The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  Hardin smiled thinly at the maimed Bermuda yawl. “I passed the test?”

  “Thought you would. Mind your footing now.” Culling brought the rowboat gently alongside, and this time joined Hardin as he stepped aboard.

  She was beamier than her sharp profile suggested, and Hardin paused for a heady moment at the aluminum helm to drink in her wide teak decks and lavish fittings and imagine what a joy it would be to work her. This was an ocean yacht capable of driving as hard and far as a man could push.

  Her sleek cabin grew from her molded fiberglass hull, rooted as integrally as a knife’s cutting edge to its blade. Where wood might offer comfort or beauty she was wood; the decks, sheet cleats, and handrail had weathered gray.

  The cockpit was small and shallow. Hardin lifted the teak seat covers and found stowage lockers, including one with a life raft, sealed tight from the bilges. Double two-inch scuppers would drain her quickly if she shipped a sea.

  She had jiffy reefing and stainless-steel Lewmar sheet and halyard winches, and her stays, shrouds, and safety lines all gleamed corrosion free in the bright sunlight. On a panel above the hatch, visible from the cockpit, were the black dials of Brookes and Gatehouse racing instruments for wind velocity, wind direction, speed, and the fathometer readout for water depth.

  “Three years old,” said Culling, stroking the safety lines with a loving touch. “Thirty-eight feet overall. Twenty-nine on the waterline. Fin keel. Six-foot, four-inch draft. Eight tons displacement. Seven thousand pounds ballast. She’s been to the Canaries, Rio de Janeiro, Fort Lauderdale, and home by the Azores.”

  “You’ve maintained her?” asked Hardin.

  “Aye. Not that she needed a lot. The owner treated her like a lady. Go below. See what you see.” He slid the smoked Lucite hatch cover open as smoothly as if it were on roller bearings.

  Hardin studied it with a wary eye until he determined that it was three quarters of an inch thick and seated in deep tracks so that a wave couldn’t rip it off. Although he worked with the latest technology and most modern materials, he was, at age forty-three, old enough to have started sailing when boats were still made of wood and carried canvas sails sheeted with manila line, and he had a conservative mistrust of amenities like plastic hatches.

  He descended the companionway into the main cabin. She was a miniature teak temple inside, light and airy, with the rounded lines and edges that showed that the Finnish carpenters had known they were building a boat instead of a house trailer. He took a long, appreciative look at the craftsmanship, then put the beauty from his mind and turned to the essentials.

  Her lockers looked good. They were clean and orderly and packed with the tools and repair materials found on a well-maintained boat. The sails had been protected from the sun and stowed properly. He worked his way through the sail bins, checking the enormous inventory.

  The owner had been slightly sail happy and had spent lavishly. If he took this boat, Hardin would have to leave some behind to make room for supplies. The rope lockers were similarly equipped, the bilges dry, and the diesel auxiliary, shielded by a heavily soundproofed box, clean, its hoses recently replaced.

  “Twenty horsepower,” said Culling. “Two and a half to one reduction. Twenty-five-gallon fuel tank. You’ve got a three-hundred-mile range at six knots.”

  “Clockwise screw?” asked Hardin.

  “Sixteen inch propeller.” Culling nodded. “The folding kind.”

  “Generator?”

  “Alternator off the main engine.”

  To drive the equipment he planned to install, Hardin would need a fair-sized generator. He gave the switchboard and circuit breakers a quick look. Like everything else on the Swan, they were orderly and clean.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s haul her. I want to see the bottom.”

  Culling nodded invitingly at the narrow cut in the cliffs. “Care to sail her first?”

  Hardin shook his head. “First I want to make sure she isn’t wearing a reef.”

  Culling smiled. “I’ll slip the mooring. You run her in.” He detached the double lines that held her to her mooring and nodded complacently when the diesel muttered eagerly at Hardin’s first touch on the starter button. Hardin wondered for the hundredth time if they might have escaped LEVIATHAN if he had replaced Siren’s balky engine before their Atlantic crossing.

  The Swan steered responsively; he regretted not having the time to take her for a sail first. But he had to know by evening if this was the boat, because he needed other things equally important to his plan.

  From the water, Culling’s boatyard appeared as a circle of well-kept boat sheds ringed by enormous tumbling-down boathouses. Rusting tracks emerged from the water and disappeared into the dark of the boathouses like the bones of beached sea monsters. Hardin asked the purpose of the ruins and Culling replied that early in the war he had maintained a repair station for MTBs— the motor torpedo boats that fought the Germans in the English Channel.

  Hardin pointed the Swan toward a smaller, functioning railway and followed the yardman’s shouted commands until her hull was wedged firmly on the underwater trolley. A winch engine chugged lazily, a cable lifted from the water and hauled her up. Culling propped a ladder against the hull.

  Hardin climbed down, stepped under the sharp bow, and began tapping the fiberglass with the wooden handle of an awl. He tapped sharply every few inches, methodically testing the entire surface, his ear cocked for the telltale soft or hollow sound that would reveal delamination of the glass layers or a faulty repair.

  He spent two hours working the awl over the hull. Twice, when he got a sound he did not like, he turned the tool around and jabbed the point into the fiberglass. The first time he discovered a tiny delamination, which had probably been there since she was built. While it showed no sign of getting worse, Culling nevertheless circled it with chalk.

  The second seemed more serious. The awl sunk sickeningly deep into a soft spot in the middle of a two-inch dent. It looked as if the boat had hit something small and hard while moving fast. Hardin tapped all around the area, assessing the damage. When he was positive it wasn’t structural, he let Culling circle it.

  After he was done with the outside of the hull, Hardin said, “Please fix those spots and paint the bottom.”

  “You haven’t sailed her yet.”

  “I’ll pay whether I buy her or not. Would it be all right if I stay after dark?”

  “I’ll run power into her.”

  “Thank you.” Hardin eyed the yardman thoughtfully. “Mr. Culling? You know who I am, what happened to my boat?”

  Culling nodded, his bright eyes curious. “Yes. I heard. Sorry about your missus.”

  “I’m building some electronic equipment to stop this sort of thing from happening again. A big-ship warning device.”

  “How you going to do that?”

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas. A long-range, low-power radar, for one. And a passive sonar listening device. Something to give early warning. The thing is, I’ll be testing the gear on my cruise. I wonder if I could install it here before I leave. I’ll need some work space.”

  “That depends on how much,” said Culling. “Summer’s coming. . . .” He hunched his thin shoulders apologetically.

  “I just need a corner out of the way. Could I put up a bench in one of those old barns?”

  “That’s all? Of course.” He seemed relieved that he could do the favor.

  “I’d like to keep the project quiet until I’ve sailed,” said Hardin. “I want to perfect it before I talk about it.”

  Culling smiled with crooked teeth. “There are no secrets in the village. But they don’t travel far.”

  Hardin climbed into the boat and started tapping all over again from the inside. Then he tested the electrical system, the diesel engine, pumps, fresh- and saltwater plumbing, winches, and the rudder, making a list of parts that should be repaired and replaced.

  It was late at night when he was done. Culling, who
had provided a meal and an endless supply of hot tea, pointed his flashlight at the Swan’s stern. Her gold-leafed name was peeling.

  “Shall I fix that while she’s up?”

  “Change it,” said Hardin. “No port. Just the name. Black paint.”

  “What name?”

  “Carolyn.”

  6

  The shattered hull of an abandoned MTB filled an enormous boat shed far from the main entrance of Culling’s yard. Her bow, riddled by machine-gun fire, cleaved fiercely toward the harbor as if she were straining for a grave denied her. Her stern was lost in darkness.

  Hardin built a workbench in the shadows of the dead fighting boat—three thick boards on four round legs sawn from an old boom—hung fluorescents to supplement the daylight that streamed in the shed’s open front, and laid out his tools on nearby beams.

  The first thing he made was a long, narrow plywood box, a mold with tapered sides and rounded inside corners, which he coated with paraffin and lined with four layers of fiberglass cloth bound together by epoxy resin. He repeated the procedure on a separate flat piece of plywood to which he had screwed two chrome angle irons.

  The laminated fiberglass had to cure. He used the time to shop for electronic equipment in Plymouth and Bristol. Then he extracted the fiberglass box he had formed in the wooden mold and, using a fine blade, sawed out its narrow back, epoxyed the flat piece with the angle irons to the top of the box, and refastened the cutout with hinges and a rubber seal.

  He had created a long, slender nacelle, two feet wide and six feet long. It had rounded corners and a streamlined front, connectors on top, and a small watertight door in back.

  He carried it to the edge of the harbor, filled it with rocks, and submerged it to see if it leaked. Culling wandered over to see what he was doing. He helped Hardin pull the nacelle out of the water, rolled a cigarette on licorice paper, and watched without comment as the doctor opened the door and pulled out the rocks. Finally, after he tipped it up and the last of the rocks tumbled out as dry as they had gone in, Culling lighted up and asked, “Coffin?”

  Hardin ignored him. He admired the old yardman’s skills, but he deliberately maintained a distance because Culling always seemed to be watching.

  “Can you haul my boat?” he asked.

  “Now?”

  “Now.” He had waited until after four o’clock when Culling’s men went home. They were alone.

  “Aye. The way’s clear.”

  “I’ll need her up for a couple of hours.”

  “Aye.”

  “I can put her back in myself.”

  “I’ll stay about.”

  Hardin rowed out to the Swan and ran it up to the rails. When the boat was out of the water, he drilled four holes into her keelson and fastened the nacelle to the bottom of the hull, between the fin keel and the propeller shaft, with long chrome screws. Culling watched with interest.

  “Begging your pardon, Doctor, but what the deuce are you doing?”

  Hardin finished tightening the quick-release wing-nuts, stepped out from under the boat, and straightened up. It was time to give Culling something.

  “It’s a sonar nacelle.”

  “Sonar? That’s big enough to smuggle a corpse.”

  Hardin laughed. “It’s got to be big. It’s really a big ear. It will be lined with foil inside. What do you think?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I’m not inventing anything new,” Hardin continued. “I’m just trying to make it cheap and simple enough so an offshore sailor will use it.”

  “What about your radar? ”

  “That’s next. Same principle. It’s got to be cheap and simple, and since it’s on a sailboat, it can’t use too much power.”

  “Is that what all that gear is in the shed?”

  “Some’s radar,” said Hardin. “Some’s sonar.”

  A black box was a black box and the lying came easily. As a doctor and an engineer he was accustomed to working in an exclusive world, privy to secrets of biology and physics that were as mysterious to most people as the Latin language had been to a medieval serf.

  Culling eyed the nacelle which hung behind the keel like the cabin of a blimp. He tested the chrome angle irons. “Don’t know much about radar and sonar,” he commented. “But I’ll tell you one thing. A box this size’ll have enough buoyancy to tear it right off your boat if you don’t ballast it.”

  Hardin opened the watertight door. “I’ll let her fill for the test. I’ll give it a lead bottom if it works. Do you think it’ll drag?”

  Culling looked at it from several angles. “Hard to say, Doctor. She’s such a finely shaped hull, you can’t tell what a little change’ll do to her.” He squatted down and measured the bulk of it with his hands, handling the nacelle the way a good cook would heft a fresh chicken. “I’d like it a bit smaller.”

  Hardin squatted beside him and eyed it dubiously. “Dammit, I think you might be right.”

  Culling scuttled out from under the boat like a slow crab and carefully straightened his gnarled frame. Kneading the muscles of his lower back with bony fists, he said, “You’ll find out soon enough when you take her to sea.”

  It was the first time he had been in deep water in the month since the rundown, and the sight of a giant oil tanker as he sailed through the slit in the cliffs into the English Channel scared the hell out of him. It stood as sharp in the sun as a toy on a gameboard, empty, riding high, its hull dark red and black, its superstructure gleaming white, gigantic, dwarfing the ships around it, yet barely a quarter the size of LEVIATHAN.

  The Swan nudged him away from his fear. She sliced authoritatively through the Channel’s sharp chop, a stiff sailer with little inclination to heel sharply or roll. He had started the engine, just in case she needed help clearing the narrow inlet, but she’d sailed well to windward, and he’d gotten her out on a single starboard tack.

  Now, running before the southwest wind under mainsail and genoa, he steered her east along the English coast and nervously eyed the procession in the outbound shipping channel. He had never seen so many big ships at once.

  Tankers and bulk carriers—grain and ore ships—predominated, riding tall and black in the sparkling, sunlighted water. Freighters were smaller, the old ones sprouting vast deck cranes, the more modern stacked high with rectangular containers.

  The ships became so monotonous in their black and gray anonymity that a fruit carrier with ebullient green stripes on its flared bow was a startling sight. White, it was a beautiful ship with fastlooking lines and the Star of David proud on the funnel. Hardin was reminded of a trip he and Carolyn had taken to Israel.

  The day waned. Hardin scanned the coast, checked the distinguishing features against his chart, and readied a pair of anchors. The ships filed into the setting sun in neat and orderly procession, the color of the clouds, decks burning red, then flaring out to ash. The Channel waters turned a rich blue-gray, not the slate of the North Atlantic, but lusher, as if they drew color from the fertile soil of England and France.

  It was almost dark when he entered Portland Harbor. He found anchorage near the mouth, lowered his sails, and sank exhausted into his bunk.

  He awakened at dawn, his hands and muscles stiff from handling the sails, his palms sore. Ravenous, he ate apples, cheese, and cereal, brewed coffee, and ghosted out of the harbor on a light morning breeze. By nine the wind had freshened. He pushed the Swan and made Chichester, late that night. Her performance under a variety of conditions—sailing to windward, on a reach, and before the wind— seemed largely unaffected by the nacelle riding behind her keel.

  The next morning he awakened late and was preparing to raise sail when the Chichester Harbor Patrol bore down on his anchored boat in a fast motor launch. A customs officer asked permission to come aboard. Hardin presented the Swan’s registration and his passport. A second man waited in the launch with a dog.

  “In from Fowey?” asked the officer politely.

  “I stopp
ed at Portland.”

  “And you’re heading?”

  “Rotterdam. I’m cruising the Rhine.”

  “We won’t be long. You can come with us or go about your business.”

  Hardin said, “I’ll do what I’m doing.”

  The officer called the dog. It was a half-breed shepherd. The launch pilot slipped its lead and it bounded under the life lines and into the cabin.

  Hardin faced the light breeze and decided upon a genoa jib. He went down the forward hatch, got the sail, and squeezed past the officer, who was going through one of the lockers. The dog whined with excitement. Hardin scratched his ears.

  “What do you do?”

  “Chester’s a sniffer,” said the man.

  “Dope?”

  “Explosives.”

  Hardin nodded his understanding. He had expected this. The IRA still posed a constant terrorist threat. These so-called customs men were probably Special Branch.

  “Do you search every boat that comes in here?”

  “We spot-check. And we recognize strangers.”

  He made Hastings that night and started early the next day on a run across the Channel which brought him to Calais in eighteen hours, exhausted by the nerve-wracking job of keeping out of the big ships’ way as he crossed the east- and westbound traffic lanes. It was blowing hard the next morning, and the North Sea was fierce as soon as he cleared the harbor. He beat all day against a heavy chop and only got as far as Ostend on the West Flanders coast.

  The next day was worse, a full gale from the east, but Hardin tacked out of the harbor past small-craft warnings and beat east along the unfamiliar shore. He hadn’t the time to wait. A mist settled in and he overshot the entrance to the inland water route across Holland to Rotterdam. Fearing the breakers that muttered ominously to starboard, he forged on, and that afternoon, as the fog rose, reached the Hook of Holland.

  He dropped his sails and powered into the Nieuwe Waterweg past Europoort—an enormous complex of silver storage tanks and VLCC berths that sprawled over a low, flat, smog-wreathed plain, bounded by blue-gray forests of slender smokestacks that fed a yellow sky. Ten miles from the sea he turned into the Nieuwe Maas, and followed the diked channel that twisted through the basins of Rotterdam Harbor.