The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  But it did occur to her most poignantly in the instant after Richard broke contact that she hadn’t sent her love to him, the twins or to her father. And she hadn’t asked how the court case was proceeding. Still, it was too late to worry about any of that now.

  The mist wall was snatched away by the black fist of the storm. ‘Here we go, gentlemen,’ she observed, and closed both her hands round her coffee cup. Clotho dipped and rolled off the back of a tall sea into the unremitting grip of the storm.

  CHAPTER TEN - Day Seven

  Tuesday, 25 May 04:00

  The darkness was so solid it seemed to press against her face and the silence was so absolute she could feel it in her ears. Mouth wide, to help her breathe more silently, she felt her way along the corridor wall. She moved so slowly and carefully she could feel her joints creaking. Her knees seemed to grate as she lifted them, one at a time. The friction in her hip joints seemed to make her whole pelvis throb.

  At last she felt the edge of a doorway with her fingertips. With languid movements, she began to trace the crack between the frame and the door itself until she discovered the warm round jut of the door handle. With a gasp, she jerked her hand back as though the slick knob had given her an electric shock. Mouth dry, she fought to control her breathing until the thudding of her heart had slowed. Only then did she take a grip on the handle and begin to turn it. The door opened inwards a fraction as soon as the handle was turned. At once there was sound and a glimmer of light. She stood, listening, stretching every cell in the auditory section of her brain, as though by an exercise of will she could hear yet more. There was the slightest of rhythmic creaking and the occasional throaty gasp. The familiar sliding and hissing of a body exercising on the big rowing machine.

  She had her back pressed to the solid panel of the door, with the handle at her left hip. She pivoted round this, leaning forward from the waist, feeling the way the long muscles pulled all down her back and up her thighs. She tensed her buttocks to stop the movement and held the door with the firm length of her leg. Her hair swung forward in a veil and she reluctantly released her hold on the hot, slick handle to pull it back behind her ear.

  The rowing machine was on the far side of the gym in a shaft of dim light. What could be seen was more a matter of shadows differentiated by slightly lighter surfaces. There was no sense even of roundness, though the muscle tone of thigh, arm, shoulder and breast was accentuated by the lightest oiling of perspiration. It was hardly recognisable as a human body, simply shapes in almost languid motion. But this slowly mobile piece of abstract art made sense enough to her wide eyes, as the sounds had made sense to her straining ears.

  He was curling forward into foetal rest, massive hands by the naked splay of his feet, low light gleaming across the sweep of his shoulders, over the corrugations of his ribs, and on the mountain peaks astride the valley of his spine. Under his hips, the black padded seat was motionless at the furthest end of the square metal track, but across that track, resting on the twisted cushion of his vest and training shorts, the woman’s crossed ankles concealed any more from Ann’s eager sight.

  Then he rocked slowly upright, the sculpture of his back suddenly rippling into motion, and began to slide backwards. And as he did so, so his partner’s body was released from the trap between his thighs and chest. As his shoulders slid back and down, so her body slowly rose upright in turn, seeming to float above him, held erect by the strength of her hands, clutched over his, on the handles of the rowing machine. At the full stretch of the machine’s design, these handles rested vertically while his arms angled down towards his shoulders, supine now, above the crossed ankles under his heart. And she sat utterly erect, the handles on either side of her short ribs, arms trembling with the effort, head held high above the little exercise towel draped round her neck. This served to clothe her torso, and the rest of her was cloaked in shadow. Light stealing under her arm revealed the bowed corrugations of her ribs just to the palest swelling at the rear of her breast. The ribs ran down to a tall, sharp arch, beyond which her stomach plunged, concave, to the impenetrability of the shadows where their bellies met. Arched delicately astride this secret place rose the elegant curves of her thigh, spreading to the angle of her knee and the falling, fading shadow line of her shin as it plunged back towards her ankles, crossed beneath his trembling chest.

  Silent and lissom as a cat, Ann crossed towards the pair on the machine as the man began to rock upwards again, and their faces, which had been masked by darkness, moved back into the light. His eyes were closed in the deepest concentration, and he was frowning with fierce pleasure as he worked, but there was no mistaking Henri LeFever’s chiseled profile. The woman’s face rolled back into the brightness, blankly expressionless, as though in the deepest sleep and curtained by tendrils of sweat-darkened hair. But, again, there was no mistaking who it was. Ann’s breath was jerked out of her by the impact of realisation. Her whole body seemed to liquefy with shock. It was as though she was looking in a mirror. The woman was Ann herself.

  She found herself lying on her tumbled bunk staring up into the darkness, surrounded by the throbbing of the ship’s generator and the restless jerking movements of the hull as it tossed helplessly through the power of the storm. But these were lost beneath the thumping of her heart and the jarring gasp of her breathing.

  I’m going to have to do something about these dreams, she thought. I don’t want the gorgeous Henri LeFever to become too much of an obsession.

  But the obsession revealed by the dream extended to more than the infinitely attractive scientist. She was still prowling around the ship whenever she got the chance. And, since the storm had taken such a hold upon all their lives, she had much greater chance for exploration. The crew had proved to be as great a disappointment under these conditions as they had been in fairer weather. They reacted to the loss of propulsive power with almost universal acrimony. The officers blamed the captain who blamed the officers. The deck officers all blamed the engineers who had only just bothered to turn up for duty when the disaster struck. The only person currently free from blame in the incident was Reynolds, and that was because he was dead. He hadn’t actually been the only competent seaman aboard. Captain Black at least had had sense enough to put a makeshift sea anchor over the stern so that Atropos rode more easily in the slowly abating storm while they waited for her sister ship. But once that had been done, the backbiting and recriminations had redoubled. The crew, led as usual by O’Brien the sexist New York thug of militantly Irish descent and his sidekick the slimy Symes, wearily vanished from the scene and the officers of both sorts, with nothing much to do except to maintain power, communication and some kind of lookout, sat around in dazed silence. For four hours before retiring to bed — to dream of LeFever — she had prowled around the bridgehouse as though she had been all alone on the ship.

  She jerked her left arm up to look at the luminous display on her watch. Either sixteen hours — or twenty-eight — since the propeller went. Something must be happening by now. It would be just like these men to let her sleep through Clotho’s arrival. She sat up and switched on the light. Her clothes lay in an untidy heap amid the general mayhem of her cabin. Never a tidy person at the best of times, she saw no reason to make an effort now. Her untidiness sent Nico right up the wall and had been the cause of some truly memorable moments in their stormy relationship. She swung out of bed, her mouth curling into the gentle smile she always wore when thinking about Nico. Then she shrugged herself to her feet and began to climb into her clothes. They were still damp. Her stiff, bruised limbs did not appreciate the extra difficulty that the recalcitrant cloth added to the task of dressing on the pitching, jerking deck.

  The first place she went to was the galley. In truth, she doubted that she would really have slept through anything so momentous as Clotho’s arrival, and even had there been something of the most pressing urgency to be done, she would have been incapable of doing it without getting some coffee inside her fir
st. When she went to sleep, the galley had been dark. The chef had refused to serve hot food under the storm conditions. It was bright and bustling now — someone had changed his mind for him. He was working grimly beside the massive, tightly clamped urn of boiling water and he needed no second bidding to hand her a huge mug of steaming coffee. As he turned towards her she saw that he had a badly swollen eye. She made no remark, but noted it. Who had changed cookie’s mind? It could have been Hogg, desperate for a refill after emptying himself so spectacularly and so often. It could have been any of the crew, though the simple, brutal directness had O’Brien written all over it. It could even have been creepy Captain Black himself. On Atropos, one never knew.

  The next place after the galley had to be the bridge and she made the perilous ascent without spilling a drop. The bridge seemed surprisingly quiet. There was no one to throw her out of the wheelhouse itself when she went in to look around. Timmins was asleep in the watchkeeper’s chair. The door behind him swung restlessly, revealing the hunched but silent form of the radio operator, also apparently asleep. Hogg was sitting slumped by the bank of bright instruments she had last seen him vomiting over. They might as well all have been dead. There was no one else around. There was no steersman as they had no steerageway. There was no one, in fact, between Ann and the angled panorama of the clearview.

  Drawn by dull fascination — there was nothing to see, so there was nothing to quicken real interest — she crossed to this and, standing where the helmsman would have stood, looked out. At first the darkness before her seemed to be as impenetrable as the darkness of her dream. The digital chronometer on the wall above the window read 05:04. It would be a long time to dawn, especially as they had been running north since the propeller went, so the darkness was hardly surprising. But as she looked, learning to blank out the reflection from the dimly-lit bridge in the window, she began to discover a little more. There were lights along the deck before her. Red lights one side, green lights the other. On Napoli, Nico had shown her the running lights and the riding lights, and all the special signals which ships were supposed to show. If she looked carefully enough, she guessed, she should be able to make out lights somewhere up there which said ‘ship running without power’ or some such thing. But the thought about the lights made her mind begin to dwell on Nico once again, and memories of her cheerful, laughing Latin lover drove even the infinitely tempting LeFever from her mind. Concentrating on these, she brought her hot mug of coffee to her lips and sipped.

  Just as she did so, part of the cloud cover was snatched away. There was a full moon, impossibly huge, incredibly low, which seemed to be sitting on the horizon dead ahead. Its brightness was so dazzling that she flinched away and then squinted back. It was wonderful to look outside, beyond the confines of the ship; she felt as though she had been blind and could now see again. The huge effulgent silver orb called to her and before she realised what she was doing, she was outside on the bridge wing, to meet its cheerful beaming countenance face to face. The instant she was out, she realised her mistake. It was incredibly cold out here. The first breath she took was like liquid nitrogen in her lungs. Sub-zero temperatures stabbed through her damp clothes with lethal speed. She found her feet slipping from under her and her coffee went over the rail to fall in a graceful arc towards the deck below. She fell against the railing but had the presence of mind not to touch it with her bare hands. Her elbow thumped onto the ice-clad wood of the railing and stuck there so that she had to stand outside for a moment or two longer while she tore the cloth from the freezing wood by main force.

  And in those moments, she looked around herself. The moon’s bright beams struck across the ocean directly at the ship. The lines of light seemed almost to be coming parallel to the surface of the sea, as though the moon were sitting over the North Pole looking down at the vessel being thrust towards it by the wind. Everything between the restless vessel and the still curve of the planet was heaving, gleaming, white.

  From horizon to horizon, port, starboard, dead ahead, everything was white. She looked down along the side of the ship. Beyond the deck, down among the waves, it was black. Rough waves and black water. Yet dead ahead, from one side of the world to the other, it was white.

  She ran across to Yasser Timmins and began to shake the little man with all her strength. ‘Wake up,’ she was yelling. ‘You too, Hogg.’ Over Hogg’s shoulder, the radar screen showed a pale wall from one side of the deep green bowl to the other. A warning light was flashing but the sound was turned off.

  She swung back and Timmins was blinking at her like an irritable owl. ‘Something dead ahead,’ she said. ‘I think it’s an icefield.’

  ‘Oh sweet Jesus Christ!’ sang out Hogg even as she spoke. ‘Go and tell the captain, Yasser. We’re going into ice.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ snapped Ann. ‘You’d better stay up here. Where is he?’

  ‘Cabin behind the chart room,’ answered the little man, craning round to look over his right shoulder as though his agonised gaze would be the best guide across the wheelhouse.

  She was off at once and had only taken a step or two before the alarm bell, ringing from the radar, informed her Hogg had turned it on again. To get this close to an icefield without anyone realising — heads were going to roll, she thought. Reynolds would never have allowed it to happen. She was through the chart room at a flat run and hammering on the door beyond. ‘Come,’ said Black’s voice, instantly alert.

  She pushed the door open and stood on the threshold. He was sitting, back straight, on a narrow bunk. He had clearly been sleeping partially dressed, but his trousers still seemed to be impeccably pressed and the shirt he was buttoning might just have been ironed. For once he did not attack her for being who she was, what she was or where she was. ‘Icefield, dead ahead, Captain,’ she said.

  ‘A field of ice?’

  ‘Horizon to horizon as far as the eye can see.’

  ‘How far can you see, Miss Cable?’

  ‘Halfway to the Pole. The moon’s out.’

  ‘I see. And how near do you estimate —’

  His calm questioning was interrupted by the first shock of contact since the rogue floe had smashed their propeller fifteen hours earlier. The grinding hesitation, coupled by the slight but unmistakable canting of the deck, made the rest of his question superfluous. He rose, punctiliously sliding his tie under the starched points of his shirt collar, a frown beginning to gather on his lean, lined face. ‘Miss Cable, I wonder if I could ask you to find the chief engineer.’ His faded, weary eyes flicked up to the clock on the wall. ‘He will be in his cabin at this time in the morning, I expect. Give him my compliments and explain the situation. He will have to doublecheck that everything in the engine room is secure.’

  She turned to go, but for some reason he continued, tricked into a fleeting intimacy. ‘I should phone him, of course. That’s what a captain should do. But he has disconnected the bells in his cabin and his workroom so I can’t disturb him, you see.’

  The chief engineer’s name was Lethbridge and Ann disturbed him all right. For some reason, Captain Black’s defeated words made her angry with the chief engineer. She hit his door like a small avalanche, battering it with her fists. He opened to her, his face thunderstruck. Nobody had dared summon him like this since he had been an apprentice. ‘Now just what the infernal —’

  ‘Captain says you’d better look to your bits and pieces, Chief. It seems the wind’s pushing us up into an icefield.’ And even as she spoke, a second, more serious impact came. Atropos seemed to jump to port as the starboard quarter bounced off a bigger floe. It was a movement every bit as sudden and almost as violent as any enforced motion during the storm. All through the ship — unnaturally quiet because the engines were shut down — came the rumble of the impact.

  And something more. From far below there came a sudden reverberation, so bass in sound it seemed to make the whole bridgehouse shudder, so powerful it seemed to have no beginning or end. Only when
it had been repeated several times was there any pattern discernible in it, as though a huge bell was tolling slowly in the deepest bowels of the ship.

  The chief engineer came fully into Ann’s view, pulling up the zipper to close his overall across his lean belly. He set off at a run and she followed him without a further thought. Together they plunged down the companionways while the air around them filled time and again with the noise of the icefield thumping and grating along the hull and the great bell ringing ever louder beneath their feet. As they went, they seemed to collect a team of men about them. The engineering officers appeared from cabins like hibernating bears in spring and ran down at their sides, Lethbridge’s sidekick Don Taylor first among them. LeFever appeared from nowhere and joined in as they went down past A deck into the engineering decks. He tucked in beside Ann. ‘What’s going on?’ he yelled.

  Ann seriously considered trying to frame a verbal answer but he would never hear it, so she shook her head and hoped that would suffice as they reached the corridor where nearly sixteen hours earlier they had first learned about the propeller. Here the noise was almost overpowering. And the reason for the sudden plethora of engineers was explained: it was coming from the engine room. They ran towards it as though the damage each overpowering chime was doing to their ears was a thing of no account. Ann followed, though she was getting very frightened now. Anything which summoned so much unquestioning dedication from men who bitched unendingly about arriving in their work area at 08:59 or leaving it at 17:01 had to be something she wanted to report. And because she was going in, Henri LeFever followed on.

  Like her sister ship Clotho, Atropos was powered by two compact Rolls-Royce RB211 gas turbines. They were so compact that it was possible to carry a third aboard so any serious problem could be rectified by lifting the damaged unit out and putting a complete new motor in. The third turbine was carried suspended from the roof of the engine room. It was secured in a heavy sling which was held up by four lines, two to the fore and two to the aft of the room. The shock of impacting with the icefield had caused three of these lines to snap so that several tons of engine was swinging from side to side of the metal-sided room. The bell-like cacophony was caused by the fact that at the apogee of each swing the turbine was thundering up against a wall.