The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  They found Clotho an hour later, though the pilot had increasing trouble keeping in contact with Bill Christian on the radio. ‘Combination of anticyclonic conditions, solar flares and the good old Borealis,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Ain’t life great up here in the frozen north?’

  She was lying still, in a blaze of light that they could see from miles away. The pilot didn’t bother circling. He charged straight on in and set down immediately in front of the bridge. Nico’s radio message had forewarned Richard about the missing gantry and the shadows born of broken lights effectively hid the rest of the damage up forward. He pushed the door open and slung his bags out. Then he automatically checked his wristwatch. As he did so, the pilot bellowed over the roar of the rotors, ‘Remember we crossed another time zone, Captain. It’s just coming up to midnight here.’

  ‘Thanks,’ yelled Richard and hit the release on his seatbelt.

  He stepped down onto the throbbing metal of the main deck, thinking, ‘I only left London at eight. That’s pretty good, even for Crewfinders.’ Then he caught up his cases and, doubled under the screaming rotor blades, he took his first steps aboard his new command.

  *

  Audrey had stayed on duty even after she had ensured Richard would get through quickly. She had phoned the police while he was in the taxi on his way to the heliport and she knew that if she went home she would simply sit and brood about the utter ruin of Mr and Mrs Curtis’s lives. Just the thought of them made her cry again, though she had never even spoken to them. Richard had, she knew. He had been down there and talked to them. And it was only the current emergency which had stopped him from going back down to break the news himself. As she had observed, Crewfinders took care of everything.

  At 4 a.m. she rose and stretched. There was a pot of particularly excellent coffee on the simmer in the Heritage Mariner office next door and although they worked for different firms on paper, the corporate spirit made them all a team together. This was particularly true of the twenty-four hour secretariat. Many of them became fast friends during the long night hours when they had to be ready to handle emergencies of all kinds but had nothing to do for most of the time except sit and keep boredom at bay. War conditions, Audrey called it.

  ‘Any traffic?’ she asked as she crossed beside the chesterfield.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Jane, nearest of the two night guardians of the company radio waves. ‘Come in for a coffee?’

  ‘I’d kill for one. It smells wonderful. Is it still the Blue Mountain Captain Hammond brought?’

  ‘It is. Liquid ecstasy.’

  ‘Hot, strong and goes on for ever?’

  ‘Very witty. Sharon, do you want one?’

  ‘In a minute, thanks, Jane. I think I’ve got an incoming ...’

  Audrey poured Jane a cup and carried it across to her, not really paying any attention to the one-sided conversation Sharon was having.

  ‘You are very faint ... Say again, please ... No. I’m afraid not ... You are fading. Please say again ... Damn! Lost it.’

  The others looked over at that, for Sharon only raised her voice in the direst of emergencies and neither of them had ever heard her swear.

  ‘Who was it?’ asked Jane.

  ‘I’m not certain. It was very faint. It’s that solar flare.’

  ‘... but I think it was Captain Mariner.’

  Audrey’s eyes flicked up to the bright spot marking Clotho’s position on the big map. ‘He’s there already?’ she said, surprised. ‘That was quick.’

  But Sharon swung round, frowning. ‘No!’ she said. ‘The other one. Not him. Her!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY - Day Ten

  Friday, 28 May 00:00

  ‘Jesu, Richard, you look dead beat.’

  ‘It’s been a long day, Nico. Twenty-eight hours long, quite apart from anything else. You don’t look too bright yourself.’

  ‘You think I look bad, you wait until you see Clotho in the morning.’

  ‘I can look round now.’

  ‘You can look. You won’t see nothing. All the lights down at the bow, they’re —’

  ‘Fucked?’ It was an old joke. The swearword was the Neapolitan’s catch-all for anything that wasn’t working properly, from a door handle that wouldn’t turn to a tanker that wouldn’t float. Nico gave a weary smile, hardly more than the crinkling of his eyes.

  ‘So,’ said Richard, still in the grip of the momentum that had carried him here, so far so fast. ‘Let’s get everyone up here for a council of war.’

  ‘That won’t take long,’ said Nico flatly. ‘But if I was you I’d make it a quick one. The others are as tired as you look and I feel. If you got the energy, I would ask you to take the next watch and we see what to do in the morning. But you are the captain now so we do whatever you want.’

  The current complement of the good ship Clotho stood at six, including her new master. It was almost with awe that Richard surveyed them a few minutes later. Two deck officers, Nico and big bluff Johnny Sullivan; two engineers, Andrew McTavish and Harry Piper; Bill Christian the radio officer. Together these five had saved the ship and pulled her through the last of the north-wester. The tow had parted twenty-four hours ago exactly; their day had been every bit as rough as Richard’s.

  ‘I’m going to send you all to bed in a moment,’ he said. ‘The first watch is mine and it will run for six hours. But before I dismiss you, I must get some things clear in my mind. Bill. You first. No word from Atropos at all?’

  ‘Nothing, Richard. But things have been pretty bad on the airwaves.’

  ‘The solar flares. I know.’

  ‘I’ll leave her on open frequency and turned right up before I go.’

  ‘Right. Andrew, you next. If I was thinking of going north to look for Atropos, maybe to take her in tow again, could you give me the power?’

  ‘Aye, I could. She’s running very sweetly, Richard, and we’ve plenty of bunkerage.’

  ‘Nico. What about the bows? Could I take her north?’

  ‘You’ll see for yourself in the morning. And you can read my rough report if you feel like it tonight. But yes. She’s afloat and she’ll stay afloat. If the good weather arrives.’

  ‘Johnny. Will it? What do the machines say?’

  ‘That was Rupert Biggs’s area really, but the system’s running pretty well and, yes, the weather’s set to stay fair for the better part of a week. Warm sunny days, cold clear nights. No wind to speak of. Typical winter anticyclone. The sea will be flat calm to go with it, I should say.’

  ‘All the local stations confirm that,’ added Bill Christian. ‘Air pressure going through the roof.’

  ‘All right, then —’

  ‘Even so,’ interrupted Nico quietly, ‘you got to think of your insurance. If your insurers ever find out you deliberately took a damaged vessel into a sea full of ice on anything except an immediate answer to a distress call, your policy will be—’

  ‘Fucked,’ said Richard. ‘Yes, Nico, I know.’

  *

  They were going nowhere. There was no point in even trying for steerageway until they could get some idea of where Atropos was, so that they would know what course to set. The engines were idle and only the alternators were running. According to the positions punctiliously marked on the chart and confirmed by the satnav read-outs, they were hardly even drifting. Maybe five miles in the last twelve hours. From the look of things, not much further in the next twenty-four, now that the wind had dropped. They seemed to be sitting in a pool of still water at the convergence of the currents. They could certainly stay here quite safely through the night watches. Far north of the usual sea lanes, and lit up like a Christmas tree to boot, they were hardly a threat to shipping. In any case, the collision alarm radar was functioning every bit as well as the satnav; anyone foolish enough to be running this far north who also happened to be blind would set off the alarms and get a pretty sharp warning from Richard — if he could reply on the radio; he couldn’t raise Heritage House.

/>   Well, even if voice transmission wasn’t reliable, he could always send in Morse code. The simple pulses would cut through the solar interference much more efficiently.

  He boiled a kettle, made some coffee so strong that it seemed to hang upon his teeth, and sat down, as Nico had suggested, to read the report.

  It had been the loss of the gantry that saved her. The hole in her bow which had let water into number one hold with such disastrous results had not been big. Nor had it been low on the front. When the weight of the gantry was removed, the deck had lifted. The hole had been jerked a good ten feet into the air and the water had stopped coming in at once. Even without power, the ship had remained steady, swinging sluggishly across the wind to settle with her bridgehouse acting as a sail and taking the lead. By that time, the long hull had spun round once through 360 degrees and the weather had abated considerably. Power had been restored as the dawn had come up and Nico had run due south. His radar showed him the end of the ice barrier at the twenty-mile limit to the west of him, and he had observed nearly ten miles of it. Then it had finished, cutting away northwards in a clean, almost rule-straight line. By the time he had cut his power and allowed her to drift to her present position, he was clear of the ice and safe enough.

  All morning Bill Christian had broadcast in clear and code, on company frequencies and on open channels, with very little success. Morse signals drifted in and out of the static, but they were never strong enough to make sense, let alone contact. Things improved midday and peaked at four when he raised several local radio stations, one or two ships running to the south of them now that the storms were clear, and a Scandinavian Airlines 747 flying over the Pole. And, of course, Heritage Mariner. But with the onset of evening, communications had closed down again almost as though the god of the airwaves wanted to enforce the old adage ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t speak to it’.

  Once Richard had read the report, he put the log away and hauled himself to his feet. As much to keep awake as for any other reason, he began to check everything on the bridge. It was an old habit. One of his tricks of command. He tidied up the chart desk, sharpened all the pencils and set them in neat rows like soldiers on parade. He opened the Arctic Pilot and left it on page thirty-three where the heading said ICE. He crossed to the collision alarm radar and checked the detail of the five-mile setting. Then he turned the alarm down and checked the ten- and twenty-mile settings. Only when he set it at maximum could he see the ice barrier. A square corner of it palely disfigured the otherwise flawless deep green circle exactly at the eleven o’clock position. He reset it to five miles and turned the alarm back up. He checked the satnav and momentarily regretted that he did not have a sextant because the stars were huge and brilliantly clear and he would have enjoyed taking a sighting. But then he remembered how cold it was out on the bridge wings — and he was still dressed for a board meeting in London. He got a printout of the latest weather position from a satellite in low orbit overhead and would have given anything to ask it to scan the sea to the north of him for Atropos.

  He forced himself to go through Nico’s report of the separation and the loss of the two men on the forecastle head and realised he had been doing much of the fiddling and tidying around the bridge as an unconscious stratagem to avoid doing just this. The report was bald and direct. Its conclusions were inescapable. The men had been on the forecastle head when the tow had parted. They did not return. As soon as possible under the circumstances, Nico himself had gone out to look for them. They were no longer there. They were lost overboard. There was nothing to be done.

  Richard sat for a moment, wondering how he would feel if he heard that the twins were dead. If he heard that Robin was gone. It was too painful for him to contemplate for any length of time.

  At last he went through to the radio room and sat looking at the bright red and green displays, listening to the hiss of the open channels.There was a range of radios here and he knew enough about them to know which he could touch and which to leave alone. He took a pair of earphones and slipped them over his head, then idly he began to search the ether. As he concentrated on what he could hear, so his eyes went slightly out of focus, but they never left the warning light which would alert him of a signal incoming on any of the other radios, nor the display beneath it which would record the band, frequency and strength.

  And so the night passed while he fruitlessly searched the short waves for any sound of even faintly human origin. At about three o’clock it occurred to him that the sound the empty waves were making was exactly the same sound as bacon and eggs in a frying pan and he realised he had eaten nothing since breakfast exactly twenty-four hours ago at 7 a.m., London time. It hadn’t been bacon and eggs, either.

  He took off the earphones and got up. In the chart room, in the corner beside the kettle and the instant coffee, there had been a stack of clingwrapped sandwiches. He strolled through to investigate. The first one he opened was shrimp in salad and mayonnaise. It must have been there for the better part of two days and was starting to smell a bit sorry for itself. The same was true of the tinned salmon and cucumber. The thick, sliced, tinned ham was better, but the tomatoes had soaked through to leave sticky circles on the outside of the bread. But then he hit paydirt: beef and mustard. Three pairs of triangles. Perfect. He strolled back out onto the bridge, trying to find out where the edge of the cling wrap was.

  He was concentrating on the near-impossible task so absolutely that he did not notice the warning light flashing from the radio room and it was not until he tore the wrapping free that he looked up. As soon as he did so, he dropped the unprotected sandwich and ran forward. The still wrapped pair went onto the watchkeeper’s chair as he went past and he was wiping butter and Coleman’s English on his lapels as he went in, in case he got the chance to transmit. It was the short wave. He turned the volume up until the hiss was like a big wave breaking, and right at the back of it, far, far away, he heard a whispering pulse: ... dot dot dot ...

  He was in the seat at once, twisting the volume up until it was like sitting under Niagara Falls: ... dot dash dash ...

  He caught up the handset in direct communication with the radio officer’s cabin. He didn’t even have to dial; just picking it up rang Sparks’s bell.

  He found he was whispering, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ But whether he was talking to Bill Christian or to the signal, he never knew.

  ... dash dash dot dot ...

  ‘Yes?’ So loud, it made him jump almost out of his skin. ‘Bill, I’ve got something. Morse. Sounds as though it’s coming in from Mars.’

  ‘On my way.’

  Richard put the handset back. His lips were moving with the Morse pulses, saying letters. His hand was scrabbling for a pencil, ready to write the letters down as soon as he understood them.

  ... dot dot dot ...

  ‘S.’

  ... dot dash ...

  ‘A.’

  ... hissss ...

  ‘Missed it! Come on, come on!’

  ... dot dash ...

  ‘A again.’

  ... dash ...

  ‘T. It’s T. God ...’

  ... dot dot dot ...

  ‘S. It’s an S.’

  When Bill Christian came dashing onto the bridge, he heard his captain in animated conversation with the radio, yelling jubilantly over the thunder of static. When he swung round the door to look down into the radio shack itself, he saw Richard aglow with almost uncontrollable excitement.

  On the pad in front of him were the capital letters written in his clear, bold hand:

  A T S A T S A T S.

  ‘ATS,’ said Richard, beginning to calm down a little.

  ‘It’s Atropos’s call sign. We’ve got her, Bill, we’ve got her.’

  *

  They woke Andrew McTavish long enough for him to get them under way and put the engines on automatic, then Richard turned the wreck of Clotho’s bows towards the ice barrier and they began to feel their way northwards, following
that scarcely audible Morse code call sign, with Bill Christian sharpening up the reception and broadcasting Clotho’s Morse call sign CLO in return.

  Once they were safely under way, Richard split his time between the helm and the chart table. To begin with, they simply followed the bearing where the reception was strongest, but this, even if it was giving them an accurate direction, only gave them the line Atropos was lying on, somewhere between Clotho and the North Pole. Once Richard was confident which direction the signal was coming from, he started to swing more and more widely off course to east and west, checking the new bearings which Bill gave him, trying to make that all-important triangle on the chart at whose point Atropos would be lying. It was slow, painstaking work which nevertheless required fierce concentration on the part of both men. The night fled by and it was not until the signal began to fade with the first hint of light that Richard realised he had given Nico considerably more of a lie-in than he had intended.

  He sent Bill Christian down to bed, then went round the bridge one last time himself. He ended up staring disconsolately down at the bearing lines chinagraphed on the clear sheet over his chart. Where there ought to have been a dark-sided, clear triangle, there was something which looked more like a hedgehog. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make the darkest part of the figure coalesce into something positive, with no great success. Still, he had a ballpark. He would find the diamond later. And the striking plate, in due course.

  Trying to coin an equivalent English analogy using cricket pitches instead of baseball parks, he walked over to the helm, pressed the communications button beside it and summoned Nico onto watch. When the Italian arrived, much refreshed, Richard explained how he and Bill Christian had spent the night. While he did this, he punched a course into the automatic pilot which would take them straight towards the point where most of the lines on the chart seemed to come closest to crossing each other.