The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Prologue

  By a coincidence neither man would ever be aware of, they were both in the same place, doing the same thing at exactly the same time a week before it all really started, as though they were bound by something more elegant than the rough chains of circumstance already tightening around them.

  The tall Englishman sat in the window corner of the first class compartment watching the familiar countryside blur by with tired, almost dead, eyes. On his lap lay a paperback novel, open but unread. Opposite sat four Japanese, dividing their intelligent, excited scrutiny between England's southern scenery and this huge native; far more awed by the man than the moorlands.

  Three of the Japanese - two men and a woman - were tourists from a remote province and were more used to Westerners on television than in the flesh. The fourth, a second woman in her early twenties, was a student at London University supplementing her grant by acting as a guide. They spoke animatedly in Japanese, just loud enough to be audible above the rhythmic clatter of the train.

  'Are all Englishmen so tall?'

  'No. This one is taller than most.'

  'And his bones stretch his skin - one can almost see the skull beneath his face ...'

  'It may be that he is tired. He is certainly thin for his age and height. He seems tired ...'

  'But look at his eyes! Like a summer sky. Do all barbarians have such ...'

  'Many have pale eyes but few have eyes of such a colour. I believe, however, it would be incorrect to call this man a barbarian. Observe. He is reading a work by one of the masters of Japanese literature. In translation to be sure. However ...'

  'Oh! A Japanese novel! Pray, you who can read English so well, tell us which novel it is?'

  'It is the work by Yukio Mishima. It is called The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea ... Oh!'

  The Englishman did not hear the conversation or the horrified exclamation. Utterly unaware of the shocked faces opposite, he was ripping the book to pieces, from top to bottom along the spine. Then he stood, his actions ugly, abrupt, violent. He opened the carriage window and hurled the fluttering pages away.

  Every once in a while Richard Mariner would come south to Rowena's grave, his actions dictated by something deeper than time. It would never be when it was convenient, or on the anniversary of their meeting, of their marriage, or of her death. He would suddenly find himself prey to nightmares. In his dreams, great ships would blow apart. Then sleep itself would become a dream. He would become moody and violent. Unable to concentrate. Unable to work. Surrounded by ghosts wherever he was. Until at last he would find himself travelling south. South and west from London. Down to the graveyard at Land's End.

  If he had suspected half the trouble it was going to cause him, he would have shoved her box into the ground very much nearer to London, no matter what the caprices of her morbid childish dreams. It had been empty - the casket - so what did it matter where it lay? Except that a sense of the fitness of things had dictated that the coffin should lie here, no matter where the body was.

  Not, in fact, that the body was anywhere. Atoms, molecules, shreds and splinters spread over half the Channel. Mixed in with forty others and his last command, in pieces too small to see. So only an empty coffin lay here under her headstone lovingly - lyingly - inscribed in the tiny graveyard overlooking the Western Approaches on the cliff top at Land's End where England, indeed, ended, far out in the Atlantic.

  Richard Mariner stood at the foot of his wife's empty grave, therefore, two hours after he had destroyed the book with that morbidly accurate title, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. It was six o'clock, British Summer Time, on the evening of 8th July and he was thinking of all that he had lost.

  No! he thought to himself. Not lost! All that you took from me, Rowena Heritage. From me and from all the rest of us. All that I'm going to get back. When I can and how I can. Whatever the cost.

  His ice-blue eyes looked away over the green water. West towards the horizon.

  The big black Cadillac turned off the blacktop on to a sandy Cape Cod lane. The driver knew where he was going. In the back, neither the Italian nor the Greek said anything. It had been a long trip. A business trip, the Italian had said, and the first hour or two had passed in heated discussion, then in acrimony and finally almost in threats. There had been a stormy silence since then.

  At last the Cadillac turned off the lane into a small parking lot and stopped. The Italian got out, knowing where they were and why they were here. The Greek followed silently, watchfully. The lot backed on to a low stone wall. Beyond that, a squat church and beyond that, a graveyard. Then the sea.

  An early afternoon calm held the place silent, deserted even by the sea wind. The Italian looked overdressed in his black overcoat. The Greek took off his jacket and laid it on the dry-stone wall as he followed the other through the broken gate and into the graveyard itself.

  'All this way to visit a graveyard?' The Greek's body was square and hard under the white cotton shirt. His arms stuck out of the short sleeves, corded with muscle. 'What is this, Mr Diavo?'

  The Italian turned and smiled. 'I wished to make a point.

  That is all. To give you a gift. To cement our partnership.' It had been about the 'partnership' that they had quarrelled. The idea had been the Greek's. The inspiration, the research, the selection, the recruitment: the creation of the plan.

  But the investment, it now transpired, had been the Italian's. The money the Greek had borrowed to supplement his own - the friends with which he had shared his vision, a little, secret, part for each one of them in return for a little price - everything had led back to Mr Diavo. The Greek was like a businessman thinking he had many small investors; finding they had all been bought out by one corporate raider. And so now, instead of many partners each ignorant of the whole plan, he now had one powerful partner who knew it all. Instead of twenty modest financiers each on a fixed - minuscule - return, he now found himself funded by one Company - who wished to dictate terms.

  'I paid for the tanker myself,' blustered the Greek. 'Apart from the loan we expedited for the actual running costs,' observed Diavo icily. 'Supertankers may no longer be so expensive, especially when they have been rusting at anchor for years, but running them will never be cheap. And who sent this tanker to Lisbon for refitting? Who got her registered a hundred per cent at A1 Lloyd's of London? Insured for ten times her actual worth? Who completed your negotiations for the cargo of Iranian oil she will load at Kharg Island next week? Who finalised the legal cover, the contract with the Abu Oil Company to transport it from the Gulf to the refineries at Europoort in Rotterdam?'

  'I did most of that ...'

  'Started most of that! Who has made the way so smooth? Every inch of the way as far as it goes? Who finished it all so swiftly and efficiently and who has shaken hands on it all already?'

  'You ...' This was going too fast for the Greek ship owner. Diavo had such a grasp of the plan, of the whole thing. It was awesome. He had been expecting to fix up the rest of it himself. So they had contacts even there ...

  'We!' Diavo put the word in the silence like a foot in a door. 'All the way down the line!' His voice lost some of its ice. 'Your plan is so simple. The profits are so vast. There is room for all of us. The tanker is yours: you take the hull. The oil is ours: we take that ...'

  'No!'

  '...and pay you a finder's fee. Five per cent. It diminishes your risks. And you can still make millions. Millions!' The final word was hissed out.

  Then silence.

  It seemed there was no more to be said. The Greek bunched his right fist and drove it into his left palm. It was on the tip of his tongue to refuse even now. It had cost too much in money, time and lives - yes, lives - to get this far!

  The Italian - Diavo was not his real name - saw the ship owner gather himself for refusal and he waited. He had one last card to play and it must be timed to perfection. How much easier it would have been if the Greek had been more tractable. The ma
n's idea was brilliant but too soft. Like the man himself - ruthless but not sufficiently deadly. To have thought of it all but then to have gone to such lengths to ensure ...

  Diavo's lips twisted. He would play the card now and bring this blustering Greek to heel. But it was too early yet to tell him about their fail-safe alternative. And in any case, too many survivors would only look suspicious.

  'And, as a gesture of our own good faith, let me show you what we have bought for you. A gift which you and your family will all appreciate in time!'

  Diavo's sudden bonhomie threw the Greek out of his stride. Greed flashed in his mind like the side of a golden fish in a deep, dark pool. The Italian's arm went round his shoulder propelling him towards the back wall of the graveyard. The Greek's eyes were busy far beyond this. On the sand there was nothing ...On the water! His greedy eyes peered out to sea. The ocean ... Nothing ...

  'Here!' The Italian's soft voice brought the Greek's gaze back from the far horizons. There at his feet lay a hole in the ground. At its far end, a plain marble stone. Beside it, another. Then another. And another.

  On the gravestones were the names of himself, his wife and his daughters.

  He turned away, defeated. All thought of refusal was gone. He stood by the low wall, his mind racing feverishly, working out with all his greedy wit how even now to extract the best deal.

  Behind them, the driver called, 'It's one o' clock, Mr Diavo. You told me to tell you.’

  The Greek glanced down at his watch, then up again and away, mind racing, lips parted, gold tooth gleaming. Hard brown eyes looking away over the gold-green water. East towards the horizon.

  And so it was, though neither of them knew it, that the Owner and the man who would be his Captain each stood in a graveyard at 16.00 hrs Greenwich Mean Time, on 8th July, looking out to sea. Each looking almost directly into the other's eyes, with only the Atlantic between them.

  GULF

  Chapter One

  11 p.m., Gulf local time, 15th July. The VLCC Prometheus lay at anchor off Kharg Island, and nothing at all seemed wrong.

  She lay deep in the black water, fully laden with 250,000 tons of Gulf Light Crude, like a battery waiting to be connected; charged with enough dormant energy to light New York when released. To light New York or destroy Hiroshima. But all that massive energy lay caged in the three cathedral-sized tanks, held still by baffles of steel stretching like unfinished walls from side to side, from top to bottom of the huge chambers. Its volatile elements, capable of exploding at the merest spark, lay smothered by the inert gases pumped into the ullage between the surface of the liquid and the roofs of the tanks.

  She lay dark and quiet, lit only by the lights denoting Ship At Anchor and brightness on the bridge; giving off only the gentle hum of the generators necessary to keep those lights burning. The bulk of her only visible because the absolute blackness of sea and sky were pierced here and there by the silver tracers of stars. A faint breeze set the waves to dancing so that ghostly shafts of the timeless starlight defined occasionally the lines of the peaceful ship.

  Manoj Kanwar, Third Mate, who held the watch, should have been on the bridge, not running through deserted corridors covered with sweat and gasping with fear. If the Captain caught him! His stomach churned. The Captain was a man perpetually enraged. Sober he was terrifying - drunk he was scarcely sane. But Manoj had to get to Nicoli with the news. That was the most important thing. Nicoli would know what to do. If he didn't, they were all as good as dead.

  The thick soles of Kanwar's desert boots screamed quietly on the linoleum decking. The rasping of his breath filled the still air. He reached the First Mate's door and thundered on it with his fist. Then, scared by all the noise he was making, he knocked once more, quietly.

  There was a distant groan as Nicoli came awake. A wash of light over Kanwar's boots from under the door. Unable to wait any longer, the young Indian turned the handle and all but fell in. Nicoli was on the point of opening the door and so they found themselves standing chest-to-chest: a short, wiry, dusky boy and a tall, bullish Greek with wise blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair.

  'It's Gallaher,' wheezed Kanwar. 'He says there's a bomb on board.'

  Gallaher gazed at the pair of them with his disconcerting eyes. 'Of course there is,' he slurred. 'Now would I be telling lies?'

  He was a small Irishman, red-headed and covered with freckles. His face and arms were terribly marked with scars, overlain with sunburn where he had fallen into a drunken stupor yesterday, sitting on the fo'c'sle head unprotected from the sun. So fair were his brows and lashes that his pale eyes looked naked. His once lean body was running to fat. Only when he was totally drunk did his hands stop shaking and he screamed in his sleep for Maureen who was dead.

  Nicoli knew nothing of Gallaher, ship's electrician, and wanted to know nothing. But he knew the truth when he heard it, and he acutely suspected why the bored, drunken Irishman had told Kanwar his secret - to see the terror in the boy's soft, dark eyes.

  'Where?' he demanded.

  Gallaher leered up at him, fuddled with whisky and sun­ stroke. A shadow moved in the depths of those naked eyes. What was it? Fear. 'They expected me to keep it here,' said the Irishman. 'Sleep with it under me bunk till it was time. Not me! Never again! Not for any amount of money. Been blown up before! Never again! You take it from me, old Nicoli, once is enough ... Under me bunk! I should fuggin' think so!'

  'Where did you put it, Gallaher?' Nicoli's voice was quiet now, appealing.

  Gallaher grinned like a death's head. 'No hospital, y'know. Hell, how could they? Five Paras went up with me. It's bits of their bones did this.' His hand brushed his pitted cheek. 'Smuggled me south so they did, picking out the shrapnel splinters as we went. And almost enough bone for a whole skeleton.'

  Nicoli shook him gently, trying to bring him back. 'Gallaher!'

  'I was no good, after, o'course. Just the smell of the stuff made me puke. I'd have gone mad with keeping it in here.' He gripped Nicoli suddenly, with bruising force. 'You do see that? I'd have come to pieces with it under my bunk!'

  'Course you would, Gallaher. Anyone would, after that. But where did you put it?'

  'Put it in place and primed it. Jeez, you'd think if they was payin' me good money to see it done, they'd have some idea ...But no ..."Keep it hidden and set it twenty-four hours ahead. Prime it when the signal comes in ...To be safe ..."They know nothing about modern timers! Reliable? Christ! You can set your fuggin' watch by them!' The idea amused him. He giggled helplessly until Nicoli shook him again, then his professional pride reasserted itself. 'And I didn't need any of that fancy stuff they sent across from the States in the old days. I'm an artist! You know what I used? Videos! The timers from a couple of old videos set in tandem. Easy. Accurate. Damn near fool proof. Set 'em to run anything up to sixteen weeks ahead, the way I got 'em rigged. Won't run to sixteen weeks, o' course. They'll run to time. To the very minute. Then boom!' He screamed it at the top of his voice and collapsed back into his bunk giggling helplessly as Kanwar and even Nicoli jumped at the sound.

  Spurred by the shock, Nicoli leaned forward and grabbed the man by his shoulders, pulling him into a sitting position, his face inches from the Irishman's. 'Where did you put it, Gallaher?' he asked, again gently.

  Gallaher continued giggling.

  Nicoli glanced over his shoulder then. 'Wait outside,' he ordered Kanwar. And, from the tone of the First Mate's voice, Kanwar was glad to go.

  It took ten minutes. Kanwar stood well clear of the door, so he never found out what kind of duress the Mate used. But after ten long minutes they came out together, Nicoli's arm firmly round Gallaher, supporting him as though they were friends.

  'Quick!' snapped the First Mate, with uncharacteristic rudeness. 'Take his other side.' Kanwar obeyed at once. And so, three abreast, they proceeded.

  They crushed into the lift and hissed down into the bowels of the great tanker. Kanwar's fear of being discovered by the Captain was
at once replaced by the fear of discovery by the equally terrifying Chief Engineer, the tall, taciturn American, C J Martyr. Indeed, rounding a bend in the corridor suddenly, they bumped into two figures so unexpectedly that Kanwar cried out aloud, thinking himself discovered by both of these ogres at once. But it was only two of the Palestinian General Purpose seamen coming off engine-room watch. Kanwar knew them: Ibrahim and Madjiid.

  'You two!' ordered Nicoli at once. 'Come with us.' Obediently, unquestioningly, they fell in behind.

  Kanwar paid them no more attention, all other thoughts wiped from his mind by the sudden realisation of where Gallaher was taking them: the Pump Room.

  The thought had no sooner entered his mind than the great steel bulkhead door was before them.

  'Open it,' ordered Nicoli. When Kanwar hesitated, Ibrahim stepped forward and lifted the great iron handle. Like the door to a bank vault, or a nuclear bunker, the huge steel portal swung wide. All of them hesitated on the thresh­ old, as though they knew what awaited them within.

  The Pump Room was the heart of the supertanker. When the computers in the Cargo Control Room four decks above worked out the optimum loading schedules, every drop of oil aboard, even the bunkerage which fuelled the engine, could be moved through here.

  The room itself was three decks high and was palisaded with pipes around the walls. On the far side from the door ­ way they were now hesitating in, some forty feet distant, a single ladder led rung by rung up to a hatch on the main deck just in front of the bridge. On their right, built out from the pipe-covered wall almost like a stage house in a play, was the fire control room.

  In the fire control room great racks of carbon-dioxide canisters stood attached to the automatic fire-fighting equipment; for a fire here was the most dangerous thing that could possibly happen aboard. At the slightest hint of a spark, the automatic equipment would fill the whole Pump Room with carbon dioxide. This process took only seconds. It was the only way of stopping the whole ship exploding.