by Peter Tonkin
‘I’ll tell him,’ snapped Ann. ‘You’d better stay up here. Where is he?’
‘Cabin behind the chart room,’ answered the little man, craning round to look over his right shoulder as though his agonised gaze would be the best guide across the wheelhouse.
She was off at once and had only taken a step or two before the alarm bell, ringing from the radar, informed her Hogg had turned it on again. To get this close to an icefield without anyone realising — heads were going to roll, she thought. Reynolds would never have allowed it to happen. She was through the chart room at a flat run and hammering on the door beyond. ‘Come,’ said Black’s voice, instantly alert.
She pushed the door open and stood on the threshold. He was sitting, back straight, on a narrow bunk. He had clearly been sleeping partially dressed, but his trousers still seemed to be impeccably pressed and the shirt he was buttoning might just have been ironed. For once he did not attack her for being who she was, what she was or where she was. ‘Icefield, dead ahead, Captain,’ she said.
‘A field of ice?’
‘Horizon to horizon as far as the eye can see.’
‘How far can you see, Miss Cable?’
‘Halfway to the Pole. The moon’s out.’
‘I see. And how near do you estimate —’
His calm questioning was interrupted by the first shock of contact since the rogue floe had smashed their propeller fifteen hours earlier. The grinding hesitation, coupled by the slight but unmistakable canting of the deck, made the rest of his question superfluous. He rose, punctiliously sliding his tie under the starched points of his shirt collar, a frown beginning to gather on his lean, lined face. ‘Miss Cable, I wonder if I could ask you to find the chief engineer.’ His faded, weary eyes flicked up to the clock on the wall. ‘He will be in his cabin at this time in the morning, I expect. Give him my compliments and explain the situation. He will have to doublecheck that everything in the engine room is secure.’
She turned to go, but for some reason he continued, tricked into a fleeting intimacy. ‘I should phone him, of course. That’s what a captain should do. But he has disconnected the bells in his cabin and his workroom so I can’t disturb him, you see.’
The chief engineer’s name was Lethbridge and Ann disturbed him all right. For some reason, Captain Black’s defeated words made her angry with the chief engineer. She hit his door like a small avalanche, battering it with her fists. He opened to her, his face thunderstruck. Nobody had dared summon him like this since he had been an apprentice. ‘Now just what the infernal —’
‘Captain says you’d better look to your bits and pieces, Chief. It seems the wind’s pushing us up into an icefield.’ And even as she spoke, a second, more serious impact came. Atropos seemed to jump to port as the starboard quarter bounced off a bigger floe. It was a movement every bit as sudden and almost as violent as any enforced motion during the storm. All through the ship — unnaturally quiet because the engines were shut down — came the rumble of the impact.
And something more. From far below there came a sudden reverberation, so bass in sound it seemed to make the whole bridgehouse shudder, so powerful it seemed to have no beginning or end. Only when it had been repeated several times was there any pattern discernible in it, as though a huge bell was tolling slowly in the deepest bowels of the ship.
The chief engineer came fully into Ann’s view, pulling up the zipper to close his overall across his lean belly. He set off at a run and she followed him without a further thought. Together they plunged down the companionways while the air around them filled time and again with the noise of the icefield thumping and grating along the hull and the great bell ringing ever louder beneath their feet. As they went, they seemed to collect a team of men about them. The engineering officers appeared from cabins like hibernating bears in spring and ran down at their sides, Lethbridge’s sidekick Don Taylor first among them. LeFever appeared from nowhere and joined in as they went down past A deck into the engineering decks. He tucked in beside Ann. ‘What’s going on?’ he yelled.
Ann seriously considered trying to frame a verbal answer but he would never hear it, so she shook her head and hoped that would suffice as they reached the corridor where nearly sixteen hours earlier they had first learned about the propeller. Here the noise was almost overpowering. And the reason for the sudden plethora of engineers was explained: it was coming from the engine room. They ran towards it as though the damage each overpowering chime was doing to their ears was a thing of no account. Ann followed, though she was getting very frightened now. Anything which summoned so much unquestioning dedication from men who bitched unendingly about arriving in their work area at 08:59 or leaving it at 17:01 had to be something she wanted to report. And because she was going in, Henri LeFever followed on.
Like her sister ship Clotho, Atropos was powered by two compact Rolls-Royce RB211 gas turbines. They were so compact that it was possible to carry a third aboard so any serious problem could be rectified by lifting the damaged unit out and putting a complete new motor in. The third turbine was carried suspended from the roof of the engine room. It was secured in a heavy sling which was held up by four lines, two to the fore and two to the aft of the room. The shock of impacting with the icefield had caused three of these lines to snap so that several tons of engine was swinging from side to side of the metal-sided room. The bell-like cacophony was caused by the fact that at the apogee of each swing the turbine was thundering up against a wall.
They crowded into the engine control room and froze, petrified with horror.
A series of marks along the far wall and lines of gleaming debris which made an hour-glass shape on the floor showed that the engine was not content to follow only one arc of motion. ‘It’s coming this way!’ screamed Ann and shocked them out of their stasis. So it was. They scattered. The wisest, perhaps, headed back out of the door they had just come in through. The chief, followed by LeFever, Ann and the second engineer Don Taylor, went out of the right-hand door and onto the steps there which led down into the three-deck-deep hole which contained the engines and all the ancillary equipment. The third engineer, the panicking boy who had told them of the propeller, went the other way.
The engine did not, in fact, hit the engine control room on that swing, but it collected the little metal balcony and the left-hand door which opened onto it and the steps which led down from it and slammed the whole thing against the wall. The young engineer never knew what hit him. It was, perhaps, the closest a man could come to being swatted like a fly.
The last line, the one from which the engine was swinging, was secured to a power pulley on the far side of the room. But it was a big room and they had to get down to the next deck level before there was a lateral walkway. They were halfway across this when the engine crashed into the corner of the engine control room in an incredible explosion of glass and metal shards. ‘We’ve got to stop it before it swings again, Don,’ screamed Lethbridge to his deputy. ‘All the computer controls ...’
But the second engineer was more concerned to gesture ahead. The series of marks along the further wall led inevitably towards a sheaf of massive pipes. The engine would hit them on this swing. Like wild things, the engineering officers ran and, caught up in the drama of it all, Ann would have followed. But as the two crewmen flung themselves wildly down the steps towards the power winch, Henri’s hand closed like a vice on her shoulder.
‘Too late!’ he screamed. ‘We get out.’
Any protest she might have made was stymied by the power of his grip and his action. He hoisted her like a child and ran back along the walkway with her. The engine swung past them, whispering as it hurled through the air, like the deadly blade in Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.
Lethbridge hit the power winch and the emergency release. The weight of the engine was enormous and the force of its motion cataclysmic. The released cogs spun at tremendous speed. There was an automatic safety but it burned out in an instant and the engine wou
ld have thundered to, and probably through, the deck had not the second engineer collided with his chief. Lethbridge’s overall, still only partly zipped and hanging loose, caught in the whirling cog and snagged it. The big man hurled himself backwards so that none of his body followed the cloth to shred through the rabid steel jaws, but the hesitation gave the engine the instant of time it needed to complete its final swing. It cut only the outermost of the sheaf of pipes but that was quite enough. A spray of superheated steam thundered into the engine room. It billowed in boiling clouds around the two engineers. The other two were lucky to avoid the full force of it, saved by Henri’s action.
Not so lucky, however, was the ship’s generator. In an instant the cool metal was running with condensed water. In another, with a blinding flash and a crackling roar, the machine died. And in the echo of its death, the battered wreck of the RB211 engine slithered to the deck.
As the wind-driven, helpless Atropos, struck dark and blind, deaf and dumb, wedged deeper into the flank of the moonlit icefield, Captain Black in desperation screamed at the setting moon, ‘Where is that British bitch with Clotho?’
11 - Day Seven
Tuesday, 25 May 05:40
Clotho was moving east again, one hour’s sailing south-west, coming in at full ahead. Robin, pale, exhausted but grimly determined not to give in to fatigue, was on the bridge. From her position, the moon had almost set and the palest fingernail of it lay above the corrugated coalface of the sea in the thinnest gallery of clear sky trapped claustrophobically beneath the mountainous weight of the clouds. Just as it did set, the undersides of the clouds were suddenly dusted with the palest mother-of-pearl and the whole sky seemed to light up for a moment before the blackness clamped back down.
‘You seen that before?’ Robin growled at Nico.
‘No, Captain. I’m a Mediterranean man. I know what it means, though. Icefield ahead.’
Robin crossed to the collision alarm radar and fiddled with the setting. Just for a moment, she wanted the big picture, in spite of the fact that it would probably be pretty vague. The range clicked up from five miles to fifty. Far up above her head, the equipment in the big golfball of the radome readjusted itself and the image in the bowl silently changed. Twenty miles to the north, the deep green of the image paled in an almost straight line east to west. Above it, the paleness went northwards towards the Pole. The bright spark denoting the silent sister ship shone on the edge of that sinister, pallid sea. According to the calibration, it was a little west of dead ahead. They were still allowing for the current, though the force of it had moderated, as had the force of the wind.
But just to the south of Clotho, the machine showed another area of paleness. The pallor represented another area of thick ice, and this was what had held them up.
Robin snapped the machine back to the detailed five-mile setting before they bumped into anything too small to feature in the big picture but large enough to do them harm. Then she crossed to the watchkeeper’s chair. It was Nico’s privilege to use it because he was on watch now, but the Italian was happy enough to be gallant. He had been tucked safely in his bunk since she had dismissed him at eight last evening. He had enjoyed eight hours’ blissful slumber while Johnny Sullivan and Rupert Biggs had held their watches. She had been on the bed in the captain’s day cabin behind the chart room and her sleep there had been restless and disturbed.
It was the ice to the south of them that had been the trouble. Sullivan, knowing how exhausted she was and wishing desperately to let her sleep, had nevertheless been forced to report to her when it had materialised right across their path a mere ninety minutes after she had gone to bed. By 22:00 hours last night, they had been off course, running due west with the wind behind them, looking for a way round the obstacle — or through it. The five-mile setting on the radar showed them parts of it, but not enough to get a clear idea of its size or disposition. The big picture went fuzzy incredibly quickly because of the power of the storm. It was impossible to tell much about it. It was big. It was in their way. It was made of ice. That was all.
Rupert Biggs, the electronics wizard, had guided them round the end of it in the dead hours of his watch and had woken Robin again when the situation warranted a major change of course. Blearily, she had ordered Sam Larkman, who held the con until Errol arrived with Nico at 04:00, to swing back due east and come up to full ahead. The engines responded nimbly; they would have done so under the direction of the automatic systems, but the automatic systems were redundant because Andrew McTavish’s engineers were awake and keeping watch as well.
Now they were running up to their objective at full speed, cutting through the stormy water at nearly thirty knots, throwing up a bow wave like a speedboat. Robin crossed towards the spray-spattered clearview, feeling very much in charge of the whole situation.
As she did so, Bill Christian pushed his pale face out of the radio shack, calling, ‘Captain! She’s gone dead. Atropos has gone dead.’
Robin swung round to look at Nico, as she did almost habitually in a crisis now. He called himself a Mediterranean man with that wry Neapolitan gift for understatement, as though the term defined the limit of his experience. But he had been around. He had learned a lot. He had more than earned his papers. He was a good officer. They were a very good team. Automatically they were bouncing ideas off one another in an instant.
‘Power loss, probably, Captain. Generators down.’
‘Probably, Nico. So we wait and see if she comes back up when the emergency systems click in.’
‘But if her generators are down, how will that affect what we are going to do?’
‘The answer to that will depend firstly on how many auxiliary systems the back-up is designed to run.’
‘Light, navigation, communication.’
‘Heat? Galley? Deck equipment?’
‘The split windlass works independently.’
‘I know. Thank God. But we need to be certain about food and heat too, in this weather.’
Bill Christian called through, ‘Atropos is back. On emergency power. Their main power is completely lost — their generator’s down. More details as and when they can. Could we give Captain Black an ETA? He’s not a happy man.’
‘Less than one hour. I want to know at once if he gets full power back.’
‘Aye aye, Captain.’
‘Right. That’ll give us something to do other than sitting around worrying while we go on in. I’ll get the chief up here and if he can’t tell us what the back-up power systems do and don’t run, then I’ll get the ship’s specifications out and we can look it all up.’
*
‘As you well know, Captain,’ said Andrew McTavish in his gentle Lowland Scots burr, ‘the power on these ships comes from two alternators run in tandem. If one’s gone, the other will have shut down automatically so they’ll be running on battery power and that will give them only the very basics. And no heat. If both alternators have gone, they’re in trouble. If one alternator has gone, it’ll be a case of fixing it, starting it and bringing it back into phase with the other one or they’ll burn out the switchboard and a whole lot else besides. How fast they can do that depends on the damage and the chief engineer over there.’
‘Atropos is back on the radio, Captain.’
‘Thanks, Bill, I’ll come myself. Excuse me, Andrew.’
‘What do you think, Nico?’
‘I don’t know, Chief. I thought this was the unlucky ship. Looks like her sister is worse.’
‘Oh come on, Number One, you’re not serious about all that claptrap, are you?’
The Italian looked at the bluff Scot and wondered whether to be insulted. His Neapolitan pride was hurt and his hot blood would have been happy enough to declare a vendetta. But he knew that he was tired and that if he took umbrage then he would just be giving in to the mala fortuna of the whole situation.
‘Right,’ said Robin tensely, returning before either man could add another word. ‘The situation is this
. They’ve lost one alternator. It fused out because it was sprayed with superheated steam from a fractured pipe. Their chief and first engineer have both been boiled alive by the same steam, the third has been crushed to death and they’ll need help to put things right.’
Andrew looked at Nico, his eyes wide and his dour Calvinist education trying vainly to come to terms with the Italian’s dramatic concepts of fortune. They suddenly seemed to be absolutely accurate after all. ‘I should think they will need help,’ said Andrew feelingly. ‘When we come alongside I’ll have to go across myself. And I’ll take Harry Piper my third engineer along with me. He’s young but he’s keen. It’ll be good experience for him. That’ll leave Lloyd Swan, my number two, to look after you until I get back.’
‘Would you like to take Jamie Curtis as well?’ asked Robin. ‘The experience would be good for him too.’
‘Aye. He’s another one who’s bright and keen. For a deck cadet. He’ll do to carry any messages back and forth that I mightn’t want to broadcast.’
Andrew’s eyes met Nico’s. The pair of them looked across at their captain and she met their gazes imperturbably. ‘Are you suggesting that all might not be well aboard our sister ship?’ she asked quietly.
‘It’s Nico,’ answered Andrew. ‘He’s got me thinking that maybe she’s bad luck.’
*
They saw her lights within the hour and slowed to a crawl while Robin talked to Captain Black first on the radio and then on the walkie-talkie. With the deck lights on and the searchlight atop the stubby communications mast just behind the forepeak blazing at full power, it was possible to judge how far the wind had pushed her into the mush ice and smaller floes along the edge of the icefield. The night was nearly over, and the storm likewise. Tall waves still rolled up from the south-east and it was these as much as anything that kept the edge of the ice broken up. When dawn eventually heaved itself up into view, Robin reckoned it would reveal the taming of the big seas down to ripples in a mile or so by the solid weight of the ice. But there was still some time to go until sunrise, and there was much to be done before it. Andrew McTavish, Harry Piper and Jamie Curtis were all dressed in bright orange survival gear and ready to go across. They would be using one of the lifeboats and, never one to waste effort, Robin was sending a cable across with them.
