I’ve got a lot to do, then. Over and out.’
Of course both statements had been understatement. There was an enormous amount to say. But this was not the time. And she had an unimaginable amount to do, or to ensure was done, from the correct disposition of the glass in the bar and galley to the rebalancing of the ballast for foul-weather running and the placing of the moveable gantry nearer the bridgehouse or the forepeak, depending on how Clotho rode in a blow. But most of it would have been taken care of by the steady team of cooks and stewards, seamen, officers and engineers. The rest she would have to make up as she went along.
