Goose out of Gander, that’s how the skipper had described the discovery of the drifting vessel. Not a thoroughbred horse, but a beaten up flying boat working past retirement. The Mary Alice had been spotted by a Grumman Goose amphibian flying out Gander, Newfoundland, heading north by north east for the coast of Greenland with a scientific survey party. The call had brought a change of duty for the Canadian Coastguard Cutter Cape Roger and she switched from Fisheries to Search and Rescue. She put her bow south by west towards the Labrador coast and the engine room shoved the diesels against the line. At a shade over 62 metres and 1,255 tons she hammered south at 17 knots while her engineer tried to push her harder by sheer force of will. The best time over distance they could hope for was nine hours and when the drifting wreck hove into view Jack Cocker and his crew began to deploy a boat from the fast davits. Cape Roger hove to eighty yards off with the derelict drifting in the lee of her hull and Cocker read the name stencilled on the cabin side through his binoculars. Mary Alice out of Lewisporte rolled gently with the swell as the wind nudged her along. Cape Roger’s skipper, Lisel Brockhart, conned the ship and Cocker and his team dropped the boat on the lee side. The ninety horse power Evinrude kicked first time and coughed blue smoke along the length of the 4.5 metre RIB. Jack Cocker released the shackle from the lifting harness and Stan Kowalski opened the throttles. The youngster of the team, Jimmy Oldfield, with barely a year’s service stood behind Kowalski and held onto the backrest of single seat console. Cocker swayed with the motion of the boat as it cleared the lee of the Cape Roger and wrapped the painter around his hand. He held it like the reins of a horse as they drew alongside the sea-worn hull of the fishing boat where a peeling bumper sticker on the bulwark declared that "On the seventh day, God went diving," but that was some time ago and after the rubbing strake of the RIB stroked its way along the timbers it said a bit less. The fragments stuck to the Hypalon tube as it buckled under his weight as Cocker steadied himself for the jump. Rubber and wood moved together and he went for it, clearing the bulwark and dropping on to the deck, caught out by the roll of the vessel and the mess smearing the planking he went down, still holding the painter and fetched up heavily against the engine box. The thick effluvia of oil, grease and seawater that slopped sullenly across the deck stained his uniform. He hitched the painter to the nearest cleat and reached for the first aid pack as Oldfield made the leap. Cocker grabbed him as his feet began to slide, "Steady lad," he muttered, "worse than a bloody ice rink this."
"Thanks Chief," Oldfield looked around him. "God, what a mess, what happened?" Stan Kowalski as coxswain stayed with the RIB.
"That's what we're here to find out," Cocker said and nodded towards the stern, "I'll check him out, you take the wheelhouse." He had seen one of the crew wedged between the engine box and the transom. His feet splayed out and his trunk hunched up, thrown down like a rag doll he cradled an aqua-lung cylinder like a child. The wide-open eyes and the look of surprise on his face said it all. Cocker knew the only thing waiting for him was a body bag. He picked his way aft to the figure and crouched beside him then gently closed his eyes. "Poor bastard." Cocker checked the body for injuries and shook his head. Half of the aqua-lung cylinder was missing; the damn thing had blown in two while they were filling it. The thigh was laid open and blood had flowed freely to add to the cocktail swilling around the deck and the cylinder had hit below the breastbone crushing him against the transom.
Oldfield went forward to where the broken wheelhouse door hung on twisted hinges. He dragged the wreckage aside and pushed into the small hut-like structure then backed out quickly and threw up. Cocker heard the commotion, "what's up?"
Ashen faced Oldfield swallowed hard. "The skipper’s in here."
"So what's he like?" Cocker went see for himself.
"Grim." Oldfield said as Cocker pushed past him and stared inside. The skipper was slumped at the wheel, wedged upright where his arms had dropped among the spokes. The wreckage from the door was mixed up with the debris from the roof of the wheelhouse where the other half of the aqualung cylinder had come to rest alongside the compass. The back of his head was split like an eggshell. With the auto-pilot off and the skipper slumped into the wheel the Mary Alice had run until the tanks were dry and then drifted until the Goose out of Gander called the Coastguard.
Cocker’s radio crackled. "Go ahead Skipper,"
Brockhart had skippered the Cape Roger for six months but Cocker still found it weird hearing her voice on the speaker.
The static crackled voice said. "Talk to me Jack," and Cocker outlined the situation.
"What do you need?"
"Body and evidence bags. I don’t think there’s foul play involved, but it isn’t clear cut...”
"It might be useful to get this on disc. It could tell us something we might have missed and judging by the way that she's lying in the water; she may not survive the tow. There's a blow coming up from the South east and we'll have to make for the nearest port."
"OK skipper, how long do we have?"
"Hard to say, time is pressing, we need to get the tow under-way ASAP."
"The boat's on its way back." He said and ordered Oldfield back in, then slipped the painter off the cleat, "get the gear and then we can get to work." Oldfield steadied himself against the tube as the Kowalski opened the throttle and eased the RIB away from the Mary Alice's scuffed paintwork. Cocker unpacked the digital camcorder from his belt and starting at the stern he swept the lens across the scene, zooming in to capture the details and adding a terse commentary to the recording. Sticking to the facts, he left the speculation to others who would study the footage and panned across the littered deck. Whatever had happened to the Mary Alice hadn't done so while she was fishing. The gear was stowed, not tidily, but it wasn't ready to run out. He finished off with the skipper in the wheelhouse and the cylinder fragment in the roof then switched off the camera and packed it away. He eased the skipper from the spokes of the wheel, struggling against the sullen rolling of the hull and by the time the RIB returned he had the body laid out on deck, his uniform and life-jacket smeared with a viscous sludge of blood and tissue; he retched, coughed and spat over the side. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned to meet the RIB. Oldfield stood ready with the painter; Kowalski swung the wheel and eased back on the throttles, giving the stern a little shimmy as the wash built up under the transom. Kowalski twitched the wheel and eased the nose against the timbers, taking another shaving off the bumper sticker as Oldfield tossed the painter across. Cocker had it fast around a cleat as Kowalski slipped the engines into neutral, leaving the Evinrude burbling in tick-over as he reached across from the centre console and grabbed Cocker's outstretched hand to draw the two boats together. The wind had freshened and the movement of the Mary Alice, though still sluggish, was a touch more unpredictable. Oldfield and two Ratings scrambled across with the body bags and began to wrap the bodies of the crew. They were quickly zipped up and ready for transfer to the RIB and the short trip across to the Cape Roger. Respect for the dead isn't straightforward or easy when you're trying to get a loaded body bag across the gap between two boats in a rolling sea. But there was an attempt made to add something to the practicality of what was necessary and the body bags were soon lying on the deck alongside the tubes, feet to stern and out of Kowalski's way where he straddled the console. Oldfield slipped the painter. Once the dead were aboard the Cape Roger she would reposition herself and the RIB would bring across a three-inch hawser that would form the main spring of the tow. Oldfield and Cocker were detailed to secure the tow and while the weather held, stay on board, if the wind strengthened, they would ship back to the Cape Roger. They might have to slip the tow and leave the Mary Alice to the elements, a possibility with the way she was wallowing, Cocker went forward to take up the tow-rope. Twenty minutes of hauling and swearing had the tow secured and Cape Roger took up the slack, she settled on her new course at a steady six knots and eased her bow towards Lewisporte, Newfoundland.
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Two days later they slipped the tow of Mary Alice in her home port and Cocker had gone with the local police to inform the next of kin. The two men from the boat now had names and a story. The skipper, Jed Brunson was forty-six, a fisherman since he'd left school and worked as a deck hand, engineer and finally, at forty, with his own boat. The Mary Alice had been his pride, taking everything he had earned to cover the cost of maintaining, running and paying off the bank for the mortgage they had given him to buy her. The payments had been difficult to meet lately and he had turned to other work that occasionally left Mary Alice tied up alongside. When he did fish it was often with any spare hand loitering in the bars or on the dockside looking for a berth. That's how he found Billy White, pushing twenty seven with a broken marriage and years of kicking around the docks and the bars. He had drifted into a relationship with his present girlfriend two years ago and despite attempts to stay ashore he enjoyed life on the boats and White and his girl, Sarah, had come to an understanding. They agreed to one last trip and then look for steady work on shore; that was before the Coastguard brought him home.
Cocker went home to his apartment in a block overlooking the harbour where the view from the window was the only thing that had ever meant anything. The sea had always been there and the women who had tried to share his life over the years, none for more than a few months at a time, had eventually realised that he would go whenever it called and they would have to wait or leave; so they left and the sea remained. Cocker pushed open the door and dropped his kit bag in the hall, let the door swing shut and went straight into the kitchen. He switched on the light of the cooker hood and it splashed his reflection on the kitchen window, blending it with the lights from the harbour below. He spooned Brazilian decaf into the filter machine and switched it on. Leaving the machine to gurgle the water through the filter he went through into the living room and found a half-full bottle of scotch nestling alongside the sofa and carried it back to the kitchen. He stared out of the window until the coffee was ready, poured it strong and black into a mug and added a splash of scotch. He switched off the light and stood in the darkness to drink, sipping the scotch coffee and letting its warmth settle in his belly. He dumped the empty mug on the worktop, stripped his clothes into the washer and went to bed. He slept, crazy pictures crowded his dreams, flickering, flowing and melting into a picture of the young girl at the door cradling the baby as the tears began. The tears smeared her make-up and her features blurred until she became Billy and the kid was the aqua-lung cylinder. Then his face would disintegrate and the girl would be there holding the cylinder. She smiled gently, greeting Cocker and pushed the cylinder towards him. He took the fragment and stood alone, in a vast library, thick with dust and walked between huge walls of books that swayed like wave crests,. Threatening but never breaking. Cocker was lost and needed help and he woke with a start, feeling his heart thud in his chest and stared at the ceiling. The window was opened a couple of inches, the breeze nudged gently past the curtains into the room. He rolled over in bed and lifted the receiver from its cradle and with the same hand punched in the home number for the local dive store. He flopped back and pressed the receiver against his ear, listening to the ring down the line. There was a click and sleepy voice asked. "Hello, who is this," a touch of exasperation at the lateness of the hour, "What do you want?"
"Jenny, it's Jack here, sorry about the time. Can I talk?"
“Jack, it's after three, can't it wait?"
"I know it is I guess I need to talk. Just hear me out, please?" He said. Jack heard the sound of movement down the line and reckoned Jenny was grumbling and making herself comfortable. "OK," she said, "go on."
Jack Cocker told her the story. "…Jenny, what would it take to burst a diving cylinder?"
"Depends on working pressure and test pressure, but that is usually well below the burst pressure."
“Ball park for a fairly typical rig?"
"Well," she drawled sleepily, "the typical working pressure 232 bar, test pressure 345, but you can double or triple that before the cylinder blows apart. 232 is about 3,300 psi, I did read of one tested to destruction that blew at about 9,400."
Jack Cocker shuffled around in bed and settled the receiver more comfortably under his neck, holding it in place with his chin. "That's way beyond the pressure you could pump with a diving compressor, isn't it?"
“Way past," Jenny agreed, "the compressor would crash or hoses would split, long before you got near that. You couldn't do it."
"So if a cylinder blew on a compressor, the problem is the cylinder not the compressor." Cocker's voice changed as the pieces began to slot into place, “one last thing, is there any scuttlebutt about dodgy cylinders?”
The line went silent and Cocker thought she had dropped off to sleep. "Jenny, you still there?"
"Yes, just thinking. Nothing lately; you get the odd anecdote, but if you've heard it a dozen times you don't take much notice. Very little around these days, there used to be more." She yawned noisily, "but I'll keep my ears open and if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
Cocker chuckled, "OK Jenny and thanks for listening."
"Goodnight Jack, go to sleep, take something, drink something, anything." She said, her voice softening towards sleep as she spoke and laid the receiver down before he had time to finish his reply.
He heard the soft click and the line purred. Cocker put the phone down and laid back, he stared at the ceiling, the bustle in his mind already slowing. The cylinder had failed under pressure. His eyes closed and as he fell asleep his mouth dropped open and slept with his hands behind his head and snored loudly through the night. He woke just after eight with his throat sore from the snoring and he went in search of a drink. Finding the mug from last night he swilled out the coffee grounds and ran the water from the tap for a few minutes and splashed his face, then filled the mug and drained it in one swallow. He gulped half of the second mugful and gargled, spitting the rest into the sink. His mouth felt better already. The birdcage bottom feeling was softening and he gargled three times until it felt normal again. He emptied his kit bag into the washing machine and set it running while he dragged himself under the shower and hit the thermostat for cold. Five minutes of bracing himself against the barrage of icy needles and he eased it upwards and as the temperature climbed he worked up a lather and got busy. Half an hour later, scrubbed, dried and dressed he headed for the harbour diner and breakfast. He ordered the Special and settled down to plough through it, swilling it down with refills of coffee. Finally he pushed the plate away and sat with the mug on the table, peering through a haze of steam at the world beyond the rim and decided to call a mate in Scotland.
*****
Chapter Four
Iceline Page 3