by Peter Tonkin
Mr Po frowned as he stood to resume his examination, for he could not quite see what Maggie had gained from her cross examination. He would have frowned more deeply, perhaps had he been privy to the message Maggie passed to Andrew. ‘Anna Leung was probably a police informer. Tell Robin on the noon radio link.’
*
At noon on Wednesday, Robin was sixty hours into her 120-hour voyage, and feeling very much on top of things when Andrew’s information on their midday radio contact turned everything upside-down. In that intense, five-minute conversation he redirected her attention to the containers and their contents and revolutionised the way she thought about the mysterious secrecy of the China Queens Company. She had spent most of her time so far settling in and reacquainting herself with the ropes — literally as well as figuratively — and had made only a relatively cursory exploration of the ship and its cargo, so far, but she had found opportunity to be in most places aboard and to check most things. She had checked the outsides of all the containers easily reached and planned to try and get inside one or two as soon as she had the chance.
She reckoned she had done as much as might reasonably be expected of a busy first officer with a full range of duties, catching up on a certain amount of missed sleep.
Robin had, in fact, enjoyed two good nights’ sleep so far, in so far as the catnaps she had been able to fit round the 00:00 to 04:00 watch counted as a good night’s sleep. As with most first officers in her situation, she tried to sleep between 21:30 and 23:30, then from 04:30 to 08:30. Perhaps this did not count as a good night’s sleep in the head, but in the heart it certainly did. It was incredible to her just how quickly she stepped back into the old, familiar shipboard ways. In fact she had not felt so well-rested since she had slept like a baby, alongside her own babies, on the Isle of Skye.
Robin loved the middle watch for she could sit there, alone, at the centre of the illimitable night, observing the slow spin of the constellations, keeping careful lookout for signs and signals of danger nearby and making up the careful logs of the state of sky and sea. These watches were balm to her troubled soul on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights as the Seram Queen ploughed carefully north-west across the South China Sea. The British Admiralty China Sea Pilot (Volume 1) warned her against scorpion fish, stone fish, stingrays, barracudas ‘considered the most dangerous of fish’, sharks, moray eels ‘particularly dangerous in April to May, their breeding season’ — an uplifting thought this early in June — and ‘a species of jellyfish, whose sting can cause death’. Robin was not looking forward to the first lifeboat practice which would probably bring her into all too close association with these particular dangers.
The Pilot also took time to describe the beautiful bioluminescence which had followed the ship, and occasionally surrounded her, on the voyage so far. But it had not mentioned the silver-sided tuna which could leap — individually, or in shoals which looked like the surf on an uncharted reef — out of the water around the bow. It did not mention the gleaming, oiled-steel dolphin which sported in the bow wave then peeled away like Battle of Britain Spitfires to hunt the gleaming tuna. Alone to think, and glad enough of the unaccustomed leisure, Robin turned recent events over and over in her mind, trying to look at it all from a new perspective, one which would give that extra gleam of light which would unearth a hidden clue like a diamond hidden in ice.
And, each dawn, when she awoke again, still locked safely in her cabin, still stark but cool though more often than not wildly entangled in the now twisted rag of a sheet, she moved to put her thoughts into the first stages of action. Her days were apparently full of the normal bustle which filled the routine existence of any first officer. She had safety checks to make — she was responsible for all the lifesaving equipment and needed to be sure that it was in full working order for the strict series of drills Captain Sin never quite bothered to call. She saw that the quietly competent Sam Yung had completed all his duties, though he seemed mildly surprised when she checked his emergency lists and lifeboat disposition lists twice. Wai Chan remained grudging if not quite obstructionist in his reaction to her checking on his work. It was with him that she went through the pre-set channels on all the two-way radios aboard, and checked that they were in place, powered up and working at optimum.
She was also responsible for the safe bestowal of the cargo, above decks and below. As lading officer, she had to ensure that the weight of the cargo put the hull in no danger and guaranteed its most economically efficient movement through the ocean. She was also responsible for ensuring that nothing in one container could possibly contaminate, or otherwise damage anything in any neighbouring containers. The sickly First Officer Chin Lau seemed to have been an efficient lading officer — if his records actually accorded with the disposition of the containers. The only way to check that was for Robin to choose a random selection and open them for inspection. In most ships she had served upon, and on any ship she had commanded, the captain would have insisted that the lading officer completed these duties in very short order, for the captain was ultimately responsible for the safety of the hull and the economic consumption of bunkerage. But Captain Sin was somehow uninterested, or otherwise engaged, or he simply didn’t care to have his strange first officer poking around in the cargo.
Robin filled her days with doing immediately important tasks, being casually careful to give priority to those which allowed her to explore. She kept expecting to fit her activities into the routines dictated by the captain, but Sin seemed to be a hard man to pin down. By the dog watches on Tuesday afternoon, Robin was actively seeking him out. The ship should have gone through a full lifeboat drill but it had singularly failed to do so. This was worrying. Although the individual pieces of equipment, from the boats themselves to the lines on the davits, all checked satisfactorily, the only way to check them properly was to test the system as a whole, and that meant using it. But even though she was ship’s security officer, only the captain could call a lifeboat drill.
As lading officer, Robin needed at the least to inform her commanding officer that she had checked every single container aboard from the outside — except for the series of containers carried in the deepest section of the hold. She needed to apprise him of the fact that she proposed to open some containers and check that their contents actually agreed with the manifests.
In her attempts to reach the elusive captain, Robin came up against the intransigent and unsettling Fat Chow, chief steward. When at last, on that sultry Tuesday evening, she hammered on the captain’s cabin door, it was the chief steward who answered, like a cornered rat turning on a terrier. Or, better, like a cobra confronting a mongoose. ‘Captain not available, missy,’ she was informed. ‘He ssend hiss orderss through me. You do what I ssay, misssy. Yess?’
‘Fat Chow, are you familiar with the phrase “In your dreams”?’
‘No misssy.’
‘Keep this up, and you’ll get to know all about it. Now, I need to see the captain. I accept orders from no one else. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, misssy.’
‘Good. Do I get to see him?’ She pushed against the door. The wiry man holding it was surprisingly strong. There was no way past him other than to fight him.
‘Captain sick, misssy.’ Their eyes locked. He was simply not going to let her past.
‘Really?’ If force would not work, maybe cunning would. ‘Then perhaps I should inform you that I am ship’s medical officer — and, indeed, acting captain if he’s too sick for command.’
‘Chow?’ called the captain’s voice from inside the cabin. The chief steward shot her a fulminating glance and slammed the door. As soon as the door was closed, the key turned in the lock. ‘Well done, Fat Chow,’ said Robin, loudly enough to be heard if he was listening. ‘Two keys in two days. That must be some kind of a record.’
So it was that running a ship she didn’t know with a cargo she hadn’t properly checked, a crew she had never met, and safety equipment she had not had a chance to test took up a
ll too much of Robin’s time. The long middle watches were her only unpressured time, the only time in which she could think, plan and question, but it was in the busy dog watches that she expected to achieve her first real breakthrough, for it was then that she was up and about, searching, looking and checking, militantly unaware of the cold eyes of Fat Chow, Wai Chan and the mysterious Captain Sin, which were all focused on her back.
In the event, the first of the answers came not during the workaday dog watches but in the quiet middle watches, so that at first, when the way began to come off the ship at 02:36 on Thursday morning, Robin believed that the strange sensation she was experiencing must be part of a dream.
As soon as she realised that the strange sensation was actually a sudden cessation of engine vibration, Robin pulled herself out of the watchkeeper’s chair and crossed to the long shelf of equipment which reached under the clearview windows across the front of the bridge. There were no alarms ringing. Nothing untoward seemed to be happening — except that the automatic log showed that the ship’s speed was falling rapidly away from the eight knots she had maintained since Singapore.
Robin’s first action was to call the captain. Such a loss of propulsion had to be reported immediately. Her call was answered at once by a wide awake and very irate Captain Sin; she had half expected to be talking to Fat Chow. Inform Chief Engineer Chen Hang, she was instructed by the miraculously fit and clear-thinking commanding officer, and tell that lazy individual to get his act in order.
The chief, too, answered on the first ring and grudgingly agreed to assemble his engineering officers and find out what was going on.
By the time there was a full showing in the engine room, it was the better part of 03:00 and the Seram Queen was dead in the water, except that a sluggish current was pulling her fitfully north-eastwards along her plotted course, towards the Paracel Islands which lay perhaps seventy kilometres dead ahead. There was, Robin calculated as senior navigating officer on the bridge, no real danger at present. Seram Queen was well over the Herald Bank which stood, at its height, 235 metres below the keel. To the starboard lay the Bombay Reef and to the port, Discovery. But one was thirty kilometres distant and the other more than forty. Not even the warning light on the tall tower on Bombay reached this far. On this course with the currents charitable, the vessel could drift for the better part of a week before there was any real chance of coming dangerously aground on Woody Island of the beautifully named Amphitrite Group, north-east of the Paracels, or on Lincoln Island further west, which already stood with one great wreck so obvious there that it was a recommended radar beacon. So it was with very little immediate disquiet that Robin dialled the engine room and asked the chief for a prognosis.
‘Engine broken,’ observed the gruff Chen Hang. ‘Take time to fix.’
‘Yes, I understand that, Chief; but may I tell the captain how much time? One hour? Two?’
‘No ideas until I find problem, missy. Maybe one day.’ The word ‘day’ hit her like a slap in the face. ‘One day?’
‘I do not know. You get off the phone and maybe I be able to find out, missy! Yah?’
The captain was hardly more courteous and Robin recognised that she was caught in the unenviable position of being the lubricant which kept two rough but important parts of the crew from rubbing each other raw. Her lips thinned. She had gone well past this situation in her normal professional life. Nowadays she had people to act as lubricant for her! She was a ship’s captain and a senior executive. She owned this tub, for heaven’s sake, every stick and every soul aboard, she shouldn’t be greasing egos, she should be kicking butt and pissing people off left, right and centre!
The thought was as wry as it was inaccurate. Rarely, if ever, had Robin rubbed anyone raw. Even those who failed to give satisfactory service were exhorted and uplifted to improving their performance. Not even the most intran-sigently idle or cross-grained had proved able to resist her dogged excellence of example for long. But she was all too well aware that she was not in any position to pull this crew round; only Captain Sin could do that.
The rest of the watch was filled with a quiet bustle of activity. Robin called Sam Yung out of his scarce-warm bed and summoned the grumbling Wai Chan to her side as well. The navigating officers had much careful work to do. The relatively modem navigational aids available to them — and efficiently functioning as long as the ship’s power continued independently of her main motors — established the ship’s position with near-perfect accuracy. But only as long as power was maintained. Only a fool would have failed to act on the assumption that they might go blind, deaf and dumb at any moment. Radio Officer Tso was called up too, but the captain refused permission to send a distress signal or even to alert head office. Robin understood that, at least — she would have kept quiet for a while too. Seram Queen stood in no danger and Robin’s navigating team was perfectly capable of checking, almost to the centimetre, how close any stood, on either hand, ahead and below. But as the long night waned, Robin realised that Chief Engineer Hang had meant what he had said. The engines were not going to come back to life immediately. As dawn crept up, promising a scorchingly bright, high-pressure, monsoon-cooled day, she handed over to Wai Chan and dismissed the comatose Sam Yung to grab a few hours’ sleep, as she herself proposed to do.
After a couple of hours restless slumber in the all too quiet environment of the powerless ship, Robin awoke with the irresistible impulse to test the emergency generators in case the maladies currently affecting the engines should spread to the main alternators, as she had half expected them to do last night. In the cold light of day — even a hot, calm day such as this — her fears of the coffin watch now looked even more unsettling. If the chief was right, then there would be no power tonight either. Drifting towards the jumble of banks, reefs and islands of the Paracels wide awake with full electronic warning of any danger nearer than ten kilometres was one thing. Going in blind as well as powerless was something else again. Going into the Paracel Islands powerless and blind might be very dangerous indeed. And once she had arrived at this thought, she felt an equally irresistible urge to institute the lifeboat drill which Captain Sin had neglected to hold so far.
Rolling out of her bunk, still half asleep, Robin climbed into the ready-folded, easy-to-reach uniform which she had taken out of the ‘clean’ drawer last thing last night. With everything pulled on, tucked in, hooked and buttoned, Robin dragged a long-bristled brush through the golden riot of her curls and crossed to the door — and froze.
Her fingers grasped the cold brass door handle but her eyes were fixed on the empty keyhole. A frantic search through her dirty laundry proved that the key still lay in its usual shirt pocket and Robin wracked her brains for a moment, trying to remember whether she had turned it in the lock and popped it back in the pocket without thinking. One turn and pull on the handle revealed that she had collapsed into her bunk and left the door unlocked. Mentally she cursed herself. Her sleep had been short but deep. Anyone could have come in and done more or less anything. The very thought made her flesh creep. She swung back impulsively and was just about to check her shoulder bag and Edgar Tan’s priceless gun when the emergency alarm shrilled.
The noise of the alarm was so unexpected and so loud that it made her start with surprise. She turned, hesitating between the gun and her duty, her mind a turmoil. She looked at the chunky watch she had worn for so many years — though it looked thoroughly inappropriate on her slim wrist. It was 08:07 local time. Wai Chan was on the bridge. She and Sam Yung had enjoyed little more than two hours’ sleep after all, and now they would have to face God knew what. As these thoughts raced through her head, she forced herself to be calm. Perhaps this was the lifeboat drill she so much wanted the captain to hold. Whatever it was, she could not possibly waste time looking in her case now.
Within five seconds of the alarm’s first sound, she reached for the handset of her bedside phone. There was no reply from the bridge or the engine room. Well, even i
n the absence of contact with the captain and the chief, her duty was clear enough, and defined by Sam Yung’s emergency lists which she had been so careful to study. She caught up the two-way radio from her bedside table and slipped it into her pocket. She crossed to the door once more, glanced around the room from the threshold and locked the door on the way out. Then she was pounding up the corridor to her emergency station, adrenaline lending wings to her heels. It was possible that this unannounced emergency was more serious than a drill — on this ship, almost anything seemed possible.
As Robin ran out onto the deck her eyes were busy amid the bustle of crew, trying to find the captain. He was nowhere to be seen down here, but a couple of figures loomed on the port bridge wing high above. That ought to be the captain and the watch officer. She pulled out her walkie-talkie. Thumbed the open channel to the bridge. ‘First officer on the main deck,’ she said. ‘Please explain the nature of the emergency. Over.’
As she waited for a reply, she looked around her, glad that this was a crew of small-bodied Orientals amongst whom she stood tall.
‘ … Drill,’ said her radio. ‘Proceed to …’
‘First officer understands this is a lifeboat drill. Proceeding to my designated position. Over.’
Teams seemed to be forming at the lifeboats and she crossed to her place and began counting the faces, knowing she could never hope to remember all the strange names of the men who should be there. Still too busy to feel isolated or even faintly at risk, she walked briskly down the line, counting. Further down the deck, she could see Sam Yung doing exactly the same thing. On the far side of the bridgehouse, the senior officers in the boats which should have been commanded by the captain and the second officer would be doing the same, she knew. ‘First officer. All present, over.’
‘Proceed.’
Her eyebrows rose. The man might have been sick but he was certainly making up for lost time now — a full drill. Well, OK.