The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  The ship had all the latest electronic guidance equipment, some designed especially for it, and the captain knew his position within a foot and his speed to inches per second. The pilot would use the aids, but not rely on them. He was a master mariner—at sea for twenty years before he’d retired to bring ships into his harbor— and he knew that with the colossal impetus LEVIATHAN generated, the instruments could tell him only what was already happening. It had been dead calm last night and still they’d needed six of Southampton’s strongest tugs to hold her.

  But now there was wind. He watched it all day, fearing the night’s work. It had begun stirring from the west in the afternoon, rippling the summer grass in his pony fields, miles from the sea. The Met forecast indicated it would remain west and might blow harder after dark. If it ever gripped LEVIATHAN, if the ship embraced it, nothing but grounding would stop her.

  Throughout the day he had nurtured a terrifying image of the giant drifting out of control, smashing into another ship, its thin skin rupturing, the residual oil and fumes in its tanks igniting like a thermal bomb, obliterating the harbor. Now, as the refinery’s marine terminal manager drove him toward the ship on the narrow pier roadway, he repeated to himself an earlier promise. If the wind rose above ten knots, he would refuse to take it out.

  “Swinging west,” said the terminal manager, as if he could read his thoughts.

  “Yes,” said the second pilot, a younger man in the backseat of the speeding Mini. He was a backup man in case the first pilot was incapacitated in the middle of the job.

  The pilot wondered about the luck of the draw. Of the fifty members of the Southampton and Isle of Wight Pilots Service, the refinery had selected six to pilot the crude carriers. The refinery wanted the best—their installation was as expensive as it was delicate and a mishap could put them out of business for months— and he was one of the six best. But why had he won the toss for LEVIATHAN? The man who had brought her in last night didn’t want her again. He knew that the others had hoped to lose. He had been intrigued, as had his friend in the backseat. And they had won. It was as if the ship had selected them. Tonight, he wished it hadn’t.

  “Dropping,” said the terminal manager. Like the pilots, he too had been a master mariner—a ship captain—and his assessment of the weather was more than a polite remark.

  “I think you’re right,” said the pilot.

  “I devoutly hope so,” said the terminal manager. He looked as uneasy as the pilot felt. The bloody thing ought not to be here and all three men knew it.

  Barely a tenth full, yet still holding one hundred thousand tons of Abu Dhabi crude, LEVIATHAN had had a draft just shallow enough to permit her into Southampton Water during the three-hour stand of high water which was created by a second tidal flood around the east side of the Isle of Wight. Ordinarily the giant ship would never discharge at the Southampton refinery, but it had off-loaded half a million tons at Bantry Bay, Ireland, and four hundred thousand at Le Havre, and her managers had offered the remainder of her cargo for a pittance rather than waste time waiting for the French and Irish facilities she had glutted to take more.

  London had overridden the objections of the terminal manager who had denied the ship entry on the grounds of safety. He leaned on the horn button; a camera crew scattered out of their way. The pilot smiled at the manager’s grim expression. Corporations, he had noticed, could act as stupidly and illogically as people. Despite their flowcharts, memoranda, private language, dedication to profit, and facade of precision, they often did what they did merely because they wanted to. That was really why LEVIATHAN was here. So someone could take pictures and say “Look what we did.”

  The car sped alongside the ship and pulled up at the silver gangway that angled up the hull a quarter mile from the bow. The manager cast a worried eye at the cargo transfer arms, six elbows of pipe and hose that looked like the legs of a giant praying mantis.

  “Be gentle.” He smiled.

  The pilot nodded politely, already half out of the car, his mind narrowing, shutting out nonessentials to concentrate on the job. The second pilot followed silently; they knew each other’s habits.

  The pilot straightened his navy-blue jacket and donned his white peaked hat. Then he started up the long slanting gangway. He climbed quickly at first, looking up, but the higher he went the more the slender stair bounced and he had to slow his pace to break the rhythm his feet had started. He looked down just before he reached the deck. Already he was higher than on most ships’ bridges.

  The wind gusted stronger on deck. This was his first real view of LEVIATHAN, and even in the fading light he was struck incredulous by its size. Twelve acres of green deck spread before him like a vast plain, broken here and there by pipes and valves and divided lengthwise by a central catwalk connecting fire stations, and crosswise by taut mooring cables. Halfway to the bow, a Bell Ranger helicopter sat on the port pad.

  Aft, the accommodations tower rose ten stories above the main deck, a gleaming white structure half as wide as the ship and crowned by triple spires—two slim black funnels and a tapering mast between them festooned with radar dishes and telemetric aerials. Slender bridge wings cantilevered over the sides of the ship from the top deck. They and the twin funnels, which spewed thin gray smoke as the engineers built steam, and the mast were incongruous touches of grace on the massive ship.

  Followed by the second pilot, he walked toward the tower on a pathway marked with rough gray sand paint. The path humped here and there to cross lateral piping. It passed dark-green piping, yellow valves, white fire stations with red nozzle heads, and hissing black winches from which dragon tails of steam rose lazily until they were dispersed by the wind.

  The pilot had to climb over several mooring cables, taking care not to smear grease on his uniform slacks. He already had oil on his hands from the gangway; that was standard on crude carriers. They entered the tower through a watertight door, stepping over a traditionally high sill, although it was hard to imagine seawater on this deck. An English seaman threw them a polite half salute and showed them to the lift, and there all semblance to an ordinary merchant ship ceased.

  “Bloody great office block,” remarked the second pilot as the spacious car silently ascended ten levels to the bridge deck. The pilot nodded. The ship sat in the water as solidly as a building on bedrock. The lift opened onto a broad carpeted hallway, a wide corridor like a foyer with lighted oil paintings on the wood-grained Formica walls, and potted palms on the floor. The pilots headed for a door marked Chart Room/Bridge.

  It opened into an enormous, dimly lighted, windowless room. Banks of computers occupied most of the space and yet, the pilot noticed, there was as much room around the oak chart table as you’d find around a lord’s billiards table. Two young officers were attending the computers, reading the printout sheets which were spilling from them in steady streams. A cadet was pulling the Southampton Water and Approaches chart from the wide, flat drawers beneath the table.

  The pilot passed through a heavy black curtain that separated the chart room from the bridge and stopped still. The view was breathtaking. One hundred feet above deck and two hundred feet above the water, big square windows swept the width of the bridge. It was like standing atop a twenty-story building. The city of Southampton was visible in the distance.

  A number of low engine-control, communications, lighting, and electronics consoles squatted in front of the windows. Between the row of consoles and the bridge’s rear bulkhead, a broad space ran uninterrupted from wing to wing. One hundred fifty feet separated the doors at either end of it. They were open to the evening breeze.

  Amidships was the helm—a small yoke, smaller than the Mini’s steering wheel—and ahead of the helm, hung from the low tile ceiling, were the magnified gyrocompass, the Doppler radar which showed position relative to the pier, the rate-of-turn gyro, and the knots and revs indicators. The pilot gazed at them for a moment. These were his.

  At sea, satellite navigation,
computer tracking of other ships, and anticollision radar were primarily in charge of the ship’s position and well-being, but here, in his channel, the pilot worked with the most basic questions: Would the ship clear a buoy by fifty yards? How quickly was it turning? Was it going fast enough to turn? Was it going too fast to stop? When the bow left the pier, how would the stern follow?

  But LEVIATHAN was too big. Its mass created uncontrollable momentum. Already in its short life it had overrun a sea berth in the Gulf, killing two men and holing its thin-skinned bow, and on another voyage it had ripped three cargo arms from the piers at Le Havre.

  “You’re late, Pilot!”

  The voice carried across the bridge like a bugle. Cedric Ogilvy, the legendary P and O captain who’d left his old line for LEVIATHAN, did not look up from the instrument console he was studying. The pilot walked over to him.

  Ogilvy was in full uniform, a rarity these days in the merchant service, and his sleeve carried four broad gold stripes. The pilot’s sleeve bore faint stitch marks where his own four stripes had resided. It was the custom of the Pilot Service to remove your stripes so as not to embarrass a captain whose rank might be technically below yours. A courtesy. So few wore uniforms that it hardly mattered. Merchant masters manned their bridges in a variety of costumes that ranged from sweaters to nylon windcheaters. The pilot’s favorite was an Italian captain who brought an old VLCC into the refinery once or twice a year dressed like a magazine model, in soft leather shoes, cashmere pullover, and a cotton shirt out of the best shop in Rome.

  “Good evening, Captain Ogilvy,” said the pilot, extending his hand. “I’m—”

  “Late,” said Ogilvy, nodding at the satellite navigation readout and not accepting his hand. The pilot looked at the screen.

  SAT FIX QLT: 03

  GMT 20.03.00

  LAT N–150 50.158

  LON W–001 19.524

  It showed the satellites whose signals the computer was using to determine the fix, the time, and LEVIATHAN’s latitude and longitude. Ogilvy tapped the second line with a long, thick, well-manicured finger. Greenwich Mean Time twenty-oh-three. Three minutes past eight. Three minutes late in reporting to the captain—the three minutes the pilot had paused to drink in the bridge.

  He held his tongue. That sort of nonsense had gone out of the merchant service years ago. Pompous old goat acting like he still Royal Navy. And yet . . . it was common knowledge that Ogilvy was the only captain who had stayed with LEVIATHAN after his first voyage. The ship devoured captains. Last night’s pilot said that the chap who had brought it in from the Persian Gulf looked to be on the edge of a breakdown. Neither time LEVIATHAN had gone out of control had Ogilvy been in command. Let his luck hold one more night, the pilot thought grimly.

  He remarked on the wind, which he noticed was stirring the clothes of a seaman who was opening the bow thruster control panels on the starboard wing. Ogilvy met his eye for the first time. There was a hard edge beneath his blandly handsome face that had not been apparent at first. And something else, further down. Something strange, like fear, but it couldn’t be fear.

  Ogilvy stared at him for an uncomfortably long time before he spoke. He said, “You are two hundred feet above Southampton Water, Pilot. Of course it’s windy. The matter of interest, however, is the force of the wind at deck level.” He pointed at a dial. “The anemometer reads four knots. Barely force two. What?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Ogilvy tapped the satellite screen’s time line again. “We sail with the tide in forty-five minutes,” he said, dismissing the pilot. Then he raised his voice.

  “Number One!”

  The chief officer, a slim, dark, quiet-looking man, came running. “Sir?”

  The pilot drifted away, trying to repress a smile. Number One? That was old Royal Navy with flags flying. The second pilot caught his smile and muttered, “Flogging on Sunday?”

  They walked out onto the port wing overlooking the pier. Far below on the main deck the Pakistani galley crew were still carrying crates and cardboard cartons into the tower. The sun was setting behind the hills, and the wind was shifting due west, frighteningly strong. The lights of the refinery began to glitter in the deepening dusk.

  He looked astern. Far across the marshes beneath Calshot Castle and the open Solent was the Isle of Wight, a dark-blue line on the southern horizon. It would be four hard hours before LEVIATHAN rounded the island and the pilot boat took him off, but he reckoned he would have matters in hand once he was stern to the wind in the Solent. First, however, he had to guide the long and ponderous ship through two sharp turns—right from the Calshot Reach into the narrow Thorn Channel, then a hard left, a full one hundred twenty-five degrees.

  Three tugs were stationed dead in the water on standby as they had been all day in case LEVIATHAN tried to drift across the estuary and take the refinery pier with it. Three more were coming down from Southampton. He could see their lights a couple of miles away. The wind suddenly gusted sharply.

  He heard cries of alarm and, looking down, saw the men on deck scattering like ants.

  “Look!” shouted the second pilot.

  He caught a glint of movement on the stern-most mooring cable. Midway between the side of the ship and the mooring winch, the cable had started to shred. The strands peeled away from each other, blossoming open like a steel flower.

  The cable parted with a loud bang.

  One end flipped high in the air, buzzing angrily, and disappeared over the side. The other end, that attached to the winch, slashed across the deck like a saber. It caught one of the fleeing galley stewards in the back of his legs and flung him twenty feet. He crashed to the deck, his white pants red with blood. A chilling scream pierced the hissing of LEVIATHAN’s funnels and the hollow rumble of the tugs in the river. Ogilvy ran from the wheelhouse, looked down at the deck, and instantly shouted orders into the lapel mike of his VHF two-way radio. Seamen boiled out of the accommodations tower and ran to the nearest mooring winches. Urged on by a wiry bosun, a second deck gang began running a new stern line, humping a cable past the fallen man. At the same time, the tugs in the river nosed against the ship and pushed toward the pier. Only when the new cable was secured did the seamen gather around the fallen steward.

  Ogilvy’s radio crackled urgently. The pilot heard the word “hospital.” The captain’s lips tightened; he glanced at the setting sun and the darkening sky. Then his gaze fell on the Bell Ranger on the helipad.

  “Send him in that damned helicopter,” he snapped. “Number Two, get down there and see to it.”

  The second officer looked quite young, almost a boy, and he was staring, transfixed by the twitching form on the deck below.

  “Now, mister!” snapped Ogilvy. “Hop to it.”

  The pilot’s stomach was knotted with pain. Twenty years at sea and he’d never gotten used to its sudden violence. He stared at the hills and suddenly thought of his ponies, wild beasts he had captured in the New Forest and trained to be happy in his fields.

  Ogilvy directed the removal of the injured man from his place on the bridge, issuing orders into his radio while they carried him forward to the helicopter. A man with a curiously red face trotted out after them and clambered aboard. The whippy blades began revolving. After a quick warm-up, the helicopter lifted off the ship with a thrashing roar and banked up the channel toward Southampton.

  A heavyset man in a rumpled windbreaker hurried onto the bridge wing. He glanced at the Ranger vanishing into the dark, and looked down at the lighted deck where seamen were gathering loose apples and hosing away the blood.

  “What happened?” he asked the white-haired Ogilvy, who looked ten years his senior.

  To the harbor pilot’s surprise, the captain answered him civilly.

  “A stern line parted. Sliced the legs off one of my stewards.”

  The man nodded and gazed for a moment at the activity below. Then he turned to the pilot.

  “James Bruce,” he said, extending
his hand. “Company staff captain.”

  “Checking up on me,” said Ogilvy, with a faint smile.

  “Troubleshooting.” Bruce smiled back. He explained to the pilot, “We run constant inspections on our ships.”

  “Someone should have inspected that mooring winch,” snapped Ogilvy, displaying emotion for the first time since the accident. “I can’t very well be expected to turn her inside out the first day I’m aboard.”

  “You’re quite right, Cedric,” said Bruce. “I’ll check your predecessor’s maintenance charts before I get off.”

  Ogilvy flushed darkly. “What is the point of a captain taking leave if his ship is a shambles when he returns?”

  “Cedric,” Bruce pleaded, “even you need a rest.”

  “A lot of good that’s done me. I’ll be sorting this mess out as far as Capetown.”

  “It won’t happen again,” said Bruce. He glanced up the channel where the helicopter’s lights had blended with those of the city. “You’ll be wanting that helicopter.”

  “He can jolly well catch up!” snapped Ogilvy. “Number Three! Radio that man not to approach until we’ve passed Nab Light. Under no circumstances is he to attempt to land without my permission. Pilot! The tugs are ready. Stand by to single up.”

  Four tugboats pushed LEVIATHAN toward the dock. Another stood by with a line to the stern, and a sixth waited with a line to the tanker’s bow. Their powerful engines jetted diesel exhaust high into the air. White water frothed behind their low sterns. Slowly, the docking cables slackened.

  When all twelve cables were drooping equally, Ogilvy spoke into his radio lapel mike. The pilot raised his binoculars. Far below, on the main deck at the stern, Ogilvy’s chief officer was relaying commands to LEVIATHAN’s deck gang and the dockers on the pier. His second officer was doing the same at the bow, while his third, whose watch it was, hovered at the captain’s elbow.