Mariner's Ark

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘That depends on how fast the docks are cleared,’ said Richard, cutting into the increasingly acid exchanges. ‘But if push comes to shove, I expect you can manage something, Captain Sin.’

  ‘If push,’ snapped Sin, ‘comes to shove.’ He spat the final word as though ‘shove’ was one of his obscure Chinese insults, like sons of rabbits.

  As he thought this, Richard opened the rear door of the cab that had pulled up in obedience to his signal. ‘Are you riding down to the docks with us, Major? Or waiting for your own people?’ he enquired, calmly and courteously.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ answered the major shortly, reacting to Sin’s tone rather than Richard’s emollience. ‘And I trust you – and we – will be able to get through the traffic jams down to the dockside.’

  As it happened, the cab was able to avoid the worst of the jams by scooting down West Ocean Boulevard and Pico Avenue – more or less the reverse of the route that had brought them safely up here earlier – so that Richard, Antoine and Sin were dropped within walking distance of Sulu Queen’s gangplank little more than a quarter of an hour later. Even so, a long, grey evening was beginning to draw in. As he walked through the unnatural quiet of the dockside, Richard suddenly realized he still hadn’t called Robin. He dialled her mobile and her face filled the screen almost at once.

  ‘God,’ she said as contact was made. ‘Look at the time. I’d better get back and change.’

  ‘Change?’ asked Richard. ‘What for?’

  ‘Dinner, you dope. Nic’s taking us to the Sky Room at the Breakers Hotel. We’re due at eight. It’s a “good luck” meal for the girls on Katapult8 and a “thank you” to us for last night. We’ll have missed the sunset by more than an hour but the view should still be spectacular.’

  ‘So’s the food!’ called Nic, from seemingly far away.

  ‘Eight o’clock,’ said Richard. The clock in the top of the screen told him it was well after five now. He looked up at the thickening overcast. ‘Wouldn’t have been much of a sunset tonight in any case,’ he said. ‘You hitching a ride on the Bell?’

  ‘Yes, she is!’ called Nic as Robin hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Ask Nic if he can he pick me up where you dropped me at lunchtime.’

  ‘Sure, Richard,’ called Nic. ‘Be there at six!’ And Richard began to wonder whether Robin had her cell on speakerphone.

  ‘You get that?’ asked Robin.

  ‘I’ll be there if I can get Sulu Queen sorted out.’

  ‘We’ll be there if Nic can get the girls back off Katapult8 in time. He’s gone off to call then in now.’

  ‘Gotcha. Come in, Katapult8, your time is up! Something like that?’

  ‘Something like that, lover,’ she answered.

  By the time Richard was standing at the spot Nic’s Bell had dropped him off more than six hours earlier, the docks were beginning to come to life again. The security lights were on and an urgent bustle was building beneath their yellow brightness. The crane beside Sulu Queen was lifting the first few TEUs and loading them aboard his vessel with pinpoint accuracy and practised forethought – heaviest at the bottom of the columns, lightest at the top. Stevedores and crewmen were securing the lateral lashings in place, tightening turnbuckles and twistlocks as though Sulu Queen might set to sea with the one-hundred-and-twenty-foot TEUs of the National Guard’s equipment stowed aboard.

  Which was why, during much of the intervening time, Major Guerrero had been standing stolidly on the far side of Captain Sin to Richard, while Antoine had been monopolizing the ship to shore, talking things through with the senior legal officers at Southey-Bell, calling Richard through as and when he needed the owner’s weight to back up what they were doing – and proposing to do.

  But, at last, Richard had felt confident enough to leave them to get on with it. Hard hat and security vest in place once more, he followed one of the few officers not involved with loading the ship back down the walkway towards the gangplank. Now, on his right, instead of that vacancy with its Rubik’s cube floor there was a wall of red, lead containers, ridged for strength, battered but still strong, stinking of oil, metal and rust. And this time, the vacancy was on his left hand, for the dockside was slowly being cleared of the first of the containers that had been choking it.

  Normally it would have taken little more than a minute to lift a container from the dockside and position it aboard, but the process was slowed by several factors. The major’s containers were not well placed and had to be moved from the side of the rail tracks before the cranes could lift them. They had also been offloaded from the trains that brought them down here without regard to contents or, crucially, weight. Furthermore, because they were going on to a vessel that was fundamentally unprepared to receive them, there was often an unusually lengthy discussion between the longshoreman and the lading officer as to precisely where each container should be deposited. A one hundred minute task, therefore, was threatening to stretch out to five hours and more. It was out of the question that Richard should have to wait until the better part of midnight to see everything completed here. Especially as Captain Sin and his crew were perfectly capable, if less than happy. Major Guerrero was able to take any decisions regarding National Guard matters and Antoine – a bachelor gay in the old-fashioned use of the term – had no calls on his time and was content to stay aboard and oversee any unexpected legal snags.

  When Richard clambered aboard the Bell it became immediately clear that Nic had been more than generous in offering him a lift. The six seats in the passenger compartment were filled. Nic himself, Robin, Liberty and the crew of Katapult8 were packed in tight. Richard hesitated, feeling a little like a mackerel invading a sardine tin. But Nic waved him forward with a grin. ‘You’re riding shotgun,’ he shouted over the roar of the Pratt and Whitney motors. ‘The co-pilot’s seat’s still empty.’

  Richard folded himself as tightly as he could and oozed into the cockpit like toothpaste sinking back into the tube. Even so, the wiry pilot had to squeeze hard against the side window to let him through. Richard gingerly unfolded himself into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled his seat belt tightly. The Bell jumped into the air. Richard had seen enough of the docks for one day, so he looked across at the man in control.

  And blinked.

  The pilot’s skin was darker than Antoine’s Creole colouring, but not quite dark enough to be African-American or West Indian. Her hair was curled thickly enough to camouflage the headpiece of her earphones. The stem of the built-in microphone almost touched the fullness of her chiselled lips. She shot him a glance from eyes that were unsettlingly like Major Guerrero’s – long lashes framing milky whites and black-coffee pupils almost as dark as the irises at their centres. Her nose and cheekbones were sharp, as was the intelligence behind those arresting eyes. ‘All secure, Cap’n?’ she growled.

  ‘Yup,’ was all he could say.

  And the Bell went up like a rocket lifting off.

  TEN

  The cab dropped Richard and Robin outside the Sky Room on South Locust Avenue at seven fifty-five p.m. and they hurried through the increasingly humid atmosphere under the bright thrust of the awning and into the restaurant section of the Spanish baroque fantasy of the Breakers Hotel. They crossed the lobby and entered the lift, which obligingly whisked them upwards almost as fast as Biddy McKinney, Nic’s chopper pilot, had done.

  Richard had watched, fascinated, as the pilot sent the Bell soaring across the docks and down into the Island Express helipad. Robin held a pilot’s license and was a gifted helicopter pilot. He was well used to watching her taking control of a range of helicopters, but Biddy seemed to him to have something extra. A special gift – almost an ability to become one with her machine. It was at once fascinating and faintly disturbing. Like something out of the long discontinued X-Files.

  ‘What’s the matter, Cap’n?’ she’d growled after a moment or two under his piercing stare. ‘Ain’t you never seen a woman of colour fly?’

  His answe
r had begun a brief but intense conversation, during which he’d discovered her name and a great deal more about her. Not least that she was born and raised in Enterprise, Alabama, educated at the Enterprise Ozark Community College before joining the army and eventually transferring to the First Aviation Brigade at nearby Fort Rucker – Mother Rucker to those who knew and loved it. Among her other duties there, she’d worked her way up to warrant officer and served with the Aviation Technical Test Centre as a test pilot for choppers, so there were hardly any she didn’t know her way around. She loved army life, flying and working under the command of Major General Magnum but, when her last tour of duty had come to an end, she’d discovered with some surprise that her reputation had spread beyond the realms of the aviation brigades, the state of Alabama and the United States Army Air Service – so much so that there were men willing to make her offers that were hard to refuse.

  Mr Greenbaum had made the best of them, so here Biddy was. And, she had to admit, spending much of her time in corporate luxury in her quarters aboard Maxima – which were hardly less lavish than the guest suites – and pottering around in a pretty little new-generation Bell 429 was more like a long vacation on full pay as far as she was concerned. Moreover, she was off to Mexico tomorrow for a three-day cruise followed by a week or so in the most well-appointed building she had ever come across. As she had flown the chopper from which they had shot much of Mr Greenbaum’s Dahlia Blanca video, she’d known exactly what she was talking about. The weather up here in California might be darkening down, but the future looked bright to ex-Warrant Officer Biddy McKinney.

  The elevator doors opened several seconds and eighteen floors later. Richard and Robin stepped shoulder to shoulder into the Sky Room and Biddy vanished from Richard’s mind, overwhelmed as he was by his immediate surroundings. The maître d’, who introduced himself as Mario, greeted them and, at the mention of Nic’s name, led them to a table in the corner. As they followed him, Robin looked around, caught between amusement and surprise. The whole place was like Queen Mary’s younger sibling. The ship’s 1930s Art Deco fittings were echoed here in the stylish restaurant by furnishings every bit as palatial, but from the 1940s. And Mario’s quiet speech of introduction and orientation mentioned the later cohort of Hollywood stars. In place of Greta Garbo, the Astaires and their generation, famous in the pre-war years, he talked of post-war regulars like Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Cary Grant, who had famously come here to sip their cocktails and look down over Long Beach in the company of Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner. Robin glanced across at Richard and shook her head. His grin was just as wide as it had been aboard the Queen Mary last night. Any wider, she thought, and the top of his head would fall off.

  ‘This is Mr Greenbaum’s table,’ announced Mario as he pulled out a chair for Robin. ‘Here in his favourite corner.’

  But this corner was no hideaway, no secluded spot, Robin thought. Two long picture windows met to form it, offering a breathtaking view across lower Long Beach towards the ocean, from the cranes standing tall under the security lighting above Sulu Queen right the way round past Queen Mary to Grissom Island and White Island in the outwash of the Los Angeles River, to distant Seal Beach beyond. Under a low grey sky that looked like the roof of a squat mineshaft, the city spread out like the strike of a lifetime in a diamond mine. Like the sales tray in Tiffany’s – points of jewel brightness beneath a coal-black cover of velvety darkness.

  Robin and Richard were still discussing the impressive but slightly unsettling view when Nic, Liberty and her crewmates arrived. No sooner had they settled in their chairs than the menus and wine lists were presented. Robin was charier tonight and settled for an alcohol-free evening like her teetotal husband. The sailors were also careful – the last thing in the world they needed when they got underway in the morning was a hangover. Nic cheerfully fell in with the general abstemiousness and the sparkling water flowed.

  As it was with the wine list, everyone was careful with the menu, thinking less about having a great gastronomic adventure tonight than about whether they might regret it tomorrow. They all settled for asparagus soup and Caesar salad. A certain amount of oysters Rockefeller and seared Ahi had been consumed last night, so the table settled for blue lump crab cakes, jumbo shrimp and, on Liberty’s recommendation, truffle pommes frites. Then they got to work on the main courses.

  For Richard this meant Colorado rack of lamb, heirloom carrots, Brussels sprouts, spiced croquette potatoes and mushrooms. Robin went for the veal chop with mushrooms, carrots and asparagus, while big meat-eater Nic chose rib-eye with more asparagus and yet more truffle pomme frites, with no thought at all for the health of his cardiovascular system, thought Robin. A decision he would have had a hard time making were he not a widower bereft of a solicitous life partner’s good sense. The crew of Katapult8 variously went for pasta, salmon and black cod. From the dessert menu, those thinking of their waistlines choose the chef’s trio of sorbets, while the rest went for the ‘chocolate therapy’.

  The conversation was about the view and the ambience to begin with, then about the menu and the food. But Liberty soon started needling her father about tomorrow. ‘That fat gin palace of yours won’t stand a chance,’ she announced. ‘It could have twice as many Caterpillar diesels and pull horses by the thousand but it won’t even see Katapult8 after an hour or so, except on radar maybe, let alone keep up with her.’

  The gauntlet she threw down so calculatedly included Richard and Robin, who were also due to be aboard Maxima for the run down to Puerto Banderas. Nic smiled indulgently and remained silent, but Richard rose to the bait. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s put your money where your mouth is time. What do you bet?’

  Liberty’s eyes went wide, then narrow. ‘What do you know?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing you don’t know.’

  ‘It’s the weather, isn’t it? It’s this ARkStorm – if it ever arrives!’

  ‘If it arrives,’ interrupted her father forcefully, ‘then we’ll all be running south of it as fast as it’s possible to sail or motor.’

  ‘That is part of the point,’ added Robin. ‘Your father wants you, Katapult8, Maxima and all of us well out of the way before the heavens open.’

  ‘But I can’t see how a storm, even a once-in-two-centuries event, is going to make us go slower and you go faster,’ persisted Liberty, paying no attention to Nic or Robin, focused entirely on Richard and his challenge.

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to guess,’ he answered blandly.

  ‘There’d be winds along a storm front,’ persisted Liberty, glancing at crewmates, Florence Weary and Emma Toda. ‘It’s the calms we need to worry about.’

  ‘Maybe that’s it,’ said Flo thoughtfully. ‘Maybe he’s reckoning that if the ARkStorm streams in here there’ll be light winds or dead calms to the south of it. What d’you think?’

  All four yachtswomen looked at Richard. He raised his eyebrows and presented his blandest face. After a moment he took a mouthful of lamb and began to chew slowly and silently. As he did so, suddenly but spectacularly in the background, the Tino Productions orchestra went into their opening number. Aptly enough, it was Billie Holliday’s ‘Stormy Blues’.

  The table rather split into two camps after that. Liberty’s crew went into a huddle, whispering among each other, and even started to make obscure notes on a folded napkin, letting the astonishingly good food go cold while they tried to second guess what Richard was up to – and to come up with something that they could put up against him in the wager.

  Robin tried to brighten things up between Richard and Nic by describing in exhaustive detail everything she had seen aboard Maxima, including a long and detailed description of the ‘pictures’ of Dahlia Blanca. But when it became clear that neither man was paying attention, she turned her own attention to her recently arrived chocolate therapy dessert and let them all get on with it. The orchestra moved on to Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining in My Heart’.

 
Halfway through dessert, Liberty looked up. ‘You’re on,’ she said. ‘What’s the wager, Richard?’

  ‘Winner’s choice,’ he answered easily. ‘I trust you, and you know you can trust me. Whatever the winner demands of the loser.’

  The band moved on to Wynonie Harris’ ‘Stormy Night Blues’. ‘Within reason,’ said Flo and Emma together.

  ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ laughed Richard. ‘Reason is my middle name.’

  ‘Right!’ decided Liberty with a captain’s authority. ‘Winner’s choice.’

  ‘Given,’ added Robin severely, ‘that the last thing Richard and Nic had us all race against each other for turned out to be worth several million dollars.’

  ‘That’s another story altogether,’ said Nic. ‘Though I still get letters of thanks from all the charities it went to – and the Tokyo University’s Earth Sciences and Climate Change department.’

  ‘Me too,’ added Richard. ‘And from the British Antarctic Survey.’

  ‘Right,’ said Liberty, taking control once again, noting that the dessert plates were empty and the hour was getting late. ‘That’s all for now. Bedtime, ladies. We’re up early tomorrow.’

  ‘Up and out early,’ added Flo with a meaningful glance at Richard.

  ‘That’s what I’d recommend,’ he advised easily. ‘But the tide will be against you until ten, so I’d spend the early hours getting ready for a Le Mans racing start then or thereabouts.’

  The orchestra segued into Arlen and Koehler’s ‘Stormy Weather’.

  ‘What in heaven’s name was that all about?’ demanded Robin as she, Richard and Nic rode down in the Sky Room’s lift a quarter of an hour later with T-Bone Walker’s ‘Call it Stormy Monday’ echoing out of the restaurant behind them.

  ‘Making assurance double sure,’ he answered.

  ‘He’s lit a fire under the girls’ tails,’ said Nic. The lift stopped, the doors opened and they began to cross the lobby.