The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Which is what CZP allege.’

  ‘But if the ship sank under me because the cargo had damaged the hull, then whoever shipped the cargo is responsible for the loss of Napoli and the final resting place of whatever was in her holds.’

  ‘Which would be your defence. But you say that no one has made any allegations of further responsibility.’ Her eyebrows rose, and her long almond eyes gleamed with disbelief.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. Then he frowned. ‘That is ...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The owners of the cargo, Disposoco, are a pretty shady outfit. I haven’t heard much from them except that they will be supporting CZP in this case. But if what you say is true and there is a case to answer for the cargo, then they would be in deep trouble because it was their cargo.’

  ‘Unless the high court says it was you who put the cargo where it is.’

  ‘So this case could be about much more than just the Napoli. And if I lose it, then it could be only the beginning.’

  ‘And that is where I come in. If I come in.’

  They ate in silence for a while, then Richard continued, ‘It’s potentially ruinous. Heritage Mariner could stump up the cash for a new hull if push came to shove. And, of course, Crewfinders carries insurance against the loss of ships under their personnel. But if CZP prove liability against us for the criminal placing of the cargo, then the matter rapidly seems to go out of control. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already lawsuits in the offing from American environmental agencies, fisheries, individuals. Whoever ends up with the legal responsibility for having put that cargo where it is could well be facing lawsuits from anyone on the eastern seaboard who contracts cancer.’

  ‘That’s overstating the case, I think.’

  ‘Look what happened to Pan Am when a case was made against them over Lockerbie.’

  ‘Well, let’s look at another aspect. What sort of people are CZP?’

  ‘Sharks. Desperate ones, by the look of it. But they’re not as bad as Disposoco.’

  ‘Let me get this clear. CZP owned Napoli and chartered her to Disposoco, who were responsible for moving the cargo.’

  ‘That’s correct. It was Disposoco’s captain, a man called Fittipaldi, who was replaced by John Higgins. Fittipaldi was killed in the Lebanon while the ship was being loaded. He was the lucky one, as it turned out. The rest of the crew they had hired were trapped aboard by trick contracts. Couldn’t get off no matter what.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘Not what you’d call ethical, certainly.’

  ‘Are you being coy?’

  ‘Yes, I am. If my experience with them so far is anything to go by, they make the Mafia look like a benevolent society.’

  ‘And you say Disposoco will be supporting CZP in their lawsuit against you?’

  ‘Count on it. They’ll be working hand in glove. Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs.’

  She pushed aside her thermidor, not quite finished. ‘All right. So we’re looking here at a suit against you presented by CZP, owners of the ship, but supported by Disposoco, owners of the cargo. This suit charges that you personally and Heritage Mariner are responsible for the sinking of Napoli and are therefore liable for the cost of replacing the hull. But my bet is that somewhere behind all this there is a further suit which says that by criminally sinking the vessel, you are directly responsible for the placing of the cargo in its present position. And that consequently you must indemnify them and also bear responsibility for any other suit arising from the placing of the cargo in the place where it presently lies.’

  ‘My God, do you think Sir Harcourt thought of any of this? Or Brian Chambers?’

  ‘I doubt it. Look, they’re lovely men, both, but whose men are they? Sir William’s, I’ll bet. Even if they’ve arrived in the twentieth century, they’ll still think the British Empire’s in place. New York simply won’t have entered their thinking. Especially if they’ve been fiddling around with pre-trial hearings in front of the judge. They won’t have had leisure to look at the big picture at all. You do realise that in theory the American government might require whoever is proved to be responsible to get the whole lot up and to dispose of it correctly?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘It might be a cheaper alternative, especially if you lose.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Maggie.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, surprised by the bitterness in his tone. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s right on top of the Titanic.’

  *

  They were still deep in conversation when the plates were cleared. They had eschewed pudding, but their communion, interrupted only by a final word with the chef, took them through several cups of coffee and it was not until nearly midnight that they finally called for the bill.

  At the same time as Richard reached for his wallet, Maggie took out her purse. ‘No,’ she said decisively, ‘I’ll get this. You’re a friend and I’m not your silk yet. I don’t want to get hauled in front of the Council for touting. But if anything goes wrong with this case, you’ll need every penny you can lay your hands on.’

  The purse was in her handbag, and as she was taking care of things, the spine of a book caught his eye. It was such an unusual thing to see in an evening handbag that he looked at it more closely. It was called The Leper Ship and he knew it well. It was Ann Cable’s best-selling account of the final voyage of Napoli.

  When Maggie looked up again, his eyes were still on the book. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you came prepared.’

  ‘I haven’t read it yet. I wanted to hear your version of events before I read hers. Then I wanted to think whether there’s a case for either side before seeing Brian Chambers.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘Go to see Brian Chambers? Yes, I shall. That I can promise.’

  ‘And will you get involved?’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s quite another question.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Day Six

  Monday, 24 May 08:00

  The largest feature of the North Atlantic is the Gulf Stream. Fuelled by the westward pressure of the North Equatorial Current, it spews endlessly up out of the Gulf of Mexico and pushes north. Moving millions and millions of gallons of warm water at a mile or two a day, it flows up the east coast of Florida, past Georgia and the Carolinas before turning eastwards to slide over Bermuda and away towards northern Europe.

  Along a front perhaps a thousand miles wide, it washes the western coasts of Cornwall and South Wales, of Ireland from Fastnet to the Bloody Foreland, of Scotland from Kintyre to the Shetlands past the Hebrides and the Orkneys and the Summer Isles. By the time it sweeps past the Faroes and away along Norway towards Russia, it has changed its name but not its nature. It has become the North Atlantic Current but it still carries with it mists and warmth, fecundity and the occasional tropical fish.

  As it reaches the outer edge of the European Continental shelf, where the abyssal depths of the Atlantic climb precipitously upwards towards the shallows of the North Sea, the Gulf Stream splits and sends a wayward tentacle due north. This never-ending river of warmth pushes up into the coldest arctic seas, washing up past Iceland, through the terrible Denmark Strait and into the frozen Norwegian Sea, washing back to the west of Greenland through the Labrador Sea into the icefields of the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. And, according to the simple laws of physics, as the warm currents push northwards towards the Pole, taking the occasional lost garfish, shrimp or snapper, so the cold currents come back southwards, bringing ice.

  The Gulf Stream was pulled northwards that year. It seemed to want to follow the sun which was just beginning to bring spring to the tundra and light to the far north. But this apparent beneficence was double-edged, for the extra flow of warm water gave added strength to the currents flowing north and this broke up the icefields more quickly. And as the flow into the Norwegian Sea and Baffin Bay was stronger, so the cold currents coming south also moved with more force and they brought a lot
more ice. This situation was further complicated by a series of particularly destructive storms which swept along the old tracks, as predictable as freight cars, from Hudson Bay to Murmansk. Until, during that week late in May, a ridge of high pressure — a wall of solid air — spilled south off the polar icecap to stand along the icecap over Greenland. It stopped the storms dead in their tracks so that they piled up one on top of the other, each one fiercer than the last.

  Atropos and Clotho were sailing the same course between Canada and Cumbria, one going eastwards and one going westwards. The course was far north of the normal shipping lanes because of the potential danger of the cargo. All things being equal, the two ships would have met just south of Kap Farvel at the southern tip of Greenland, which the old charts called Cape Farewell. But things were not equal. The disturbing Gulf Stream was running further north than usual and the Denmark Strait was spewing out ice on the back of the Greenland Current. But it was doing so under clear heavens and light airs.

  Clotho was sailing calmly westwards through still seas made strange by the unusual conditions. The Davis Strait was haemorrhaging floes and bergs in the freezing grasp of the Labrador Current under black skies and increasingly frenzied winds, and Atropos was pushing doggedly eastwards into the teeth of a south-easterly storm, with every sense alert for disaster.

  They had both been at sea for six days now, and in fact they were less than a hundred miles apart. But they were still separated by the wall of heavy air standing over the Greenland icecap and they might as well have been on different planets.

  *

  ‘Sound “abandon ship”,’ ordered the captain.

  Nico Niccolo was just handing over the watch to Johnny Sullivan, but the Neapolitan first officer was still technically in charge of the bridge so it was he who obeyed, crossing to the console under the broad, angled clearview window and hitting a button beside the microphone there. He turned back and the captain handed him a stopwatch and a walkie-talkie radio. He nodded once to show he understood what was required; speech would have been wasted for it was nearly impossible to hear. Clotho’s emergency siren bellowed through the ship’s tannoy system, through all the navigation, storage, accommodation and work areas and out across the quiet ocean.

  Clotho was on automatic, following a parallel course to the optimum course in her computers, a little under twenty miles south of where she should have been. For days now, five miles to the north of her had stood a grey wall of fog where the icy, ice-laden current coming down from the north met the warm water running up beneath them from the south. But at dawn this morning, Nico, the watch-keeper, had woken Robin to report that the mist wall had turned south to cut across their course. Now it was 08:00 local time and the day around them — as far as the edge of the fog — was bright and calm and utterly clear. Forward for five miles or so, and astern and on their port beam, the air was so limpid it seemed as though mere eyes could see as far as the instruments on the bridge. It was warm enough for the bridge wing doors to be standing open. The gentle breeze brought in only the occasional rumble born of their progress through the sea to mix with the throbbing of their massive engine. And, once in a while, from beyond that impenetrable mist wall to the north, it brought the eerie howling and groaning that ice makes.

  In the engine room, all the systems were on automatic and none of Andrew McTavish’s engineers had come on duty yet, so there was no one to obey the urgent summons to abandon ship. In the crew’s quarters, the cabins all stood empty: the crew were up and the stewards were not yet at work. In the officers’ quarters it was the same story, though the bunk of Rupert Biggs, the young third officer, was still warm — he had enjoyed a mere four hours’ sleep since handing the watch to Niccolo. Only in the galley and the mess rooms was there any reaction as Clotho’s complement threw down their knives, forks and spoons, their pots, pans and ladles, and abandoned their breakfast to take part in the practice. Last man out was the cook who made sure all the ranges were switched off.

  This was the second practice they had had so far and it passed off as smoothly as the first one had done: it was a new crew with a new captain aboard a new vessel, but everyone belonged to the Heritage Mariner fleet and was used to doing things the Heritage Mariner way. That didn’t stop the complaints, though.

  There were four big lifeboats, each designed to take up to twenty in an emergency, ten under normal circumstances. They hung in pairs on either side of the bridgehouse, suspended on davits in the shelter of the overhanging bridge wings, ready to be swung out and lowered into the ocean at a moment’s notice. The captain was in charge of the forward boat on the starboard side with the third officer in charge of the one behind it. The first officer was in charge of the port-side boat, level with the captain’s, and the second officer’s was just behind that. The engineers went with their corresponding deck officers, the chief with the captain and so forth. Also with the captain went the ship’s cadet Jamie Curtis and the radio officer William Christian.

  In fact, it was Jamie who was detailed to take charge of the second lifeboat on the port side because the second officer, Sullivan, held the watch and would only abandon the bridge in a real emergency.

  Under the watchful eyes of the captain and the first officer, each of whom held a stopwatch in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other, the boats’ crews lined up beneath their pendant keels and waited to be dismissed. They were ready to abandon in a matter of minutes and felt that the next natural step should be the stowing of the boats and the completion of breakfast.

  Why she let the exercise run on she would never know. Perhaps the crew were too confident. Perhaps she felt the whole Heritage Mariner atmosphere was too cosy. Perhaps it was because the crystal stillness of the morning was perfect for the full practice — and they could do with a full practice. Perhaps it was because of that sinister mist wall closing from dead ahead, warning so vividly of a terrible change in the weather and sea conditions to come. Perhaps she had an inkling of what was to come.

  When stillness settled on the scene and silence fell, apart from the throbbing of the huge engine and the whisper of the wake as Clotho surged onwards to the south of Kap Farvel, Robin’s eyes flicked up to glance along the line of rigid profiles under number one boat. She glanced across to Nico Niccolo whose position matched hers exactly and saw that he was waiting too. ‘Proceed, Mr Niccolo,’ she said.

  The groan came from the davits as they swung full out to suspend their burdens over the sea, but it might just as well have come from the throats of forty hungry sailormen seeing their breakfast disappear. At once the scene closed down. Up until this point the captain had overseen the whole. Now the officer commanding each boat took his responsibility for its correct launching and for the safety of all within it.

  Robin strode forward and stood by the radio officer, Bill Christian. Beyond him, Andrew McTavish was keeping a wary eye on the group of GP seamen who made up the rest of the lifeboat’s complement. Robin knew three of them — old hands all: Sam Larkman, his narrow face set hard as stone and his thin lips tight closed on some blistering thoughts about officers in general and captains in particular — female ones being the worst of all; gentle Joe Edwards echoing Sam’s every movement, though probably none of his thoughts; big Errol Jones, the only black person aboard in spite of Heritage Mariner’s positive policies with regard to race, sex and background. The others were not so familiar, but they seemed to know what they were doing well enough. While Joe Edwards and Errol Jones held the falls and lowered the boat until it was level with the safety rail, the others crowded forward and stripped the canvas covering away to reveal the neatly disposed contents.

  Once again they paused, and this time Sam Larkman actually glanced up at her, though she realised later it was a simple glance of enquiry and probably held no thought of a complaint at all. Her eyes met Sam’s for a moment and she felt her eyebrows rising. Her own lips set to a thin, pale line. She switched her gaze to Christian’s and gave a brief nod. The radio officer swun
g the lifeboat’s radio out of the doorway and onto the first thwart with a convulsive movement. Then he was in after it. ‘Look to the falls,’ snapped Robin and two of the nameless seamen joined Joe and Errol while everyone else climbed in.

  ‘Lower away!’ She called it loudly enough to carry to all the boats so that the other officers would know how far the practice was proceeding and how fast her crew were working. She stayed on the deck and noted the time when number one lifeboat’s keel kissed the water — though she did not stop the watch until the second starboard boat was in the water too. Then, with a curt ‘Stay there, please’ to the teams on the falls, she crossed to the port side.

  Here, too, the boats were in the water and beginning to trail behind the ship. Nico stood above the fourth one, obviously surprised that young Jamie Curtis had got his into the water as quickly as everyone else. Jamie, too, was jubilant and he stood in the bow of his command, his left hand holding the double fall above his head, and waved up at his captain with youthful glee. She gave him the same curt nod she had given Christian, though in fact her mood was quite light. She turned and met Nico’s watchful gaze and at last allowed herself to thaw a little. A glimmer of a smile crinkled the corners of her eyes and stirred the corners of her lips. ‘Well done, Nico. Bring them in,’ she said.

  Being a Neapolitan, he appreciated that tiny smile as much as if she had laughed aloud. Being an officer, he was pleased at last to see some of his captain’s gloom beginning to lift. And being a man, he considered basking a little in the sunshine of her approval. He got less than a second to indulge these feelings before young Curtis went overboard into the water.

  It was an easy enough mistake to make. The cadet had stood up on the whaleback covered bow of his boat without noticing that there was a loose loop of rope from the fall beneath his feet. As soon as the men aboard Clotho tightened their grip, ready to lift the lifeboat back aboard, the loop jerked up tight, caught his foot and catapulted him overboard. The second engineer, now in charge of the boat, was caught completely by surprise and the seamen crewing her weren’t too quick on the uptake either. Nico thrust past Robin who had her back to the incident and crossed to the rail. ‘Let go the falls,’ snapped the first officer, but the men on the deck, thinking to help, simply let go of the ropes instead of releasing them correctly. The pull of the lifeboat was enough to whip the ropes through the block and snarl them hopelessly. Nico swung back, suddenly infuriated, and opened his mouth to bellow a string of orders only to find his captain standing calmly just behind him.