by James Barlow
Ahead, under a flash of lightning, Tomazos saw that the Areopagus was poised and that the ascend of the wave was seventy feet. The propellers, out of the water at the stern, seemed to drill his teeth.
The spectacle in that flash was nerve-racking. But, as the Areopagus rushed and dropped down a mountain of water Tomazos saw, beyond and rising as he fell, the lights of another ship. What was so alarming was that he saw all of them – in other words, the white light on a foremast, a similar white light on a mainmast fifteen feet higher, the red light on her port side and green on her starboard. All these indicated a vessel of over 150 feet in length. The light on the mainmast was required to be at least fifteen feet higher than the forward light. His eyes did the split-second mathematics and told him that this ship was only hundreds of yards away, at most a thousand.
His hand was already rising to the handle on the deckhead Mr. Biggar had inquired about weeks before, and he shouted to Yannopoulos, ‘Starboard, all you’ve got!’ – a crude command, but Yannopoulos, was already flicking the wheel.’
Oh, God, Tomazos pleaded in his mind, the time available so inadequate that he did not, even in thought, enlarge the petition . . .
He had, in theory, a choice. No. There was no choice. The rules said Starboard. But in the grim realities of the sea d seamanship he had a choice. He might order Stop! To the engine room, followed at once by Full Astern! To minimize a head-on collision. A collision, he knew, was almost inevitable.
But an order to stop was only an engine order. The ship, even in this sea, would carry on forward, with her momentum driving her ahead and only slowing down gradually over a distance of miles even when the engines had been put ‘Astern.’ Under these ‘Stop’ conditions and without engine reversal a very large tanker might take an hour and cover nine miles before she was dead in the water. Abaft the bridge, the ship – any ship – widened out to its maximum beam, where boilers and engine rooms were situated. It was this two-thirds full-bosomed and bottomed section which constituted most of the buoyancy of a ship. If the ‘unsinkable’ trans-Atlantic Titanic had not turned away upon sighting an iceberg that awful night in 1912 – if she had held her course – which would have required enormous strength of mind from the captain – the fine bows would have folded like a concertina, but little buoyancy would have been lost. Turning, she had had her bottom and double bottom ripped open . . . But it was inevitable, if the two ships were to collide end-on here and now, that neither would have slowed down much. To slow to a stop would have taken each from two to five miles. The reaction from the telegraph was too slow. The engineers had to receive the order Stop (that is, go into neutral like an automobile but with gears weighing tons), and then into Reverse . . . Otherwise the heavy gearing would smash to pieces.
The alternative choice, already made, was to turn to starboard and if the other ship did the same there was a small chance of total escape, and a great one of grazing. If the other ship did not alter to starboard and the Areopagus did, there was a likelihood that the liner might be cut in two. Or, if the other ship altered to starboard, and was a big tanker one fifth of a mile long, it was possible that the Areopagus would ram her port side near the stern . . .
As well, in turning to starboard, even if carried out by both ships, there were dangers. The passage of a hull through the water was accompanied by a system of pressure and velocity changes that extended all around the ship – astern, ahead, underneath and on either beam. The velocity changed on the beam if it was close to a river bank or to another ship: the water was restricted and therefore flowed faster. As the afterbody of most ships was fuller than the forebody, the effect was usually more pronounces toward the stern, and the tendency was to turn the bow away from the solidity of the river bank or ship in close proximity. The two ships would be pushed together by the higher water pressures on their outboard side. Helm action could counter this if applied (as now) at a sufficiently early stage.
Nevertheless, the first effect of applying starboard rudder was to push the ship bodily to port, especially at the stern, and the subsequent turn to starboard followed seconds later . . .
Tomazos knew all this, knew that it was happening, was aware even that the storm, too, while confused, had its strength on the starboard side. Even so, his hand pulled the handle and the single long blast of the siren signalled to the other ship ‘I am turning to starboard.’ He had to give a chance to the other ship.
Aboard the Seattle Doll they had turned to starboard just prior to the signal of steam which they scarcely heard anyway.
On both ships men coiled, cowered and flinched as they saw the other ship, in the violent off postures dictated by the storm. Some men shouted, others froze to the spot a few threw themselves flat . . .
The two ships would have missed if they’d been granted half a minute more, or if the sea’s agitation had been on their side . . . As it was, they struck, port side to port side, ripping lumps out of each other, and passed, momentums greatly reduced, in a shower of sparks.
The Seattle Doll struck about midway between bulkheads 83 and 151 of the Areopagus so that only one main compartment (to begin with) was affected, and both boundaries were left intact. This was in fact the minimum damage to be expected in a collision and to be provided for . . .
The deep fuel tanks on the pot side were punctured by the impact. These were a quarter empty, so seawater rushed into the tanks and the asymmetrical flooding produced a heeling momentum of 3,000 tons so that the Areopagus in seconds listed to ten degrees. Cabin accommodation was sliced, fractured or crushed down to the level of these tanks. The lights went out, although Tomazos didn’t know this for long half seconds.
Half a mile away the liquefied explosives crackled, burned through mattresses and reached the toe puff. The tons of toe puff, unknown to the crew of the Seattle Doll, were highly dangerous. The crew, already exhausted after hours of fighting fires and flood, now began in the energies of terror, to fight the fires in the explosives store. They were doing this when the toe puff exploded with enormous violence and split the ship in half. The buckled halves of the ship burned but did not sink at once. The storm tore at them. Lifeboats were burned or shattered. Men were brutally injured, killed or burned . . .
On the bridge of the Areopagus there was some confusion, for the captain, not quite on his feet, had been thrown by the collision and lay on the deck with a serious face injury. Tomazos had already signalled Dead Slow. The storm wouldn’t allow him to stop, but he didn’t want the propellers thrashing the sea in which men might be swimming. He must save them. God had, he believed, spared his old ship, but grim hours lay ahead.
He was filled, not with terror but emotion (but not, assuredly, in the stomach!) He recalled the simple message of trust and compassion which had been offered by the American child, Debbie, in the floating restaurant in Hong Kong. He was in charge of the ship, Captain Vafiadis was beyond responsibility now. Elaine passed briefly through his mind, but meaninglessly: she did not belong here. He did. He was tired but, in an odd way, exhilarated. This was his destiny. The misery caused by Elaine was trivial. He would see these passengers to safety. He would save some of those men thrown into the sea by the explosion. He would see this good old ship to harbour if it killed him. A small tender memory plucked at his mind: Kristina standing on the dockside at Singapore, weeping, he had recognized, for him. He was glad that she was not here, subject to risk and injury and terror . . .
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘I feel so ill,’ Keith had confessed forty minutes before.
It was the first thing he had said in days which had any relationship to what had existed before – the friendship bordering on love, the days passed amicably.
His eyes had added in supplication, ‘And I am frightened.’
Dimitrios had responded at once. It was true that he was the only person Keith could talk to in English down here but that he should
so, even in sickness, warmed the Greek boy, who immediately was full of concession, near to tears.
‘I have some pills,’ he had told Keith. It hurt to do so, but he had admitted frankly, ‘John gave them to me. You have to take six at a time.’
Keith had smiled ruefully. ‘Six!’ And then, equally open, he had claimed, ‘It must be terrible out there.’
Dimitrios had told him with feeble humour: ‘It’s pretty awful down here,’ and they had laughed, giggled together like schoolboys.
And now, forty minutes later, in total darkness and with water swishing about and men shouting and some groaning, Dimitrios pleaded aloud, unheard by these, ‘My friend! Oh, God, save my friend.’
Dimitrios was lucky – very much a relative luck. He had been up steel rungs ten feet above the deck when the Areopagus had collided. The jolt had thrown his feet from under him but his hands had held. His body had swung outward, then returned; steel rungs clouted him across the chest and stomach, and winded him, but no worse.
All lights went out.
It was terrifying.
He heard water – or possibly oil – rushing about and shouts of fright, whole scores of yards away, another world.
The sensation was appalling – the ship’s dreadful pitching and yawing didn’t cease for a moment, but the multisonous cataclysmic tearing of steel was the noise of indifferent gods. And now the acoustic symptoms and indications were all unpleasant: steam hissing, water sloshing about in tons, metal groaning under stress.
He deduced that the lights had gone out as the result of flooding, and that every light on the ship would be off. Worse, every instrument operated by the generators would now be useless – radar, gyro-compass, cabin lights, elevators, telemotor steering, pumps, burners . . .
In this he was correct. The half-empty deep fuel tanks on the port side had been penetrated. There were tanks on port and starboard sides of a narrow central alleyway. At the forward end of it was a pump room containing the valves for controlling the flow from the tanks or flooding them with seawater ballast. The aft end of the alleyway led into the generator room, and as the alleyway was narrow and bounded on all sides by oil-tight and watertight plating, no watertight door had been fitted. The alleyway was now flooded with water and it was not possible to reach the flooding valves for the port tanks or equalize the heeling momentum, even if the tanks had been sound. Nor was it possible to stop the water in the alleyway from pouring into the generator room.
Failure in the electric power would mean failure of the forced draft and air preheaters. His shaken mind couldn’t work it out. Violent cooling by water would be disastrous to the boilers and steam pressures. But so would a gross increase in heating.
He could smell burning paint and soot. Oh, God, he thought in terror. A stack fire! The jolt of the collision has caused torching in the uptakes and the smoke pipe. He knew that sparks and even flames would be belching out of the stack, visible to the officers on the bridge . . . The whole ship could blow up. If oil vapour was billowing around the ship it only had to find somewhere with a temperature of about 750 degrees Fahrenheit for autogenous ignition. It didn’t even need a spark.
Steam hissed deafeningly in the darkness from ruptured piping and forty feet away molten metal cascaded into water with a hiss.
Dimitrios was shivering with fear in a huge oiler room where steam or water or fire or suffocation might kill him. What could he do? Light. They all needed light. And shut off the main steam stop valve – and close the steam to the oil heater, close the atomizers and secure the oil lines and oil pump. Close the furnace tightly because a sudden rush of cool air (let alone water!) into the heated interior would damage the refractory surface lining and create chaos among the tubes.
All these things were impossible. In theory he should go on and pump out the bilges as well! He was not sure whether during this dreadful day the bilges had been steamed out. If not, oil and oil vapour might be accumulated and ready to explode.
No lights, he cautioned himself, unless they have steamtight globes . . .
He had a watertight flashlight somewhere. In his cabin!
What had happened?
Where was everybody?
Priorities. Shut off the oil supply by means of the quick closing valves and stop the oil pump. Start the emergency generator. Shut off the main steam stop valve. But what if the distant control gear is under water? Then you’ll have to climb up there and close it with the toggle-operated globe valve. In the dark? Do I have the physical strength?
He came down the steel rungs carefully and found that water was four feet deep. It meant – anything. All bad. Nothing good could happen . . . When water reached or penetrated the furnace walls . . . I’ll have to shut down the high pressure boilers.
Chest deep in water he moved slowly, hot but shivering, breathing badly because ventilation had gone, gasping, ‘My friend, oh, God, save my friend’ – and bumped into Keith.
In the total darkness he identified Keith by a total awareness – a consciousness of height, and the other’s slimness, a scent of hair oil, a manner of breathing, love and terror emanating like radar emissions . . .
‘Keith!’
‘Dimitrios! We are lost!’
‘No. Listen! If we can shut off the oil and the mains team valve and start the emergency generator –’
‘Nothing can save us.’
‘We shall save ourselves.’
‘It is all so useless – ‘Keith submitted, meaning that everything was interdependent and now nothing functioned: neither the main steam equipment nor the host of auxiliaries operated by steam – the air cocks, drain valves, soot blowers, blow valves, steam flow indicators, the auxiliary steam stop valve . . .
‘Yes, but we can save the ship. And the starboard engine will get us away . . . We must.’
‘It is beyond my strength,’ pleaded Keith, willing to die, get it over with.
‘Please, my friend –’
‘I cannot swim,’ Keith admitted in terror.
Flames flickered in the darkness as drops of oil dropped onto hot exhaust pipes, little lumps of incandescence fell near them and floated, still burning.
Some lights came on unexpectedly – someone else had found the leads to the emergency generator. And with the familiar chaos of armoured wires, asbestos-shielded pipes and steel around them it did not at first seem so bad.
There were two other men clinging to valve wheels. One was the watch engineer officer. Three other men floated, injured or dead, burned faces, and hair. Three were missing . . .
Dimitrios noticed that the water was pitching with the ship, and that when the bows went down the water ran that way too, leaving the level here whole feet down.
The officer observed, this, too, and stumbled toward the distant-control gear. The water returned, a foot higher, before he reached the position and knocked him sprawling yards past Dimitrios.
‘My God!’ whispered Dimitrios. ‘Stay here, Keith.’
The water was up to the boy’s neck. His eyes were wide in fear, but he shouted resolutely, ‘I’ll turn off the quick-closing valves.’ His hands clung to the safety rail, but his feet moved.
Dimitrios allowed the water to carry him thirty yards to where he struggled against it. His hips smashed against protruding metal, his hands burned on something, he sounds frightened him, and all the time metal groaned and he could smell soot and paint and hear the roaring of the stack fire, the storm – he wasn’t sure and didn’t dare analyze.
He was climbing past the fire bricks and rear casing of the furnace and tubes toward the superheater. It was hot, foul, airless, and awesome. For this boiler was in trouble from all directions. Dimitrios knew that about a quarter of the volume of the entire boiler below the waterline (including drum, tubes and water walls) was steam, and that only fifteen percent
of eh total volume was within the big tube. Each of the Areopagus’ boilers evaporated a hundred thousand pounds of water each hour. There were vast volumes of steam at the temperature of fire seeking release . . . There might now, as a result of the impact, be extreme changes in the water level in the boiler – and whether it was ‘swell’ or ‘shrinkage’ the changes were high that the feed water regulator was out of order. The firing rate might have altered, or even stopped . . .
He struggled, twenty feet up steel rungs, with the stop valve. It was old and resisted the power of his hands. Perhaps the thread was worn or it was the resistance of the boiler pressure. He struggled and cursed, ground his teeth. He was using both his hands and at the same time clinging because of the ship’s extreme postures. He wept in frustration and called on God.
He had just finished when there was a flare-back. It was on the other side of the carbon steel casing by the burner openings. There was a violent concussion, like gunfire, a flash, and then hissing. Oil patches began to burn on the tide of water. The flare-back was, Dimitrios presumed, due to an explosion of oil vapour in the furnace or to the drop in the air pressure in the fire room as the result of the failure (or deliberate stoppage)of the forced-draft blowers. Perhaps the fuel oil pipeline joints or even the boiler walls had been disrupted by the collision . . . It was impossible to know if the furnace was closed up tightly in these conditions, and if it was not, and cool air or water got in, the refractory furnace lining would crack and tubes would become warped, to say the least of it.
He had done what he’d set out to do – perhaps saved the ship from exploding – and now he was panic stricken. They must get out of here.