by Peter Tonkin
More up-to-date is a source that my son Guy found for me when we were researching conditions in the North Atlantic. Redmond O’Hanlon’s terrific book Trawler gave me all the details about the crewing and handling of La Carihuela - and, in combination with a range of news stories about submarines tangled in fishing nets, the backbone of the plot.
Finally, I must thank a colleague at The Wildemesse, Mark Robertson, who cheerfully gave me much more than just the name, character and appearance of the intrepid Captain of Quebec. Mark got into the story because he is Canadian, a Nova Scotian Blue Noser, and he was amused by the idea of being a character in one of my books. When I told him he would be the captain of a submarine, however, he laughed and warned me that the reality of such a situation would be far from what I proposed - for he suffers from uncontrollable claustrophobia. The condition is so fierce, he says, that he cannot even go camping anymore because the combination of darkness and restrictive sleeping bags tricks it off. ‘If they really put me in a submarine,’ he told me, ‘I’d flip at once and simply start killing everyone who tried to stop me getting out.’
And so Paolo Ursini was also born - or Psycho Bob as he becomes known to the men and women aboard the ill-fated Quebec . . .
Peter Tonkin. Tunbridge Wells. Spring, 2006
One
Rogue
The rogue formed suddenly at the western mouth of the Denmark Strait, where the seabed plunges over a 2,000-metre cliff into the abyssal Labrador Basin, and it then ran swiftly and secretly south-westwards parallel to the Greenland coast from Kulusuk to Cape Farewell.
It was big, even as North Atlantic rogues go, but it was running with the set of the sea, hard in the wake of a moderating storm. So that in spite of its uncanny speed and massive size, in spite of the deadly danger it represented, it was able to creep up on the vessels in its path like Jack the Ripper hunting victims in a Whitechapel alley.
The first of these vessels was the ocean-going tug Sisyphus sailing under contract to the Heritage-Mariner Shipping Company and due in the North Sea oilfields in thirty-six hours’ time. Sissy was sailing south-eastward again after a run into the shrinking Greenland ice fields to test bows that had been recently ice-strengthened for work in the North Atlantic.
The second was the Victoria-class submarine Quebec, last of the diesel-electric Upholder series to be sold by the British to the Canadian Navy. Quebec was running in the still waters one hundred feet beneath the storm-surge as she started on her long voyage home to the St Lawrence seaway after a shakedown under the ice cap designed to get the Canadian crew familiar with her systems.
The third was La Carihuela, a Spanish trawler designed for the Mediterranean and really a little out of place in this vast, stormy wilderness. La Carihuela had just been unceremoniously chased out of Icelandic waters by a couple of gunboats for poaching protected fish stocks, but was still keen to top up her cargo bays with a last haul of redfish, or anything else she could net while she was here.
It was not so much the vessels themselves that made the difference in the end, however - it was the men and women aboard them; particularly those who owned, controlled or commanded them.
And the first of these, aboard Sissy, was Richard Mariner.
Richard towered at the right shoulder of Sissy’s duty helmsman, the ice-blue dazzle of his eyes half hidden as he squinted forward. His bright gaze searched along the line of their course south-westwards into the North Atlantic, the easy rocking of his sea-wise stance holding his head steady and level even against the pitching of the wave- tossed vessel. Had the man possessed the almost telescopic gaze of the seabirds sailing easily one hundred feet above his foredeck, he might have been able to make out the distant shoreline of Greenland so far away on his right that it was hidden by the curve of the earth. Or the distant speck of La Carihuela, concealed by the grey skirts of the storm withdrawing dead ahead. But he did not. Nor did he need to - he had instruments aplenty that could see further even than the gulls.
However, Richard had been looking at little but screens and bowls for far too long. Now he wanted to see the world in all its vivid glory, to focus his weary eyes on something more than a metre distant.
The great cloud-walls of the storm that had been battering Sissy for the last eighteen hours were sweeping away westwards at last, seemingly brushing the heaving surface of the sea itself. Above them, peeking over their stratospheric shoulders like Richard looking over the helmsman’s, peeped the westering, early afternoon sun. After days of gloom and storm it was a welcome sight. With the clean, rain-washed, almost French blue of the clear sky, it gave the steadily receding ridges of the waves a touch of colour to relieve the unremitting slate grey of the deep ocean. There were gleams of gold now, and heaves of breathtaking aquamarine running away before them into the cloud-shadows of the vanishing overcast.
A sense of peace began to settle out of the gathering golden brightness, an ageless understanding that after storms there will always come calms. Even though, mused Richard grimly, the sea was still running dangerously high. He noted the fact but felt none of the prophetic shivering that such an observation usually gave him in such conditions - courtesy of some distant Highland witch of an ancestor. Besides, as if to emphasize and explain the fact both at once, the wind buffeted against the aft of the bridge-house, causing Sissy to swoop forward as though she had been rabbit-punched.
Richard looked back. Unusually for a vessel of this size, Sissy had a clearview carefully located in the after wall of the bridge-house. It was a clever part of the design of the vessel which had made Richard interested in acquiring her for use by his company - and indeed in acquiring the rights to build more vessels such as this one. The clearview looked back along the tug’s after sections so that those on watch could oversee whatever was being towed behind as easily as they could see the way ahead - without having to venture on to the open wings that extended the closed weatherproof bridge on either hand. But there was little to see behind Sissy at the moment, other than the blinding glare of the bright new sunbeams off the glittering tumble of oncoming waves.
The overpowering physical sensations all too easily drowned any fey foreboding that might have warned Richard of approaching doom. Suddenly, looking out at the day through the clearviews from the steel-walled safety of the bridge was no longer enough. He had to be outside, whelmed in the vast, vivid immediacy of it. ‘Steady as she goes,’ he ordered the helmsman and the watch officer alike as he strode impulsively towards the bridge-wing door. ‘Just a knot or so slower than the oncoming seas - that way we can ride them comfortably and safely. And keep your tiller midships, remember. We’ll wait for things to moderate further before we swing back southerly and risk those seas coming in from the beam.’ He added the final order as his massive fist closed on the bridge-wing door handle, feeling the whole metal portal throbbing under the combined powers of the big wind outside and the four huge engines down below. ‘We’re not due back at Brent until tomorrow in any case,’ he added, pulling the door wide and stepping over the high sill on to the exposed bridge wing, into the icy brunt of the gale. ‘And they’ll not be ready for us to take the platform sections under tow for a good while longer - not after this lot,’ he concluded, speaking to himself now as he heaved the doorway closed and stood there, looking around.
Or rather, he thought ruefully, staggered there, looking around. For the power of the wind coupled with the swooping roll of the big tug’s hull combined to make even him unsteady on feet that were usually as well rooted as oak trees. Without thinking, his hands guided by automatic dictates far below consciousness, he clipped his lifeline on to the safety rail before doing anything else at all. Then it was only human nature to turn and glance back along the tug’s wake, to see where the wind, weather and waves were coming from. But, almost fatally, one hurried glance was more than enough for him. The brightness of the Denmark Strait was simply dazzling - the white of the sun, glinting like magnesium flares off a thousand tumbling wave-tops as though
off shards of steely mirrors stabbed into his forebrain. Tears welled, their crystal gush compounded by the bitter blast which itself was thickened by pellets of sharp salt spray, multiplying the terrible light into something akin to blindness. Richard turned away, blinking and swearing, having seen almost nothing that lay behind them at all.
Even with the wind at his back and the cloud-shadows soothing his eyes it was a while before he would be able to see clearly again. In the meantime, he held on to the steel safety rail that ran at waist height in front of him and rode the bucking Sissy like a bronco, tears turning from fire to ice as they flooded down his cheeks.
‘My God!’ shouted Robin, Richard’s wife, some uncounted time later. ‘You must be thinking of something really sad, my love!’
Richard’s eyes sprang wide with surprise - he had heard nothing and yet she must have opened and closed the door close by, then walked across the bridge wing to his side and clipped on to the safety rail there. He glared down at her now, his expression dictated by the lingering dazzle that gave her dancing golden curls an almost angelic lustre in his stillstreaming vision. The wind-blushing oval of her face seemed to swim up at him, her grey eyes as steady as unruffled pools.
Robin misinterpreted his expression - a rare miscalculation brought about by a lingering tension that stood between them. He hadn’t wanted her to come aboard on this trip, for the work they were undertaking threatened to be lengthy and tedious as well as hard and dangerous. And under normal circumstances the crew would have backed him, for they were almost as superstitious as trawler men. Female officers might be everyday occurrences on the big commercial tankers that made up most of the Heritage Mariner fleet, and which Robin as well as Richard held current papers to command. Women might be carving out well-earned careers in naval vessels of all sorts and sizes all over the world. But they were still something of a rarity in the rugged macho madness of smaller boat work, even if they were no longer absolutely forbidden to enter this strange environment of tugs and trawlers, supply ships and lighters.
However, Robin had been amongst Sissy’s crew before, in that mad dash from Durban to Kerguelen Island, fighting to save the drifting French tanker Lady Mary. The beautiful Englishwoman had become something between a ship’s mascot and a kind of pin-up for Captain Hollander and his cheerfully unreconstructed South African crew. They had been happy to see her back in the flesh.
Richard had shared with Robin many years of marriage and more tense situations than he cared to recall and he had always believed there was not a jealous bone in his body. Now he wasn’t so sure. And this was a situation she seemed to enjoy. Perhaps because their marriage had become so settled - staid. Perhaps because within the last few years she had been nearly killed in an explosion and faced weeks of surgery and months of physiotherapy in recovery - an experience that had shaken even her unthinking confidence in herself. Because he, in the meantime, had contrived to get himself isolated in some very intimate situations with several stunning young women who varied in profession from Canadian Mounties and Russian police investigators to French merchant naval officers, but who did not, as far as Robin could see, vary one little bit in either their attractiveness or their vulnerable availability.
‘What?’ she demanded shortly, wary of another confrontation.
But Richard shook his head. ‘Nothing. I just got the sun in my eyes. I looked back into the Denmark Strait - it’s like a supernova back there.’
Without a second thought, Robin did the same, then hissed in pain almost at once. When their eyes met again, hers were as wet as his. And she shared his preoccupied frown. ‘Have you got your sunglasses on you?’ she demanded.
‘I think so,’ he answered, patting his pockets one-handed, holding tight to the safety rail. ‘Why?’
‘I thought I saw something when I looked back there.’ She was patting her own pockets too, her frown deepening as the instantaneous vision of what she had glimpsed began to firm up in her head like a photograph taking form in a developing tray. But the first thing that her questing fingers found was her little walkie-talkie. No use for looking through at all.
Sissy settled then, sitting back into a trough between two waves that seemed longer and calmer than the rest. Richard popped open a pocket in his wet-weather gear and pulled out the fortunately indestructible, almost priceless designer eyewear given to him by his friend and colleague Doc Weary to celebrate their successful completion of the Fastnet Ocean Yacht Race a year or two since. He slid the tight black band of plastic and glass round his head and settled the coated lenses astride the great blade of his nose. ‘What?’ he said again and turned.
Turned and froze, like Lot’s wife in the Bible, turned to a pillar of salt by what she saw.
Richard’s first impression was that it must be an iceberg it was so high, so sheer, so square, so solid. It appeared to be a standard tabular berg the better part of one hundred feet in height, seemingly sheer, square at the top, and stretching away on either hand farther than he could easily see. Not so wildly out of place in these latitudes, of course.
Except that it was upwind of them and there was no telltale odour of cucumbers such as icebergs always give off. And yet the sheer cliff of it seemed so much more absolute, substantial - simply solid - than water could ever be. Especially as the westering sun glinted on the deep-water- green precipice of its leading wall, giving it a heavy bronze sheen that - even through the treated lenses of his sunglasses - made it seem more like metal than anything else. But then he registered the speed at which it was rushing down upon them; and he registered the lack of surf along its cliff- foot - and he knew.
‘Rogue,’ he grated to Robin, his voice carrying easily in the sudden hissing silence of its wind-shadow. ‘It’s a rogue.’
Two
Wave
Now the unusual design of Sissy’s bridge-house really began to come into its own. In many ways, in fact, it represented one of the sturdy vessel’s best hopes of survival. The huge rogue wave was almost upon her. It was travelling much faster than the seas through which she had been sailing. And even these seas had been too fast and too steep to allow her to turn beam-on with any safety. To try and turn now would be instantly fatal. There was no chance of facing their monstrous opponent bow-on, therefore.
But, as with their careful passage south-westward since the storm began to clear, if they controlled their speed and power carefully - perfectly - they might just be able to let it pass safely under them, riding up its sheer face stem-first. As though they were reversing in a motor car up a treacherously icy precipice.
But the waves they had been dealing with so far were ten metres at the most from trough to crest. The rogue was more than thirty. Like a tsunami, it would have engulfed a ten-storey building without breaking into foam and passed on easily. If they got it wrong in any way at all, it would engulf them just as readily. Indeed, if they got it right in every detail and regard, the monster still might prove too much for them...
‘Full ahead all!’ ordered Richard, his gravely voice low and tense - not least because Robin insisted on remaining outside on the bridge wing, claiming she could see things more clearly from out there, promising to add her observations via the walkie-talkie. And, short of ripping off her safety line, slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her on to the bridge like a caveman, he had neither the time nor the power to change her mind. Not that he would have had the inclination to do so if she had been any other crew-member aboard, for a lookout on the bridge wing might indeed be a vital help. If he glanced to his left now he could see her through the window in the top half of the bridge-wing door, clutching intrepidly at the after rail, her head tilted back, sunglasses now securely in place, seemingly stargazing as she looked at the oncoming crest of the thing.
Sissy’s four huge motors responded to Richard’s terse command almost at once and the tug surged powerfully forward. As she did so, Captain Tom Hollander appeared, breathlessly, summoned by the watch-keeper on Richard’s first terse w
ord of warning. ‘A rogue?’ demanded the wiry Capetowner, resuming command of his own bridge.
‘Biggest I’ve ever seen,’ confirmed Richard.
Hollander joined him at the rear-facing clearview and said something foul in Afrikaans. Even though he couldn’t see its crest, thought Richard, impressed. Or, perhaps, because he couldn’t see the crest. Which emphasized how Robin’s riskier strategy of standing outside where her upward vision was limited only by the sky instead of the window frame and deck head could be vital.
In spite of the fact that they were running at full speed, they were beginning to slide further back down the leading slope of the long trough preceding the rogue. A glance over his shoulder showed Richard that the helmsman was looking up towards the gulls a hundred feet above the deck now; the gulls and the tops of the dark storm clouds away beyond them. And the aft-facing clearview was looking down along the afterdeck towards the bottom of the approaching monster as the crest of it seemed to rise to newer, ever more threatening heights. At least Robin could see the topmost reach of the rogue and have some clear idea of their chances of bobbing up there before it all closed down and sucked them under like Titanic.
‘There are vessels ahead of us, Tom,’ said Richard, almost conversationally. ‘Better put out a warning to them.’
‘I hope to God there are vessels all over the place,’ answered Hollander flatly. ‘I’m putting out a mayday. Sparks, did you hear that?’
‘Mayday, Captain. Aye.’
‘We’ve enough emergency equipment aboard to get everyone through this - but only if we get a chance to abandon ship,’ calculated Hollander grimly. ‘But we don’t even have time to go to emergency stations. Still, I’ve ordered the decks clear and everything battened tight...’ He glanced out at Robin, the only one aboard not obeying his orders at the moment. ‘Anything else’d be a waste of time in any case, I’d say.’