The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  They crowded into the engine control room and froze, petrified with horror.

  A series of marks along the far wall and lines of gleaming debris which made an hour-glass shape on the floor showed that the engine was not content to follow only one arc of motion. ‘It’s coming this way!’ screamed Ann and shocked them out of their stasis. So it was. They scattered. The wisest, perhaps, headed back out of the door they had just come in through. The chief, followed by LeFever, Ann and the second engineer Don Taylor, went out of the right-hand door and onto the steps there which led down into the three-deck-deep hole which contained the engines and all the ancillary equipment. The third engineer, the panicking boy who had told them of the propeller, went the other way.

  The engine did not, in fact, hit the engine control room on that swing, but it collected the little metal balcony and the left-hand door which opened onto it and the steps which led down from it and slammed the whole thing against the wall. The young engineer never knew what hit him. It was, perhaps, the closest a man could come to being swatted like a fly.

  The last line, the one from which the engine was swinging, was secured to a power pulley on the far side of the room. But it was a big room and they had to get down to the next deck level before there was a lateral walkway. They were halfway across this when the engine crashed into the corner of the engine control room in an incredible explosion of glass and metal shards. ‘We’ve got to stop it before it swings again, Don,’ screamed Lethbridge to his deputy. ‘All the computer controls ...’

  But the second engineer was more concerned to gesture ahead. The series of marks along the further wall led inevitably towards a sheaf of massive pipes. The engine would hit them on this swing. Like wild things, the engineering officers ran and, caught up in the drama of it all, Ann would have followed. But as the two crewmen flung themselves wildly down the steps towards the power winch, Henri’s hand closed like a vice on her shoulder.

  ‘Too late!’ he screamed. ‘We get out.’

  Any protest she might have made was stymied by the power of his grip and his action. He hoisted her like a child and ran back along the walkway with her. The engine swung past them, whispering as it hurled through the air, like the deadly blade in Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.

  Lethbridge hit the power winch and the emergency release. The weight of the engine was enormous and the force of its motion cataclysmic. The released cogs spun at tremendous speed. There was an automatic safety but it burned out in an instant and the engine would have thundered to, and probably through, the deck had not the second engineer collided with his chief. Lethbridge’s overall, still only partly zipped and hanging loose, caught in the whirling cog and snagged it. The big man hurled himself backwards so that none of his body followed the cloth to shred through the rabid steel jaws, but the hesitation gave the engine the instant of time it needed to complete its final swing. It cut only the outermost of the sheaf of pipes but that was quite enough. A spray of superheated steam thundered into the engine room. It billowed in boiling clouds around the two engineers. The other two were lucky to avoid the full force of it, saved by Henri’s action.

  Not so lucky, however, was the ship’s generator. In an instant the cool metal was running with condensed water. In another, with a blinding flash and a crackling roar, the machine died. And in the echo of its death, the battered wreck of the RB211 engine slithered to the deck.

  As the wind-driven, helpless Atropos, struck dark and blind, deaf and dumb, wedged deeper into the flank of the moonlit icefield, Captain Black in desperation screamed at the setting moon, ‘Where is that British bitch with Clotho?’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Day Seven

  Tuesday, 25 May 05:40

  Clotho was moving east again, one hour’s sailing south-west, coming in at full ahead. Robin, pale, exhausted but grimly determined not to give in to fatigue, was on the bridge. From her position, the moon had almost set and the palest fingernail of it lay above the corrugated coalface of the sea in the thinnest gallery of clear sky trapped claustrophobically beneath the mountainous weight of the clouds. Just as it did set, the undersides of the clouds were suddenly dusted with the palest mother-of-pearl and the whole sky seemed to light up for a moment before the blackness clamped back down.

  ‘You seen that before?’ Robin growled at Nico.

  ‘No, Captain. I’m a Mediterranean man. I know what it means, though. Icefield ahead.’

  Robin crossed to the collision alarm radar and fiddled with the setting. Just for a moment, she wanted the big picture, in spite of the fact that it would probably be pretty vague. The range clicked up from five miles to fifty. Far up above her head, the equipment in the big golfball of the radome readjusted itself and the image in the bowl silently changed. Twenty miles to the north, the deep green of the image paled in an almost straight line east to west. Above it, the paleness went northwards towards the Pole. The bright spark denoting the silent sister ship shone on the edge of that sinister, pallid sea. According to the calibration, it was a little west of dead ahead. They were still allowing for the current, though the force of it had moderated, as had the force of the wind.

  But just to the south of Clotho, the machine showed another area of paleness. The pallor represented another area of thick ice, and this was what had held them up.

  Robin snapped the machine back to the detailed five-mile setting before they bumped into anything too small to feature in the big picture but large enough to do them harm. Then she crossed to the watchkeeper’s chair. It was Nico’s privilege to use it because he was on watch now, but the Italian was happy enough to be gallant. He had been tucked safely in his bunk since she had dismissed him at eight last evening. He had enjoyed eight hours’ blissful slumber while Johnny Sullivan and Rupert Biggs had held their watches. She had been on the bed in the captain’s day cabin behind the chart room and her sleep there had been restless and disturbed.

  It was the ice to the south of them that had been the trouble. Sullivan, knowing how exhausted she was and wishing desperately to let her sleep, had nevertheless been forced to report to her when it had materialised right across their path a mere ninety minutes after she had gone to bed. By 22:00 hours last night, they had been off course, running due west with the wind behind them, looking for a way round the obstacle — or through it. The five-mile setting on the radar showed them parts of it, but not enough to get a clear idea of its size or disposition. The big picture went fuzzy incredibly quickly because of the power of the storm. It was impossible to tell much about it. It was big. It was in their way. It was made of ice. That was all.

  Rupert Biggs, the electronics wizard, had guided them round the end of it in the dead hours of his watch and had woken Robin again when the situation warranted a major change of course. Blearily, she had ordered Sam Larkman, who held the con until Errol arrived with Nico at 04:00, to swing back due east and come up to full ahead. The engines responded nimbly; they would have done so under the direction of the automatic systems, but the automatic systems were redundant because Andrew McTavish’s engineers were awake and keeping watch as well.

  Now they were running up to their objective at full speed, cutting through the stormy water at nearly thirty knots, throwing up a bow wave like a speedboat. Robin crossed towards the spray-spattered clearview, feeling very much in charge of the whole situation.

  As she did so, Bill Christian pushed his pale face out of the radio shack, calling, ‘Captain! She’s gone dead. Atropos has gone dead.’

  Robin swung round to look at Nico, as she did almost habitually in a crisis now. He called himself a Mediterranean man with that wry Neapolitan gift for understatement, as though the term defined the limit of his experience. But he had been around. He had learned a lot. He had more than earned his papers. He was a good officer. They were a very good team. Automatically they were bouncing ideas off one another in an instant.

  ‘Power loss, probably, Captain. Generators down.’

  ‘Probably, Nico. So we wait an
d see if she comes back up when the emergency systems click in.’

  ‘But if her generators are down, how will that affect what we are going to do?’

  ‘The answer to that will depend firstly on how many auxiliary systems the back-up is designed to run.’

  ‘Light, navigation, communication.’

  ‘Heat? Galley? Deck equipment?’

  ‘The split windlass works independently.’

  ‘I know. Thank God. But we need to be certain about food and heat too, in this weather.’

  Bill Christian called through, ‘Atropos is back. On emergency power. Their main power is completely lost — their generator’s down. More details as and when they can. Could we give Captain Black an ETA? He’s not a happy man.’

  ‘Less than one hour. I want to know at once if he gets full power back.’

  ‘Aye aye, Captain.’

  ‘Right. That’ll give us something to do other than sitting around worrying while we go on in. I’ll get the chief up here and if he can’t tell us what the back-up power systems do and don’t run, then I’ll get the ship’s specifications out and we can look it all up.’

  *

  ‘As you well know, Captain,’ said Andrew McTavish in his gentle Lowland Scots burr, ‘the power on these ships comes from two alternators run in tandem. If one’s gone, the other will have shut down automatically so they’ll be running on battery power and that will give them only the very basics. And no heat. If both alternators have gone, they’re in trouble. If one alternator has gone, it’ll be a case of fixing it, starting it and bringing it back into phase with the other one or they’ll burn out the switchboard and a whole lot else besides. How fast they can do that depends on the damage and the chief engineer over there.’

  ‘Atropos is back on the radio, Captain.’

  ‘Thanks, Bill, I’ll come myself. Excuse me, Andrew.’

  ‘What do you think, Nico?’

  ‘I don’t know, Chief. I thought this was the unlucky ship. Looks like her sister is worse.’

  ‘Oh come on, Number One, you’re not serious about all that claptrap, are you?’

  The Italian looked at the bluff Scot and wondered whether to be insulted. His Neapolitan pride was hurt and his hot blood would have been happy enough to declare a vendetta. But he knew that he was tired and that if he took umbrage then he would just be giving in to the mala fortuna of the whole situation.

  ‘Right,’ said Robin tensely, returning before either man could add another word. ‘The situation is this. They’ve lost one alternator. It fused out because it was sprayed with superheated steam from a fractured pipe. Their chief and first engineer have both been boiled alive by the same steam, the third has been crushed to death and they’ll need help to put things right.’

  Andrew looked at Nico, his eyes wide and his dour Calvinist education trying vainly to come to terms with the Italian’s dramatic concepts of fortune. They suddenly seemed to be absolutely accurate after all. ‘I should think they will need help,’ said Andrew feelingly. ‘When we come alongside I’ll have to go across myself. And I’ll take Harry Piper my third engineer along with me. He’s young but he’s keen. It’ll be good experience for him. That’ll leave Lloyd Swan, my number two, to look after you until I get back.’

  ‘Would you like to take Jamie Curtis as well?’ asked Robin. ‘The experience would be good for him too.’

  ‘Aye. He’s another one who’s bright and keen. For a deck cadet. He’ll do to carry any messages back and forth that I mightn’t want to broadcast.’

  Andrew’s eyes met Nico’s. The pair of them looked across at their captain and she met their gazes imperturbably. ‘Are you suggesting that all might not be well aboard our sister ship?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘It’s Nico,’ answered Andrew. ‘He’s got me thinking that maybe she’s bad luck.’

  *

  They saw her lights within the hour and slowed to a crawl while Robin talked to Captain Black first on the radio and then on the walkie-talkie. With the deck lights on and the searchlight atop the stubby communications mast just behind the forepeak blazing at full power, it was possible to judge how far the wind had pushed her into the mush ice and smaller floes along the edge of the icefield. The night was nearly over, and the storm likewise. Tall waves still rolled up from the south-east and it was these as much as anything that kept the edge of the ice broken up. When dawn eventually heaved itself up into view, Robin reckoned it would reveal the taming of the big seas down to ripples in a mile or so by the solid weight of the ice. But there was still some time to go until sunrise, and there was much to be done before it. Andrew McTavish, Harry Piper and Jamie Curtis were all dressed in bright orange survival gear and ready to go across. They would be using one of the lifeboats and, never one to waste effort, Robin was sending a cable across with them.

  Jamie stood out in the gusty dark under the forward port side lifeboat. It was a raw morning still capable of flinging unexpected squalls of rain and hail into the unwary face, but the savagery had gone out of the wind and things seemed to be improving. The young cadet was excited. This seemed to him to be one of those adventures which had peopled his dreams of the seafaring life. Even when the wind forgot to gust and flap around him, the noise was still incredible. The ice groaned and clashed and rumbled as it heaved. It was solid enough to thunder as one piece jarred down off a wave back onto the edge of another. It was fragile enough to have bubbles, pockets and chambers of air trapped within it, air which fountained out in invisible geysers as the restless ice crust rose and fell, roaring like the breath of monsters trapped below. There was a smell to it — if one was unwise enough to sniff and risk deep-freezing the adenoids. There was an atmosphere to it, of wildness and mystery, of being at a great frontier. There was a romance to it which even the massive darkness beyond the lights could not cloak.

  Joe Edwards’ hand thumped down on Jamie’s shoulder and the big seaman gestured up to the lifeboat. Together they released it and the gravity davits swung it down and out. Then Joe held the tricing-in pendant, keeping the boat close to the rail while Jamie released part of the cover and scrambled in. So confident and nimble was he about the little vessel now that it was strange for him to recall that it was less than twenty-four hours ago that he had fallen off the whalebacked bow. He turned just in time to see the engineers scramble past Joe, then Nico appeared and took the tricing-in line until Joe had climbed aboard too.

  As soon as they were settled, the first officer hit the release and the lifeboat slithered down the falls, the speed of its descent automatically controlled by the centrifugal brakes. In the lee of Clotho the sea was still enough for the lifeboat to kiss the surface and bob as though sitting in a millpond while Joe busied himself about starting the compression ignition engine. Once it was running smoothly, they cut themselves off from their mother ship and began to move through the freezing water. At first their progress was easy, unimpeded by ice and undisturbed by swell. They ran down Clotho’s side and paused under the overhang of her stem as a great looped end of cable was lowered to them. This was not the towing cable itself; had that monster been lowered to them, it would have pushed them straight to the bottom of the sea.

  With the cable safely secured, Joe turned the lifeboat’s head towards Atropos and off they went. It continued easy sailing to begin with. The first strain on the little craft came from the drag of the cable she was pulling, but wisely foreseeing that the short voyage would not be all that easy in any case, Robin had sent a buoyant line with them which bobbed merrily in their wake, almost luminescently orange in the brightness of the lights. Next, they met the ice. A thin crust first, which whispered under the bow; then little pieces big enough to hiss and thump quietly. They had little more than twenty metres to traverse but soon the chief engineer had caught up the boat’s oars and was using them handily, reaching over the bow to push baby ice floes out of the lifeboat’s path. Jamie had thought they would be flat and round like frozen lily pads, but he found inste
ad that the small ice floes were shaped like anvils. They had thin necks near the water with broad shoulders beneath the surface and bulbous heads above. At the edge of the pack it was like sailing through a sea of solid, slightly grubby little thunderclouds.

  It was not until they reached the tall black side of the stricken ship that the third obstacle was revealed. This far away from Clotho’s shelter, the waves rose high enough to have the lifeboat rising and falling considerably, waves which curved, not into breakers, but into hills and valleys which slammed up and down against Atropos’s flank. Even Joe’s evident skill could not stop the little craft from being thrown against the forbidding steel cliff several times as they explored along the length of it, looking for a way to get aboard.

  At last, near the bow, where the ice was getting threateningly thick and the waves dangerously high, they found the end of a Jacob’s ladder dangling just above the sea, its upper reaches lost in sinister, silent darkness. Not that it would have been possible to hear anything but the loudest whistle down here among the cacophony of warring, roaring ice in any case. It would clearly be impossible for any one of them to carry the line aboard and so Andrew told Harry and Jamie to secure it to the bottom-most rung while Joe held the boat still and the chief himself fended off the ship on one side and the ice on the other. When it was tied, the three who were going aboard scrambled up, certain that it would be easy enough to pull up the ladder, and the line along with it, as soon as they were safely on deck. And so it proved, though they did not need to do the work themselves. Atropos’s first officer was there with a little team of men ready to get the line up to the windlass and the tow rope pulled aboard. In the meantime, Jamie and the engineers ran on down the deck. They had no need of a guide, of course: this ship was identical to their own ship.