by Peter Tonkin
Beyond the bellow of the storm and the thudding of the cross sea, beneath the rumble of the half-power motors, there was the drip, hiss and tinkle of running water, but no evidence of it close at hand. No evidence of any quantity large enough to have pulled down the head of a vessel designed to fly with this and two more decks jam-packed with a hundred vehicles.
So, out they came and down they went. To the same scenario as the one above. Nothing obvious at all.
And out they came again. And down they went. It was not that they became careless or even blasé. It was simply that they were in a hurry. And there was nothing at all to arouse their suspicions. Tom simply opened the third metal bulkhead door and stepped over the sill, exactly as he had done with the two above.
And vanished.
There was no warning, nor at first glance was there any explanation. Richard ran forward to the empty doorway where the captain had been standing an instant earlier. He looked through into the car-deck, bellowing, ‘Tom? Tom!’
The lights burned dully. The calls echoed briefly and without reply. The sounds and sensations were all the same as they had been one deck and two decks higher but Richard stood frozen, eyes busy, refusing to move until he understood.
And then he saw. It was the floor. Up to the very level of the raised metal sill - the better part of eighteen inches above the main deck - the floor was under water. And the water, smooth and silent as ice, black and almost invisible against the metal of the deck itself, was rushing back along the length of the Cat with sufficient force to have snatched the unsuspecting Tom away in a twinkling.
That was very bad, thought Richard. For, below these decks there were at least three others, full of equipment, ballast and bilge. All of them full of water now too, by the looks of things. Logic dictated that he should close the door and go back up to discover where the water was coming from. But, remembering the terrible blows that the slim bow had taken as the great waves slammed Goodman Richard up and down - and also the fact that the bow was designed to open to allow cars to come and go - there seemed little enough doubt. Doc could pass his thoughts along via the radio transceiver he still held. There were others better qualified to sound out his suspicions. And in any case, he was unwilling to leave Tom.
But even as Richard stood, calculating the full danger of what was going on here, the first quicksilver rush of it gushed over the sill and out into the stairwell at his feet. Jerked back from the realms of speculation, he looked around for yet another lifeline, talking to Doc as he did so. ‘There’s a bad leak for’ard, Doc. Get on the radio to engineering and tell the Chief, if he doesn’t already know. He needs to send a team to look at the seals on the bow doors. Start at car deck two.’
There, beside the door was a fire-point. It had an axe, an extinguisher and - blessedly - a hose.
An instant later, as Doc finished talking to the Chief, Richard was securing the hose around his waist, slowed only by the weight of the metal nozzle. Then, taking careful grip of the doorframe and glancing back at Doc, who was ready to take the strain, he stepped over the little Niagara at his feet.
Even though he was expecting it, the vicious tugging of the millrace at his ankle and shin nearly tripped Richard up immediately, as it had obviously tripped Tom. But he found that if he angled himself forward against the pull of Doc’s safe hands on the hose, he was able to slop forward from handhold to handhold along the wall.
He knew the layout of the decks well enough. There were two central columns, each seemingly square and solid from the outside, but each containing a stairwell. He had come down the forward one of these, and the water was rushing past that and the second one aft of it, towards the stern. Both had hand rails and doorways to port and starboard, but nothing much to hold on to fore and aft. Beyond these the deck was as open as a football field and not a lot different in size. Say one hundred yards long and fifty wide.
The lights in the deck-head above were burning brightly enough for Richard to see the swirl of the water, which, as he took his third or fourth step, attained sufficient depth to flood over his boots. By the time he had reached the after end of the stairwell, the water was foaming up towards his knees and he had to be careful not to lose his boots altogether with every step he took. And he still could not see Tom.
But then, as Richard hung on to the aft-most handhold, looking back down the heaving deck, he saw Tom at last. The Captain had been swept on to the forward end of the next stairwell - either by good luck or by quick thinking. He was sitting there now, with his back against the upright and the water foaming against his chest, holding him upright with its simple force.
‘TOM!’ bellowed Richard, and the Captain’s eyes flickered. Widened.
Spreading his feet as wide as they would go, Richard released his handhold and began to surge forward against the steadying pressure of the hose around his waist. He had taken ten more steps when the line behind him tightened. He was at the end of the tether - and not for the first time that night.
He stood like a colossus in the speeding flood, feeling the water snapping at the tender flesh behind his knees. ‘Come to me!’ he bellowed again, opening his arms.
Like a lizard with prehensile hands, Tom oozed up the wall, helped by the unrelenting pressure of the water pushing him against the white metal cliff. Little by little, spreading the wetness like a contagion all around him, Tom writhed upwards until he was standing erect. Twenty steps separated the men. Richard could go no further, so no matter what his condition, Tom must come to him. But the gap seemed huge and the Captain was white - obviously hurt. Richard strained until his ribs felt as though they would break. Another step. A second. He leaned right forward, reaching out with his long, strong arms.
And Tom plunged, frog-like towards him. Water exploded against the leaping body, seeming to reach upwards as the desperate man jumped out of its grasp as best he could. He landed on all fours, halfway home. The surface smashed him backwards, seething up over his face, but the intrepid - desperate - man would not give in. He gathered himself and leaped again. But he only managed half as far, as though he was reenacting the Pythagorean conundrum of the frog that could only leap half as far with each succeeding attempt - and was doomed to hop for eternity.
‘Well done! That’s the ticket,’ yelled Richard, as Tom settled back on his haunches once again. If his body gave way against the overpowering thrust of deepening water, his feet at least stayed firmly anchored now. But his face was bone-white and his eyes were closed. He had one more attempt, perhaps, within him. ‘One more,’ called Richard, wondering if Tom could even hear him any more. ‘Come on, Tom. Go for it!’
At Richard’s final cry Tom leaped. His legs heaved his body up above the grasping surface. His back straightened and his arms reached.
And his wrists slapped into Richard’s palms, as though they were high on the flying trapeze. Even before the exhausted body could collapse back into the wild rush beneath, Richard jerked backwards, hurling the pair of them up towards safety. The steadying strength of the hose slackened at once, then jerked tight again as Doc began to reel them in.
It was a brief but brutal struggle, but the three of them fought it together grimly. Until, battered and bruised, Richard could pull the fainting Captain over the gushing sill and into the stairwell. It really was a well now. From knee-depth down to the bottom of the vessel, the square box of the companionway was full of the same black water as the lower car deck. Richard turned anxiously to Tom. ‘Can you walk?’ he began. But his answer was a hacking cough which ended with a gurgle and a thin dribble of blood.
‘That’s a broken rib,’ Doc told him helpfully.
‘And it’s damaged his lung,’ said Richard. ‘He needs to lie down until we can get him proper medical attention. Or sit up, more likely. But not on the bridge.’
‘Thank God we’ve got Robin on the throttle then,’ said Doc more soberly.
‘Thank God on bended knee,’ agreed Richard quietly. ‘But she needs to know about this
as soon as possible.’
Doc took Tom back to the Chief Steward while Richard ran up to the bridge. In a few brief, grim, words, he warned Robin what was going on. Had he himself been sitting with one hand on the helm and the other on the throttle levers of the engine room telegraph, he would have entered into at least a brief discussion with her. An exchange of ideas at least, a shared weighing of alternatives. But she just nodded her golden curls once, decisively, and got on with the job in hand.
Richard glanced out through the cracked and foam-smeared clearview. On the far horizon, under the swirl of the lowering storm, it was just possible to see a band of brightness which promised land just below the black heave of the water ahead, as though there were a city beneath the sea down there. ‘I’ll go down to the second car deck. See if I can assess how much time we’ve got.’
She nodded again. ‘Time to the Lizard?’ she demanded.
‘Still thirty minutes,’ answered Paul Ho.
‘That’s how much time we’ve got,’ she said.
Chapter 8: The Loss
Richard crossed the second car deck to the group of engineers gathered around the Chief. The Chief was crouching at the junction of the hinged forward section and the deck itself. In a dark line above his head stood the seam that stretched up through one more deck to the weather deck itself. Away to one side of him an inspection hatch stood open like a square manhole cover opening down to the deck below. The conversation as Richard crossed the echoing chamber was hushed. When he came right up to them they fell silent and looked up at him like doctors waiting to deliver a fatal diagnosis.
Which, in a way, he thought, they were.
The seam above the Chief’s head was not perfectly vertical. It was, in fact, angled through two planes. It led at an angle of perhaps eighty degrees from aft to forward along the line where the bows would open. It angled slightly but appreciably inwards from the outer flare of the bow towards the narrower ‘V’ of the keel. For these reasons it was not at first possible to see the stream of water cascading along its length, for the little river was contained in a decided valley and held by the Coander Effect which guides water drops in curved tracks along the outsides of bell-shaped glasses. It disappeared through the deck at the line where the bow detached from the horizontal when the front was open. Through the man-hole it was possible to see it cascading with redoubled force down the wall of the area below into the rapidly filling lake where Car Deck 3 had been.
‘The same the other side?’ asked Richard. Nodding across to another despondent little group.
‘Worse,’ answered the Chief. ‘The damage was worse over there and that’s the weather side.’
‘How long?’
‘Trying to calculate now. The faster we go the more rapidly it comes in. But the slower we go the longer it’s got to flood us out. How long do we need?’
‘At this speed, half an hour.’
The Chief sucked his teeth, looking very worried indeed. ‘And of course,’ he said, simply thinking aloud, ‘the quicker we go, the higher her bow sits - and the faster my engineering areas get flooded out at the stern. Once the motors get wet we all get wet.’
‘Any way you could barricade the vital areas - seal off the bulkheads and let the water drain away? It’s only for twenty minutes or so.’
‘Look,’ he continued, thinking feverishly. ‘The forward car-deck door got us into this. Could we maybe open the rear ones a foot or two and let this just shoot on through while we power on home? If we could get her head up and ease up towards full ahead, we’d be at Land’s End in fifteen minutes.’
Typically, this appealed to Richard. It was neat, clear and decisive. And it allowed the maximum of action.
‘I can’t say yea or nay,’ said the Chief. ‘It has a certain wild appeal, particularly as the third car deck’s flooded anyway so it’d be straight in the front and straight out the back if you got it right. But you’d have to ask the Captain. If it can be done it would need to be done with a great deal of delicacy, mind. And it’d take me maybe ten minutes to prepare.’
‘Go and get started,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll talk to the Captain now.’
‘Are you mad?’ said Robin. ‘Open the rear doors on a moving SuperCat in the middle of a storm? One big sea would poop us and we’d go down like a brick.’
‘We’re on our way down anyway. You need half an hour. You simply haven’t got it. Lionheart is lost. It’s just a choice of where she’s going to founder and who she’s going to take down with her. If you maintain this course and speed where will you be in twenty minutes?’
‘The Runnel Stone,’ both she and Paul answered together.
‘Then that’s where you’ll go down. I know you’ve been in constant touch with the coastguard but you must see that they can’t help us anyway. They haven’t got a lifeboat. They certainly don’t have anything big enough to get us all off. And even if they had a tug or two up their sleeves, they’d never be able to tow us home. Once the water gets up past the second car deck then we’re going down. Like a brick, as you so rightly say. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Except for us. Where will you get to if you come up to three-quarter speed?’
‘If we can come to speed; if we can keep the engines dry; if we can open the rear car-deck door just so far and hold it; if we don’t get swamped by a big wave from behind before we can start running faster than the seas and if she doesn’t start porpoising again...’ began Paul.
‘Penzance,’ snapped Robin. ‘We could maybe make Penzance.’
‘That’s it then,’ said Richard. ‘The Runnel Stone Light with fifty metres of cold green water beneath you and a mile and a half swim up to Hellas Point. Or Penzance Harbour with maybe six feet to a safe, sandy bottom and a short stroll up to the prom. The Chief says it’s the Captain’s choice.’
‘And I’m in the Captain’s chair.’ Robin hit the engine room hailer without further thought. As she waited for the Chief to answer she said to Paul, ‘You’d better fasten your seatbelt. We’re in for a bumpy ride. Paul, update the logs. We want this all clear when we hand them over to the inquiry...’
‘Chief here!’
‘Captain here. We go with Richard’s plan. I’m easing towards Three-Quarters Ahead now. Tell me when the engines are secure and we’ll open the rear doors as I come towards Full Ahead. But gently.’
‘It’s your decision, Captain.’
‘Yes, Chief. I know.’ She switched off and immediately started easing the levers forward. ‘Sparks, tell the Coastguard of our change of plan. I know there’s nothing they can do but keep their own log of our movements and decisions but we’ll keep them up to date. Richard. Make yourself useful. I want Doc up here and both of you on watch. Tell him to bring Tom if there’s any way at all he can be moved.
‘Paul, I didn’t really mean it about the belt. It was a line from a movie. I’ll probably need that chair for Tom if he’s strong enough...’
‘Sharing the responsibility?’ asked Paul, self-consciously loosening his seatbelt again as Richard turned to go.
‘Looking for a bit more expertise,’ she answered easily. ‘And it is his ship I’m getting ready to rip apart.’
In fact Tom was nowhere near well enough to be up on the bridge but the instant he felt the change in the speed and disposition of his command, wild horses would not have held him back.
‘How’s she answering?’ he gasped as Richard eased him into the seat Paul had just vacated.
‘Well enough,’ answered Robin. ‘You think she’s strong enough for this?’
‘Built like a jumbo jet,’ he answered, bracingly.
‘Then we only need to get the physics right.’
‘I’d say so. And the luck, of course.’
Richard stood on the port bridge wing looking ahead through the night glasses, swinging easily out to port and back to full ahead. Ahead, there were lights along the horizon now, shining from the cliffs between Land’s End and Hellas Point. Nearer and brighter, but away out
to port, was the bobbing flash of the Runnel Stone Light. As Lionheart gathered way and began to lift her head fraction by fraction, so the light got brighter but began to swing away further still from port beam to three-quarters aft.
Richard watched it and scanned the stormy sea around it with the automatic method of a practised watch-keeper, missing nothing at all with his eyes even though his mind was far away. For, at the same time as he was keeping watch, he was so utterly involved with what was going on at his right shoulder that he could sense, see, feel it all as clearly as he could hear it.
‘Looks like an area of relative calm ahead,’ said Robin.
‘Flaw in the wind down to Force Seven, I’d say,’ he answered instantly. ‘Sea running low and regular as far to port as the Runnel Stone.’
‘Just what we need,’ wheezed Tom.
‘How’re things coming, Chief?’ asked Robin into the mic. ‘I have a window of opportunity now. Coming up to Three-Quarters.’
‘Engine room secure and dry,’ answered the Chief’s tinny voice. ‘I don’t know where the water’s going but it’s not coming in here.’
‘OK. As we come past Three-Quarters I want you to open the rear doors. One foot. On my mark. Mark!’
At Three-Quarter speed Lionheart’s bow should be lifting, thought Richard. But she was being terribly, terribly slow. Thank God for the low seas ahead.
But then, as the rear door lifted out of its footing and began to slide up, the whole frame seemed to leap. Richard staggered back, as though a hand had been placed in his chest to push him down a slight slope. He banged the back of his head against the edge of the hard hat Doc had not yet taken off. ‘That seemed promising,’ someone said.
‘On my mark, another foot, Chief,’ ordered Robin. ‘Mark!’
Somewhere at the rearmost section of the great box-like car deck area, the door slid up another foot, like a portcullis being raised in an ancient castle. Out from under it there gushed the maelstrom of water that had snatched Tom along the lower car deck. The head at the forward end of the SuperCat lifted further. More of the damaged seam came up out of the water. But the pressure against the larger, lower, section that was still cutting through the waves intensified almost geometrically. What had been a trickle into the equalized pressure of the bilge and forward engineering areas became a flood, spraying inwards as though through a cracked high dam. And all of it surged backwards, moved by inertia and gravity against the vessel’s gathering momentum and slope. This was not good. But it felt good, for Lionheart seemed faster, more responsive. Or she did until they tried to make her turn.