Ship to Shore

by Peter Tonkin

  Whether or not the others heard him over the numbing cacophony of sound there was no mistaking his gestures and there was nothing else to do. They fought through the foaming rapids that the sea water had cast round their knees already. Three together could move up much faster than two. Richard slung John up first. He handed up Fatima and John hauled her the rest of the way, then they both reached back down for the big white gauntleted hands below them. So they raced the foamed water as it came thundering up the stairwell behind them, with terrifying rapidity.

  They were short of breath, the sea was pushing out the last of the air from the place but they could still gasp a conversation. ‘The others?’—John to Fatima.

  ‘Dead!’

  ‘Salah?’ He could not believe it.

  ‘She killed him. She stamped him out. This bitch of a ship. What did they call her? The dockers.’

  ‘A leper ship,’ gasped Richard. That was all they could say. They climbed on up.

  They were stunned and all but overcome by the situation and by the cost in friends’ lives which had been paid to get them here. John could not get out of his mind that his beloved wife was up there somewhere watching him die. Hell of a honeymoon, he thought. Richard and Fatima were both thinking of Salah, insofar as they were thinking of anything other than staying alive. There was no doubt in their minds that they were under the water now and yet they would not stop fighting to get free. What was the alternative? To sit in genteel acquiescence as the passengers of Titanic had? No! Never! These were people who fought every inch of the way. Who never gave in. Who would fight the Western Ocean until it snuffed out every last spark of life from them.

  They came out into the corridor behind the bridge and fell forward again. The differences between this corridor and the other one four decks down were twofold. To begin with, its forward wall was made of glass and overlooked the main bridge and wheelhouse itself. And the huge bulkhead doors at either end of it were closed. There was air here, trapped like them because there was nowhere else for it to go. The doors were watertight. The windows were holding against the water pressure. The metal of the bridgehouse, lovingly welded in the shipyards of Gdansk all those years ago, remained airtight.

  As there was nowhere else for them to go, the three of them had an instant’s leisure to look around. To look downwards, at least. John gazed across his empty wheelhouse and through the straining bridge windows down the length of the main deck almost as though his ship were sailing normally into a dark night. All the light was coming from the surface far above them, like a sunset astern. Ahead, the sea they were sailing for this one last time gathered through a dazzling array of hues, passing from the palest blue, still given a green tint by the distant sunlight, to the deepest indigo. Dead ahead it was night-black, starless and icy, giving off its own aura of utter annihilation. The lightless abyss waited patiently, just beyond Napoli’s bows.

  ‘God, Richard, she’s done for us too,’ he whispered.

  And the whisper carried, because all the other noise had stopped. An absolute silence seemed to claim them. Even the water coming out of the stairwell behind them was welling up silently.

  John looked at Fatima and she looked enough like his beloved Asha almost to break his heart. ‘We’re dead,’ he whispered. ‘There’s no way out. No way.’

  The engine exploded then. It had built to such a pitch of heat spinning the broken shaft with no resistance whatsoever, that the cold water of the ocean depths simply made it shatter like glass. Glass which had contained many thousands of pounds of pressure. Richard’s assessment of what this inevitable moment would bring proved, for once, inaccurate. The force released by the explosion did not just go upwards, towards the surface. It went out in a sphere of destruction as well, tearing the whole keel off the ship from the coffer dam behind the last hold to the hole where the propeller had been. It bent out the sides of the ship even against the gathering forces of ocean pressure. And because its joints had been weakened by the mountain of water last night and were now under added strain because of the air trapped within it, it blew the bridge house off.

  For the three on the bridge itself, the sensation was what dice must experience during an energetic game. When the wild movement stopped, John found himself flattened against the glass of the forward corridor wall, looking dazedly down. The deck was falling away from him and he simply could not credit what was happening. The water was so clear. The colours were so beautiful. With his face pressed against the glass while the shallowest skim of water flowed across it, he watched the main deck of his lost command fall slowly downwards. It wasn’t really green any more, he noticed its colour redefined by the thickening water. The twisted cranes down the middle of it waved at him. Behind them opened a gape in the deck, a crater as though there had been a tooth there, recently drawn. And behind that horrendous hole, he saw the gantry of the after gallows and the poop where Asha and he had loved to stand.

  Then so near as to make him shout aloud, Napoli’s great funnel fell past and tumbled after the rest of the ship with a kind of balletic grace.

  His ears popped.

  With his shout, the magic of the moment broke. The three of them were no longer in the grip of that timeless time which had held them, like flies in amber, eternal. Dead. Instead they returned to the panicked, untidy, agonising, desperate scramble for life. The water continued to thunder into the bridgehouse as the air billowed out. But the physics which had begun with the explosion of the engine still held them relentlessly in their grip. The air could not escape fast enough to stop the wreck of the bridgehouse from following its new course. The air that had been trapped in the rooms and passageways, pressurised by the force of the deep water seemed extra-buoyant. The outside walls of the square construct were of metal, but most of the internal ones were of wood. Quite apart from the three people trapped within it, there was much in the bridgehouse that wanted to float. And float it did, for a while at least. As the hull of Napoli slid down into the dark, her entire deckhouse leaped back up towards the light.

  The three on the bridge held onto each other like children fighting a nightmare. They screamed as their eardrums flexed in the explosive lessening of the pressure.

  The screaming allowed the high-pressure air to escape from their lungs. The water tried to overcome them but the friendly air remained. The coldness of the ocean tried to take them but their vital warmth survived. Moment after moment after moment it went on, until with a great, overpowering roar, as though of joy and understandable pride, the bridgehouse burst out of the water altogether and seemed to leap up into the air halfway between the lifeboat and Rainbow Warrior’s helicopter.

  The Bomb Ship

  Peter Tonkin

  Copyright © Peter Tonkin 1993

  The right of Peter Tonkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1993 by Headline Book Publishing PLC.

  This edition published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.

  For Cham and Guy

  BOMB SHIP: ‘A ship loaded with mortars or bombs.’

  First used 1704.

  Oxford English Dictionary

  For there is no friend like a sister,

  In calm or stormy weather;

  To cheer one on the tedious way,

  To fetch one if one goes astray,

  To lift one if one totters down,

  To strengthen whilst one stands.

  Christina Rossetti, Goblin Fair

  PART 1 - The Bombs

  1 - Naming Day

  Tuesday, 16 February 04:00

  The black waters parted and a black-wrapped bundle rose all but invisibly to the surface. It was rounded but not round, as though a square object had been wrapped in some protective material and then swathed in black plastic. It was about the same size as a backpack and roughly the same shape, though the way it sat on the water made it seem that something larger and mo
re buoyant was supporting it from just beneath the inky waves.

  A westerly squall gusted across the lough, spraying chill rain like handfuls of gravel, setting the surface to dancing and foaming, and sending all the flotsam bobbing eastward with the choppy wavelets it created. The black bundle moved determinedly westwards into the teeth of the wind, shorewards towards the sickly yellow of the security lighting and the twinkling city beyond.

  A second squall roared over the mountain and across the sleeping streets and on down to set the water rearing into more ugly wavelets, giving the first bundle a brief bow wave just as a second one broke water beside it. The foul weather continued to beat against them as they pushed forwards, like two slightly misshapen naval mines, towards the shore. As they neared the tide line, so the heads and air tanks of the divers pushing them broke the surface in turn and the steady beating of their diving fins disturbed the wave pattern behind. The nearer the tide line they came, the slower the divers swam, so that at last, just as the two black bundles began to grind up a solid slope, all forward motion stopped and the glass of two face plates reflected the security lighting as the divers looked up and around themselves.

  Beyond the bulk of the bundle, each saw first the slope of a concrete slipway, slick and glossy with rain, ribboned with steel rails like giant railway tracks. At the crest of the slope, on the runways waiting to be launched, sat two ships side by side. The ships were facing inland, and the perspective combined with massive size and impenetrable shadows to make it impossible for the divers to comprehend everything at once. All they could clearly make out as they hung immobile in the freezing water, waiting until their first visual check of this end of the shipyard was complete, was the massive brass propeller sitting beneath the overhanging stern of each of the ships.

  Each propeller had three blades and each blade shone, bright new metal reflecting the security lighting almost as clearly as the glass in the face plates. Each blade was as tall as the first storey of a house front and almost as wide. With the huge conical boss round which the blades were hinged, each of the propellers would have obscured the front of any of the modest two-storey terraced houses in the city beyond the shipyard. There was about them an air of massive weight and solidity, an impression which was deepened by the hulls of the ships beyond.

  The divers floated for an instant side by side, a tall, muscular figure beside a shorter, slighter one. For all their physical difference it was clear that the shorter of the two was the dominant one the instant they were in action. There was no signal apparent between them but they were in motion at exactly the same moment, pushing their burdens forward up the slipway to reveal black rafts on which the bundles sat. The wind thundered around them as they rose out of the water like black seals. The rain spattered and hissed on the concrete as they slipped off their air tanks and face masks, then crouched to remove their flippers and to release the bundles from the rafts. The foul weather cocooned them as they sprinted forward into the outwash of the security lighting, each now burdened with his black-wrapped parcel, heading with one accord for darkness and quiet.

  But not warmth: there was no heat available to the two divers within or without. All they could hope for was some shelter from the stormy wind and the driving rain, some opportunity to catch their breath, chafe their shaking hands, and endeavour to massage some feeling back into their numbed fingers. So cold were they that the rain felt warm against their lips and chins before the wind-chill factor cooled the wet skin to freezing. Bare feet as senseless as fingers stumbled and stubbed as the two black-clad figures ran up the slipway and into the darkness between the two ships. The closer they came to the pair of vessels, the greater their size seemed to grow. The thrust of massive steering gear became obvious behind the great propellers. Smaller, manoeuvring propellers behind the main ones were dwarfed by the sheer scale of the shafts thrusting out to the main propellers. The hulls of the ship towered over the two scurrying figures and the bundles they were carrying.

  Between the parallel keels was a tunnel of darkness five hundred feet long and into this the two divers plunged side by side. Moments later they emerged, every bit as hesitantly as they had come out of the water, into the light between the steel-clad cliffs of the bows. Immediately beyond the dizzy reach of the shear cutwaters stood a grandstand constructed of steel girders dressed in bright canvas. The gaudy colours seemed to be bleached and running under the twin effects of yellow light and driving rain. The bunting seemed to be light and sere under the influence of the stormy wind. Beneath the canvas covers, however, there was relative calm and apparent warmth, if not much reduction in noise, and the two figures crouched side by side again, like children sheltering in a massive tent. The canvas was heavy enough to cut off most of the light and so the first thing taken from each of the bundles was a torch. Two beams swept around the forest of tubular steel supports and the wooden sky of seats rising into impenetrable shadow, step by step as the grandstand fell back. But the divers were not interested in the further reaches. They unpacked their bundles and retraced their steps to that part of the grandstand which stood nearest to the twin hulls of the ships. Here they shone their torch beams along one steel strut after another, bright pools of light lingering especially on the joints, until one thick reinforcement tube answered the yellow brightness with a small red mark.

  The taller diver held the beam on the marked member while the other carefully unscrewed it. The wind gusted with a sound like an avalanche outside and all the girders flexed and creaked. Both divers looked around apprehensively, but the joint they were uncoupling remained firm. The sleeve which they were unscrewing slid down to reveal the gape of open tubes. While everything else around then flexed and groaned, these tubes remained firm. It was the work of a very few minutes to pack the contents of the black bundles into the hollow tubes. Twenty pounds of doughy Semtex explosive oozed stiffly into the metal members, turning the grandstand’s false supports into a lethally powerful bomb. A timer, itself tubular, fitted exactly between the ends of the tubes within the joint. A white finger pushed a button and a pre-set display flashed into life. The finger was chalk-white because it was chilled to the bone and what should have been a simple, accurate, single stab of action, became a clumsy, shaking one. The display flashed into life, died, lit up again. The pre-set figures jumped forward, adding ten minutes to the countdown.

  The two divers looked at each other, frozen with shock. Then the slighter one, who had mis-set the timer, gave a peculiar, almost French shrug. ‘C’est la vie’, it seemed to say. Clearly it would be impossible to reset the digital display through twenty-three hours and fifty minutes if the simple act of switching it on could go so disastrously wrong. Hurriedly now, as though unnerved by the bad luck that had rendered their actions less than perfect, the first diver lifted the joint sleeve and screwed it back into place so that its extra thickness perfectly concealed the explosive and the timer. Then the two of them stumbled back to the little pile of rubbish which was all that remained of their two bundles. Carefully they cleared up any trace of themselves and then they ran back out into the stormy night. Under the restless canvas, all that remained of their presence was a twin set of wet footprints which were almost instantly concealed by the drizzle forcing its way through the wooden seats above.

  At the water’s edge, they fought their way back into their compressed air tanks and their flippers. They carried the rubbish with them back out into the water until they could leave it floating safely, anonymously, lost for ever among the flotsam. Then they turned to look back one last time and the taller one hit the other on the shoulder in exuberant relief. ‘Well done!’ the friendly blow seemed to say. The smaller figure reacted unexpectedly. Turning towards the tall diver, it reached up for him, face plate dangling from one slim wrist. He lowered his head and, waist deep in the black water, the two divers kissed long and deeply.

  Then the slighter figure put her mouthpiece where his lips had been and turned away. He stood for a moment longer looking ba
ck at the pale wash of the security lighting, the dark loom of the sister ships and the two bright brass stars of the propellers. The glass of his face plate reflected the dockyard and the lights of the city beyond, creeping up the black shoulder of the mountain behind. Then he gave a fatalistic, almost hopeless shrug and followed his companion eastwards into the first steely promise of the stormy dawn.

  2 - Naming Day

  Tuesday, 16 February 08:00

  Robin Mariner turned away from the shaving mirror above the washbasin and padded across the bathroom. She had used a flannel to wipe away the condensation from her bath, but it kept returning to make the little glass useless as a make-up mirror. As she passed the bathroom chair, she caught up her towelling dressing gown and used it to clear the condensation off the full-length bathroom mirror instead. When she had done so, she stood back and moodily surveyed her naked body in it. She did not much like what she saw.

  Since her teens she had taken a sort of thoughtless pride in her girlish figure and her ability to keep it. Her busy, physically demanding work had seen to that. Slim muscularity and complete fitness had been something she had taken for granted. But during the last eighteen months, motherhood had changed all that. It had added an unwelcome softness to her breasts, inches and stretch marks to her waist and hips, an all too apparent weightiness to her thighs and bottom. She felt fat.

  An explosion of hilarity came from beyond the bathroom door as the twins pulled their father into one of their games. Robin’s mouth twitched into an automatic smile which only served to show the wrinkles around her eyes. Really, this mirror was merciless! She padded closer and concentrated on her face. Too many windswept, blistering days at sea had undermined the natural creaminess of her complexion and all the oils and unguents money could buy did nothing to smooth the lines at the corners of her eyes and lips. At least the gold of her short-cropped curls concealed the increasing number of silver hairs among them. Even so, she felt old.