by Justin Scott
“How did they find out?” he asked, knowing it mattered not at all.
“Similar to the way we did. Sorry.”
Miles sounded genuinely compassionate. Hardin said nothing. The airwaves hissed in his ears. After a while he stopped trying to find a way to blame the Israeli for what he knew was his own carelessness in Germany. He wondered, if he had it to do again, whether he could have killed the soldier who sold him the weapon, to keep him quiet. He shuffled through the charts in the drawer beneath the table.
“Still there?” asked Miles’s voice.
“I’ll call in a week,” said Hardin.
“What for?”
“I’ve got to think about this.”
He turned off the radio and headed for the sail bins.
12
Captain Ogilvy’s legs ached. They were thin beneath his tailored uniform and they felt as if they were sheathed with lead that weighted every step and squeezed his calves and thighs. The pain gnawed at his concentration, but he refused to leave the bridge while LEVIATHAN was still in close quarters.
He had last slept twenty-four hours ago at dockside the afternoon before sailing. While the ship was moored, his first officer was in charge of off-loading, his second of laying out their course to the Gulf, and his third of directing provisioning. On the high seas he trusted them to stand their watches. But whenever the ship maneuvered in heavily trafficked areas like the English Channel, the Cape of Good Hope, or the Quoins at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, he and he alone commanded LEVIATHAN. The others were good sailors, but only he understood the dimensions of the ship’s momentum.
His legs were always the first to protest the long watches. Arteriosclerosis, the doctor had told him. Insufficient blood to the extremities. Pills to open the arteries did little more than flush his face. He had installed a proper commodore’s chair on the bridge, just after and starboard of the helmsman. A big swivel device. But it wasn’t like driving a bloody car. He couldn’t just sit there. Not when he had to keep hopping up and down to view the radarscope and press his face to the bridge windows, and run out on the wings to get a look aft or abeam.
Forget the anticollision computer, the satellite navigation, and all the rest of the electronic aides. When your ship had to pick her way through a crowded channel like a plow horse in a barnyard, you didn’t con her from an armchair. Not likely. You ran your bloody arse off just to see where she was.
Though he had been born the child of a laborer and a kitchen maid, Ogilvy affected the manners and speech of an upper-middle-class Englishman. Talent and ambition drove him from his obscure west-country town. He had been accepted, against virtually impossible odds, at Dartmouth after he had learned that British naval officers were expected to speak differently from seamen. The habits he had taught himself stuck; he might refer to a subordinate’s colossal error as a balls-up or something that annoyed him greatly as being ruddy, but his officers rarely heard him utter the bloodys and arses that crewed his thoughts.
He puttered about the bridge, willing his legs to behave, extending his stay miles beyond necessity, reluctant to break off the grueling effort. Finally, when Brest was far astern and fifteen hundred miles of open Atlantic lay between LEVIATHAN’s bow and the Madeira Islands, he turned to his chief officer, who was on watch.
“She’s yours, Number One. Good night.”
“Thank you, sir. Good night.”
“I thought the off-loading went well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I hope our friends in Le Havre don’t hear of it.”
“Sir?”
“They might feel we were discriminating against them, don’t you think?”
The chief smiled wanly. They had spilled two hundred gallons in the French port when a coupling parted. Ogilvy chuckled and left the bridge. He liked the sudden thrust to keep his officers alert and, though his chief had sailed with him for six years, thought it best to remind him of his responsibilities.
His personal steward, a frail Indian, drew his bath and laid out his pajamas, moving about the cabin with the swift quiet motions of an Afghan hound. After he bathed, Ogilvy lay in his comfortable double bed with the curtains drawn and a cup of hot chocolate at his side. Spasms of relief rippled luxuriously through his legs as he prepared for a solid twelve hours of sleep. His chief knew his habits and he would not be disturbed for anything less than Emergency Stations.
Channel markers, running lights, and the speckled sweep of the radarscope flashed before his eyes and he heard over and over the bearings repeated by the helmsman. He sipped the cocoa and waited for his mind to surrender command and leave the bridge. He was sixty-three years old and he knew how to be patient while natural processes ran their course.
The helicopter pilot wandered up to the bridge to watch the sunrise from the highest point on the ship. He hurried through the bridge house, ducking past the helmsman, and went out on the port wing, where the view was best and he wouldn’t be in the way.
The size of the ship still amazed him. If the U.S. Navy had any smarts, he thought, they’d underwrite a few of these babies and build them so they could be converted into aircraft carriers. Set up a double-purpose merchant marine like the Russian Navy’s.
Shoot to kill.
Bruce’s last words still echoed in his brain—and forget what Bruce had said about Ogilvy. Bruce was his real boss. The pilot shivered. He had the right to blow the guy’s head off. Like the war, only better. This guy didn’t have any gooks backing his hand. A goddamned turkey shoot.
He shivered again, but for a different reason; whenever he started to feel good, he remembered the crash. His eyes wandered from the rising sun to the distant Bell Ranger. He hadn’t completely lost his nerve, but this was his first job since the crash in Texas, and he’d taken it only because it meant flying over water.
He wouldn’t be wearing this Halloween face if he’d ditched in the water instead of trying to save his passengers. No passengers on this job; just him and the craft and the gun. He tore his eyes from the helicopter and looked at the sea, rehearsing the emergency landing drill: Head for the water; lay her on her side just before she hits; climb out and start swimming.
He’d almost turned back from the hospital in Southampton, but the guy started screaming. The pilot rested his gloves on LEVIATHAN’s vibrating rail and watched the waves for a long time.
The wing decks were wet with morning mist, and it was still chilly, when the third officer came on watch at eight o’clock and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. The pilot stepped gratefully into the warmth of the bridge house.
The young men talked, leaning on the varnished wood rail in front of the bridge windows, watching the sea. The third had a wife—a bride of five months—in England. Wives were not welcome on LEVIATHAN, as they were on most oil tankers; Ogilvy’s preference. The third’s wife resented the fact that he would sail with Ogilvy anyway.
The helicopter pilot had a girl friend in Dallas. She was a flight attendant with ninety-percent-off flying privileges and she had promised to join him in Arabia.
“Do you think you’re going to Arabia?” asked the third officer with a knowing smirk. “I’ve been in the P.G. sixteen times and the most I’ve seen of Arabia is a white line on the horizon. LEVIATHAN loads offshore.”
The pilot’s face twisted into a grin—prompting the third to wonder if his girl friend was from before or after his accident. “But I got a ticket off here.” He nodded at the Bell Ranger. “Maybe I can wangle a leave and catch up.”
“Maybe if you get chummy with the Old Man.”
“He’s got as much use for me as a cowman has for sheepdip.”
The third nodded with studied sagacity. “Not an easy man to get close to,” he intoned. “We’ve had some good chats, though. I think he rather likes me.”
“What makes you think that?”
“We served together in P and O. He asked me along when he took LEVIATHAN.”
“What’s P and O?”
> While the third explained about the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company and the positions he hoped to hold in it some day, a seaman came onto the bridge to relieve the man at the helm. The new man noted the course and speed and confirmed that the sea ahead was empty of obstacles and that the automatic pilot was functioning, then sat behind the yoke, which was moving slightly, controlled by the computer’s invisible hand. The two helmsmen exchanged covert grins over the third officer’s ambitions.
“It just hit me what this thing looks like,” drawled the helicopter pilot. He tapped the glass, indicating the green decks beyond. They were bisected by gray pathways and the central catwalk, and scattered with dark pipes, black winches, towers, fire stations, and yellow valves. “It looks like a goddamned oil field.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said the third.
“Yeah, right, you don’t get off the boat. Well, I seen a lot of ‘em down home and that’s what this thing looks like.” He stared at the sea and shook his head. “I can’t believe the son of a bitch is moving. Jesus! I know dirt farmers who built castles when they found less oil than in this thing in their back yard. And a guy in a sailboat wants to sink it. I’ll be damned.”
“Quiet!” hissed the third, glancing back at the helmsman.
All morning he’d been trying to devise a way to suggest that the Old Man tell the crew before they learned it as rumor. The helmsman gazed at the bow.
The pilot whispered, “It’s crazy, man.”
“Well, perhaps he is.”
“You don’t sound worried.”
“It’s as you said. One man.”
“And one rocket. Pretty hard to miss a target this big.”
“From the deck of a sailing yacht?”
“Maybe you’ve never seen a TOW. A nine-year-old with bifocals could hit this thing with a TOW.”
“Well, I guess that’s why you’re along.”
The pilot picked up one of the binoculars that sat on the wooden rim beneath the big square bridge windows and scanned the water.
“Hey! Look there.”
The third looked where he pointed. A white dot on the horizon, dead ahead.
“That’s a sailboat,” yelled the pilot, bolting toward the chart room on his way to the lift.
“Disengage the autopilot!” cried the third.
A screaming thunderous racket tore Ogilvy out of his sleep. Incoming fire, was his first thought. It whisked him back forty years to a wartime Atlantic and he had his feet on the deck before he realized his error. The deck was thickly carpeted, not the cold wet steel of convoy stations.
The racket faded. Memory returned. He’d been up a few hours in the middle of the night, then back to bed, and he was groggy with sleep. He threw open the heavy curtains and looked out on LEVIATHAN’s gigantic deck. The helicopter. It was ranging ahead of the ship. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. He saw a sail at ten thousand yards.
He put on his robe and rode the elevator one level to the bridge. 0930, said the chart room clock. His third officer was on watch, leaning on the rail under the bridge windows, drinking coffee and intently watching the helicopter. Ogilvy glided silently behind him.
“What the ruddy hell is going on, mister?”
The third stiffened to attention, put down his coffee mug, and slowly turned. He paled when he saw Ogilvy’s expression.
“Sir?”
“Who authorized that takeoff?”
“He said he saw a sail, sir.”
Ogilvy picked up a pair of binoculars. The helicopter was darting over the water, closing with the white sail on the horizon. The captain focused the glasses. Immediately, he banged them down and pointed a shaking finger at the radiophone.
“Raise him.”
“Sir?”
“Immediately!”
“Sir!”
The third raced to the radio and made contact.
“Tell him to return to the ship.”
“He says he’s circling for a closer look.”
“He is to return immediately!” shouted Ogilvy.
He stalked onto the bridge wing and watched the helicopter circle and grow large in the sky, while the distant clip clop sound of its main rotor gave way to the whine of the turbine. The aircraft clattered to the deck. Ogilvy waited until the deck gang had secured it and the pilot was walking slowly toward the bridge tower. Then he switched the bridge telephone to public address.
“Pilot!” His amplified voice echoed grimly about the ship. “Report to the bridge!”
He waited, fuming, his body still aching with weariness despite the long sleep, until his third ushered the pilot onto the wing.
“Where were you going?”
“Checkin’ out a sailboat,” he replied jauntily. Ogilvy noticed the anxious flicker of his eyes behind his sunglasses.
“Checking out a sailboat, did you say? ”
The pilot shifted his feet. “Yeah. Like I’m supposed to.”
“Pilot,” Ogilvy said softly. “You will wait for permission from me or the senior officer of the watch before you leave this ship. Is that clear?”
“Yep . . . but, Captain . . .”
“But?”
“But if it’s an emergency. If that guy is coming for us, do you want me to waste the time asking for permission?”
Ogilvy pointed at the sail. LEVIATHAN was catching up rapidly and the yacht was close enough to make out some detail. “Describe that yacht to me, mister.”
The pilot shrugged. “It’s a sailboat.”
“Does it have any distinguishing features?”
The pilot squinted in the bright light. “Yeah. It’s white. It’s got a red sail in front.”
“That is the spinnaker,” said Ogilvy. “A headsail in the bow. It is attached to the forward mast. There is a second mast aft. Do you see that, Pilot?”
“Yep.” His lips quivered in an apparent smirk.
Ogilvy continued as if he didn’t notice. “That second mast is forward of the tiller. Do you see that?”
“Yeah. I saw that up close. Can’t tell from here. You got good eyes, Captain.”
“That is a ketch,” said Ogilvy. “Repeat after me. Ketch.”
“Hey, now come—”
“Ketch,” Ogilvy said icily.
“Wait a—”
“Ketch.”
The pilot wet his lips. “Okay. That’s a ketch.”
“Two masts, you ruddy nincompoop. A ketch. Hardin’s boat is a sloop. One mast. One jib. Get me paper and pencil.”
The pilot extracted a pad from the breast pocket of his nylon flight jacket. Ogilvy snapped it out of his gloved hands and drew a triangular profile with his gold pen.
“One mast, one mainsail, one jib. Sloop. And when you see one you ask permission to leave my ship. I’ll not have some damned fool hopping off my foredeck whenever he takes it into his head to have a little jaunt.”
He stormed back to bed, but he couldn’t sleep.
The helicopter was a stupid way to protect LEVIATHAN. The crew would find out soon that something was wrong, which would get them worked up and nervous every time the damned thing took off. Bad enough they’d sailed in blood with the galley steward maimed by the mooring cable. There’d be no peace on this voyage until the helicopter was tied down and the pilot confined to his quarters. Ogilvy smiled. That bloke was in for a surprise when they reached southern waters.
Foolishness. Hardin was a minor threat at best. How in blazes did he think you could sink LEVIATHAN? Probably shared the popular delusion that an empty crude carrier was a gas-filled bomb awaiting a match. But every tank was so heavily inerted—the oxygen forced out by engine exhaust—that you could drop a burning house in and watch it go out.
One rocket against a ship a third of a mile long. The man was mad, or a fool. Not that a hit wouldn’t do damage, which was why he had devised a simple, fool proof defense. Too simple to bother explaining to James Bruce and his lot at the company.
He donned his robe and slippers and rang his ste
ward for tea, which he took into the office of his three-room suite. An oversize chart on one of the paneled walls showed the eleven-thousand-mile tanker route around Africa—the seas between Europe and Arabia. The North Atlantic Ocean. The South Atlantic Ocean. The Indian Ocean. The Arabian Sea. The Gulf of Oman. The Persian Gulf— LEVIATHAN’s waters.
Ogilvy had all the facts, all the times and all the distances in his mind, and now he grease-penciled them on the chart’s plastic overlay. Hardin would have known LEVIATHAN’s date of departure almost to the day by reading the marine journals. So why had he left England three full weeks ahead of the tanker?
In the answer was Hardin’s plan.
Ogilvy had inquired closely about the yacht. It was much more important than the man’s motivation and the range of the weapon, and the way he parted his hair. It was a fast boat; Hardin was likely to be competent and he had a woman to spell his watches, so one hundred fifty miles a day seemed a likely speed. Three thousand miles in three weeks, four thousand in four, the extra week being LEVIATHAN’s cruising time to the target area.
The tanker routes were well known. They were obvious on any decent chart and it was clear that around the bulge of West Africa they became quite narrow where the ships cut close to the coast to save fuel costs. Ogilvy drew an oval around the tanker routes between points three and four thousand miles from England. The oval encompassed the bulge of West Africa. Included within the thick black lines were Dakar, the capital of Senegal; Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Monrovia, Liberia.
Within that oval, Hardin would try to attack. It explained his departure date. It was a narrow, easily surveilled hunting ground. And it offered an escape route—South America was only eighteen hundred miles away.
Ogilvy picked up dividers and uttered a small, private sound of satisfaction. The man was on a sailboat, for pity’s sake. Nine knots maximum. Maximum. Six and seven much of the time. He didn’t need a helicopter.
13
