by Peter Tonkin
What was it, then? Richard wondered. What element of the promising situation was out of place? Something so tiny as to be almost impossible to see. Something so subtle, indeed, that no one else had seen it yet. Something so obscure, in fact, that even he could not put a conscious finger on it, but must be content to let it sit there at the back of his mind like an itch he could not scratch. As the day wore on, he found himself returning time after time to the forecastle head where he had spent his quiet time last night, watching the black-etched outline of the albatross cross in front of the massive moon.
There was nothing of equal magnificence to see today, however. There was the green heave of the sea, blue-backed where it caught the light. The water was clear and Arctic still, and yet innocent as yet of the telltale signs he knew so well from his work at either pole that warned of big ice nearby. There were dolphins in the distance and seals in the bow wave, but mostly there were the raucous gulls calling and diving. Calling and diving. There was no longer any of the Arctic odour in the air - that compound of berg and bergy bit, although he noticed the wind was shifting. Then he was surprised to realize that he could feel a wind at all after the dead calm of the last few hours. There was the steady prairie-flower blue of the sky reaching away to the far horizon. Seemingly far beyond even the cape that was their destination. So far ahead and so high above that it seemed to darken a little at the top. And there, with its back against the dark stain of the troposphere above the still and crystal air, precisely in contrast to the albatross against the moon, there was the purest, whitest, wisp of cloud.
Twenty-Four
Cape
They all arrived at the rendezvous off the Cape within a couple of hours of each other. Richard in Sissy towing Robin aboard Quebec was slowest but had least far to go. Admiral ‘Long John’ Pike in Athabascan came much faster and brought both Huron and Iroquois with him. But the outriders of the storm came fastest of all.
Richard knew the storm was coming almost from the moment that he had seen that white cloud like the wing of an albatross against the utmost top of the sky. He did not need the warnings that Sparks began to bring with increasing regularity to a frowning Tom. He did not need the tidal wave of information that exploded from Admiral Pike’s weatherbeaten fleet the instant the dead-air protocol was past. He felt it coming on a deeper level. And he feared it. So he began to draw his plans accordingly.
‘It’ll hit at the worst possible moment,’ he said loudly and formally to Tom, Chief Jaeger, Gus the winchmaster and Bob on Sissy’s bridge in the early afternoon. They were speaking a little stiltedly because they had open channels to Mark on Quebec who had Robin and Chief La Barbe listening, and to Athabascan where, no matter who was listening, only Pike seemed to be speaking. It was important to get as much as possible agreed now - for communications would not be quite so easy when the weather closed down. And once the weather did close down then they would have precious little time to save Quebec and her people.
‘We’ll lose communications with you first, Quebec, because we’ll have to send someone over to close the hatches or your control room will start to flood with rain and spray…
‘And we know what that did to Chicoutimi,’ inserted Pike.
‘Precisely. In the meantime we’ll all have to do risk assessments. Or redo them. Mark, we’ll look to the Yokohama fenders and the flotation system out here. You’ll need to assess which shored-up bulkheads are most likely to fail if the going gets really rough.’
‘You’re sure we’re not riding high enough to start taking people off, Richard?’ Robin asked.
‘No. I’m afraid not. We might be able to risk it in an hour or two, depending on wind and weather at that time, but at the moment we’ve only managed to put you back at square one, I’m afraid.’ Richard crossed to the rear of the bridge and looked out across the complexities of the afterdeck, the tow and the Yokohama line. ‘You’re exactly at the point you were when the forward escape hatch opened and flooded the weapons area. By the way, has that area been drained enough to allow access or must we work with the aft escape hatch?’
‘No. It’s still flooded. We can use it if we absolutely have to but it would be better if you could come aft.’
‘OK. And no way out through the fin?’
‘Only a couple of us are slim enough to get through the damage done when the periscopes broke and the escape capsule moved. And we can’t get up to the cockpit from there any more at all.’
‘OK. After escape hatch it is for preference, but forward one if push comes to shove. Admiral Pike. We’ve explained the situation to you. What practical hands-on help do you envisage giving us?’
‘We’re able to transfer fuel to Sissy in case she’s running low - you must be going through bunkerage pretty fast out there and I guess it won’t help matters if you have to slow down or stop. We’re rigging Huron and Iroquois with lines and winches so that they can go alongside Quebec and take your Yokohama-fender system aboard the instant that we get to you. That should lift Quebec right out of the water. As long as the nets she’s wrapped in hold. Then it’s all a done deal.’
‘And as long as we have calm weather and time enough to get that all in place,’ warned Richard, sceptically, glancing up at the square white battlements of cloud beginning to gather overhead. ‘What else?’
‘My men are ready and prepared to go in our inflatables and take any survivors out of the water, of course. We have a team of divers getting prepared on each of the ships. Halifax and London have both wired us details of the internal layout of the sub, so they’re being briefed in case they can somehow get aboard. Maybe through the damage to the bow you told us about. We’ve got the infirmaries ready. We can send in our ship-borne choppers at a moment’s notice...’ The admiral’s voice wavered a little.
Richard understood the no doubt highly uncharacteristic faltering as a sure sign that the admiral knew as well as he did that there was almost nothing any of them could do if the bad weather moved in too quickly and remained against them for any length of time. What they needed was a very specialized type of craft - a small fleet of them for preference. Minisubs, support and repair vessels, specialist tugs even more task-specific than Sissy. But among all the offers of help that Sparks had received during the last thirty-six hours, there had been nothing of any use - cruise ships exploring the Greenland coast and the scientific station at Cape Farewell itself, a couple of Cunarder Queens halfway between New York and Europe, tankers and container ships bound to and from the St Lawrence Seaway, trawlers without number. All welcome for their support. All, in the final analysis, even less use than Pike’s warships. The simple fact was that they were too far away from the obvious sources of relevant help and the situation itself was so unusual that unless Quebec could be kept afloat - and Sissy kept under full power - for another week or so, then there was no chance of anyone helping them.
So they were going to have to help themselves. And fast, he thought, as a pattering of raindrops splashed across the busy towing deck he was looking down upon.
Richard stood on Quebec's foredeck for what he suspected was just about the last time. The waves washed past his knees, and were beginning to gain sufficient force to make him stagger. ‘Tighten the Yokohama line,’ he ordered Gus - for they were desperate enough now to put the whole contraption at risk by pushing matters to their limit. There was an intensifying groan that seemed to come from all around him as the central winch gathered in the lines with ruthless force. Quebec's head tried to shrug the weight of the ocean aside as the fenders attempted to force themselves under the surface - and the whole lot tried to tear the netting off the hull altogether.
But Richard’s system was designed to work with the forces around it, easing the sleek hull upwards little by little as the fenders pulled against the anchor-points near the damaged keel. Forcing things to move so fast was simply to risk losing it all. The groaning came again, seeming to boom out of the vessel he was standing on, to throb in the hollows of the damaged
fin behind him, to boom out of the slate grey of the gathering weather smeared across the lowering sky dead ahead. He found he was sweating, as though the massive forces unleashed by the relentless tightening of the Yokohama , line were tearing his own solid frame apart. The waves washed over the shining black whale-backs of the drowning balloons at the submarine’s head, breaking and foaming then re-forming as they slid across the drowned swell of the hull half a metre down. They groaned again, all fourteen of them in a chorus of protest taken up by every line below them and every strand of net around them. Richard could feel it in the soles of his feet like some kind of Inquisition torture. ‘That’s it, Gus,’ he called at last. ‘She’ll come apart if we tighten any more now. We’ll try again in a while when things have adjusted here.’
‘OK,’ came the reply.
The terrible noise stopped at once, but the soles of Richard’s freezing feet continued to burn as though he were walking on burning coals. He turned. Bob, his buddy on this expedition, was already, halfway up the fin. He was all set for a bellowed heart-to-heart with his captain. And it would be Bob - and maybe Richard if Sparks was too deeply involved with MARLANT radio traffic - who would be coining that last time to take the radio and to close the hatch when the weather got too bad to risk letting it into the sub. And that wouldn’t be too long now, thought Richard.
He hesitated, for a moment, looking around. The sky behind them was milky, washed with striations of high white cloud. Above them it was dull, though the rain had stopped again. Ahead it was grey and darkening - and closing down towards the increasingly restless surface of the sea. Away left, the ocean gathered into a vague rain mist as another squall swept south of them, a skirmisher ahead of the main army of the storm. To the north, on the right hand, the air was clear enough to show on the furthest horizon a solid smudge of darkness. And that was it. That was their destination and rendezvous point. That was Cape Farewell.
But even as Richard established in his mind the certainty of what he was looking at, the sight of it was washed away by another, north-running squall, as though the whole view were a wet watercolour running into a misty grey mess. ‘Better talk fast, Bob,’ Richard bellowed up over a sudden bluster of wind. ‘Or you’ll be closing that hatch on this visit after all.’
Richard and Bob were back within the hour. The sea was much more restless now and the rain came driving icily on a north-easter that was in itself so cold that it was a wonder the rain could exist at all without turning to hail, sleet or snow. The two men swarmed up into the cockpit atop the heaving fin, its movement so much more violent, it seemed, than the pitching and rolling of the deck below. And they weren’t a moment too soon, Richard thought, watching the way the rainwater was swirling down the hatchway like bath water down a plughole. As it went it completed the destruction of the radio they had been too slow to retrieve after all. And made little cascades off the cable spiral leading down to the hanging handset that no longer carried Mark’s words to the world. ‘Any last words?’ He bellowed to Bob.
‘Anything?’ Bob bellowed down the gurgling gape of the hatch.
‘Nothing here,’ called Mark faintly in reply. ‘But is Richard Mariner there?’
‘Here!’ shouted Richard.
And Robin’s voice shouted up to him with unexpected clarity and force. ‘See you soon,’ she called.
‘Help’s on the way,’ he called - though he had told her before - and everyone aboard knew what their plans were. ‘So hang on in there. And remember, I’ll never give up. I’ll never stop looking...’
Bob’s hand smote down on his shoulder then and he glanced up. An even more vicious squall was battering in over the tossing shape of Sissy. Another couple of thousand tons of water was cascading from the sky. Without a further thought, Richard slammed the hatchway shut and Bob secured it. Then the squall hit and Richard began to wonder whether he and Bob would get back aboard the tug themselves.
Athabascan came round the cape less than an hour later. She was running at flank speed with a big white bone in her teeth, the only bright thing in the grey-on-grey of the picture. Battleship-grey destroyer running through a steel-grey ocean under a slate-grey sky. Even her running lights seemed dimmed by the rain beating down on her. Iroquois and Huron were close behind her sailing in line, but almost invisible in the gathering murk. For they seemed to bring the full fury of the tight little storm with them.
Richard watched their approach from Sissy. His work on Quebec was done for the moment. She was sitting higher in the water now than ever, but still they dared not open the hatches for the Atlantic would simply pour into her even now. And that massive reservoir of water would be all too fully supplemented by a relentless downpour whose power and simple weight of precipitation would shame the fiercest tropical monsoon.
But, more worryingly still, the rain was accompanied by wind squalls of intensifying fierceness that whipped up the waves all too efficiently into a spiky chop the better part of two metres high that seemed to come from all directions at once. It was a credit to the design of the Yokohama tow - and the sturdy workmanship that had gone into it - that the whole Heath Robinson construction seemed to be standing up to the battering. But Quebec was beginning to yaw and roll as she pitched. The fin kept catching the wind like a sail - the power of it all too easily visible as the water streamed this way and that off it, torn into fluid patterns like sand off the top of a Saharan dune, like ice crystals off the crest of a glacier. The strain on the real tow was beginning to tell all too clearly and Gus bellowed in from the thunderously streaming deck that he was back to giving the corkscrewing vessel more line. And easing back on the Yokohama tackle into the bargain.
‘With you in fifteen,’ rasped Pike over the airwaves.
‘And not a moment too soon,’ replied Tom courteously. ‘We’re finding it increasingly difficult to keep things under control here.’
‘I hear you,’ snapped Pike. ‘Now, let’s just run over our approach manoeuvres again. Looks as though we’d better get it right first time...’
Richard stood in his allotted place - one that he had chosen for himself. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Gus the winchmaster and Bob, watching intently as Iroquois and Huron eased themselves against the fenders clustered thickly on Quebec's sides. Athabascan held back - but only a very little, scarcely more than Sissy, who was preparing to let her tow rope run to twice its current length. The falls were tumbling already from the hastily rigged cranes on the forecastles of the two destroyer escorts. On each fall hung a marine, like the winchman on a coastguard helicopter being lowered to a drowning man. They would secure the falls to the fenders and, as soon as it was all secure, the ships would, in very precise concert, lift the submarine out of the water. That was the plan at least. And it was a natural extension of Richard’s own. Except that, like the last desperate tightening of the Yokohama line that they had tried themselves, it made no allowance for working with the elements. That crucial element of the original design had gone by the board with the arrival of the storm.
For with the sunshine and the calm, time for manoeuvre had vanished into the screaming murk.
‘Those Yokohama fenders are doing another first-rate job! ’ bellowed Bob as the shrinking foredeck suddenly seemed very small and frail between the two towering warships as they pitched and yawed astride her. The fenders stopped groaning and started to scream. The sound of rubber trapped between acoustic tile and solid steel sounded like fourteen pigs being brutally slaughtered.
Richard just nodded in reply, and dashed his hand down his streaming face, knocking the water out of his slitted eyes with brutal abruptness. He nearly broke the battered beak of his own nose - but noticed neither the pain nor the spontaneous tears it brought. He dashed his hand across his face again and whipped the spray off his fingertips. ‘All secure,’ came the order over Gus’s transceiver. ‘Slacken your towlines.’
Sissy eased away as the lines from the two big warships tightened. The heaving sea between them seemed to boi
l. The black-backed fenders bobbed helplessly in the massive cauldron. Then, under the relentlessly irresistible pull of the massive ships’ cranes, they began to rise out of the water as though they were real balloons. And, after a few breathless moments, the battered foredeck of the submarine hove into view as well. And even the fury of the vicious little storm was smothered by the cheering that tore so many hundred throats.
Cheering or no cheering, the moment the submarine’s deck was clear of the surface, the teams went down again. This time they had cutters. The net was hacked apart over the forward hatch. And, Richard assumed, over the after hatch as well. The forward hatch was all he could see. And he began to cheer again with all the rest as he saw the first figure ease itself up into the dreadful day. That must be Robin, he thought. And yet...
For fifteen minutes more the sub hung in place as figures streamed out of the forward hatch and were guided up to the boarding nets hanging from the vessels’ rails. It was hardly more of a scramble up aboard the sleek warships than it had been up on to the top of the submarine’s fin, thought Richard. And they must have sent Robin off first, with the halt and lame, the sick and the wounded. Then the crew and officers in the order familiar from countless routine rehearsals. The only man hanging back must be Mark Robinson. The captain always the last to abandon. In the finest traditions of the service. ‘See anyone you recognize?’ Richard bellowed to Bob.