by Peter Tonkin
‘I agree. If there’s anyone aboard who wants to pray, though...’
‘Too right. Just so long as they can do their duty on their knees. You ever been through anything like this?’
‘Never.’
‘Any theoretical seamanship that might cover the case?’
‘Any minute now we’ll be right at the bottom of the trough,’ observed Richard thoughtfully if apparently irrelevantly.
‘With our bows pointing at the North Star by the look of things,’ agreed Hollander, brown eyes narrow as he fought to follow Richard’s logic.
‘Yes. And that’s the point I think we want to go into full astern all. We have four huge motors. The propellers they drive are massive and variable-pitch, designed to push us forward no matter what we’re pulling behind us. With any luck, we can use all that power to help us pull backwards up the leading edge of the wave.’
‘If we go to full astern all when the stem is already settled pretty deep in the trough - probably awash, I’d say - won’t that simply pull us deeper under water?’ demanded Hollander, understandably wary of further risking his command.
‘It might. But if we can stay in control, then that’s no bad thing, is it? The deeper the stem sits as we start going up the front of the wave, the more traction the propellers will have. As long as the rudder stays straight amidships and we don’t let her head swing round. Surely our greatest danger will be simply to lose our grip and slide back down into the trough so that the wave can wash right over us either from the stem or from the beam. Sissy would never survive that.’
‘Too right! I can’t think of many submarines that would. And Sissy’s sure as hell no submarine. Right. Any plan is better than no plan.’ An unnatural darkness swept into the bridge at Hollander’s heartfelt words. The icy shadow of the wave itself. ‘Helm. Full astern all,’ he called at once, his voice cracking. ‘Maximum reverse pitch. Keep your rudder set dead ahead.’
‘Full astern all. Max pitch. Dead ahead. Aye.’ The young helmsman glanced lugubriously over his shoulder and added, ‘May I pray now, Captain? In our church we do it standing up.’
Whether it was a manoeuvre Richard would ever repeat or ever recommend that other mariners in similar desperate circumstances follow, he was never sure. It probably broke all sorts of laws of nature, physics and seamanship that even he was unaware of. But it seemed to be working - at first, at least. Sissy’s stem was already awash as the oncoming rogue began to sweep over her. The reversing of her fully-pitched propellers sucked the strong, square after section deeper under the water, until they could see even the bases of the aft cranes through a bottle-green swell and all her deck furniture almost to midships was lost under a welter of foam. Robin abruptly reported that she thought she could see the big deck hatches above the engine room beginning to buckle, her voice over the walkie-talkie sounding like a whisper in a thunderstorm.
But then, as Richard had grimly calculated, the power of the wave really came into play: the force that makes a ping-pong ball sit on top of a fountain at a fairground shooting gallery multiplied by millions. Sissy’s stem was under water but it was watertight as long as the hatches held, immensely strong and full of air. Up the wave it rose, therefore, like a lift-car in the fastest of express elevators.
Sissy tilted forward. Her bow see-sawed down until the heights of the heavens were replaced by the deeps of the ocean in front of the helmsman’s staring eyes - and his prayers became audible to more ears than his God’s. The bow slammed down into the water as hard as if the wave had really been an iceberg, and Richard fell to his knees with the shock - thanking God Himself that the whole fore quarter had been ice-strengthened so recently. Foam exploded up over the rails at the forecastle head and spattered on to the clearview. As thick as soapsuds, it washed upwards, but, blessedly, fell away again. Because - just for those few crucial seconds - the game tug did not slide forward down the steep slope of the wave front.
And Robin’s place out on the bridge wing began to pay some dividends. It also gave them hope because she informed them they were already a third of the way up the wave and going strong.
Like Richard had thought she would, Sissy mimicked a motorcar reversing gingerly up a steep and icy slope. Motors screaming well into the red, threatening at any instant to bum out, burst a gasket, throw a bearing, turn a driveshaft into a corkscrew, she inched backwards, the whole of her solid steel fabric throbbing as though it would burst in the grip of these terrible forces like the frailest of balloons.
For one more moment, she hung there, slowing, as the huge wave surged relentlessly forward beneath her. For one more moment. Then for another, before she hesitated.
‘Halfway/’ came Robin’s hoarse report. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of spray coming over the crest but it’s not going to break. I don’t think it’s going to break...’
White water surged across the afterdeck, green water close behind it, threatening to reach the bridge itself and stamp down upon them all like the foot of an angry god. Robin was calling something further over the walkie-talkie but it was impossible to hear her words through the overwhelming sound. Her tone seemed hopeful, though.
Richard looked across at the shuddering bridge-wing door and caught a glimpse of her still standing there. He thought she gave a wave, then events overtook them once again.
The darkness in the bridge lightened. The dark wall behind them suddenly turned to crystal - as green as darkest emerald - then bottle green, then aquamarine. A wall of spray smashed up the length of the juddering vessel. But it was only spray, as Robin had promised - not water after all. And with it came the gale. As though the storm wind had been caged by the massive wave then released into new fury now, it smashed into the jumping vessel now at the very worst of moments.
For it hit Sissy as she still hung there, balancing like a see-saw, her bows amongst the gulls that had been a hundred feet above them only mere moments before. The gulls remained unruffled, riding the blast as though the storm had no power over them, eyeing the men and their ship incuriously.
Sissy rocked forward just a little under the terrible power of wind and spray. Then the forward motion of the wave itself came to their aid. Had the rogue been standing as still as a hillside on the ocean, then Sissy would indeed have fallen forward. But it was rushing south-westwards, almost as swiftly as the storm itself. And as Sissy rocked on its foaming, wind-whipped crest, the rogue rolled onwards towards Cape Farewell and the game vessel toppled backwards instead.
Engines still racing in full astern, it settled back, digging deep into the after slope of the water mountain it had just climbed so miraculously. The racing propellers gripped. The weight of the vessel itself reversed the force that had got it here so far, and Sissy slid incredibly swiftly down the longer slope of the wave’s back. A slope that was longer - but no less high, of course. The gradient might be easier but the fall was still one hundred feet. One hundred feet into the face of a thirty-footer close behind.
‘Reverse your motors!’ yelled Richard, still on his battered knees.
And Captain Hollander bellowed, ‘Full ahead all!’
The helmsman, the only one still standing on the bridge - perhaps the only man left standing aboard - obeyed. The shrieking motors calmed, rumbled, reversed their thrust and began to build back to that steady throb that had got them safely this far.
The next wave in the smaller storm swell arrived and, although its crest washed all along the length of Sissy’s weather deck, it passed. And the intrepid tug settled back on to her south-westerly course as the dark wall of the rogue’s wide shoulder swept away from under its ice-strengthened bow and off into the drizzling murk which was all that remained of the departing storm so far ahead.
Richard picked himself up more than a little stiffly. Relief at their survival was bursting into dizzy elation in his breast. He lingered at the helmsman’s shoulder as he caught his breath, watching the dark line of the water-wall recede and vanish. ‘You’ll need to do a detailed in
spection after that,’ he called to Captain Hollander as the wiry Capetowner bounced back on to his feet.
‘Every plate and every rivet, every blessed nut and bolt,’ agreed the South African, his tone more animated than Richard had ever heard it.
‘Every man aboard as well,’ added Richard cheerfully. ‘You’ll be lucky not to have some halt and lame after all this rattling about.’ As he spoke, he crossed to the bridge wing door. He had someone to check on himself, he thought cheerfully. The elation in his massive chest became a warmer feeling altogether. He pulled open the door thinking that she had been right all along. Right to insist on staying aboard. Right to remain out here in spite of the terrible danger. They had been so close to disaster that perhaps her intrepid countdown had been the thing that made all the difference. He stepped out on to the bridge wing, his face creasing into a forgiving smile, his arms automatically reaching out. Not for the safety rail this time, but reaching out for her.
But the windswept, foam-spattered bridge wing was empty.
‘Robin?’ he called, foolishly, as though she could be hiding somewhere among the open, Spartan functionality of the place. His eyes swept over the metal-floored platform once, seeing only deck rails, observation pillar for binoculars and so forth, small winches, attachment points for lines and suchlike. Attachment points for the self-inflating life raft. The Denmark Strait beyond with Greenland lying just below the horizon to the north.
Richard took off his near-priceless fashion-victim designer sunglasses and looked around again, his eyes flooding with scalding tears once more.
But she simply wasn’t there any longer.
Robin was gone.
Three
Catch
Everyone hated Paolo Ursini. They had a range of reasons for doing so. He was Italian. He had been put aboard La Carihuela by the bankers in Malaga who owned the mortgage on her hull. He had been put aboard so that the trawler could continue to sail in spite of the fact that Paolo’s solid Spanish predecessor had quit amid muttered warnings that she was little more than a death trap. He had come aboard in the face of Manuel Bosola’s opposition - a desecration of the proud young captain’s rights finally allowed because only subservience would stop the bankers foreclosing on the debt of nearly €3,000,000 carried by Bosola himself as owner and commander of the vessel.
And, worst of all, Ursini was the engineer.
Of the eight men aboard the Spanish trawler, the engineer was the only one on a salary instead of a share. He was the only one whose livelihood did not depend on dragging catch after catch out of the unforgiving ocean and getting them safely back to Malaga docks. He was the only man aboard - it was clear - with a safe berth no matter what. For Captain Bosola was famously ruthless and anyone falling even slightly beneath his exacting standards would be on the beach and unemployed in an instant. But the men could understand - perhaps even forgive - the captain: €3,000,000 was a lot of debt to carry around with you; and the only way to survive under such a burden was to bring home the biggest and best catches with almost mechanical regularity. Any man who did not help in this endeavour did not deserve his place aboard. Any man who did, of course, could grow rich on his share of the proceeds. Any crewman, that is - but not the engineer. Which was one of the reasons that Paolo Ursini hated them as roundly as they hated him.
They were Spanish. The gutter sweepings of the Malaga docks. They were young, strong, lusty. He was older; educated. They had hot-blooded women - and brawls in bars that bordered on the legendary. He had as many books as would fit in a suitcase with his clothes - and the occasional whore when he was desperate. They all came from within ten kilometres of La Carihuela's berth. He came from Turin. They were ill-shaven, untidy, unremittingly sloppy in everything except their seamanship. He was punctilious, perfectly shaven and as neat as a maiden aunt. They ran around the decks above and below with the sureness of monkeys in the forest canopy. He was always unstable and slightly seasick. Even in the engine area which was his domain, he felt slightly out of place, even, on occasion, disturbingly claustrophobic. They seemed oblivious to the rotting-fish stench that pervaded everywhere aboard - especially the makeshift galley. He wore too much Armani cologne and tried not to breathe too deeply. They seemed to subsist on a gut-wrenching combination of seafood, chorizo, saffron and rice. He pined for pizza and pasta. They were family, they belonged - with each other, with the boat and on the water. He was unattached, footloose; rootless and lonely - the hired gun. He really belonged in a factory with unshakeably earthbound foundations and cavernous workshops boasting the pristine atmosphere of an operating theatre - and no tight spaces or dark shadows - constructing the most intimate sections of Ferrari motorcars with the calm precision of a master surgeon. But jobs in the Ferrari factory were few that year and Paolo had been desperate enough to put himself out to hire even down in Spain. And when even the Seat factory proved impenetrable, he found himself lost and destitute. Then he met one of La Carihuela's bankers in a Malaga bar and idly accepted his offer. Needs must, when the Devil drives.
But this was all merely the beginning of Paolo’s problems. For La Carihuela’s crew saw their mission in life as an epic struggle to wrest the greatest fruits from the most dangerous deeps and grow into comfortable middle-aged domesticity on the proceeds, while Paolo Ursini saw this simply as a relentless attempt to destroy all his good hard work aboard her. With no benefit to himself, either. Quite the reverse, in fact, if his experience of the voyage so far was anything to go by. Certainly there wasn’t any gratitude offered when the complex of systems remained miraculously functional, but the insults when it failed went all too rapidly from gratuitous to libellous.
And even this by no means plumbed the depths of the mistrust the engineer held for the rest of the men aboard. For a start, Captain Bosola was set on running the venerable engines to ruin, always in a hurry to seek out the next catch - usually to be found lurking under the nearest storm, or deep within the most forbidden and fiercely guarded foreign territorial waters. Then the wild young captain insisted on bringing the whole floating disaster to places where the weather alone tested heating, lighting, water - and waste - disposal well beyond their limits. Furthermore, the mate and his barbarian acolytes were determined to destroy the cranes and winch motors that pulled the huge nets in and out - and the servos that raised and lowered the aft section and runways when they did so. Finally, the whole bloody lot of them were determined to get so many catches aboard that catch control, from the chute-hatches, belts and tables in the fish room to the refrigeration units in the chilling holds, was simply permanently overloaded. Inevitably, there was always something going wrong somewhere. Usually in some dark and disgusting constricted space full of wild shadows and even wilder stenches. It was almost enough to send a man mad.
What in God’s name will go wrong next? Engineer Ursini wondered, crouching over the labouring motors, trying not to smack the back of his seal-smooth head on the deck immediately above and trying not to vomit into his oil-tray below. The relentless see-sawing motion had begun to ease for the first time since the Icelandic gunboats had fallen below the horizon astern some twenty-four hours since. That promise of respite had given him the opportunity to dash down here and check his charges - a kind of insurance against the next inevitable mechanical failure. As he worked, so the relentless motion seemed to ease a little further. But perhaps that was only the steadying effect of the nets that had gone over the stem at the first sign of the storm beginning to ease. The distant rumbling roar of the wind had seemed to moderate a tone or two, however - so perhaps it was more than the effect of the nets after all. Perhaps they really were heading for a little calm weather, he thought.
But no sooner had the hope occurred to him than he heard another stirring of thunder much more close at hand, the sound of half a dozen bloody great Spaniards rushing aft with one accord. That would only mean that the mate and his men were stirring themselves - unnaturally full of animal energy from their unusual six hours’ st
orm-bound slumber - and were getting the bulging nets back aboard once again.
Ursini looked around the cramped little engine room one last time and, with a shudder of soul-deep revulsion, began to unfold himself. If the crew were back on deck and the nets were coming in, then it would likely be the winches that would break down next. They were designed to handle catches of anchovy, not cod and redfish. He eased himself out through the tiny, crazily tilting doorframe with its lashed-back door and hesitated for a moment, taking an instant to stretch his cramped body and to straighten the creases on his perfectly pressed overalls while waiting for his legs to adjust. Once he got up above deck-level, he would be caught up in the mad whirl of activity and he knew from bitter experience that if legs or stomach let him down he could expect a lot more derision than help.
When he could trust himself, he went on upwards, using the wildly leaping companionway as a final test of his fitness for the deck. As he did so, he was unceremoniously barged aside by a human avalanche that resolved itself into two soaking sailors dashing down towards the fish room. At least they didn’t knock him over. With mounting confidence and gathering irritation, he pulled himself into the deckhouse proper, then out aft, into the covered runway that led from port to starboard behind the bridge-house itself. Here he crossed to the carefully organized peg on which he kept his gear, frowning with irritation when he saw that it had been carelessly disturbed. Carelessly - or more likely calculatedly. He stooped and collected his wide-strewn sea-boots and waterproof trousers, checked them for unpleasant surprises then pulled them on. Adjusting the rubber braces, he slipped the rest of his wet-weather gear over his head, tightened his safety harness, adjusted his life preserver and took his lifeline clip in hand before staggering uphill towards the midships doorway that led out on to the deck.