The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  It contained the electronic monitors for the twin high-pressure boilers and the paired 35,000-horsepower steam-turbines, secondary, smaller boilers, freshwater evaporators, and a three-million-watt electric-power plant. Gray paint thickly coated the walls of steel and the mazes of pipe, the spindly catwalks and the studded decks.

  Wisps of steam danced where certain pipes joined. Bruce shook his head angrily—dozens of steam leaks. LEVIATHAN needed a full day’s repairs. Cedric would take care of it. He would shut her down on open water and plug them up.

  “Sir?”

  The oiler was hesitating in the doorway.

  “What is it?” Bruce yelled over the roar.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Of course.” He pushed a button and the door closed, blocking much of the noise. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing the matter, sir, really. Just . . . I go on deck when I can. There’s a point aft where you can see over the side.”

  Bruce nodded. There were wide notches in the gunnels for the stern cables. “Yes?”

  “Not this last time but the time before. When we was coming up the Frog Coast?”

  “Captain Ogilvy’s last trip?”

  “Aye. I was out gettin’ air and gettin’ wet.” He grinned and his dark solemn face turned youthful. “Soaked to the skin I was. It squalled. I do that sometimes at the end of my watch. Warm up later in the shower.”

  “Yes,” said Bruce. The seamen enjoyed extraordinary comforts on the big tankers. Private cabins with their own baths. A laundry service: clean boiler suits on each watch.

  “I was watching the wake, sir. It’s like a string we never let go. Tied to the hull, if you know my meaning, sir.”

  Bruce nodded. He had once seen a sailor throw himself into that string, mesmerized by the endless flow. The oiler rambled on. Bruce listened, his expression thoughtful, his mind elsewhere. So many sailors were like this man. Quiet loners who juggled unspoken words for days on end, then suddenly spouted fanciful thoughts— poetic, or naive—and just as suddenly fell silent again. He waited for the man to run down. Abruptly, he snapped alert.

  “What?”

  “Like I say, sir. It’s my feeling we hit something.”

  “Hit something? When?”

  “It all come bobbin’ up in the wake.” His blackened fingers played in the air. “Like knots on the string.”

  “What?”

  “Pieces. Floating things. White things. Just a handful. Couldn’t see too much. It was soft. Mist. And the deck is lofty.”

  “When?”

  “Off the French coast, sir, as I was saying. The trip before last.”

  “What do you think the ship hit?” asked Bruce, trying to conceal his concern.

  “I don’t know, sir. Maybe that doctor’s boat.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the investigators?” Bruce asked sternly.

  “They didn’t ask the engine crew, sir.”

  Bruce ground his teeth. Every now and then the ancient engine-room-deck rivalry still reared its head. In times past, when the deck crew bunked forward and the engine crew aft, ships were often divided into two camps, each bristling with self-importance and convinced that the other, if not closely watched, would allow the ship to founder. Bruce himself had been a cadet in the old Clan Line Mutlah on a voyage beset with such hostility. The ore ship broke up at night, and at dawn the bow and stern floated separately and not a man on either waved.

  The investigators who had examined Hardin’s charges had failed to consider that an oiler might have been on deck. And an oiler not asked was insulted, so he had said nothing. Probably best this way. Let it be. “Well,” he said, pushing the door button and admitting the engine roar, “Thank you for telling me. I’m sure it was nothing.”

  “Do you think we hit the doctor’s boat?”

  “No. And I wouldn’t bandy that about. You’d upset people.”

  “Yes, sir. Um, sir?”

  “Yes?” Bruce asked briskly.

  “Why is that helicopter on board with a gun?”

  “What gun?”

  “A big machine gun, sir. Mounted. Some of the lads saw it when they tied her down.”

  “As far as I know,” said Bruce, “we’re delivering it to a sheik in Qatar.” He forced a grin and patted the oiler’s arm. “You know the Arabs. If we’ve got a toy, they want it.”

  “That’s for sure, sir. Good night, sir.”

  Bruce ascended to the captain’s bridge deck, cursing the Company, himself, the helicopter pilot, and Ogilvy for predicting what had just happened.

  “There are no secrets at sea,” Ogilvy had snapped that afternoon in his cabin. “You’ll panic my crew. This is not a warship and these are not fighting men.”

  Bruce had paced about Ogilvy’s cabin, pleading and cajoling, while the captain sat ramrod straight at his desk. He explained again the information that British intelligence had delivered to the Company’s offices in London. Dr. Peter Hardin, the man who claimed that his yacht had been run down by LEVIATHAN, was suspected of stealing a man-carried antitank rocket and was last seen three weeks before sailing from England. The conclusions were obvious.

  “He is mad,” said Bruce. “And armed with a deadly weapon. We must protect the ship.”

  “I am quite capable of protecting my ship from a lunatic on a sailboat,” Ogilvy replied. He stood abruptly, a head taller than Bruce and dressed in full uniform—navy pants and jacket, white shirt, dark tie, and gold on his sleeve—and he made Bruce feel uncomfortably short and round and a little shabby.

  Bruce hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his windbreaker. There was nothing left to argue.

  “Cedric,” he said, unable to meet his eye. “The Company insists. You must take the helicopter.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not just my decision.”

  Ogilvy had flushed darkly. His lips had tightened at first, but then his jaw moved up and down behind the flesh in an old man’s expression of bitter defeat.

  “If it’s Hobson’s choice, I’ll take my ship.” He raised one finger, which curled back into his fist as he spoke. “But remember, that helicopter pilot is under my command, no less than the lowest cook’s boy in the galley.”

  As LEVIATHAN rounded the corner of France in bright sunlight the next afternoon, the Bell Ranger rose from its deck, buffeted by the passage winds of the ship’s sixteen knots and a ten-knot crosswind blowing off the Atlantic. Angling its bubble nose toward the airflow, it headed east for the port city of Brest. Aboard were its pilot and the company staff captain, James Bruce.

  From the air it was possible to compare the enormous size of LEVIATHAN to the lesser ships that were steaming through the juncture between the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. Skirted with white froth like an island that chopped ocean waves into surf, the ship was almost double the length and breadth of the largest crude carrier in sight, and three times as long as the freighters. And even as ships they had flown over disappeared behind, LEVIATHAN remained visible. The pilot could still see it aft of him like a distant mountain range, when he spotted the yellow coast of France and zeroed in on a Brest navigational radio beacon.

  He aimed for a landing in a white circle on the end of a pier in the harbor, working his hands and feet on the pitch sticks and tail rotor pedals to lower the helicopter levelly while it tried its damndest to fly up, down, forward, back, and sideways all at the same time. But despite the enormous concentration he conjured for the approach, memory tortured him. He had crashed in flames on a Texas dock pad just like this one, which was why his red face didn’t move much and why one of his nostrils was noticeably larger than the other, and why two fingers of his gloved hand were curled as rigidly as the barbs on a wire fence.

  A slight, swarthy man huddled just beyond the rotor wash, clinging to a cheap suitcase with one hand and defending his turban with the other. The new steward to replace the poor son of a bitch he had ferried into the Southampton hospital
the night before.

  There was a black limo waiting for the Englishman who had hired him. He felt his eyes on his face, but when he turned, once the craft was solidly on the ground, Bruce looked away.

  “Here you are, my man,” the pilot shouted above the whine of the engine. “You did say Brest.”

  Bruce gestured to quiet the engine. He let it wind down until they could speak without yelling. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the steward hesitating, wondering if he should come to the craft or wait to be called.

  “Now listen to me,” said Bruce. “They’ve seen the gun, but I’ve passed the word that you’re delivering the helicopter to a sheik in Qatar. Try to support that story as long as you can.”

  “What the hell for?” said the pilot. “They’re going to get kinda suspicious when they see me taking off every time a sail goes by.”

  “You won’t see that many sails,” said Bruce. “It’s a much bigger ocean than you think, but the point is you mustn’t rile Captain Ogilvy. In fact, try to stay out of his sight.”

  “Don’t worry,” the pilot replied with a distorted grin. “I don’t much like him either.”

  “He doesn’t want you aboard, but we insisted.”

  “I don’t give a damn what he wants,” said the pilot. “You hired me, you’re the boss.”

  “No,” snapped Bruce, appalled. “He is the boss. He is master of LEVIATHAN. That means that his word is law. Absolute law.”

  “Got it.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  “The captain’s the boss. I’ll keep out of his way.”

  “There’s one other thing. . . . We know that Hardin has a rocket and a forty-five-caliber automatic. We don’t know what else he has.”

  The pilot had flown in Cambodia. “I been shot at before.” He grinned again. His cheeks cruelly parodied the reflex. “But never by a guy in a sailboat.”

  “I wouldn’t give him the opportunity,” said James Bruce. “I would kill him first.”

  11

  A week before LEVIATHAN sailed from Southampton, there had been a night when Hardin steered close to the West African coast—so close he imagined he could smell the Sahara Desert. The sea swelled gently. The sky was overcast, the night pitch-black. He looked for a light in the sea-lanes on the western horizon.

  Ajaratu was sleeping on the port cockpit seat, unaware of the slight course change that had brought them near the land. It was quiet, and warm enough to wear shorts. Once when she moved in her sleep, her fingers brushed his bare leg. Hardin edged away, closer to the shush and bubble of the stern wake, and continued watching the darkness to the west.

  LEVIATHAN was out there, close at hand, deeply laden and bound for Europe. But tonight it was only a mark on his chart where his course would pass its course.

  “Land!”

  Eleven hundred miles farther south, seven days later, the Swan was heeling before a strong northeast breeze off the coast of Sierra Leone. Ajaratu bounded onto the boom, clutched the sharply tilting mast, and waved exuberantly at an almost indistinguishable blue line between the whitecaps and the darkening eastern sky.

  “Sherbro?”

  Hardin pointed the bow toward the island. The sails spilled the wind and the Swan righted. Ajaratu jumped off the boom. The compass card swung seventeen degrees. Hardin noted the bearing to the island, put the boat back on course, gave Ajaratu the wheel, and went below to the nav station.

  On the chart, he penciled a line to Sherbro at the same angle as the bearing to the landfall. It put them three miles south of a dead-reckoned position he had plotted hourly since his noon sun shot by calculating the distance the Swan had traveled through the water, her course, her leeway, and the thrust of the Guinea Current. Fifty miles in eight hours. Three and a half thousand in three and a half weeks. The Swan was fast and they’d had good wind.

  They had reached from England on stiff westerlies past the Bay of Biscay, and when the French waters were astern, they picked up an east wind—a powerful levanter—that drove them by Spain and North Africa almost to Grand Canary Island. Then, stranded between the dying levanter and the top of the northeast trade winds belt, they had ghosted south in baffling airs. It was several frustrating days before they caught the trades, but then the Swan responded with blazing twenty-four-hour runs that were making up the lost time.

  He checked his navigation with the loran, and the electronic instrument gave a position satisfyingly close to the one he had plotted.

  “Sherbro,” he reported when he came back to the cockpit.

  “Couldn’t we just stop a moment? Just for vegetables. I want a carrot so badly I could eat the rudder.”

  “We’ll be in Monrovia the day after tomorrow.”

  Her grin faded. “Yes. I keep forgetting. This feels as if it could go on forever.”

  “Sorry.” He stared at the water. He had told her that he had to reach Rio before the hurricane season. It had a likely ring, even though, as far as he knew, Rio de Janeiro didn’t have a hurricane season, but he was becoming practiced at concealment, and the small lies came more and more easily. He had taught her a lot about sailing the boat, but she was still a stranger to this world and she believed everything he said, even that his radio calls from Miles were weather reports.

  The lying bothered him. He was reverting to the closed person he had been before he had loved Carolyn. After many years with her he had come to believe that there were no hidden meanings, no secret messages, when Carolyn spoke.

  “Peter.”

  “What?”

  “Let her go.”

  “Take the wheel.” He hurried below, climbed into his bunk in the main salon, and stared at the teak ceiling. She came after him almost immediately. He stared past her, across the cabin, out the port windows. As the boat was heeling, he saw only the deepening sky.

  “Who’s minding the store?” he asked.

  “Walter.” She’d named the self-steering gear after the politician’s son she was supposed to marry, claiming that they shared similar attributes of tiresome dependability.

  “Walter can’t see ships and we’re in the shipping lanes.”

  She fingered her gold cross. “Come with me. It’s going to be a lovely evening. Come on, we’ll have a drink before dinner.”

  Hardin gazed at her. She was always there. Several times he had stumbled into depression and each time she had coaxed him out of it. He said, “Don’t you ever get tired of inspiring me?”

  She grinned and her teeth gleamed like pearls. “I’m certainly not going to spend my first vacation in ten years with a grump.”

  Hardin’s face turned cold.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to make light, but you’ve seemed quite happy these past few days. I thought it would be all right.”

  He swung his feet off the bunk. “Forget it. Let’s have that drink.”

  “I’ll have my usual.” She smiled happily and sauntered out of the cabin and up the companionway. Hardin paused to watch her go. She had beautiful legs and she was wearing a bikini. He smiled, recalling the tentative way she had worked up to the garment. At first she had worn shorts and a halter, then a two-piece that conformed prettily to her long figure. Only after a week had she unwrapped a pale-blue bikini, still in the store’s tissue paper.

  Hardin had gradually stopped kidding himself and admitted that he enjoyed looking at her. She was simply too beautiful and interesting a companion to deny an attraction. But he felt too close to Carolyn, and too torn up inside, and too empty to want anything more from Ajaratu than her company and her strength, so he ignored the attraction exactly as he would have if Carolyn had still been alive.

  He mixed two vodka and tonics, a weak one for her, and carved up the last two limes to extract decent wedges from the molding fruit. Ajaratu raised her glass. “To land. May it fall where it ought.”

  Hardin smiled with her and drank.

  The sun was dipping toward the horizon. The sky was turning violet and the water dark bl
ue. Wispy high cirrus clouds purpled in the west and stars lighted on the eastern horizon.

  “It is heaven,” Ajaratu said softly.

  The boat was running under mainsail and genoa, pushed by a light wind from the northeast. The trades carried this evening a faint smell of land, a sweet hint of the African shore. The sun sank lower.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Hardin had been eyeing the strange shape for several minutes. It was as tall as it was wide, a blue smudge crossing their bow, miles ahead. He fixed it in his binoculars and whistled. Handing her the glasses, he altered course slightly west so as to pass closer to it.

  “What is it?” she asked again, peering through the glasses, adjusting the focus.

  “Square-rigger,” said Hardin. “Must be a training ship. Can you count the masts?”

  “Three.” Her eyes were phenomenal, but untrained. She could see farther than he could, but not as much. As the Swan drew near enough to make out detail, Hardin thought of his father. He would be over ninety if he were alive. Nearly eighty years ago he had sailed ships like that. It moved past, too far to make out its name, a ghostly stack of sails, blue in the distance, pointing the red where the sun had been.

  Ajaratu asked if he was hungry and brought up a tray of cheese and cold canned meat. When it was dark, they sat beside each other and drank coffee and talked. It had been an easy three weeks, despite the long distance they had sailed, with gentle weather. Neither was tired, and in this tropical July weather they had taken to supplementing three or four hours of cabin sleep with naps on deck.

  At the end of a comfortable pause, Ajaratu suddenly asked him why he had stopped practicing medicine. He gave her his standard answer: He had become too busy designing medical instruments.

  “But I wonder if you took up instrument design out of interest or as a way to leave medicine?”