by Peter Tonkin
‘Penny for them?’ asked Robin, breaking into his reverie.
‘Nic’s sending Biddy McKinney with the Bell to pick us up,’ he answered with a swift mental gear change. ‘But we’ll need to take a cab over to the Island Express helipad. I don’t want to get caught in whatever’s coming down. Especially not on foot and laden with luggage.’
‘That cab waiting at the foot of the gangplank, perhaps? I got the steward to call on our way up here.’
As the steward packed their cases into the cab’s boot and they folded themselves into the back seat, the rain started. Fortunately it was not the kind of rain they had experienced outside the Sky Room last night. There were no drops the size of baseballs, tennis balls or cricket balls. Just a sudden, penetrating drizzle, almost as warm as blood, which blew in across the docks as though some new-fangled colossal shower attachment was hidden behind the low black clouds.
‘Is this the start of the ARkStorm?’ asked the cabbie of no one in particular as he pulled away without even bothering to switch on his windscreen wipers. ‘This ain’t so bad. Take the storms during Oscars season last year. Now they were something! The cops closed major roads and highways. The fire department rescued people from tree trunks floating in the Los Angeles River. Power outages hit 24,000 customers. Evacuation orders were issued for 1,000 homes in Glendora and Azusa that sit beneath steep mountain slopes. Hell, they even had to cover all the big Oscar statues outside the Dolby Theatre with plastic sheeting. I’ve never seen anything like it. I tell you, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop water when it comes down hard. But this ain’t even in the same league. All this Noah’s ark stuff is just so much hooey, if you ask me.’
The Bell was sitting waiting on the helipad and it was empty apart from Biddy, so Richard had no trouble slinging their luggage into the passenger cabin at Robin’s feet and scrambling in himself. As he strapped in and settled the headphones in place, the chopper lifted off into the low overcast sky and was soon immersed in a fog that was just on the point of turning from vapour to liquid.
‘Lord only knows what’s in this foul stuff,’ said Biddy. ‘There’s enough static electricity to interfere with some of my displays.’
Even as she spoke, a huge bolt of lightning slammed down all too close on their left. By chance, Richard was looking in that direction, straining to get a glimpse of Sulu Queen. And, indeed, it seemed to him that the lightning bolt illuminated her as it dazzled him. The searing power of it was like a blow from a boxer. His head reared back. He closed his streaming eyes as tightly as he could and, as he did so, he seemed to see a picture that had been seared on to his retinas. His brain fought to comprehend the frenetic activity of what he had observed almost unconsciously with the still picture that seemed to be all that was left. And it was not helped in this by the overpowering crash of instantaneous thunder, loud enough to be disorientating on its own. The Bell jolted as the power of the strike hit it like the blast wall of an explosion. There was a powerful smell of ozone.
It seemed to Richard that the lightning bolt spread out as it tore down, out of the clouds, with lightning branches striking in white and gold at the speed of light through the streaming air. And, eerily, answering wisps of electricity grew from the tops of the tallest points in the picture revealed by the blinding cataclysm. Ghostly fingers reached upwards from the top of Sulu Queen’s guidance and communication display, from the crest of her one tall funnel, the tip of the loading crane reaching across her square piled cargo and the top of the crane itself. The downstrike of lightning met each of these, flickering between them as it discharged its unimaginable static power.
But the picture that seared itself immovably, unmoving, as still as a photograph, on to the backs of Richard’s eyes was that of the most powerful contact – of the great column of power connecting the heart of the black clouds to the top of the crane beside Sulu Queen. The crane seemed to explode with sparks as its metal structure earthed billions of volts and tens of thousands of amps into the concrete beneath it. It seemed incredible to Richard that the structure had not melted or exploded. It seemed inevitable that every electric circuit in the crane – and possibly in his ship – must have been burned out. He rubbed his fingers over his eyes, dashing away the burning tears, suddenly fearing that there might be dead and wounded over there.
‘Biddy, can you contact Sulu Queen?’ asked Robin, her voice level, calm, controlled – seemingly distant in Richard’s ringing head. ‘See whether there’s any damage to ship or crew?’
‘Will do, but I’ll have to be quick. We’re starting our descent to Maxima any moment now and I need to warn Captain Toro that we’re inbound. He and Mr Greenbaum are very keen to get underway. Katapult8 left at nine on the dot – though Liberty and her crew’ll be fighting the tide for a while yet.’
‘We haven’t held everyone up, I hope?’
‘No, Mrs Mariner. We’re bang on schedule. It was Liberty who jumped the gun. I’ll get on to Sulu Queen now …’
Richard was still blinking and rubbing his eyes when Biddy patched her conversation with Sulu Queen through on to the cabin’s communications system. ‘No!’ spat Captain Sin’s familiar voice, clearly partway through a conversation. ‘No one aboard is hurt. Dazzled and deafened, perhaps. But not hurt. And yes, our control and communications systems are fine. Though I will, of course, be conducting a full inspection to make sure none of the navigating programmes or circuits have been damaged.’
‘That put your mind at rest, Mrs Mariner?’ asked Biddy.
‘Yes, thank you. For the moment, at least.’
‘Thank you for the information, Sulu Queen. I must break contact now. Your owners will be back in touch if they require any further information. Over and out. Hello, Maxima? Maxima, this is Biddy in the Bell, coming in for landing. Hello, Maxima …’
The Bell settled on to its landing pad minutes later. In the interim, Richard’s eyes had cleared so that he was able to swing the luggage out into the hands of a waiting steward with enough speed to ensure the minimum possible soaking. Nic met them on the bridge as they hurried through the smoked-glass doors and past the silver-webbed fantasy of the lift shaft. ‘Good,’ he said, turning back from a conversation with Captain Toro. ‘Now we can get underway and head out after Katapult8.’
‘She left an hour ago, I understand,’ said Richard.
‘Yup. But she’s fighting the tide and there’s been precious little in the way of wind – down here, at least.’ Nic looked up at the writhing clouds eerily close above, which came and went through the drizzle as it filled the air and smeared the clear views. ‘This is one set of circumstances where Maxima’s big Caterpillar motors have the advantage. Especially as the tide’s on the turn. We’ll head out on the top of the water if nothing else. It’ll be like skiing downhill if not quite surfing into the ocean with the flood washing out behind us.’
As he spoke the massive motors came online, two soaking deckhands pulled the mooring lines aboard and Maxima headed out of the marina, swinging on to a southerly course and surging up to full power as she did so.
THIRTEEN
‘There she is!’ called Robin. But then she corrected herself automatically. ‘No. My mistake. I think it’s a whale …’
‘Is Katapult8 still showing on the radar, Captain?’ Richard asked Captain Toro, calling across the bridge from the open area of the radio shack, where he had just broken contact with Captain Sin aboard Sulu Queen. He was concerned about Katapult8 because her cutting-edge automatic identification system, or AIS, kept cutting out. The equipment on Maxima should have been able to track that, but they were having to rely on old-fashioned radar at the moment. Liberty knew about the malfunction, but in order to fix it she would have to heave to in a period of relative calm and send someone up to the top of the huge composite sail. And, quite frankly, Richard suspected that Liberty was happy with the relative freedom the fault was giving her to run ahead and play hide-and-seek with her father.
‘Yes, sh
e’s registering,’ answered Captain Toro, ‘but right at the outer edge. I really don’t believe Mrs Mariner will be able to see her, even with our most powerful field glasses. Even if conditions were perfect …’ The captain let his voice fade away as he gave an infinitesimal shrug. The tone and the gesture said it all. Conditions were well short of perfect. Even though Maxima had been running south at full speed for a good eight hours now, she only just seemed to be breaking out of the overcast that was still smothering Long Beach more than one hundred and eighty miles astern. The whole of the northern sky behind them was a wall of low, black thunderheads that stretched away west, apparently far enough to be raining thunderbolts on Hawaii; perhaps even on Tokyo too.
Richard paused for a moment, looking out through the clear-view windows surrounding the command bridge. There was something slightly out of kilter here, he thought. Something not quite right. The hairs on the back of his neck pricked as he tried to pin down the cause of his sudden disquiet. Perhaps it was just the view, he thought. Yes. That was probably it.
The view was enough to give anybody pause. Even those like Richard, who half believed the sayings his grandmother and great-grandmother might have set store by. Like red sky at night, sailor’s delight. There was definitely a red sky tonight, he thought. Red sky and then some. The sun was setting just south of the massive wall of charcoal cumulonimbus, sinking into the western ocean like a huge bullet wound in the heavens, spattering crimson light northwards on to the coalface cliff of the clouds and south into the haze above the restless Pacific. A blood-red haze sucked up by the unseasonable heat that swept over them as soon as they sailed out from under the lingering cloud cover, and threatened to intensify the further south they went. There was a wind which was powerful enough to raise a disorientating chop, but not strong enough to move the haze, because the air whose motion caused it was dangerously close to one hundred per cent humidity – only slightly less humid than this morning’s penetrating drizzle, in fact. The whole restless vista was full of lines and angles, surfaces and shadows which were easily able to conceal Katapult8’s sail – even if it was the size of jumbo jet’s wing; even if it was blacker than the roiling clouds.
The drizzle they left in Long Beach had intensified into a proper downpour now, Captain Sin had informed Richard during the contact he had just broken. A downpour heavy enough to be interfering with the clearing of the docks but not, as yet, heavy enough to trigger the governor’s emergency plans. Except in places like Glendora and Azusa, at the foot of dangerously steep hill slopes, where the deluge might loosen the topsoil with tragic effect. A danger that was in the forefront of many minds, especially after 2014’s terrible mudslide in Oso, Washington.
Not that Major Guerrero and his containers full of supplies would be joining either the governor’s or the National Guard’s plans anytime soon by the look of things, mused Richard now as he observed the sharp, red-fanged chop, narrow-eyed against the glare of the blood-orange sun. The lightning strike which had dazzled him eight hours earlier may not have damaged Sulu Queen to any great extent, but it had, it now transpired, fried several vital electronic systems in the crane that towered beside her. Particularly the anti-sway system – the electrical arrangement designed to limit pendulum movement of the containers, especially at the lowest points of lifting and placing – the points where the ropes were at their longest. The points at which absolute precision was most vital. The anti-sway system would be crucial as the rain intensified and the wind strengthened towards gale force. And the earliest an engineer would likely be able to start work on the repair would probably be tomorrow.
As far as Captain Sin was concerned, the storm tiger that had pursued him across the Pacific had not only arrived above his command, but it had also brought with it a whole range of bad-luck spirits. Intensified, the captain let slip, by the fact that this was his fourth command. And that, with Antoine, Guerrero and his contingent aboard, the ship’s complement was effectively forty-four. To most westerners these coincidences would have meant little, but Richard had spent enough time in Hong Kong and Shanghai to know that to the Chinese, the number four – which sounded unsettlingly close to the word ‘death’ in Mandarin – was the unluckiest number of all. And forty-four – ‘death-death’ – ranked up with seating thirteen for dinner, walking under ladders and kicking black cats out of your path in Western superstitions. Richard glanced down at the radio link through which he had just finished speaking to his superstitious and apoplectic captain, and shook his head. Then he turned to more immediate matters – though he had no more control over these than he had over what was happening in the Long Beach docks.
The super-competitive Liberty was teasing her father and his friends in the face of Richard’s wager, using the thick wind to drive Katapult8 relentlessly at more than the twenty knots Maxima was cruising at, and using the fault on her AIS, the congealing, clotting haze, the ruby dazzle and the gathering shadows of sunset to play a game of hide-and-seek with the watch-keepers. The huge composite mainsail was too good a target ever to escape the radar, though, and, when full dark came, she would have to switch on her riding lights – which included one bright star right at the tip of the massive sail itself. Unless that, like the automatic identification system transmitter right beside it, was also faulty. It was for this sail that Robin, lacking a sense of distance and scale, had mistaken the tall black fluke of a local humpback whale as it rolled over and over among the white horses. He looked at the back of his preoccupied wife, feeling he could almost read her thoughts, then he was in motion across the bridge.
Twenty knots was fast for Maxima, Robin reckoned, but not for Katapult8. The multihull’s crew was being tested, but by no means pushed to their limits. At twenty knots, they wouldn’t even be up on the J hooks that lifted her long hulls right out of the water and allowed her to fly up towards her top speeds in excess of forty knots. Were Robin in Liberty’s place, she would be running easy with two crewmembers on watch and the other two in the tiny little cabin below, heating up one of their pre-packed meals in the microwave, no doubt. And she would plan to ease back still further after sunset and dinner unless the wind got up and tempted them into something more challenging – or shifted, causing a change in the basic requirements of yacht handling.
Lowering the binoculars, she checked Maxima’s anemometer, which was adjusted for the ship’s own speed, and read the wind speed as though Maxima was dead in the water. The thick, hazy wind out there was moving at fifteen knots. Force four on the Beaufort scale. A moderate breeze which she could have estimated from the one-metre waves and the pink, foaming whitecaps. The state-of-the-art weather predictor suggested that the wind would strengthen in the early hours of the night, sometime during the first watch, she thought; strengthen and swing round to come down from the north. It was information that might have rung alarm bells had she not been so fully focused on Liberty’s probable problems with helming Katapult8 most efficiently. A brisk northerly would help Maxima as it would settle in right behind her. But a northerly would likely hinder Katapult8, for Liberty would have to stop playing hide-and-seek and start to tack from side to side – reach to reach – across the following wind if she was going to get the best out of her command as she ran due south. Katapult8 could run south at twenty knots across a fifteen-knot north-easterly wind forever, she reckoned, even with two on watch and two more making something hot to eat and drink. But once the wind went dead north, things would become more difficult.
Robin crossed to join Richard, who had come over from the radio and was now towering at the helmsman’s shoulder for a closer look at the navigational display. Maxima had come the better part of one hundred and eighty five miles south since setting sail. Katapult8 was an hour ahead, but she had made a slow start and was only fifteen miles distant, according to the radar. The instrumentation made it clear that if Robin looked away eastwards to port instead south-westwards on the starboard forequarter, which is where Katapult8 seemed to be, she would catch the first
glimpse of the lighthouse on Cape San Quintin on the west coast of the Baja California, that long peninsula running parallel to the west coast of Mexico, separated from the mainland by the Gulf of California. And even as she realized this, the beam of the light itself gleamed white against the darkening mass of the land. Dragging Richard with her, she crossed to the port side of the bridge for a closer look.
In the distance, beyond the light which was already beaming out of blue-black velvety shadows, the tops of the Baja’s central mountain chain flamed as though they were erupting volcanoes as they picked up the last rays of the setting sun. And, above them, catching the light like a cross between a star and a ruby burning against the darkening vault of the sky, there was something else that caught her eye. At first she thought it was an aeroplane, but then she realized that it was lower and slower than a plane. And, even in the shapeless dazzle of the sunlight, it was the wrong shape – too fat and squat.
‘What is that?’ she breathed.
‘Thunderbird Two by the look of it,’ rumbled Richard.
And she saw at once that he was right. There, above the jagged peaks of the mountains, the airship Dragon Dream which they had seen yesterday above Los Angeles was heading southwards towards its destination in Mexico City. Robin smiled as though the distant gleam of the state-of-the-art dirigible was the face of an old friend, then she looked down at the peaks above which it was passing. Those would be the Cordillera running through Ensenada and Mexicali, she thought. The Sierra Juarez and the Sierra San Pedro Martir. The high points of the long backbone of the peninsula that rose to ten thousand feet here at one or two peaks. But only one or two. It faded into much lower elevations for most of the length of the peninsula before gathering again at the tip into the Sierra La Laguna.
