by Peter Tonkin
Palm-roofed, almost perfectly camouflaged lean-tos the size of the Bell’s makeshift hangar housed bulky machines - tractors, trucks, whatever they needed to do their work down there. Under the light their paintwork gleamed bright yellow and red. At least there were no signs as yet of the great logging machines he had seen at work on the Discovery Channel that do to forests what combine harvesters do to wheat fields. Nor, indeed, was there any sign of the men who worked here. With their helicopters, no doubt, safely and secretly aboard some anonymous ship at anchor just off the coast.
But the explanation for the destruction of the bridge below was made all too obvious by what was happening at the far end of the terrible scar as well. Here the mountainside sloped steeply eastwards as well as southwards, for it was on the side of a spur that became the west side of the river valley. Here, where the angles were sharpest and the soil was thinnest, the ground was beginning to wash away, carrying anything that lay upon it down into the wild torrent below.
‘Do you see that? Parang...’ called Sailendra, struck suddenly with poignant regret that he had not brought a camera or even a cellphone to record the horrific destruction like a war correspondent at an unsuspected massacre.
‘Yes!’ answered Parang. And, ‘NO!’
Even as the Bell swooped over the restless, rumbling area, Parang, Sailendra and Councillor Kerian all saw the earth begin to tear away from the naked rock beneath. Roots of headless trees lost their grip on mother earth and reared, thrusting up their hairy limbs like giant spiders slithering down the hill. Logs the size of factory chimneys rolled down the precipitous valley- side like a bundle of toothpicks. The jungle on the slopes below them began shaking and shifting as though it was turning liquid under the relentless downpour.
A buffet of wind made the helicopter dance and twirl, the pilot fighting at the controls and swearing quietly in Japanese. The panorama beneath Sailendra’s bulging eyes rolled unsteadily back towards the ridge-top. And, running westwards, as swiftly as the prince’s horrified gaze itself, the gaping rent in the straining soil tore wide. Along the line of the felled trees, the living soil seemed to be simply ripping open, spewing semi-liquid mud in a wide boiling black flood. The whole of the slope below the ridge, above the western edge of Baya City itself, slid into ponderous, unstoppable motion.
Chapter 8: Under Sail
Richard and Robin rose unusually late next morning. They had made love twice the night before - once, quickly, for her; again, more lingeringly, for him. Then they had laid side by side in the rumpled cotton sheets under the lazy motion of the fan. Feeling the stirring of the cool air on their sensitive, glowing skin. Feeling the restful sway of the ship as she leaned into the steady breeze that filled the sails so close above their heads. Looking past their upturned toes to the panoramic windows that stretched above their balcony and towered over the three-deck-deep hill-slope to the stern, like the face of a tall glass cliff. Watching the shooting stars come tumbling down the velvet sky below the gleaming diamond constellations, so close behind Tai Fun that it seemed they were being extinguished in the fluorescent foam of her wake. And they talked.
It seemed to both of them that for the better part of twenty years they had hardly been able to complete a sentence or a thought - children, company, crisis after crisis had all come between, imperiously demanding attention. But now, here, as timelessly under sail as Achilles bound for Troy, or as Ulysses wandering homeward, they had peace and time at last.
‘I love this ship,’ said Robin, sleepily at last. ‘I want her. I simply have to have her, like Nic says: MNO. But you knew I would, didn’t you, darling? That’s why you brought me out to her.’
But Richard answered with a gentle snore. So she rolled over beside his massive body, placed her thigh across his loins and snuggled herself against his shoulder. Asleep in an instant. And the moment her breathing deepened into the familiar rhythm, Richard’s eyelids stirred and for an instant in the darkness his eyes gleamed as bright as the stars outside as he smiled with excitement and contentment. For even this was only the beginning of his plan.
And so it was that the moment they were up and dressed next day, Richard was dragging Robin off on a guided tour of the ship. Not that she was reluctant to go, insisting only on a fleeting visit to the breakfast bar for some coffee first. She found herself irresistibly reminded of the first time they had looked around Ashenden, their rambling, heavenly home on the cliff-tops of the South Coast overlooking the English Channel. They had bought Ashenden together nearly twenty years since, running from room to room like children in a toy store, almost too excited to speak; adding, Richard teased later, another hundred thousand pounds or so to the estate agent’s asking price. It was a house they loved, which they missed more and more each time they were away from it. But here and now, her only thought was that she was as happy and excited as they had been that day. And so was Richard.
They began their daylight inspection precisely where they had left off the night before, gripped by excitement of a rather different kind. On deck, between the twin houses of their own accommodation and the bistro, which backed on to the open access bridge further forward still. Richard was keen to start there, the one cup of thick black Java they had snatched so far seemingly gone to his head. But Robin paused on the very spot and stood looking upward, simply entranced, her slim figure outlined by the breeze moulding her light cotton dress to every curve and sending the French blue stuff of the skirt straining between her legs like another little sail.
She saw at once what had put the notion of Achilles and his Troy-bound Myrmidons into her head. Tai Fun’s sails had black panels; no mere decorative checkerboard design but huge central sections framed by gleaming white. No - not gleaming - glittering. The black-hearted sails were huge. There must be the better part of two thousand square metres of sail. Four triangular monsters bellied and strained to contain the breeze, one before each soaring mast, and a stern-most one, slightly smaller, reaching out along a boom behind the last. The masts themselves were massive aerofoil constructions, like gliders’ wings that had been pulled longer and pushed thinner until they were like feathers. They reared the better part of fifty metres against the hard lapis blue of the wind-scrubbed Indonesian sky. And on the very distant top of each one sat a little windmill, its sails racing into a circular blur beneath the steady pressure of the wind. The whole set, windmills and all, seemed to be pushing nearly two hundred metres of stiletto-slim hull towards Kalimantan at well over twenty knots.
‘Awesome, isn’t she?’ demanded Richard, sounding exactly like his university-student son. Looking like him, too, she thought, in his tropical whites. The starched cotton of the shorts and short-sleeved shirt, innocent of epaulettes or badges, gave him the air of a young cadet rather than a mature, widely experienced captain and international business leader.
‘And then some,’ agreed Robin, maternally indulgent.
‘Almost orgasmic,’ he teased.
‘But why the black sails?’ She changed the subject swiftly.
‘They aren’t just sails! Haven’t you guessed? They’re solar panels! And the windmills generate more additional wattage than you’d expect, as do the waterwheels along the hull below.’
‘Waterwheels! To what end?’
‘Everything aboard is electrically powered. A ship this size, a yacht - she is technically a high-tech cruising four-masted sail yacht - would need a keel to steady her and a pretty sizeable ballast to force her sails into the wind. Tai Fun has a specially designed aqua-dynamic hull with a draft of only five metres, and instead of water ballast she has moveable batteries - super-upgrades of the huge batteries they use on submarines. An hour in bright sunlight can power up the batteries for the next twenty-four. A day’s sailing can power her up for a week or more of cruising. And when she’s running free like this the windmills and waterwheels give her all the power she needs to service all her functions from ceiling fans to fan-assisted ovens, from computers to Jacuzzis, without tapping i
nto the main power sources at all.’
‘But what if she gets becalmed under cloud for a week?’
‘It’ll never happen. And even if it did, you know cloud cover doesn’t stop solar panels from generating power. Still and all, if her electrical systems did fail for any reason, there’s a generator aboard that would easily power the bridge computers, basic essentials and life-support - and diesel motors capable of getting her the better part of a thousand miles at eight to ten knots. The motors are used for working her in and out of port, usually. They are the only part of her apart from the systems in the lifeboats that aren’t at least carbon-neutral. And,’ he insisted, with the passion of the newly-converted St Paul arriving in Damascus, ‘it’s only to make assurance doubly sure in any case.’
‘Sort of belt and braces, anyway,’ she accepted, deflating his high-flown passion a little, like the practical Northern lass that she sometimes was at heart.
His eyes crinkled into their ready laughter-lines. ‘I knew I could count on you to keep my feet firmly on the ground,’ he teased. ‘Even in the middle of the Java Sea!’
‘Ha! You are admiring my beautiful sails, I see!’ struck in a new voice, rich, deep and resonant.
Robin turned and found herself confronted by a deep-chested, short-backed Viking. ‘First Officer Larsen,’ the newcomer introduced himself, thrusting out a great red-furred paw the size of a large York ham.
‘First Officer and sailing master. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr Larsen,’ answered Richard, as Robin shook the proffered hand and gazed unbelievingly at the wild red beard and wild blue eyes. ‘I am Richard Mariner, and this is my wife Robin.’
‘As if there could be anyone aboard who does not know you!’ Larsen gave a booming laugh. ‘Are you come aboard to fight Mr Greenbaum for the hand of my lovely lady here?’
Robin found herself looking automatically around, half expecting that there was indeed a Viking princess to be fought over. With double-bladed axes no doubt. But no. The first officer was simply talking of his ship with a pride that verged dangerously close to infatuation.
‘Mr Nordberg and Captain Olmeijer have made no secret of it,’ Larsen continued expansively. ‘And you do not think the lovely Inge comes aboard on every cruise, I suppose?’ Again he gave that booming laugh. ‘I tell you no. She only steps out of her ice palace when there is money to be made or contracts to be signed. Deals to be done!’ His Norse accent lingered over the ‘s’s in his last few words as though he was hissing in disapproval or disgust. ‘Perhaps I should bring her up to look more closely at my sails, eh? They would melt her if anything could. And literally, too! You see the glittering of the wires in the white sections round the edges of the solar panels? Specially designed! Not only must they conduct the electricity into the main conduits in the masts themselves, they must do so at nearly five hundred degrees Celsius.’ Oddly, there was no hissing as he said the words. ‘These sails are unique to these vessels. They are supposed to be able to withstand heats in excess of one thousand degrees! Think of it! One thousand degrees! That would start to thaw our Ice Princess, eh?’ And the sibilance returned for the final two words.
No sooner had he hissed his last, however, than the ship’s alarms began to sound. Captain Olmeijer’s voice boomed out across the seas, ‘Report to your emergency stations, please. Emergency stations if you please, everyone.’
Richard and Robin looked at each other, almost horror struck. In all the bustle and excitement of various kinds they had entirely forgotten the most basic safety precautions. They had no idea at all where their emergency station was. But Larsen, seemingly noticing nothing untoward, swept them along with himself. ‘You are in my boat, of course,’ he explained, hurrying them along the deck. ‘And you need have no real concern. It is a drill only - or I would be in the bridge taking care to furl my sails! I can get them up and down both within two minutes, you know! Two minutes. Hot or cold! There was some lively debate, I can tell you,’ he continued unstoppable as he swept them towards the foremost port lifeboat, the better part of a hundred metres further along the deck. ‘But with the owner and his daughter, Mr Greenbaum and the lovely Miss Cappaldi, together with the passengers assigned at the earlier stages of the cruise, the captain’s boat is full. He did not think that such experienced sailors and captains such as yourselves would be too upset to be in the lifeboat with the men and women who work the ship.’
As Larsen offered them this heartfelt if backhanded compliment, a new element suddenly came into play. The wind, which had been blowing steadily on their quarter, from a little to the north of west, suddenly gusted strongly from dead on the port bow. The great sails creaked under the added weight of wind. The rigging sang ecstatically and the whole vessel began to heel over. But at once the straining deck began to tremble. ‘Ha!’ bellowed Larsen, stopping for an instant, looking up. ‘Five degrees! What do you say, Captain Mariner? Five degrees - maybe six, and my computers tell the internal motors down below to shift the ballast! She will come back up in a moment!’ And so she did, swooping back into motion as the wind settled back on to the port quarter.
‘In any case, you will be much more safe with me or Eva Gruber,’ Larsen continued, rushing them forward once again along the nearly horizontal deck. ‘She knows where we’re bound for and I know how to get us there. Let all the rest look after themselves eh? Owners and captains and entertainments officers.’ Again the accent lingered disapprovingly upon the four ‘s’s. Particularly over the last two, Robin noted with some amusement. Apparently there was no attraction of opposites between Norsemen and Mediterranean women. And no love lost either between red-bearded sailing masters and the ash-blonde daughters of the ship’s owners, come to that. Not aboard Tai Fun, at any rate. She was more than enough to fill the big seafarer’s heart. Mere women of flesh and blood, no matter how lovely, would stand no real chance against her.
Richard noted none of this. As he strode along beside First Officer Larsen, he was taking in a host of new details about the ship he had come here to buy at almost any price. He noted that beside each of the four masts there hung a brace of lifeboats, port and starboard - eight in all. Apart from the navigating watch, and, he supposed, whatever engineers were needed to oversee security below, everyone aboard was assembling beside one or the other of these. The crews were unleashing the lines, swinging the davits round, going through the ritual of preparing to launch. But the gently swinging lifeboats looked as though they would hold twenty rather than thirty. And there were certainly more than one hundred and sixty souls aboard. There were supposed to be nearly two hundred passengers alone. The ship’s launch might take ten more, he supposed, but that still meant four or six big inflatable life rafts somewhere. Another interesting little secret to be winkled out of Tai Fun within the next few days before he really started going head to head with Greenbaum.
He would check every little detail of her safety equipment as well as testing the facilities further - from library to lido, from cinema to scuba diving, from washing facilities to windsurfing, from the bistro and the strange ballast of moveable batteries to the backgammon, blackjack and baccarat tables.
It was all he could do to stop himself skipping with excitement at the prospect, like a youngster out on his first hot date.
Chapter 9: Once Over
Lunch followed soon after Tai Fun’s emergency drill. As far as Richard was concerned, that was a very good thing, for he had not eaten heavily last night, too deeply involved in conversation and by-play to pay much attention to dinner. He had eaten no breakfast this morning and, what with one thing and another, he found he had stoked up quite an appetite. And, as things were to turn out, a well-lined stomach proved a good basis for dangerous action to come.
But once again, the passengers assembled round the captain’s table, even in the absence of the captain and his officers, managed to become quite distractingly involved with matters other than eating. It was Nic who started it. Pushing aside a half-eaten spring roll as though it was s
ome kind of gastronomic disaster instead of the exact opposite, he announced, ‘You know, I’m not sure I like cruising at all. I could get bored out of my head pretty quickly, even aboard a sweet ship like this one.’
‘Isn’t that where Miss Cappaldi comes in?’ asked Richard, a little distractedly as he eyed the repast. ‘Isn’t she supposed to keep you entertained?’
‘Us all entertained,’ chimed in Robin, and Richard realized that his thoughtlessly innocent phrase might be open to misinterpretation.
‘She’s given me a schedule of events,’ allowed Nic, less than happily. ‘But the only thing I fancy is this Dr Hirai’s talk about volcanoes. And that’s not scheduled until tonight.’
‘We’ll be about seven hundred kilometres north of Krakatoa then,’ said Robin, who, to Richard’s surprise, seemed to have found time to look at her copy of the entertainment schedule. ‘That’s as close as we go - unless we swing south on the return leg of our voyage.’
‘If we come back that way,’ agreed Nic, his mind apparently wandering a little. ‘And if we’re still aboard when she does.’
‘You’re not planning to stay for the whole cruise?’ asked Robin, surprised. Richard finished his first spring roll and reached for the salad of avocado, beansprouts and wind-dried duck.
‘Definitely not. I have businesses to run. And any case, I’ve a time limit on whatever I want to do while I’m out here. And, hey! Like I say, I get bored easy. Short attention span, I guess. Got to keep a little spice in the old life, you know?’
‘What sort of thing does entertain you, Nic?’ asked Richard. He was genuinely interested. But he would have asked the question anyway, because his only worry about the trip so far was that Nic and he would be all too likely to find themselves going head to head if a bidding war started. And it really looked to him as though he and the third richest man in the world were about to start competing for Tai Fun, her sisters and the whole of the Nordberg Line. And if Nic wasn’t planning to stay aboard for the whole cruise, they were going to have to get things settled sooner rather than later. So, at the very least, Richard would need to know his enemy. As things stood, however, he had taken a liking to the Texan and wanted to know more about the man rather than the reputation.