The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Captain.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hogg?’

  ‘You did say you’d left Captain Black outside the captain’s quarters?’

  Robin took a deep breath. The tone of the question made it perfectly obvious what was coming next. ‘He’d gone by the time your men got there?’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I’m sorry, Mr Hogg, but you just drew the short straw. Take your men and search this ship from stem to stern. If you find him, lock him up. If you don’t, then report to me. Either way, I want to see you here again one more time before you go to bed.’

  He looked, literally, mutinous. She could hardly blame him. It was the end of a viciously long period of unbroken watchkeeping for him. Even though it was a glorified harbour watch, he had nevertheless been in charge of the bridge since she and Timmins had gone on her first inspection. He was clearly all in. But who else was there to turn to? Timmins was out for the count, and apart from Harry Stone, Hogg was the only other deck officer aboard. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hogg,’ she said gently. ‘If there was anyone else to turn to, I’d let you get some well-earned rest. But there’s no one. And he must be found. As he is, he’s a danger to himself and anyone he meets. He could even do the ship some damage, you know.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, Hogg,’ said Stone. ‘If Tightship goes outside, he’ll freeze to death in a couple of minutes. You got to try at least. Come on, the guy’s your uncle, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’ll come too,’ offered LeFever. ‘I can catch up on my beauty sleep while the rest of you are juggling with propellers the same size as house fronts.’

  Hogg shrugged petulantly and the three of them went. Stone turned in the doorway. ‘I’ve left it all on open channels,’ he said. ‘Anything incoming, any contact at all, and she’ll light up like a fireworks display. I’ll keep a walkie-talkie with me so you can call me back here at once.

  When they were gone, Ann and Robin walked back through into the wheelhouse. Robin crossed to the log book and signed on. ‘I’m on watch,’ she said to Ann. ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’

  ‘I hate being on my own on this ship quite enough without going into a cabin alone knowing there’s a woman-hating coke head on the loose.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Robin, you amaze me sometimes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ann smiled at her and shrugged. ‘Never mind.’

  A little after one, Hogg came in to say that they could find no trace of Captain Black. At that, Ann decided to stay the night on the bridge. ‘Tell me what you plan to do if no help arrives,’ she said, and Robin described the plans she was beginning to firm up in her mind. Then she had to describe to her relentlessly inquisitive friend the communications system they had in place on the ships.

  It was an extension of the system they had set up to monitor the Heritage Mariner tanker fleet and it was basically divided into manual and automatic, ship-based and shore-based. The ships had radio transceivers with standard wide-range facilities to communicate with other ships, port facilities, home base and anyone else who happened to be listening on the operational frequency. They also had automatic identification signal facilities which transmitted the ship’s call sign in Morse, like the standard guidance buoys near harbour mouths and shipping lanes. These were supposed to register on radios tuned to the right wavelengths even over great distances, and were designed to give head office an idea of the whereabouts of their ships. In the current conditions, however, all radio traffic in high latitudes was being disrupted, so there was no guarantee that the call signs were being registered any more than the standard transmissions.

  There were other systems aboard — the satellite systems. The satnav system was designed to place the ship to within feet on the earth’s surface. It did this by broadcasting a signal to a low-orbit satellite which compared the source of the signal with a map of the world and gave back the correct co-ordinates. Heritage Mariner were pioneering a system by which the satellite would broadcast the required information not only to the ship but to the big dishes atop Heritage House. That way, every time one of their ships checked position, the big map would be automatically updated. But the system wasn’t in place yet. For the time being they had to be content with the third system, which was land-based but also involved satellites. In this system, the low-orbit weather and old spy satellites whose functions had now been extended to civilian use could survey specific areas of the earth’s surface in great detail so that thermal images could be read through cloud cover —something as big as a supertanker would register through quite heavy cloud cover. Or, if they got clear skies, it was quite possible to enhance photographs of the ground, and the ocean, until actual vessels and their immediate surroundings could be seen. Then these pictures could be despatched to ships to be married in with weather maps and navigational charts, to give a very accurate impression of the ship’s position. By definition, as these went through head office before they reached the ship, they were used to update the information in the office’s computers.

  But it was the onboard equipment that most captains preferred to rely on. Robin laughed and reminded Ann that John Higgins, with whom the American reporter had sailed on the ill-fated Napoli, still preferred to use his sextant rather than his satnav and he was by no means alone.

  But mentioning John and Napoli brought gloom back into the picture. Both women were too well aware that the court case would have been heard in the law courts within the last thirty-six hours, and they both regretted poignantly the fact that it was impossible to pick up even the BBC World Service on the radio. Ann gave a bitter grunt of amusement.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed? No, I guess you haven’t been aboard long enough. Mentioning satellites made me think.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We don’t even have a TV aboard. Tightship’s rules. No mollycoddling the crew. I mean we may not be able to pick up any radio stations, but we’d certainly be able to pick up a TV station or two, even up here.’

  ‘Never mind. We’ll think of something.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything except bed at the moment.’

  ‘Use mine in the room behind the chart room. I promise to warn you if I see Captain Black.’

  On her own at last, Robin sat back in the watchkeeper’s chair and allowed herself to wonder. How the case had turned out. How Richard and the children were. Where Richard was if he wasn’t in Heritage House, waiting for news of her, and what he was up to. How her father was, and how he was taking yet more bad news — God, she hoped Clotho was still afloat somewhere and the brave officers and friends aboard were all all right. But most of all, she wondered how in heaven’s name they were going to get Atropos out of the mess she was in. It was all very well to talk glibly about putting on a new propeller but it would be an incredibly difficult and dangerous undertaking. She had only mentioned it for the sake of morale. She would only think of actually trying it in the direst of emergencies, if there was no other help being promised and nothing else to be done. But this was a bad position. The ice barrier they were tied to made any attempt to reach them from the south almost impossible. The conditions of the last week made it certain that every port to the north of them — and they were few and far between — was iced up solid. The only help she could envisage was for an icebreaker to come round one end of the barrier or the other and work along the top of it until contact was made.

  She stirred herself on that thought and went to record the state of sky and sea for the log. The temperature was plunging and through the solidly fogged windows she could see so little of the moonlit night that a visit onto the starboard bridge wing would have to be undertaken. It seemed such a bore to get all dressed up, but she did so. She was conscientious, and the observation needed to be made.

  Steeling herself, she slipped outside and crossed the bridge wing to look out towards the Davis Strait. It was so cold out here that she stayed only an instant. But she saw a
full, low moon shining on a vivid expanse of gathering white coming down at her over the horizon, swamping the black water like a great wave breaking infinitely slowly. Then she was back in the wheelhouse and she realised she had been holding her breath, the air had been so cold.

  What she had seen allowed her not only to fill in the log but to return to her speculation. Any icebreaker coming up to pull them to safety was going to have to come in from the east. In a very short time indeed, the west was going to be closed off by that slowly-nearing icefield. And that ruled out almost all hope of help from the American seaboard. Even if Belle Isle was still free, a rescue vessel coming out of Labrador any later than tonight would have to sail all the way to Kap Farvel before turning round and coming on back for Atropos. Robin didn’t want to imagine how long that would take — or how much it would cost. Perhaps trying to replace the propeller wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

  She was going through the logistics of it when she fell asleep. And her sleep was so deep that she did not even stir when the radio room lit up — not quite as brightly as a fireworks display, and nowhere near as noisily. While she slumbered on, in the quiet little room behind her the signal strength indicator lit up. Numbers flashed onto the liquid crystal display. The radio began to whisper, almost inaudibly beneath a waterfall of static interference.

  ... dash dot dash dot dot dash dot dot dash dash dash ...

  ...C L O C L O C L O...

  *

  The only thing that Bob Black ever thought about, really, was heroin. Where to get it, how much to pay for it, how to cut it, how to prepare it, how to inject it. After he had injected, he could get on with his duties for a while but even as he did so, at the back of his mind he would be thinking about it. In the first rush of freedom he would think how he was strong enough to give it up — how he was strong enough to do anything, in fact. But as soon as the rush wore off he would begin to think about the next fix, long before he began to feel the need for it, before the craving set in. Long before the benefit of the present fix ran out, he would be thinking about the next one. How was he going to afford it? Where would he find a supplier? How much would the fix cost? How would he cut it? How could he inject it?

  This situation had not been going on for long. No one, not even a man as single-minded and cunning — and just plain lucky — as Bob Black could captain a ship for long without his habit becoming known ashore. Before the death of his wife and son in an automobile accident little more than a year earlier, he had only been an alcoholic. One of those cunning alcoholics who are impossible to detect. He had switched almost without thinking from Bourbon to vodka when he started keeping it on the bridge. He worked out a routine which was not noticeably different from a normal shipboard captain’s routine, but one which fitted in a nip here and a snort there. He was a naturally taciturn man so nobody noticed when the black dog hangover was on him and it was only if he went too far at the other extreme and became almost expansive that anyone raised an eyebrow. He nurtured his reputation for distant authoritarianism and aloof rudeness. He surrounded himself with men who would have noticed little even had he been more obvious in his addiction: Timmins, who was a kind of puppet; Hogg, who was his nephew.

  Later, when Mamie and young Luke were buried and the clear liquid had been replaced by the white powder in his veins, he added Reynolds to his team, accepting him with open arms for the very reasons that everyone else had rejected him. ‘Typical of old Bob Black,’ they had said, ‘wanting to lick the Wide Boy into shape.’ But the boot of course had been on the other foot and it had been the young dog teaching the old dog new tricks. The simple techniques Black had used to hide one addiction served equally well to hide the other, although he had come close to giving himself away. This voyage, for instance, Reynolds had warned him of a price increase immediately before sailing and it had only been by selling the ship’s televisions and video machines that Black had been able to make up the difference. But again, the Tightship reputation had proved excellent camouflage. ‘Doesn’t want to spoil the crew, typical ...’ But he had known as he had done it that this was the last straw. Someone somewhere ashore, even in the corporate shambles left after Dan Williams’ death in Belfast, was going to notice that the televisions and videos which had come off Atropos during the extra hours she was delayed in port had simply gone missing.

  The Wide Boy had been as cunning as his captain. He held the cards but he never played them too obviously. He took orders, and insults, like the rest. He did what he was told and never abused his position. Why should he? He was more than seaman enough to handle his duties and he was greedy, not lazy. He knew, too, as well as Black did, that this was a berth which would not last for ever. There would be other postings on other ships before he retired to his mansion in Las Vegas or wherever. It was one thing for people to gossip; it was another for them to point the finger and give examples, dates and times. Reynolds wanted anyone pointing at him to be saying, ‘Now there’s a fine seaman and an excellent young officer.’ The Wide Boy was just starting out. He needed to toe the line a little. He had never given Black enough for more than one fix at a time. He had other customers and other things aboard and he didn’t want to risk Black getting holier than thou. And being young and full of life — and on a roll —it had never occurred to the young, cunning, efficient and increasingly rich third officer that he would die in a storm at sea.

  It had never occurred to Black that his ill-tempered order to check the cargo would cost him his supplier and his supply. How in hell’s name could a man sent into the holds contrive to get himself washed overboard, even in a storm like that? He had had no conception that the loss of his supply would have this kind of effect on him. He had remained a man of fierce dignity even in the grip of his addictions, but then he had never had to face a morning in the cold knowledge of cold turkey. His pride, his character, any thought of any self-worth were all gone beneath the rabid craving. He was hardly capable of any thought at all, in fact, except Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?

  He had eluded Hogg’s desultory search with ease and had gone through the bridgehouse. His destruction of Reynolds’ room and its aftermath had taught his craving to be cunning. He wasn’t wrecking as he went this time, he was hiding even the evidence that he had looked. The only parts of the ship’s accommodation which had been barred to him since midnight had been those places where people congregated. And those he had searched when the multitudes of the two crews currently aboard were fast asleep — when everyone was asleep, in fact, and only his need kept him awake.

  Now he turned away from the noise and brightness in the radio shack and tiptoed past the sleeping figure in the watchkeeper’s chair out of the wheelhouse, his bare feet making no sound on the linoleum, and nothing to mark his ghostly passing except the whisper of silk dressing gown against the mahogany doorframe leading out into the corridor.

  If it wasn’t on the bridge — and a glimmering of intelligence confirmed that it could never have been hidden there — then it must be outside. Unknowingly, he began to trace the course of Robin’s inspection with Timmins, out onto the rear decks below the navigation bridge, by the funnel and down. Such was the all-consuming power of the need which was driving him, he noticed nothing at all of the splendour of the night through which he was stealing. He did not notice the setting moon magnified to spectacular size and brightness by the supernatural clarity of the quiet polar air. He did not notice the stars hanging like fairy lights just above his head. Reality had retreated so far from his view that he took it as a matter of no remark that he could see as well as if it were day, except that colour was all frosted into bluey monochrome. He did not notice the size of the night, spread out all around him from horizon to horizon, or the way incredible distance was seemingly brought near, his vision magically extended by the clarity of the air. The ice burned in shades of sapphire from electric neon to Stygian syenite. The barrier swept away like a range of lapis mountains to the south, their peaks seeming to contain
cold fire like the volcanoes of the planet Pluto. The ice crept down from the north, a field of restless ultramarine and indigo riven with webs of water as black as interstellar space. He saw none of it, but he heard the distant ice floes boom in the silence and the throb of the alternators grumble like a thunderstorm all around him. The stillness of the air was like the first intimation of a scream, and the minute he breathed it in, he began to die.

  Everything he touched blistered his naked skin but the nerve endings were numb with frostbite so he never noticed. Like a terminal leper he moved over the decks and down the companionways, destroying himself but never knowing. By the time he took the ladder down behind the funnel, he was leaving tracks of frozen blood upon the metal, for all the skin on palms and insteps had been stripped off layer by layer. He fell and tumbled down the wide stairway beside the wide gymnasium windows because he was shaking too much to stand. But he had been shaking ever since withdrawal set in, so he didn’t really notice this either. Lying there, face down upon the patterned wood of the boarded deck, unaware that his cheeks were white with frost, he looked along the ridges thrown into such spectacular relief by the moonlight, and he noticed that a catch was standing up. A little circular catch like a ring set into the deck. It should have been lying flat but it was standing up and gleaming.

  It was the catch that removed part of the cover from the empty pool. Hope surged through the prone body, such a fierce, hot surge of hope that it pulled the captain onto his knees no matter how much of his face was left behind. And he crawled over to the catch and lifted it, hissing with the power of his desire. He had trouble jerking his finger from the little metal ring but his desire would not be denied. He could not feel the fingers which prised the trap door up. He could not feel the steps into the shallow end beneath his buttocks and back as he slid down them, taking extra care to replace the deck section immediately above his head.