Mariner's Ark

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Then you need to get them moved, Major!’ intruded Captain Sin abruptly.

  ‘Or you and the governor will be looking at a series of crippling lawsuits,’ added Antoine. ‘Not just from Heritage Mariner but from half the people here, as far as I can reckon.’ This turned one or two heads nearby, Richard noted. Lawyers hearing the word lawsuit almost subliminally, like Great Whites scenting blood.

  ‘OK, Antoine,’ said Richard. ‘Let’s not rush to judgement here.’

  Major Guerrero was opening his mouth to add his two cents’ worth. But whatever he was about to add was cut off by the harassed-looking official who had invited them all in here. He was standing in front of a huge schematic of the Long Beach docks overlain with pictures of the chaos Richard had observed from Nic Greenbaum’s helicopter. ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, pulling off his glasses and beginning to polish them with the tip of his tie. ‘My name is Kurt Carpenter, terminal manager for the section your freight is snarled up in. I’m aware of the problems you are all facing,’ he gestured widely to the big picture on the screen behind him, ‘but in order to get them sorted out most quickly and efficiently, we’d be best to start with individual cases …’

  One of the solid-looking men in Day-Glo yellow stood up. ‘Problem’s simple, Mac,’ he said. ‘We got more TEU boxes on the dockside than we can move. Twenty- and forty-foot equivalents both, as a matter of fact. We got nowhere to put them. No one’s willing to freight them out from under our feet – not on trucks or railcars or ships. Everyone’s wanting to bring shedloads more stuff in – no one wants to take anything out. Until the dockside is cleared of some of this stuff, it’s total gridlock. There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘I know the governor’s ordered emergency supplies,’ Carpenter answered. ‘But I don’t know where he wants it put. Or who he wants to move it.’ The room was silent for a moment, with everyone looking at everyone else. Richard was looking at Major Jose Guerrero, his expression thoughtful.

  ‘Is there anyone here who knows what the governor has actually shipped in?’ asked Carpenter. ‘All I know is it’s in nearly one-hundred-and-twenty-foot TEUs.’ He waved a flimsy piece of paper, clearly some sort of manifest.

  The major stood up. ‘Major Jose Guerrero, Sacramento Division, California National Guard,’ he said calmly. ‘I reckon a lot of the stuff you’re worried about is to do with me and my guys. I can give you a detailed inventory for each container and all, but I guess we really don’t have the time. Overall, it’s just emergency equipment. Hospital supplies, emergency rations, bedding, chemical latrines, generators, the gas to keep them working and so forth. The sort of stuff we need in place if the health and welfare infrastructure of the city starts collapsing. My orders were to get it to a National Guard base for unpacking and distribution, but somehow it’s ended up on the dockside here. I suppose someone must have thought this was the nearest freight yard. Maybe it is, I don’t know; I wasn’t briefed on that aspect. But the fact is I want to shift it all out to Fort MacArthur or inland to Los Alamitos as soon as I can. They’ve both been briefed to take some of it. But Los Alamitos would be the best bet for me if we can get it all up on to I710, which is supposed to be a five-minute drive away from the dock. Then across town. Only, as far as I can tell, my consignment is stuck on the waterfront. And it’s at least part of what’s holding things up, like a cork in a bottle. I’ve called for trucks and trailers to come down but apparently the guard’s got nothing that’ll handle twenty-foot containers. The army’s got all sorts of stuff, from tank transporters to trailers, but nothing they can spare immediately. Certainly nothing that’s actually designed for containers – or to be able to shift a hundred of them.’

  ‘Couldn’t get trucks into them even if they did have,’ said the man in the Day-Glo vest. ‘And sure as shit not tank transporters! Not through the gridlock we have here.’ He gave a bark of dry, humourless laughter. ‘Roads are blocked. Quayside’s clogged. We even have trouble moving our cranes up and down on the dock. That’s why we stopped unloading everything.’

  ‘So I can’t move my stuff?’ demanded the major, frowning.

  ‘Nope. And if it don’t get moved, then it looks like nothing gets moved,’ shrugged the man in the Day-Glo vest. ‘But there’s no way you’re going to freight it out of there, even if you had the trucks. Not with everything from the Pacific to the Interstate snarled up. Like I say …’ He gave a brief, unexpected grin. ‘… What you might call a Mexican standoff …’

  ‘Put it on a ship,’ said Richard mildly. His voice was not loud but it carried across the silence that followed the longshoreman’s less-than-tasteful joke.

  ‘What?’ asked the longshoreman, swinging round to face the new idea and the man who had proposed it.

  ‘Put it on a ship out of the way,’ Richard persisted. ‘Clear the blockage, free up the harbour and the Interstates, then take it off again and freight it out when everything else is clear. MacArthur, Los Alamitos, wherever.’

  ‘What ship?’ demanded Kurt Carpenter, his voice wavering between hope and doubt. ‘We’d need permissions from here to Thanksgiving. We’d need clearance from the relevant captains … Agents … Owners … Christ …’

  ‘I can’t speak for the Almighty or his Son,’ said Richard, rising to tower beside Major Guerrero as every eye on the room became fixed on him. ‘But I’ve got all the rest covered. My name is Richard Mariner. I’m the CEO of Heritage Mariner and owner of Sulu Queen, the container ship docked in the middle of this mess and half laden. I have my captain and my agent’s lawyer here.’ He paused, aware that he was stretching a point about the lawyer. But Antoine wisely stayed silent. ‘And I’m telling you,’ he continued smoothly, ‘if you can get Major Guerrero’s containers to Sulu Queen’s berth you can load them aboard her with my blessing and leave them there until the docks are clear – she can accommodate more than four thousand TEUs and she has plenty of room to spare. Then you can take them off again when everything’s running smoothly on the docks and freight them out. No problem. That way we’ll maybe get the rest of Sulu Queen’s old cargo off and her new cargo on, and perhaps even get her back out to sea before the bad weather hits too hard.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Carpenter. ‘Is this something you can do, Mr Molloy?’

  ‘I guess,’ answered the man in the Day-Glo vest. Then he seemed to make up his mind. ‘Sure. I know Sulu Queen. My team’s been unloading her since the port officials gave us the all clear this morning. We can get some of the TEUs aboard her and see how things go from there. Good plan, Mr Mariner. Thanks.’

  ‘OK,’ said Richard, his bland gaze skating over Antoine’s uncertain expression and Captain Sin’s outraged one. ‘Let’s get to it.’

  EIGHT

  Robin went from ‘stunned’ to ‘overwhelmed’ as Nic showed her round his new toy. With her experienced eye taking in every detail as though Maxima were a boat she was just about to command, she walked at his side from the engine room with its showroom-new Caterpillar twin diesel motors capable of cruising at twenty knots, where she’d met the engineer and his little team. They walked through the galley where the chef was putting the finishing touches to the light luncheon he was just about to serve, through the eight palatial state rooms and the cavernous internal common areas where various crew members were tidying up and making beds after the crew of Katapult8 had departed for the morning shakedown aboard their own vessel. They stopped at the command bridge where she met Captain Toro, his first officer and the navigating officer – and finally the flying bridge where she met the communications officer and the electrical officer who were running checks on the navigation and communication equipment up above their heads – and where it was possible to watch Liberty and the crew of Katapult8 as they left off their preparations to take their multihull out tomorrow and came back aboard Maxima to wash-up and eat.

  Robin, Nic, Liberty and Katapult8’s all-woman crew lunched at a table on the middle outer deck, with the tail
of the Bell above them and the swimming pool below. Robin knew all of them well – she had raced with and against them in the past. If anyone could shake Katapult8 down and really get the best out of her revolutionary ‘flying hook’ design, it would be these women. Though, even having seen the massive Caterpillar 3,516–6,200-horsepower diesels in the engine room below and discussed their massive potential with the men who maintained them, she doubted that Maxima could keep up if Katapult8 got the wind in that huge jet-wing sail of hers. The gin palace might be capable of twenty-five knots at a push. Katapult8 was capable of forty-five, especially when the long, sleek hulls lifted right out of the water and she sat just on the hook-shaped hydrofoils that generated hardly any drag to slow her as she flew.

  As they tucked in to the lunch, Katapult8’s crew debated whether they should rush back aboard as soon as they were finished or whether there might be time to take advantage of the warm afternoon for a quick dip in the swimming pool, which filled much of the aft section of the deck they were looking down on. After all, the plan was to run Katapult8 south as fast as she would go and shake her down for the next Olympics, while Maxima shadowed her, then they would all meet up in Puerto Banderas and enjoy some R&R in Nic’s newly built estate down there. However, Liberty didn’t take much persuading to let her crew indulge themselves. The next couple of days threatened to be hard going, even if the weather predictions were overcautious. Earlier incarnations of Katapult had boasted comfortable accommodation for four. But this was the equivalent of a formula-one racer, not a family camper. There were berths but they were little more than strengthened hammocks. And there were supplies – though nothing tasty and nothing hot. Nor, indeed, facilities to heat anything up, in any case. It was a thousand miles down to Puerto Banderas and Liberty was reckoning on at least fifty hours’ tough sailing – sheer, solid grind. If the wind really got up they would find themselves working very hard indeed. Or swimming in far more dangerous waters.

  So the crewmen finishing the maintenance on the jet skis and inflatables around the folded-down stern section were soon treated to the distractingly attractive sight of four lithe bikini-clad bodies swimming like mermaids in an aquarium, for the act of folding down the stern revealed that the aft wall of the pool itself was made of toughened glass. And that was the reason they gave, much later, to explain why they failed to check the final item on their maintenance itinerary: the Spurs line-and-net-cutting system.

  While Liberty and her crew relaxed, Nic took Robin round the rest of the boat’s interior then, finally, after another hour or so, down to see his ‘pictures’ of Dahlia Blanca as Liberty and her crew went back to Katapult8. The minute Robin realized what he had in mind, she thought, you’ve got to be kidding me! But she said nothing, all too well aware that Nic was cheerfully winding her up. He settled her solicitously in the front row of the on-board cinema and popped a SIM card into the slot beneath the seventy-five-inch flat-screen TV that took up half the wall. Nic’s ‘pictures’ sprang to life.

  A swooping camera – clearly a helicopter-shot – sailed low across a wide blue sea towards a wall of jungle. In full, in-your- face, 3D, the blue-backed in-running waves whipped downwards out of shot at the bottom of the wide screen, replaced for an instant by a foam-edged white sand beach, but the precipitous, jungle-clad slopes washed threateningly towards the camera like a solid green tsunami. Between the leaves, trunks and creepers of the canopy, bare earth and sheer rock walls gleamed, running with steams and waterfalls. It was hard to get a sense of scale, but the angle of the shot made it all seem huge, precipitous and terribly threatening. Robin found herself leaning back in her seat as though the jungle were bursting out of the screen like an avalanche to crush her. But at the last moment the camera angle changed giddily and instead of rushing further up the precipice it turned to follow the crest of the ridge itself. Now the tops of the huge trees whipped under the shot like the waves at the start, reminding Robin of the rainforests of Africa; of the Virunga National Park clinging to the slopes of volcanoes on the Congo–Rwanda border. Equally untouched. Equally dangerous.

  On the left-hand side of the wide screen, another ridge rose higher and, distantly, another rose higher still, reducing the sky to a shred of blue as thin as the strip of white that had been the beach. It was like an enormous staircase, Robin realized. An unimaginable wall of mountainside, stepping down and down beneath the jungle canopy to that tiny ribbon of beach and then the huge Pacific.

  ‘This is like Keats’s Peak in Darien,’ said Nic cheerfully, ‘where the poet imagines the Spanish explorer and conquistador Cortez looking at the Pacific for the first time – in the poem about Chapman’s Homer. “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he star’d at the Pacific – and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise – silent, upon a peak in Darien”,’ he quoted sonorously. Then he spoilt the effect by adding, ‘Shit, it probably is that peak in Darien! On a less highbrow note, though, it’s also where ex-Governor Schwarzenegger came to film the Predator movie. The jungle’s that thick, wild and remote …’

  But no sooner had Nic made the point than the trees stopped. The camera was suddenly swooping low over the outskirts of civilization. A sizeable town clung to the lower steps of the mountainside, overlooking the rolling Pacific. Tall trees were replaced in the blink of an eye by taller hotels. The mountain slope on the left of the screen fell back into a wide, dry river valley, on whose flat floor stood an airport. On the right, the inclines were suddenly divided into city blocks, and a kaleidoscope of red-tiled roofs, flat roof gardens, hotel tops with satellite dishes and lift housings came and went. And among them, all along the straight-ruled streets below and the upper ones winding like serpents into the wild greenery above, were blue pools, gleaming the iridescent scales on a butterfly’s wing. Made brighter, Robin suddenly realized, contrasted against the early evening gloom gathering outside Maxima herself.

  A larger river swept out of the distant jungle on the left and rolled down, step by step, fall by fall and pool by pool on to a broad, winding, island-filled stream that opened into the inrushing ocean. Robin had an instantaneous glimpse of new marinas coupled with ancient commercial dock facilities. A tall, gracefully arched bridge. A massive breakwater lined on one side with warehouses and on the other with tall hotels. Then the camera whirled away, dipped and started to rise again. And there, reaching out of the precipitous heart of a jungle-clad cliff, on the edge of a placid lake at the foot of a tall waterfall, there was a vision of pure white. As though a Carrara marble outcrop had been transported here from Italy’s Amalfi coast and then carved into the shape of a fantasy by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building half clung, half floated above the vertiginous cliff slope that tumbled down to the northern outskirts of the town as they cut into the vegetation on the lower slopes and stood low above the long white beach leading back down to the old commercial dock and the broad mouth of the river.

  The camera wheeled once more with stomach-churning abruptness and soared onwards towards the beautiful white house. Again, the size of the picture was difficult for Robin to judge. What she at first assumed was an outreaching balcony, edged with a low white wall, was suddenly revealed to be a huge garden with shady palms, elegant topiary and manicured lawns fit for a golf course, at the rear of which lay a half-covered swimming pool that must have been near Olympic size. The camera swooped over this, under the awning which extended from an upper veranda and in through cavernous doors made of smoked-plate glass in a zoom that would have flattered Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles into a massive, Mexican-styled open-plan area, all decorative tile and white adobe.

  Robin was just beginning to come to terms with the abrupt transition when her phone went off. She pulled it out automatically. Richard’s face filled the screen. ‘It’s Richard,’ she told Nic. ‘I’d better take this.’

  ‘OK,’ said Nic amenably. He reached forward to freeze the screen. ‘We’ll look around the inside when you’re finished. But remind him we’re meeting up for dinne
r tonight. The Sky Room, Breakers Hotel, Ocean Boulevard. Be there at eight; we’re all booked in. My treat this time.’

  ‘God,’ said Robin. ‘Look at the time. I’d better get back and change pretty damn quickly …’

  NINE

  Both of his companions were silent – though it seemed to Richard to be a speaking silence, as Jane Austen might have put it – down to the taxi rank outside the port authority building. Neither could or would put into words what they were thinking, but Richard reckoned that Antoine had some pretty serious worries about the legal implications, which might be well above his pay grade. Sin was simply smouldering at the thought of taking containers that did not contain his cargo aboard before he could begin to unload the containers that did contain his cargo – and get on with the job he was being paid to do. But before Richard had even snagged a cab or either one of them had begun to unburden their soul, Jose Guerrero joined them. ‘Nice move, Mr Mariner,’ said the major affably. ‘But I’m not sure you’ve thought it all through.’

  That makes three of you, thought Richard. ‘How’s that, Major?’ he enquired affably.

  ‘If you’re taking my containers on board your ship, then I guess you’re taking me. And my command.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ answered Richard. ‘Captain Sin?’

  ‘We have little room for supernumeraries,’ observed the captain rudely. ‘But if you insist, Captain Mariner, we would try and find suitable accommodation. How many men are there in your command, Major?’

  ‘Half a dozen. Four men, two women. Logistics. Medics.’

  ‘That will be no trouble. We can supply food and rest areas. If you eat Chinese rather than Mexican, that is, and if you have nothing beyond basic requirements. I assume we will not be providing overnight facilities.’