The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  *

  Ann Cable’s agreed submission was read into evidence next. It was brief and to the point. She had come aboard at Naples as a representative of Greenpeace, to keep an eye on a dangerous looking cargo. She had stayed aboard at Liverpool in spite of the fact that CZP and Disposoco were less welcoming than they had been earlier. Her readings of the radiation levels in the holds had led her to contact Greenpeace and had given her increasing cause for concern as they crossed the Atlantic. After a severe storm, she had feared that the deterioration of the protective casings below would lead to meltdown, which would in turn lead to a terrible ‘dirty’ nuclear explosion as soon as the hot nuclear core melted through the hull and hit the cold ocean water.

  In the silence after this deposition, Standing rose again, holding a book. ‘I would like to point out to Your Lordship that the person who wrote that deposition has made a considerable personal fortune out of the incident. The book I hold here in my hand is called The Leper Ship. It has topped the bestseller lists both in London and New York for the better part of a year. Ms Cable wrote it soon after returning with the survivors from the Napoli and it purports to be a true account of her experiences aboard. I understand there is talk of film rights currently under negotiation. Sums in excess of three million dollars have been mentioned. Her fame as a writer, broadcaster and conservationist, the personal fortune I mentioned, and, of course, the film rights, all turn upon her contention that the cargo in the Napoli was about to go to critical mass and explode. And, as we have sadly become used to hearing in this case, the only expert witness who could confirm or deny what she alleges — the only expert witness not in the PLO — went down with the ship and is dead.’

  Maggie was on her feet again at that. ‘My final witness, my lord, has no association with either Heritage Mariner or any terrorist organisation. He was employed by CZP but is no longer. He was an officer aboard Napoli and he did not go down with the ship.’

  *

  In the two years since Richard had seen him, Marco Farnese had aged well. Aboard Napoli he had seemed almost stupid, a big bumbling boy, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being the junior deck officer and the butt of the mutinous crew’s frustration. His blond curls were close-cropped now. His eyes had lost that bovine vacancy. He wore a uniform of the Italian merchant marine with badges and braid denoting a first lieutenant. And he looked every inch the part. His English had improved, too.

  ‘Yes, I remember the loss of the Napoli very clearly, though I was not involved in the placing of the explosives, you understand. I was officer in charge of the lifeboats.’

  ‘Can you take us through what you remember from the time you began to lower the lifeboats, please.’

  ‘Of course. There were two lifeboats. Everyone went aboard except Captain Higgins who remained on the bridge, Captain Mariner and Professor Faure who were in the bow, and the chief and the two terrorists who were in the engine room. They were planting the explosives, you understand. I remained on the deck, while the lifeboats were in the water just below me. It was not easy to stand on the deck, you understand, because of the slope. The bow was down very badly since the storm.

  ‘Then suddenly Captain Mariner came out of the hatch to the chain locker and he yelled to me to get the boats clear because she was going down. He ran into the bridge. I turned to jump down into the lifeboat and I heard a strange sound from the bows. Is a deep rumbling sound. Captain Mariner told me later it was the anchor chain going through the hole in the bow. It must have been a big hole. She started to go down at once but we pulled clear very quick. As soon as the stern came out of the water, the propeller started to turn very fast. Too fast. There was an explosion in the engine room. The propeller fell off. She went down very fast after that, with more explosions in the engine room. And when she was deep, one big one — BOOM — blows the bridge right off!’

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. Now, the explosions in the engine room. Do you think they were from the explosives being detonated?’

  ‘No, I do not think this. I think they are from the engine over-revving when the propeller spun too fast. I think they are the motor burning out. I think they are the engine blowing up.’

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’ Maggie sat at last.

  Standing rose. ‘Just one or two questions, Lieutenant. Now, you say there were at least three explosions in the engine room?’

  ‘I count the big one at the end, yes.’

  ‘What makes you so certain that none of these was caused by explosives going off?’

  ‘The ship was going down. What for to blow it up then?’

  ‘Do you understand the idea of a delayed fuse?’

  ‘Yes. That way you can set off one explosion and then a second one after a while.’

  ‘Were you aware that Captain Mariner has said in his written submission that they planned to use just such a delayed fuse to set off the explosives?’

  ‘No, but I don’t understanding —’

  ‘If you cannot be certain that the explosion in the engine room was not the second half of the delayed fuse, how can you be certain that the strange noise you heard at the bow just before you cast off and rowed away was not the first part of it, detonating the explosives deep under the water?’

  Comprehension flooded Farnese’s face. ‘So the sound was not chain falling through the hull. It was the bomb exploding first at the bow, and then at the stern on a timer, a delay ... Now I understand! Of course! That’s how they pulled it off!’

  Maggie and Richard and Brian Chambers lurched back in their seats as one. The trap was sprung. Whether Farnese had just been tricked by Standing’s cunning or had been bribed or threatened, they would probably never know. But all the positive witnesses on whom Richard’s defence rested had been undermined one by one, and this final friendly witness turned out to be damningly hostile after all. Maggie was on her feet in an instant, making him rethink and reconsider. But the damage was done. There was no way it could be repaired. The case had hung in the finest of balances, right up until the end. And now it was lost.

  The judge found in full for the plaintiff, CZP, and the court was empty by teatime.

  PART TWO - The Sisters

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Day Nine

  Thursday, 27 May 10:00

  ‘Hard over,’ snapped Robin, her voice rusty with exhaustion. She cleared her throat as she hesitated for an instant, calculating feverishly. Her eyes were slitted and streaming against the combination of cold, fatigue and sudden brightness. The overcast low above her reflected the dullest of mornings and the grey light was intensified to a seemingly impossible degree by the continent of ice which confronted her and upon whose frozen shore the wind was driving her. ‘Starboard. Hard a’ starboard.’

  In the wheelhouse, Hogg, rendered useless as a navigator by the failure of his machines, automatically hit the green button beside the helm as the captain’s order came over the walkie-talkie. But the button was electrically powered, and as useless as most of the other equipment on the bridge.

  Sam Larkman, who held the helm in his calloused but delicate engineer’s hands, shot the fat officer a withering look and swung the wheel hard over. The telemotor control indirectly joining the wheel to the rudder was independent of the other power systems aboard and so it answered his command and Robin’s order.

  Atropos did not have steerageway, or anything like it. She was riding backwards across the last few hundred metres of that stormy channel between the two great areas of ice which were the last thing Robin had seen before the power went, nearly ten hours earlier. The ship was being driven south-east by the remnants of the north-wester which had been raging for the last thirty-six hours. Because her high bridgehouse acted as a more effective sail than did hills and even cliffs of ice, she was moved by the wind more quickly than the massive ice barrier she was bearing down upon. Because her hull was sleek and aquadynamic, she was pushed across the current which was actually flowing north at this point and pulling the massive sunken portion of th
e ice barrier northwards with it. Thus the powerless vessel was closing with a seemingly infinitely wide and absolutely adamantine coastline of thick sea ice at perhaps six knots. She was moving backwards towards a line of low green cliffs which rose sheer above the stormy water for about ten feet. They looked to be as solid as any made of rock, and the first part of her likely to make contact was her all too frangible rudder.

  Robin had calculated that if she ordered the helm hard over, the rudder would, within twenty seconds, swing forty degrees to her left and pull the stern of the ship round with it so that the right-hand quarter of her stern would make contact first. The cliffs were sheer and there seemed to be no ice projecting beyond them above the surface or below. The ship’s stern was ice strengthened, though not as thickly as the bow. Damage there would be minimal, with luck. And with the rudder out of the way, the propeller, already rendered useless by contact with the ice, should protect the hull from further damage.

  But the damage would only remain within acceptable limits if she acted fast once contact was made. Teams of men would have to go down on the ice and arrange mooring ropes to hold the ship in place until the swell moderated and they could think about other alternatives. If the cliffs were as solid as they looked, then there would have to be some heavy-duty fenders placed between them and whatever sections of the hull came into contact with them. Robin knew well enough the solid force that water could exert when it was liquid. What it could do in its solid state was ten times more terrible.

  All these thoughts raced through her tired head while she waited tensely for the stern of her ship to pull away to her left. She was standing on the port bridge wing —now the right-hand one, as they were sailing backwards — looking over the poop deck and the stern. She was bundled up against the cold until even her slim form seemed squat and shapeless. It was a very necessary precaution, for only the wind-chill factor differentiated the temperature outside the bridgehouse from that within it. They had joked in the galley that for a time it had been warmer inside the ship’s refrigerators than outside them. Everything she owned which Damart made was currently padded round her, and she bitterly regretted the rest so casually left aboard Clotho. Her outline now, in fact, was very much the outline she had mentally given her body during the long months since the arrival of the twins. But she wasn’t thinking about her outline now. Or her children, for that matter.

  All her attention was on her command. All her thoughts and concerns were utterly involved with what she would do if the plan to swing the rudder away from rapidly nearing danger did not work. More distantly, what she would do if her current manoeuvre did work. More distantly still, what they would do once they were tied up safely; sleep first or restore the power? That decision really depended on how Chief Lethbridge and his officers were. So she needn’t worry about it yet. A long way down the line, she wondered what she would do when they got the power back on and the radio working. How she was going to tell Richard that Clotho was lost and Atropos herself in a trap from which only a fortune in salvage payments was likely to extricate her. That Andrew, Nico and the rest, close family friends for years, some of them, were frozen, preserved until the end of time, in all probability, somewhere in the glacial depths of the Labrador Sea.

  She had an image of them being pulled by the current, year upon year, up to the black depths of the Arctic Ocean where only the weight of the water and the ice above it could keep the brine from freezing. The image was so vivid and so terrible that she cried aloud and understood why Dante in the great poem she had read at school had made the lowest reaches of his Inferno, where Satan himself was held condemned, an infinite sea of ice.

  The cry she gave jerked her awake and she cursed herself for being out here alone. How long had she been asleep on her feet? What if she had nodded off completely? She was tired enough, heaven knew; tired, exhausted and drained. She should have been lying down, to be summoned only in the direst emergency, conserving her energies to overcome the next inevitable crisis. But who else was there to keep watch here and give the orders? She was caught as surely as was her command. But, now that she was awake, she noticed that the shore of ice cliffs seemed to have jumped appreciably closer, and to have swung to a new angle.

  Atropos was turning. It was working. Robin battered on the after rail with her numb fists in jubilation and all but dropped her walkie-talkie. ‘Hogg! Pass the message that we will impact with the ice barrier on the port quarter in about five minutes’ time. I want all the work teams already told off ready to go into action then.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  Timmins had been able to arrange that at least. She hoped he’d made a halfway decent job of it and wished she could have overseen the selection of the most important teams from among the men she knew and trusted aboard Clotho. But that hadn’t been possible and there was no point worrying about it now. Nothing should go too disastrously wrong — and she did need to know to what extent she could count on the thin, startled-looking creature everyone else aboard seemed to refer to as Yasser.

  She took the opportunity of checking with another of her officers, one nearer at hand even than Hogg. The radio officer. ‘Sparks, come in.’

  ‘No luck, Captain.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘This is the last of the lifeboat radios now and it’s no better than the rest. What do you know about PCA?’

  ‘Polar cap absorption. Interferes with radio transmission in high latitudes. Happens soon after solar flares. Can last days.’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  ‘That’s what you think it is?’

  ‘I guess so. Somewhere up above those never-ending storm clouds I think the sun just gave out the mother of all solar flares and I don’t think these mickey-mouse transceivers will communicate over the length of the weather deck before next weekend.’

  *

  Things on deck got off to a promising start as men came boiling out of the bridgehouse at weather deck level to stream darkly along the poop beneath her. She suspected that many of them would have been up since first light, watching the enormity of the ice growing inexorably clearer as they swept down towards it, but there were still yells of shock — and, she guessed, disquiet — as some of them realised just how colossal and how close was the glacial barrier between them and the rest of the world. They did not come empty-handed. They brought with them an assortment of lines, ladders, fenders and the sort of equipment Timmins reckoned they would need to secure their vessel to a piece of ice which looked to be about the same size as a small country.

  Robin felt the urge to be down there with them. To find out the sort of things she would need to know about them, officers and crewmen alike, that could be learned most quickly and accurately by being in action with them. But her place had to be here, for the time being at least. The captain had to remain on the bridge until the ship had stopped moving. Really, she should stay until Atropos was secure, but she wasn’t sure she had the patience to wait that long. Right at the back of the excited crowd, she suddenly saw the slower, steady figure of Errol Jones and Joe Edwards. ‘Be careful down there, Joe,’ she yelled without thinking, and the pair of them turned to look up. Whether they heard her clearly or not, they welcomed the sound of her voice. Joe’s massively gloved hand rose to salute her, and beneath a large cold-weather hat Errol’s square face split into a broad grin which seemed to reach from one thick earflap to the other.

  The fenders were over the side and clustering thickly around the point of impact a moment or two before the collision came. As there was no beach below the cliffs of ice, there was not much surf or backwash from the waves, though the ice itself was so massive that it reacted not at all to the arrival of the swell from the north-east. Atropos slid down off the back of one such wave and crashed into the top of an ice cliff as the next came up under her. Thus her arrival against the ice barrier was a sort of shoulder barge, as though the ship was playing American football. But this shoulder was well protected. The power of the impact s
hocked through the ship and even those who had been preparing for it were staggered. Robin was only kept erect by the fierceness of her grip on the railing in front of her, and the yell of shock which the impact jerked out of her was lost on the overwhelming sound of the collision.

  As though the mass of men had been shattered by the convergence of ice and ship, they split up into their teams. One team moved watchfully down the port side, fenders at the ready as the hull swung round parallel to the ice cliffs and then tried to smash full length up against them, still at the mercy of the wind and the waves. At the stern, men were already swarming over the side and down quickly deployed Jacob’s ladders. The descent to the solid surface of the ice barrier was little more than ten feet. One man, more excited than the rest, seeing how close the surface seemed to the level of the deck, climbed over the safety rail and jumped. He landed on a slope of solid ice and his footing went at once. He crashed out full length on his back and his head hit the glass-hard surface with the sound of a rifle shot. Everything stopped for an instant, then Timmins bellowed an order. A group of men clustered round the fallen acrobat and passed his unconscious body back aboard. Some of the excitement died down after that and the teams went more quietly to work.

  Robin thumbed her walkie-talkie. ‘Hogg. Go down to the bows and tell me when we’re secure there, please.’ Certain that the second officer would be puffing his way down the length of the ship at once, Robin walked out to the far end of the bridge wing. As Atropos swung in, so the wing came to overhang the ice and Robin had an increasingly excellent view as the ship came to rest. Down to her left she could see Timmins and his team making all secure aft. Away to her right she could see the dark bustle of work beginning at the bow. But it was the scene in front which claimed the greatest share of her attention.