The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  The days ran together. He knew them only by his sun shots and the numbers in the Nautical Almanac and his penciled halting line, south, south, south on his chart. He continued to veer from Capetown, but he had to go with the wind and trust that the westerlies would push him east.

  Sometimes the wind died, becalming the Swan in a pocket of air as hot and still as the tropics. But while the sails flapped emptily and the lightest spinnaker dropped like wet laundry, the boat wallowed in misery on the ceaseless swells, invisible crestless waves that worked beneath the surface—lifting, dropping, spawned in conflict, hidden like resentment, racing from distant Antarctic storms toward the open bays and fragile harbors of southwest Africa.

  Once they saw a ship’s smoke. Hardin immediately lowered the sails and took down the radar reflector. He was a wary outcast, fearful that they might report his position. It was the only ship they saw, because they had sailed far west of the shipping lanes in their quest for the wind. And while it was a relief not to have to stand alert for ships, it was lonely. Ajaratu didn’t seem to mind, but Hardin finally succumbed to the solitude. Using his false call sign, he radioed Miles via the long-range international radio relay station at Capetown. The Israeli made contact at dawn.

  He asked Miles for LEVIATHAN’s position—it was a hundred miles west of its usual route, a lucky break—but what he had really wanted was to hear Miles’s voice as proof that he and Ajaratu and the Swan, battling ever-worsening seas, still existed, and had not, by a quirk of navigation, sailed into a dream sea at the edge of the world.

  15

  The chief electrical officer lay awake in the dark, gripping the edge of his mattress, wondering what had changed. The skin on the back of his neck prickled and he reached for the light switch.

  “Christ,” he breathed aloud.

  LEVIATHAN was rolling.

  The ship leaned to one side, then the other—a barely perceptible motion, but startling for its very existence. He had been aboard twelve days and this was the first time she had budged from a plane as flat and straight as the horizon.

  The weather satellites had been right as usual; the southern storm that had spawned below Cape Horn and was racing across the South Atlantic was a big one to build such swells so far from its center.

  LEVIATHAN was rolling more acutely when the breakfast bell sounded, and the long crosswise corridors in the accommodations tower were rising and falling like seesaws. On his way to the dining salon, the electrical chief climbed a steepening incline that slowly leveled off until it was flat. Moments later, he was loping down a hill.

  His sense of smell seemed unusually acute when he finished breakfast; the sausage grease reeked strongly and his coffee tasted sour. Too late, he recognized the familiar signs of worse to come.

  He hurried up to the bridge wing for fresh air. It was colder than the day before. To the west, far, far away, great unmoving anvil-top black clouds loomed like solid rock. The air was clear and very cold, the water deep blue, almost black, and the sunlight fell from a wintery angle, darkening the water and offering little warmth. The smooth surface of the sea undulated like gelatin as row after row of buried swells filed out of the southwest and rolled the high and empty LEVIATHAN with ever-crescent ferocity.

  He lay down in his cabin, knowing he had to get up to take his subordinates’ reports. It was heavy with the odor of furniture oil. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and stood up to go on watch. His stomach heaved and he bolted for the bathroom.

  The rolling grew worse, and the next evening, when he felt recovered enough to attempt dinner, the stewards had dampened the tablecloths to stop the plates from sliding.

  Captain Ogilvy asked how he felt. He sounded genuinely sympathetic, but the electrical chief attributed it to the general lightening up that had come from giving the mad doctor the slip and knowing they would pass Capetown in four days. The long, seventeen-day first leg would be over; they’d be in the Gulf in two weeks.

  After dinner the talk turned to the weather. The engineers and the subordinate electrical officers retired, but the electrical chief stayed on with Ogilvy and his deck officers to speculate on the route of the storm.

  Ogilvy dispatched a cadet to bring the latest weather and wave charts from the bridge, and when he had, the officers spread them out on the wardroom coffee table and grouped around while the captain led a discussion of probabilities. He drew their attention to the isobars, which showed that the depression had continued to deepen as it had moved rapidly east, from a point five hundred miles below the tip of South America to its latest recorded location fourteen hundred miles due west of Capetown.

  He traced the route across each of the charts with a thick, wrinkled finger. Then he said, “The South Atlantic high didn’t slow it one whit. Now, for some reason, it’s stalled.”

  “There’s a powerful high at the Cape,” said the first officer. “Ten thirty millibars.”

  “I think it will stay where it is until we’ve passed, or perhaps swing north,” said the second.

  The first officer picked up a satellite photograph and examined the enormous cloud swirl.

  “Trouble?” asked the chief electrical officer.

  “Trouble?” Ogilvy pointed at a wave chart. “They’ve reported ten-meter waves at its center—thirty-three feet—in addition, of course, to the swell. On another ship I would say you have to respect the sea’s power and assume that indeed there might be trouble.” He tossed the map to the table. “This is LEVIATHAN. The storm will cost nothing but bunkerage. You might want to run up the fuel figures, Number Two.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tinkling musically, the empty coffee cups slid across the polished table toward the wardroom’s curtained stern windows. Ogilvy smiled as the second officer reached to stop them.

  “She’s pitching,” he said. “You’re seeing a rare event on LEVIATHAN, Sparks. Enjoy it.”

  The bow rose a degree or two, then fell away the same small measure, and the electrical chief had a curious feeling that the other officers were gladdened by the reminder that they were indeed aboard a ship, a tender vessel influenced, albeit marginally, by the movement of the sea. He thought, as he had often since he had boarded the tanker, how young they were.

  The first officer telephoned the bridge and spoke to the third, who was on watch. “The swells are holding west,” he reported, “but the wind is shifting south.” Normally dispassionate, even he seemed excited by the prospect of a storm.

  “The advance guard,” Ogilvy proclaimed.

  The chief electrical officer was of the generation between these young officers and Ogilvy, the generation that bridged the old and modern, the rigid and the casual, and having served on many ships in many oceans, had seen enough captains to know how the tyrannical old bastard got his way. But who would master LEVIATHAN when the Old Man had gone?

  Ogilvy stared down from his full height at the charts and JAX radio facsimile weather and wave printouts on the coffee table. Abruptly, he swept them aside.

  “The storm will move,” he announced. “Across the Cape.”

  No one asked him how he knew.

  That night the pitching worsened, and by dawn the regular rise and fall of the bows made the whole ship tremble. The electrical chief slept badly—not sick, but in suspension, waiting when the bow rose for the drop to follow. His hands tightened each time LEVIATHAN reached the apogee, rearing high to smash the rollers like a relentless battering ram.

  Finally, at dawn, he gave up on sleep, dressed warmly, and went to the bridge wing, where, at first light, he leaned into a bitter-cold wind and watched the grand liftings and stately plummetings of the great blunt bows. They flung clouds of spray that dumped tons of water on the front third of the ship each time LEVIATHAN plunged into a trough and raced on to pummel the next wave.

  Great breaking combers covered the ocean’s surface in mighty rows two hundred yards apart, each row separated by a frothy field of white water. The wind was strong, and when a sudd
en wave rose higher than the rest in a long trough, the wind knocked it down for its impertinence. He walked to the edge of the wing and looked over the side. Here in the lee the water was smoother. He strained to hear the breaking waves, but heard only the wind rushing past his ears as LEVIATHAN charged into it at a heedless sixteen knots.

  Movement caught his eyes, and he was startled to see a giant albatross a few feet away, riding the wind beside the ship and watching him with an unblinking yellow eye. The bird was enormous, its wingspread ten feet at least, and he noticed that its far wing drooped lamely and its head and neck were strained with weariness. He guessed that it had been mauled by the storm, and he stepped away to encourage it to land if a rest was what it wanted.

  The albatross floated closer to the railing and reached tentatively for the gray metal with its webbed feet. One suspicious eye remained fixed on the electrical officer.

  “You’re all right,” he murmured. “I won’t hurt you.” He glanced at the bridge house to make sure, but the helmsman sat by the wheel staring at where the autopilot was taking him.

  The bird’s feet clamped tightly around the railing and it tried to fold its wings. The right wing collapsed into its resting place, but the left stuck half open at a stiff and awkward angle. The albatross flapped it, as if to try again, but the wind tore at it, unbalancing the bird. Too late, it opened the other wing to steady itself.

  The wind wrenched the albatross from the railing. Fighting to fly, struggling frantically to mate its wings to the turbulence around the ship, it was swept up and back.

  Its instincts were good. It didn’t resist the air, but tried to float with it, and it cleared the thicket of wires and antennas on the mast. Then its stiff wing betrayed it and the bird was blown hard against the tall starboard funnel. Cartwheeling like a kite without a tail, it plunged toward the water.

  The electrical officer leaned far over the edge of the wing and watched the albatross thrash helplessly in the bubbling wake. He stared astern long after the white of its feathers was lost in the riled water, angered by the loss, blaming the giant ship.

  Ogilvy came onto the bridge wing and stood beside him. He wore a high-collared greatcoat and a milky-white silk scarf at his throat.

  “Good morning, Sparks. There’s something—”

  Bristling, the electrical officer cut him off.

  “Captain Ogilvy, I’d like to remind you that LEVIATHAN’s electric plant produces enough kilowatts to power a fair-sized town. On your bridge electronic equipment pinpoints your position to an inch, anticollision radar tracks every ship in a sixty-mile radius, meteorological instruments observe every weather disturbance in the hemisphere, and your telemetry gear allows you to communicate with anyone in the world.”

  Ogilvy looked bemused. “What exactly is the purpose of this inventory?”

  “Just this, Captain. Since the functioning of these instruments is my responsibility on this voyage, I would prefer that you not call me ‘Sparks,’ which somehow implies that I divide my time between fiddling with a shortwave radio and changing light bulbs.”

  Ogilvy offered his blandest smile. “Then you’re probably just the officer to inform that as we steam into a major storm, the electronic bow-pressure indicators have all failed.”

  The chief electrical officer felt his jaw drop. “All of them?”

  “Every last one.”

  “When?” Schematics and circuit plans raced through his head. Where Ogilvy saw the steel plates and members that formed the ship’s hull, tanks, and decks, he saw miles and miles of copper wire and coaxial cable connecting the thousands of components of the electronic and electrical systems without which the ship would be a drifting hulk.

  Ogilvy chuckled. “No need to look so upset, Sparks. It’s not really that important.”

  “Not important?” he asked incredulously. “Without those sensors, how can you possibly know the effect of the seas on the bow? It’s five hundred yards from the bridge.”

  Ogilvy stopped smiling abruptly. “I’ve been at sea fifty years, sir. Long before they cooked up radar, much less bow-pressure indicators. I know the effect of the seas on my bows, thank you.”

  “I’ll have it repaired immediately.”

  “I also know better than to depend upon electrical wizardry in salt air. This isn’t a laboratory, it’s an ocean.”

  The electrical chief had heard that litany time and time again in the past fifteen years. He offered his own in return. “Electronics is merely a way of making the ocean smaller.”

  “A bigger ship is the only way to make the ocean smaller,” retorted Ogilvy.

  The chief electrical officer hurried into the bridge house and took the elevator fifteen levels down to the control room. It was soundproofed and air-conditioned, but the floor trembled from the engines. His seconds and thirds were huddled around the computerized failure-trace system, eyeing the electronic wave patterns that cantered across the test-instrument oscilloscopes.

  “Why wasn’t I called?” he demanded, swiftly scanning the computer-generated formulas on the CRT screen.

  “We couldn’t find you, sir. We’ve got it under control.”

  He bit back an angry retort. LEVIATHAN’s crew were a clannish lot and they’d made it clear that they put little trust in an outsider. He asked what had happened.

  “It looks as if the telemetry system isn’t functioning.”

  “Bloody hell,” said the chief.

  The pressure sensors measured sea forces on certain key bow plates. The information was fed up a coaxial cable from the bottom of the ship to a microwave transmitter on the forward deck that relayed it back to the tower. It was a one-in-a-million breakdown. The fact that the transmitter was working despite the data-signal loss meant that the failure was probably in the jumble of cables and connectors where the pressure sensors’ signals joined in a sealed junction box a hundred feet below deck, deep at the bottom of a crude-oil tank.

  “We’ve already got volunteers to go down.”

  “I’ll go myself,” said the chief. “Have the forward tanks deinerted. I want an oxygen mask and a radiophone link to the deck.”

  He donned a boiler suit and a slicker and rubber hat. Then, accompanied by his subordinates, he went on deck, climbed onto the fire-station catwalk, and began walking toward the spray-sheathed bow.

  Secretly, he wished he had let one of the younger men who had volunteered do the work, but he didn’t know them and he wanted the repair done right. If the system went down again when the tanks were full, it would be out until they off-loaded in Europe, because, unlike the situation on a freighter, there were no access tunnels in LEVIATHAN’s huge hull. The only way to reach the junction box that mated the bow sensors was to descend into the hellish silence of the empty oil tanks.

  The spray poured from the sky like a salty rain as he neared the bow. The lifting and plunging was much more pronounced at the forward end of the ship, because as LEVIATHAN reared to shatter the sea it pivoted from the stern. A deck gang had preceded the electrical officers and the yellow-coated sailors were grouped around an open manhole just behind the forwardmost bulkhead.

  The electrical chief gazed down at the steel ladder that disappeared into the black hold of the ship and thought wistfully of a desk job at Decca. The slow rise and fall of the bow would make it difficult to hang on to the ladder. He stripped off his hat and slicker and slung a backpack of tools and components over his shoulders.

  The bosun gave him a special hard hat with a miner’s light and a radiotelephone headset built in. An oxygen mask was dangling into the hole, to be lowered beside him in the event that he descended into a gas pocket. The inert gases, which were supposed to prevent the tank from exploding, had been pumped out already, but there was no guarantee that an oil puddle, missed in the tank cleaning, might not create a gas pocket that would asphyxiate him. The hat, the light, the telephone, and his shoes were all rubber covered to reduce the chance of sparking an explosion in the temporarily air-rich, dei
nerted tanks.

  He squeezed his bulk through the manhole and began the long climb down. The air stank of crude and was deathly still compared to the wind and spray above. He counted fifty steps down the narrow ladder that tilted to and fro with the ship’s movement, and stopped to rest.

  It occurred to him that nowhere but the sea would an engineer with his experience be risking his life to make a nuts-and-bolts repair. Looking up, he saw a tiny circle of light that was the manhole. A shadow moved over it—one of his men, he thought wryly, wondering if the new boy had plunged to his death.

  He turned on the light. The beam shone on gray metal. Everywhere he moved his head, the light showed the dead gray color of a bottom fish. He resumed his descent into the empty crude tank and a rumbling sound began to echo. Twice he passed through horizontal dividers, interior decks trod only by the oil. Then he was in the deepest tank, a tall narrow space that descended to the bottom of the ship. The rumble was louder. Black circles showed in the gray—oil inflow ports, the mouths of the thousands of pipes that honeycombed the million-tonner’s hold.

  He reached the bottom, grateful to be off the ladder, and felt through his rubber soles the source of the rumbling. LEVIATHAN’s belly shook gently each time the ship smashed a big roller. He followed his light to a massive steel member, located a small door at chest height, telephoned to double-check that the power was off, unscrewed the fasteners, and removed the door.

  The junction box was partially filled with crude oil. It spilled out as he stripped away the broken gasket and stuffed it in his bag. The oil had touched the lower rows of SC coaxial connectors, but apparently none had penetrated the threaded couplings because they were designed for severe environment. He unscrewed several and shone his light into their sleeves, confirming that their seals had held, then widened his search.

  It was the main coupling. The high-power LT inch-and-a-quarter connector had been breached. The corrosive oil had ruined the contacts. He cut the male and female parts from the coaxial cable and crimped on replacements.