The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘So I still want a sample so I can find out what did kill them.’

  Surprisingly, a sullen silence fell then, as though Henri resented the big man’s unthinking assumption of authority. Perhaps he did, thought Ann with a shock. Henri certainly wasn’t about to go scurrying off to find a bucket. She suddenly felt deflated, as though the excitement of her arrival back had caused a negative reaction somehow. Or perhaps her brief adventure away and especially her time with Colin and Kate had given her a new perspective on Atropos and what was happening aboard her.

  The impasse was solved by the arrival of the tea tray. They each took a steaming mug. As the steward turned to go, Robin said, ‘Come back with a bucket and some rope at the double, would you, please?’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’ The young steward hurried off.

  As he vanished back into the bridgehouse, the air was filled with thunder once again.

  Robin flinched, looking up at the slopes and then down along her deck to her all too fragile docking lines, but this was no icequake.

  With astonishing abruptness, the five of them found themselves at the heart of an overpowering blizzard of screaming white bodies. Thousands of seabirds, a flock seemingly ten times larger than the one which had swept past them in the lifeboat, plunged down out of the sky. The air shook with them and the sea exploded as though an eruption had taken place just below the surface. The five of them turned and ran back towards the bridgehouse, cups of tea flying right and left.

  Before they had taken half a dozen steps they were out of the babel of birds. Immediately they turned and looked back. The shrieking cloud of whirring wings and flashing yellow razor bills was settling clear of the forecastle head. The ravenous creatures were plunging down below, tearing the shoal of dead fish to ribbons, grabbing and gulping in a frenzy. The spectacle accorded strangely with the savagery of the setting and added to the sombre atmosphere. They stood silently — any sound would have been lost in any case — and watched. It was only when the young steward came panting up to his captain with a now redundant bucket that the grim spell was broken.

  ‘So much for samples,’ said Henri flatly and turned to walk away.

  Robin had too much to do to linger and so it was left to Ann to take her guests down to the galley and arrange replacement tea and a warmer welcome. ‘They aren’t usually so abrupt,’ she found herself apologising. ‘But you can see what stress we’re all under.’

  *

  Colin Ross did not suffer fools gladly. He was a man of strong and abrupt character and it was every bit as uncompromising as his profile. Years of work on the ice had chiselled great valleys into the flesh of his face while tanning his skin like leather. His mouth turned down at the corners and the lines which fell from the peaks of his high cheekbones to the outer edges of his square chin paralleled those which plunged from his lip corners. He had had enough of this ship and her crew very soon indeed. He was fascinated to look around it and to meet some of the people Ann had told him about, but Kate and he were neither needed nor particularly welcome here. If the situation should change to demand that the crew go up onto the ice, then the two glaciologists would have a function and a reason for staying. As the current aim was to get Atropos and all aboard her as far away from the berg as possible, they had none. What they did have was a camp and important work across the other side of the iceberg. And, suddenly, a reason to do an unexpected series of tests on their ice home to check whether LeFever was right and the iceberg was indeed radioactive.

  After they had finished their tea, he was restless to be gone. His mood had more of an effect on Ann than it did on Kate. Ann did not know him well enough to make allowances for his almost rude demeanour. Kate knew his whole manner would undergo an apparently miraculous change the moment his interest or enthusiasm became engaged. She saw all too clearly that their expertise might well be needed yet. She therefore insisted on a conducted tour of the ship and Ann was glad to grant her wish.

  They went back up onto the deck just in time to see the gantry arrive back at its furthest point, immediately in front of the bridgehouse. The cab at the front of the folded swan’s neck of the crane arm slowly began to move. The propeller was hanging from beneath it. They watched, fascinated, as the cab with its massive burden inched out towards the port side. Such was the weight of the propeller that the whole hull began to tilt beneath their feet and the hawsers holding the ship in place began to hum and spit. ‘Stop!’ called Colin automatically, but his voice was drowned by a blast on the ship’s siren. This was clearly a signal and the crane did indeed stop. Slowly, the ship righted herself and Colin’s dark brooding began to lighten. ‘She’s shifting the ballast to compensate,’ he said to himself. Then he swung round to face Ann. ‘She’s quite an officer, this captain of yours. Mariner. I know the name ...’

  As Atropos came upright, Ann was happy enough to tell Colin all she knew about the Mariners. This was more than enough to cover the second extension of the crane and this time the propeller cleared the deck rails and began to disappear over the side. Colin kept his eye on it and seemed to be growing tenser and tenser the further it was lowered. But just as Ann became certain that he was no longer listening to her at all, the siren signalled stop once more. The telltale sound of ballast shifting back again completed the manoeuvre. The weight of the propeller pulled the ship over until the blades settled on the ice. The slow paying out of the crane’s cable relieved the ship of its weight and allowed Atropos to right herself.

  In the still silence after the manoeuvre was completed, Colin, Kate and Ann crossed over to the port side and looked down. The propeller sat safely on the ice with teams of men releasing it from the forward crane and more teams ready to reattach it to the falls of the stores crane on the poop deck. ‘She’s really thought this through,’ observed Colin, and this time there was no disguising the admiration in his voice. Ann caught a glowing glance from Kate which turned into a dazzling smile when their eyes met.

  The moment was interrupted in the most unexpected way. The birds, having devoured the dead fish, had mostly disappeared again, but not all had gone. Like scouts left behind by an army, one or two birds lingered, greedy eyes on the lookout for food, tempted by the occasional crust or biscuit from the workers. Those that stayed used the cliff as a kind of eyrie, for it was not as absolute a precipice as it seemed and there were ledges and crannies in plenty for the birds. Just as Colin, Kate and Ann turned away from their contemplation of the propeller, a little feathered body dropped at their feet. It didn’t fly in and it didn’t land. It fell out of the sky as though it had been shot and hit the green metal of the deck with enough force to bounce. They automatically looked up as though, having snowed a feeding frenzy, it might now start raining corpses. But no. This small body was all there was to see. Colin bent down from his tremendous height and scooped it tenderly into his right hand. He straightened slowly and held it up close to his eyes as though he was short-sighted. ‘It’s a little auk,’ he rumbled. His left hand, rendered almost club-like by the heavy mitten, stroked the little corpse with infinite compassion.

  ‘I didn’t know they just dropped dead like that,’ said Ann, shocked anew by the relentless savagery of the place.

  ‘They don’t,’ said Kate. ‘Or, if they do, it’s very rare.’

  ‘I don’t think this little chap died a natural death,’ said Colin. ‘Look.’

  He held the corpse out for Kate’s inspection but Ann craned over to see what was to be seen. At first she could make out nothing wrong. Then, as Kate stripped off her mitten and moved the floppy little head on its rubbery, apparently boneless neck, the American journalist saw something which her society had made all too commonplace among humans, though it was the first time she had ever seen it in the animal world. The irises of the dead bird’s eyes were a bright yellow gold in colour and they glinted in the late morning sunshine like coins. The pupils at their centres were so tiny as to be almost invisible, shrunk to minuscul
e black dots smaller than pinheads. Ann caught her breath, shook her head and looked again, more closely. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she said.

  Colin and Kate Ross exchanged long looks which were suddenly full of suspicion. They glanced around the deck as though someone might overhear their thoughts and add them to a hit list for murder. Ann noticed nothing of this, so struck was she by the state of the dead bird’s eyes.

  ‘It looks to me,’ she said, ‘as though the poor little bastard OD’d.’

  Colin placed the tiny corpse in the pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll test it when we get back to camp,’ he said, his voice as deadpan as his face.

  Ann thought he couldn’t have understood her American slang. ‘OD’d,’ she persisted. ‘It looks as though he died of a drug overdose.’

  ‘I think the fish died of the overdose,’ said Colin Ross quietly, ‘and the bird died from eating the fish.’

  The three of them looked up at the cliff face and there was not a gull in sight. Ann opened her mouth to say more, but before she could speak, the ship began to tilt once again and the same process by which the propellor had been lowered over the side swung it back aboard hanging from the stores crane behind the bridgehouse. With incredibly delicate precision, the hand at the crane’s controls brought the weight exactly onto the line of balance midships, then lowered it out beyond the stern rail so that it could be attached to the main shaft. Once it was resting in place, ready to be skewered and properly attached, Robin called a break for lunch and everyone piled back aboard.

  *

  ‘You know it’s a Bank Holiday in England today? Nobody works.’

  ‘Thanks, lady, that’s really heartening news,’ Lethbridge growled.

  Kate Ross stood on the middle level of the scaffolding. The thick ring at the centre of the propellor was being eased over the end of the main shaft. It was an operation requiring the utmost skill and total accuracy. The rods and gears of the variable pitch mechanism, which came up through the centre of the shaft, had to meet up with their counterparts at the bases of the propeller blades projecting in through the circumference of the ring. Each line and cog had to be attached and tested before the big boss was screwed back into place and the ship was relaunched. Kate had quickly decided that Chief Lethbridge and she were two of a kind. She had a dry sense of humour which became more robust under pressure. So did Lethbridge. She liked to use her tongue while concentrating on what her hands were doing. So did he. His expertise was being exercised on making good the engineering components before him. Hers was being exercised on him.

  Colin had pointed out with malice aforethought that one of her doctorates was actually in human biology — though she concentrated on sea creatures nowadays — and she was an able and gifted physician. Ann had backed him up enthusiastically, innocently, unaware of the deeper dealings he was engaged in. So instead of discussing with the captain in her quarters the problems of drugged fish and dead birds, Kate was checking the scalded flesh of the chief engineer’s face as he was putting the propeller in place. It was an unhandy arrangement and hardly suited to the time or the circumstances but both of them were willing to put up with it. In fact it allowed Lethbridge to concentrate more fiercely on the task in hand. The simple act of pulling back his hood in the chill air gave unexpected relief to his scalded cheeks. Kate had not come equipped with any medicine or ointments of course, but she was more able than Robin or Henri to make best use of the medical supplies aboard Atropos.

  *

  ‘Yes. There has been trouble with drugs aboard.’ Robin’s voice was bitter and she was trying her hardest not to let this importunate stranger know how much of her irritation was directed at him. She knew well enough that her presence at the locating of the propeller would be little more than politic, but she was poignantly aware of how important politics could be on occasion. Lethbridge and his team would certainly be the better for her presence. They would work faster. She very much wanted to be afloat and under power tonight. The icequake this morning had emphasised all too strongly the danger of staying here another night.

  But there was no doubting Colin Ross’s genuine concern nor the fact that he was right to be worried. At the least conventional moment, just when she needed to concentrate all her faculties, all her powers of command, on getting the propeller in place and the hull back in the water, she was being pulled aside and forced to confront a situation she had hoped to sweep under the carpet until a less critical moment.

  She began to explain the problems which had revolved around Captain Black and Reynolds. Then she added for good measure the problems they had also had with La Guerre Verte. He listened with patience and then nodded. ‘No matter where they came from or why they were aboard, it looks as though your drugs were jettisoned last night.’

  ‘I agree. I just can’t work out who or why.’

  ‘Either it’s someone trying to inflate the market or it’s someone who has something of his own to hide. Like your eco-terrorist.’

  ‘Or someone getting rid of a job lot,’ said Robin, but she was not really concentrating on the conversation.

  Colin knew this and understood why. He had been impressed with the way she had thought things through this morning and he was well aware that she had pressing concerns. Where he might have been irritated to be ignored by a lesser person, Robin’s preoccupation was not in the slightest offensive to him. He was all too aware that such a preoccupation was one of his own greatest faults. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Your first priority must be to get the hull afloat. You can hold an enquiry into the murder of a couple of hundred fish and birds later.’

  ‘I’ve held one full enquiry already and searched the ship from stem to stern. We don’t have the time to do more at the moment. The American woman Joan Hennessy seems to have been on Clotho.’ She paused, and shivered with revulsion at the thought of what Richard had had to deal with. Then she went on, ‘But she’s not there any more. Any confederate she has aboard here is too well disguised for us to find. And in any case, it would seem pretty stupid for an eco-terrorist to sink a shipload of nuclear waste in the middle of the ocean.’

  ‘So why bring bombs aboard?’

  ‘The only reason I can think of is that the ships would sink in their harbours.’

  ‘Then why tell everybody?’

  ‘As far as I can judge, the story broke the day after we were due in dock.’

  ‘I see. But that was days ago and in the meantime nothing has happened. So even if there is someone aboard, they haven’t set the bomb after all. That’s good thinking.’

  ‘I’m relieved you see things so clearly from my point of view,’ she said dryly.

  He grinned. It was not a particularly ingratiating grin.

  ‘And drugs in the water are less important than drugs still aboard,’ she admitted. ‘So I’ll worry about the identity and motivation of whoever threw a fortune into the ocean later.’ She pulled herself to her feet. ‘Please don’t think I’m not grateful, Dr Ross, both for bringing Ann back and for bringing this to my attention —’

  Her words were drowned beneath a sudden barrage of heavy artillery which seemed to open in the near distance and roar overhead. The whole ship shook and Robin was hurled back into her chair. As soon as it had started it was finished, leaving nothing behind but its echo reverberating between the ice cliffs.

  The two of them were in motion at once. Robin pushed through the door and Colin Ross followed. Side by side they reached the after rail on the poop deck and looked down on the scaffolding. Robin expected to see a repeat of the wreckage which had so nearly crippled Richard, but all there was for her to see was a lot of white faces. ‘It won’t take another one like that, Captain,’ said Lethbridge.

  The fact that he had said it so loudly in front of the rest of the crew emphasised the depth of his concern.

  ‘I know, Chief. Let’s get the screw in place and get under way, shall we?’

  ‘Just as soon as we can, Captain.’

  ‘Dr Ross, I think
that’s all you can do for us at the moment; we’ve quite a bit to sort out for ourselves.’ Robin had finally exhausted the meagre store of courtesy she had left.

  ‘I see that very clearly, Captain. I’ll just pop down to avail myself of an isolation vessel from Mr LeFever so that I can preserve my dead bird, then I’ll take my leave, if I may. I have a job to do on the far side of the berg and a camp that won’t stand up to these quakes too well. But remember, we’re only an hour away if you need us.’

  Kate and Colin Ross turned back at the crest of the slipway and worked their way down the side of the ice shelf under the dizzying reach of the cliff. There was a beach here which seemed to be made of slightly opaque crystal. It was covered with rocks and boulders, rock pools and sand drifts like any other beach, but it all seemed to be made of glass in greater or less densities of opacity and dirt. All up the cliff foot behind them, bands of earth debris went back into the ice face itself. When picking up the isolation vessel for his dead bird, Colin had taken a Geiger counter and promised to warn the ship if they found any above-average radioactivity. It ticked away sinisterly every time the huge glaciologist turned it on, confirming LeFever’s findings that the ice was mildly radioactive, in this bay at least. But there was nothing strong enough to be dangerous. It might have been a leak from the ship, but then again it could have been radon from the granite dust in the dark, dirty debris all around them.

  In thoughtful silence, they returned to the crest at the top of the slipway. Here they turned and looked back down at the bustle around Atropos for the last time. High on the poop, beside the jack staff with its drooping flag, stood the lone figure of Ann Cable. Sun glinted on the lenses of the binoculars which had followed every step of their little exploration. Kate made an elaborate pantomime gesture, Nothing to worry about. Colin raised his right hand in a farewell salute. Then the two of them turned and moved away. Almost immediately they fell into a fast, economical cross-country skier’s lope which pulled them over the ice at better than five miles an hour. Neither of them said anything. Both of them were worried about Atropos and the people they were leaving aboard her.