The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  “I’m sure you’re aware that I intend to bring charges against the captain of the ship that ran me down. I’ve learned that he is named Cedric Ogilvy and I believe that he is a British subject. I want a decent introduction at the British Admiralty to somebody who can authorize an investigation.”

  “LEVIATHAN is of Liberian registry,” Cave responded. “A flag of convenience.”

  “I don’t give a damn who owns it. I want the captain.”

  “How is John?”

  “I just met the man,” answered Hardin, his patience fading. His knee had been throbbing all morning and he felt feverish in the overheated office of the Admiralty civil servant Cave had sent him to. He loosened his tie and his wilted collar.

  “Well, Dr. Hardin, I’ve discussed all this with some of our lowerechelon people—those you met yesterday—and I think I’m aware of all the facts. Unfortunately, sir, there is nothing we can do for you. If you weren’t the only witness and this were a clear-cut case of malfeasance, we might seize the ship, but neither supposition is true, to our knowledge. And a mere hearing would be worthless because we have no power of subpoena over a Liberian ship.”

  “But the captain is British,” Hardin said doggedly. His hair fell on his brow. He pushed it back. It had grown uncomfortably long and he felt disheveled and out of place in these orderly buildings. A simple memory clutched his heart—Carolyn always cut his hair. He hadn’t gone to a barber in ten years.

  “Commanding a foreign-flag vessel owned by God knows who,” replied the civil servant. “I’m sorry, sir. I can imagine what it’s like for you.”

  He flinched from Hardin’s empty eyes.

  Hardin left the Admiralty and walked the Embankment in the rain, perspiring from fever despite the damp cold. His knee hurt and kept threatening to lock. He cut through the Temple Gardens, decided outside the solicitor’s door not to stop at Norton’s office, and walked some more, growing desperate, not knowing what to do next.

  He felt alone and out of place in the lunch-hour bustle of Fleet Street. The narrow sidewalks were crowded, the pubs and wine bars jammed. Hungry, he ducked into a pub and ordered a hot meat pie, but fled the cheerful warmth before the barmaid brought it, unable to bear his thoughts of Carolyn and the trips they had taken to London.

  He walked into the old City, threaded a maze of narrow streets and tall gray buildings, found Lloyd’s of London, and questioned a doorman in a red frock coat who sent him across Lime Street to the company’s Hull and Cargo sections. On the second floor Hardin found a blue-carpeted office with big windows and rows of modern wooden desks heaped with papers, folders, bulging envelopes, and telephones, and manned by youngish men in bright shirts, loosened ties, and rolled sleeves.

  His coat dripping, his hair soaked and pasted down, he stood uncertainly beside a table of instant coffee fixings under a color pinup. After a while, someone noticed him and asked if he needed help.

  Hardin tried to order his reeling brain. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing here, but he knew no other place to go. He brushed his hair from his eyes and said, “I’d like to talk to somebody about an accident at sea.”

  “Cargo or hull?”

  “Hull, I guess.”

  “This is Cargo. I’ll take you there, it’s right around the corner.”

  He was led to a glassed-off area at the back of the Hull office.

  “My name is Hardin. My boat was run down by LEVIATHAN.”

  There were two men in the office, both in white shirts. Their suit jackets hung over the backs of their chairs. One stared, the other rose with a careful smile.

  “I’ve heard your story, Dr. Hardin, but I’m not quite sure what you’re doing here.”

  “Lloyd’s insured LEVIATHAN,” Hardin replied. “If I sue, you’ll be involved.”

  “Not directly, I’m afraid. It’s not like automobile insurance. The shipper is responsible for his own defense, if defense is called for. We merely advise.”

  “Listen,” said Hardin, “I don’t want to sue. I just want to bring charges against the captain.”

  “That’s out of our ken.” He looked over at Hardin and smiled again. “Could I offer some advice, Doctor?”

  Hardin brushed at his hair. “What? ”

  “Your position is hopeless. You can’t prove that LEVIATHAN collided with your yacht. It’s as simple as that.”

  Hardin saw a familiar expression on the man’s face. How often had he assembled his own features into a mask of wary sympathy when a patient complained of sickness for which there was no reason?

  He returned to the Admiralty with no plan in mind, found it closing, and was standing bare-headed in the rain when an ancient black Rolls pulled up to the curb and a loud voice hailed him from a lowered rear window.

  “Dr. Hardin!”

  The door opened and a wrinkled hand motioned him in. Recognizing an old man he had glimpsed in one of the offices at the Admiralty, Hardin climbed into the car and pulled the door shut. Silently, it entered the traffic, piloted by a white-haired chauffeur and heading toward Trafalgar Square.

  The wrinkled hand pushed a button and a glass partition slid up. “I’m Captain Desmond,” said the man in the backseat. “Royal Navy, Retired.”

  “We spoke yesterday?” asked Hardin, wondering what secrets the old captain could have from his aged chauffeur.

  “We were in the same room. I overheard. You’ve had an incredible experience, sir, and I speak as a man who’s been shipwrecked four times: the first on a windjammer in the Chilean nitrate trade, and three times by German torpedo.”

  The car proceeded magisterially through the London traffic, passing by sidewalks jammed with civil servants marching home beneath a rippling canopy of black umbrellas.

  Hardin’s anger, close to the surface, erupted. He was tired of the ghoulish interest his experience attracted. He said, “I’d appreciate the miracle of my survival a bit more if my wife had shared in it. I’ll get out at the next light, thank you.”

  “My wife drowned when a ferry hit a German mine,” said Desmond. "It was a year after the war had ended. You’ve reminded me of my fury at the absurdity of it."

  “A million-ton tanker steaming full speed through visibility shorter than the space it needs to stop in is more than absurd. It’s criminal.”

  “I hadn’t your luxury of someone to blame,” replied Desmond. “My anger died long before my pain.” He gazed at the city, his lips working. “Such speed is common practice. They depend on their radar. Did you have a reflector?”

  “Of course,” Hardin snapped.

  “Some yachtsmen don’t,” Desmond said mildly. “Too much windage.”

  “I wasn’t racing. I had a big one on the mizzen. I don’t see how they could have missed it.”

  “Could it have been carried away in the squall preceding the collision?”

  “No. I know my boat.”

  Desmond said, “I would hypothesize that in the conditions you’ve described they set their radar to maximum range, which reduces short-range resolution. Or perhaps it wasn’t functioning at all, though that information would be in its log.”

  “Which I can’t get to without an investigation.”

  “I don’t think a reputable shipper would cover up such information.”

  Hardin snorted a disgusted dissent.

  “No,” said Desmond. “The tankers are not known for mechanical reliability. Breakdowns are so common that they’re routinely entered. It would be very difficult to conceal the fact that a repair crew had done work.”

  “Nothing electronic is infallible,” said Hardin. “Somehow, either through breakdown, oversight, negligence, or something inexplicable, they didn’t see me. And godammit, they should have lookouts.”

  He fell silent, staring out the window as they rode down The Mall past Buckingham Palace, toward the wild horses on Wellington Arch. The Rolls swung through a set of pillars marked In and Out in front of a stone building next to Hyde Park.

  “Would
you have time to join me for a drink?” asked Desmond, as the car stopped smoothly.

  Hardin shivered. His clothes were soaked inside with perspiration and outside from the rain. A doorman was approaching the car with a big umbrella, and though he felt conspicuously unkempt, the amber glow of the building’s windows was warm and inviting.

  He accepted, and followed Desmond through spacious, dark halls to a small room where they took armchairs in front of a coal fire.

  “Whiskey and soda,” said Desmond to a young Italian waiter.

  “Scotch, straight,” said Hardin.

  “You look tired,” said Desmond.

  “Yeah.” He massaged his knee in the warmth of the fire.

  Desmond was very small. His trim body couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. The top of his head, which was ringed with a band of snowy hair, seemed nearly separated from the bottom by the deep squint lines that radiated from his eyes.

  “Can you help me?” asked Hardin.

  Desmond shook his head. “Do you realize that whatever the intentions of the corporation which owns LEVIATHAN, and the intentions of the oil company that chartered it, and the intentions of the captain and crew, none of them really believe they did run your boat down?” He raised his hand to stop Hardin from interrupting. “Wait. LEVIATHAN is so enormous that it could put a fifty-ton trawler under the sea and it wouldn’t feel a tremor. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s done it already. They’ve been disappearing regularly off Africa since the supertankers began to round the Cape.”

  “Well, I didn’t disappear,” said Hardin. “I know LEVIATHAN ran me down. I know it killed my wife. I know it sank my boat. And I’m going to do something about it. I’m sick of hearing about how it’s too big to stop, and too big to see small boats, and too big to know when it runs them down.”

  The drinks came. Desmond raised his glass with a wintry smile and sipped; Hardin drained his quickly.

  “We’re all responsible for what we do,” he said. “That’s the way it works. If they can build them that big and surmount the technological difficulties in building them that big, they can surmount the technological difficulties in sailing them, including looking out for small boats.”

  “Have the other half,” said Desmond, nodding to the waiter, who returned quickly with a second scotch. “I agree with you, Dr. Hardin. However, it’s questionable how much they’ve ever surmounted such difficulties. There are limitations, really. Physical limitations. LEVIATHAN is the latest generation of ULCC. She’s Japanese built; they fitted her with proper engines, twin screws, and twin rudders for better handling, but even so, she can’t be stopped in less than four miles. A million tons, sir. Can you imagine the inertia?”

  “I’ve seen it in action,” said Hardin. “What it comes down to is it’s too damned big for the ocean.”

  “A million tons of oil is an awesome economic tool,” said Desmond. “She makes her own market. Simply by choosing in which port to off-load.”

  The drinks drove a soft wedge between Hardin and his anger. It permitted him to accept the comfort of the deep chair and the warm fire. He nodded politely while the old captain rambled on about his life at sea and the great changes that had swept merchant shipping in recent times.

  “Age is the worst threat the ULCCs present. All ships, like all men, are doomed. Rust and vibration will have their way. Plates wear thinner each year, corroded by the sea without and the oil within. Welds part, seams open, machinery weakens, and metal fatigues.

  “LEVIATHAN was launched only last summer. In less than a decade, she’ll have begun to deteriorate. By all that’s right, then they should send her to the breaker’s yard. But little is right with the sea these days, and prudence often runs a poor second to profit. What if there’s an oil shortage that year, or the scrap-metal market is soft? What if LEVIATHAN is worth more afloat that year than as scrap? What if her owners sell her to a shipper willing to take a chance?”

  Desmond looked into the fire. “She’ll die an awful death. She’ll break down someday and go aground. Or split in two. Or sink. And I pray to God that she’ll be empty, for if she’s laden, she’ll wreak incalculable destruction on some shore of Europe or Africa. She’ll make what the Amoco Cadiz did to Brittany look like a minor spill. A million tons of crude oil. That coast will still be a desert long after it’s forgotten what destroyed it.”

  “If they keep on running it the way they are,” said Hardin, “it’ll crack up before it gets old.”

  “Not likely,” replied Desmond. “Certainly not with Ogilvy in command. He takes his responsibility very seriously. And he understands—”

  “You know him?” Hardin interrupted.

  “Cedric? Vaguely. He was my gunnery officer for a month or two on the old Agincourt just before the second war. I had a command in the Gulf. Oversized gunboat.

  “He was barely more than a boy, fifteen years my junior, I’d imagine. Now of course, he’s the most envied ship’s master in the world. Snagging that berth was quite a plum. Funny about Cedric and the tankers. He hates the Arabs; and now he’s in the Gulf every two months like clockwork. It must gall the hell out of him that they’re patrolling the waters we used to.”

  “It galls the hell out of me that he’s on the bridge of that monster after what he did to me.”

  “You’ve used the right word,” Desmond agreed. “It is a monster and Ogilvy is not entirely in control. No man could be.”

  “Someone is always responsible,” said Hardin. “And it’s the captain at sea, Master before God! At this very moment LEVIATHAN is following his route and the crew is following his orders. If he posts lookouts, there are lookouts. If he doesn’t, there aren’t.”

  “In point of fact,” Desmond said, chuckling, “Cedric Ogilvy is most likely nursing a pint in Hampstead right now and wishing his wife would let him smoke in the house.”

  “They relieved him?” asked Hardin.

  “Oh no, no, no. They rotate captains. He’s on two trips and off one. He’ll be home for six or seven more weeks—I say, Dr. Hardin, stay for another. It’s an awful night.”

  But Hardin was already hurrying to the door.

  Ogilvy’s house was in a section of large detached houses built in a terrace row at the turn of the century. A tall woman with white hair and a long plain face answered the door. Captain Ogilvy was still in the City on business. She expected him home in an hour.

  Hardin declined her invitation to wait and walked to a pub he had seen around the corner on the main road.

  The Lancers’ Arms was a free house, a simple mix of country woodwork, hunters’ kit—dusty horns, guns, knives, and whips— hanging from the low ceilings, and plastic fittings on the beer taps.

  He ordered a pint of bitter, found it watery, and switched to scotch. He had eaten nothing since breakfast at his hotel, and the whiskey on top of those he had had with Desmond had more effect that he intended. He was on his second or third, he didn’t know which, teetering between giddiness and oblivion, when Captain Cedric Ogilvy walked in.

  He was blandly handsome, a ruddy-faced, white-haired man of sixty, tall and erect, though Hardin saw a slight shuffling of his feet which signaled the early stages of hardening arteries. Two regulars at the bar greeted him, showing pleasure at the captain’s acknowledgment. Ogilvy took a seat by the fireplace.

  The barman poked the wood fire and went back to the bar in response to a patron’s demand that he be permitted to buy the “captain” a pint. Ogilvy invited his neighbors to join him at the fire.

  Hardin remained alone at the bar drinking and listening and wondering where exactly Ogilvy had been at the moment LEVIATHAN had run him down. The bridge? Chart room? His cabin? The deck? Had his hard eyes glanced at the radarscope, missed a dim blip, ignored an odd flicker? Had he labeled a pinprick of light a glitch? Had, in fact, he even been on watch?

  It was easy enough to dislike the man. He talked in a loud voice, stopping only long enough to allow a contribution to his monologue. H
e seemed opinionated and thoroughly imbued with a careless assurance that, Hardin guessed, came from years of talking to subordinates.

  One of his friends bought a second round. During the exchange Ogilvy’s big, thick fingers drummed restlessly on his knee. Someone asked him about LEVIATHAN’s performance. He lowered his pint, untouched.

  “She’s a titan. Quite simply, the greatest ship in the world.” He started to raise his glass, then stopped again. "My only regret is that England didn’t build her, but it took the Greeks and Japanese to show us that our outmoded marine traditions were holding us back. There’s a new technology of the sea, gentlemen, and in a word, it is big.

  “Build them big. Automate them so you don’t have a hundred men running around the engine room. Staff them with a few good officers—mine are British, you know. Took them with me when I left the P and O. Big ships are fast and comfortable and they get the job done. And that is what the sea has always been about, gentlemen. Getting the job done.”

  “Regardless of whom you kill?” Hardin asked loudly.

  All eyes turned to the bar where he toyed with his empty glass. He held it out for the barman to fill.

  “I beg your pardon, young man?” asked Ogilvy.

  Hardin, noticing that the barman was not pouring more whiskey into his glass, rapped it sharply on the wooden bar. The insistent drumming sound told him he was getting drunk. He put the glass down and answered Ogilvy.

  “You killed my wife and sank my boat with your big ship, sir.”

  The other people in the bar exchanged startled glances, but Ogilvy stood up, clearly understanding, and replied, “You must be the fellow who’s been slandering me at the Admiralty.”

  “You deny it?” yelled Hardin. His voice rang loud in his own ears.

  “Absolutely,” said Ogilvy, stepping out of the circle of chairs and approaching Hardin at the bar. He had small, bright-blue eyes, and up close, Hardin realized, this was a much tougher man than his bland face implied. “I deny it!”