“It’s been better since Captain Stark came aboard,” came Harry’s voice from surprisingly close at hand.
“That’s good. He’s an old friend. But it wasn’t so good under the other guy, Stevenson?”
“Well…”
There was a brief silence. Ann stepped out of the teddy and hesitated, naked, looking around. Various bits of her were reflected in half a dozen mirrored cupboard doors, all of which seemed to be open at different angles. At the back of the little room was a darker opening with a tiny cubicle on each side, one containing a toilet and the other a shower. Ann closed the door and stepped into the toilet. “Stevenson?” she repeated more loudly. “Or don’t you want to speak ill of the dead?”
“Not so much Captain Stevenson,” came the muted voice. “More the first officer. Cohen. He never gave me much — ”
Abruptly, what Harry was saying became inaudible under a cascade of water as someone nearby switched on a shower. Ann finished what she was doing and flushed. Then, walking to the little basin under the mirrors, she called, “Yes? This Cohen? What did he do?”
“Well, if you go into the shower…”
Ann pulled her nightgown over her head and glanced at herself in the mirror. Through the sheer material it was just possible to see a shade or two of added darkness at the points of her breasts and below the curve of her tummy. Oh well, she thought. No help for it. And modesty’s for the birds in any case. “In the shower?” she called as she went through. “Yes?”
“Under the faucet there’s a soap tray.”
Ann crouched beside this, only just able to make out what Harry was saying over the roaring of the shower next door. “Under the soap tray there’s a mark on the wall. That’s where I covered up a spy hole he had drilled through…”
Ann pushed at the pale mark and the whole wedge, fashioned from a soap bar by the feel of things, fell away. And there, on the far side of the opening, surprisingly close at hand but mercifully unaware, was Bob. Stark.
“You ever make use of it yourself?” asked Ann a little breathlessly a couple of moments later as she stood framed in the bathroom doorway looking out into the shadowed cabin.
“No. There seemed no point,” said Harry from her shady bunk.
“You may want to re-think your options with voyeurism,” said Ann dryly, unaware that, what with the mirrors and the nightie and the light still on in the bathroom behind her, Harry was already doing just that.
CHAPTER VIII
The pilot came aboard at seven the next morning and by the time Ann was up, New England was picking her way carefully down Delaware Bay. Ann was not a breakfast person and having greeted Senator and Mrs Charleston with their jug of coffee and slices of dry wholewheat toast and nodded distantly to Alan Miles, hoping to get away before he opened a conversation with her, she took a cup of black coffee up onto the bridge, in search of Bob.
“You must be light on your feet,” she said quietly to Harry. “I didn’t hear you leave.”
Unaccountably the computer officer blushed.
Then Ann turned and was blushing herself, for Bob’s blue eyes were on her and for a heart-stopping instant she thought he must know what she had seen last night. Fortunately there was a reddish cast to the dawn and the rosy light covered the colour of her cheeks. “You’re up and about bright and early,” he said.
“I don’t want to miss anything,” she said. And her mind put a double meaning on that too. Damn, she thought. This is going to be impossible.
His eyebrows arched. “This must be small beer for you. There’s no Pulitzer in this.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she countered, crossing to his side. “It’s a world first, isn’t it?”
“Not yet, it’s not. This is Mr Beauharnais, the pilot. Ann Cable, Mr B.”
“I believe I have seen the lady on the TV, Captain. And I have read your work, Ms Cable. It’s an honour.”
“Thank you, sir. Can you tell me anything about New England from your point of view? Is she different from any other ship to pilot?”
“Well, now…”
As they went down Delaware Bay, the pilot gave Ann a detailed commentary on piloting in general, piloting the Delaware in particular, and piloting this vessel on the Delaware specifically. Partway through the disquisition Professor Miles appeared, listened for a while and then wandered off to the computer area. A few moments later the Senator and his wife arrived, also listened for a moment and then went to the far side of the bridge where the radio room was. They wanted to send some important cables and faxes ashore before they came fully under way.
Outside New England’s sleek white hull the day expanded into azure perfection. The earlier reddish sky, as Harry’s machines showed Alan Miles, had been the last high skirts of a mild front wandering eastwards. They would catch up with it again later in the day, all things being equal, and beat it to the Western Approaches. Currently they were meandering along beneath a slowly intensifying high which was likely to give the Atlantic states a hot spell long enough to welcome them on their return in less than a week from now.
“Do you know when we’ll be coming to full power?” Alan Miles asked Harry.
“Just after we get there.” She pointed to the bright outline of Cape May on her schematic. She looked up at the digital readouts on the screen above the collision alarm slave monitor. “That will be in half an hour at most. Depends on dropping the pilot.”
*
They came to full speed at ten. All the guests were on the bridge and it was easy to forgive Alan Miles his glow of excited achievement, for the two-stage engagement of the twin jet system was every bit as impressive now as it had been off Boston.
New England plunged her concave keel securely into the heart of the Gulf Stream and followed the course of that great current east and north. The last time Ann had sailed these waters she had been coming the opposite way on the battered old freighter Napoli, following the course — and ultimately the fate — of the Titanic. Even in that rusting, dangerous, effluent-leaking old tub, she had felt part of the sea. She remembered every aspect of the adventure — the basis of her first great bestseller The Leper Ship — from the relentless pitching of the little hull to the constant battering of the wind. The peculiar aroma of the ocean lingered in her memory too, as did the vivid vistas of sea and sky which the weather decks, bridge wings and bridgehouse decks had afforded her. This experience was nothing like that at all. It was totally divorced from the ocean, more like taking a flight than a cruise. Or at least that was the effect to begin with.
Just as flying is a notoriously boring experience, the novelty of moving through the water at one hundred miles an hour soon palled, even for Alan Miles. The crew had duties to perform and old-fashioned watches to keep, even though the computer systems maintained engine pitch and power, speed and course, and even monitored the cargo seated on the air-cushioned floors of the great holds. But the passengers had little to do during the increasingly long and featureless day other than to get to know each other and rely on the old skills of society and conversation to pass the time.
By lunchtime, at one, New England had just crossed a time line so that outside her sleek hull it was already two o’clock. By the time they finished dinner, twelve hours after they came to speed, twelve hundred miles east of Cape Race, they had left the Grand Banks behind and were beginning to cross the Mid-Atlantic Basin, and had caught up another hour on Greenwich mean time.
The second day of the trip started late for all of them and breakfast was not completed until well after ten, by which time they were two thousand, five hundred miles east of Cape Breton, just about coming north of the Azores, one more hour back on Greenwich mean time, and swinging gently north towards the Western Approaches to the English Channel. They were due at Southampton by late lunchtime tomorrow.
While still pumping Harry for the point of view of a woman isolated in a man’s world, Ann was widening her area of study, with little success so far. She had touched base with the irred
eemably dull Stubbs and with Dix who was still settling into his post and had few insights to offer either on ships in general or New England in particular. The engineers were equally uninformative. She spent a fruitless couple of hours in ear protectors trying to make sense of what Chief Bligh was bellowing over the Niagara roar of the sixteen massive engines on full throttle. Next she turned her attention to the cavernous holds. It required all of her considerable powers of persuasion to get Bob to take her down there, for the holds were normally isolated during passage and he had to override a range of safety systems to get down to them from the sealed bridgehouse. The last of these was a great bulkhead door.
“You’d better hope there’s no emergency down here requiring quick access,” Ann said, only half-jokingly, as they walked along a corridor towards the door.
“There’s nothing likely to happen in the holds that we can’t deal with through Dix’s cargo control systems, which are monitored by Harry Newbold’s computers. Though Dix doesn’t like it any more than Cohen did, apparently.”
She put that on hold for the moment. “Monitored or overridden?”
“Monitored, I guess.”
“You’re not sure, Captain? I’m surprised.”
“I know the theory. I’m just not sure of the full power of Harry’s system. The networks are designed so that Dix has control of his own programs as lading and cargo control officer. Same as O’Reilley as communications officer and Bligh as chief engineer. But everything on their computers is accessible through Harry’s system and I don’t know whether she could in fact program her computers to override the smaller computers.” As he said this, he opened the great iron door. There was a hiss, as though this was an airlock on a spaceship. As the door opened wider, Ann could see a vast, dark space packed with huge cubes of solid blackness.
They hesitated inside the great portal on a piece of flooring which looked like nothing so much as an iron doormat. There was what looked like a phone on the wall just inside the door but when Bob pulled it free, Ann could see it was a tiny transceiver. It even had a screen currently showing First Officer Dix’s face. “Alarms all off, John?”
“Alarms and sensors, Captain. But walk light, talk quiet, stay cool and breathe shallow.”
“Lucky I’m not an overweight smoker,” said Ann. “God knows what I could set off.”
“Lights on then,” said Bob, paying no attention to her lame levity. And on his word, bank by bank, the darkness jumped away.
When she was very much younger, Ann, like many of her generation, had fallen under the spell of Rubik’s Cube. She had spent many hours happily twisting the sectioned cube trying to make all the faces show the same colour. Never in all the hours she had spent doing this did she imagine that in the fullness of time she would find herself inside a Rubik’s Cube, moving between the planes like a micron. But that was exactly how she felt during the next half hour. In the clinical atmosphere of the hold, slightly and strangely redolent of rubber and engine oil, metal and ply, the cubes looked like massive coffins awaiting some weird kind of burial at sea. Each of the great coffins contained eighteen containers, three wide, three long and two high. The coffins were piled three high to the deck above with what looked like millimetres of clearance. It was just possible to pick a way between them on the strangely springy floor.
As Bob took Ann up to the walkway above the lower hold and showed her the lifeboats, they talked easily and increasingly familiarly. It was, perhaps, too early to say that a relationship was springing up between them, but the possibility was there.
The possibility was extended in the more social atmosphere of dinner that evening. This was a rather less formal affair than last night’s and the conversation was much livelier. Bob was at the top table with the guests spread around him and Harry at the end. The other officers shared the nearby tables except for Stubbs and the third engineering officer who held watches. In the relaxed atmosphere, as the main course surrendered to a pudding of considerable weight, Mrs Charleston revealed a wealth of dry and knowing observations about the rich and famous. She began at first to talk of some of the politicians she had known, then of their associates in the worlds of entertainment and the arts. Soon the great and the good of all walks were withering slightly but amusingly in the glare of her recollections. Ann made a mental note to tax Mrs Charleston more deeply in the morning. She turned to Bob. “What was it Eleanor Roosevelt said to your father when he first took his seat?”
Her opening for Bob to add some reminiscences of his own was interrupted by an urgent buzzing which seemed to come from all around them. Bob, Chief Bligh and Harry all reached for their personal phones at once, but the chimes of the ship’s tannoy stopped them. “Captain,” came Stubbs’s voice, suddenly sounding young and a little nervous. “We have an emergency distress call coming in. It sounds important. And dangerous.”
Ann would not be kept off the bridge and Bob indulged her, on the firm understanding that she would be out on her ear the instant she got underfoot.
“And I don’t want any post-mortems, Ann. I may have to make some quick decisions. I could look as frail as one of Mrs Charleston’s victims under the glare of hindsight.”
“I’ll keep out of the way. And I’ll write nothing without your express permission.”
“Fair enough. If you’re telling the truth.”
Ann had no idea whether she was telling the truth or not; what she wrote would depend on what happened. She was not, therefore, offended.
Wisely, she positioned herself in that little quiet space Richard had discovered beside Harry’s lair. The night was dark and so there was nothing to see beyond the broad clearview. The bridge lights were dim and it was hard to make out exactly what the busy men all around her were doing. They all crouched over their instruments with such concentration that she would have been unable to see any displays, even had she been in a position to interpret them, which she was not. But everything she needed to know in order to understand exactly what was happening was coming up on Harry’s displays, and the computer officer was keeping up a low but clear commentary on the most salient points. Her voice was quiet but it carried easily to Ann through the disorientating babble of communication going on all around.
“Situation?” rapped Bob as he strode onto the bridge.
“One vessel, yacht Calcutta, on fire and sinking with all hands.”
“Got her on the Lloyds’ ident CD,” said Harry. “Calcutta, Southampton. J-class racer. Thirty-metre. Could be as many as twenty aboard.”
“She’s dead ahead,” said Dix from the collision alarm radar. Even as he said this, Arm saw Harry’s radar monitor light up and a bright blip at the outer range of the ship-generation triangle appeared. Harry’s finger left the keyboard for the instant it took to point this out to Ann. “Limit of our range,” she said quietly. “Take us just under an hour…”
The elongated triangle started to spread and then suddenly a larger triangle sprang into life on the screen above. “That’s the Magellan reading,” said Harry, and pulled in her breath to call out something.
“Nothing within an hour of her,” said Dix, making his report just before she did. “Nothing over the horizon. We’re her only hope.”
“The Nordica is nearest,” said Harry quietly. “A Swedish freighter. Three hours at her best speed.”
“O’Reilley, what do they say?”
Harry switched another screen to life and the message flickered up before Ann’s eyes even as O’Reilley called out a potted version.
CHANNEL 16, said the top right-hand corner of the screen. MAYDAY…MAYDAY…MAYDAY. YACHT CALCUTTA, YACHT CALCUTTA, YACHT CALCUTTA. SIERRA OSCAR 4574, SIERRA OSCAR 4574, SIERRA OSCAR 4574.
“What are those figures?” asked Ann.
“Call sign.”
“And those?”
“Co-ordinates. Chart position. She should give location information but she’s too far out. Co-ordinates is all she’s got.”
FIRE OUT OF CONTROL. LIFEBOATS GONE. F
ULL CREW STILL ABOARD.
“What does he mean, gone?” wondered Ann.
“Lost?” Harry hesitated. “Burned?”
NEED ASSISTANCE AT ONCE. DOCTOR FOR BURNS.
“Do we have a doctor?”
“Captain and Dix have got certificates.”
WILL SINK WITHIN THE HOUR. NOWAY OFF.
“I should think not. It’s two miles deep out there and seven hundred miles from home.”
WE WILL BE LISTENING ON CHANNEL 16, 2182 kHz AND 2MHz.
“Well-equipped, isn’t he?”
MAYDAY…MAYDAY…MAYDAY. YACHT CALCUTTA…YACHT CALCUTTA…
There came a silence as the Calcutta’s radio man took a breath and O’Reilley stopped calling out. Into this Bob said quietly, “John, is there no one who can get to him?”
“Three hours soonest, Captain.”
“Do we have to alter course at all?”
“No,” whispered Harry, tracing a line across her screen to the burning dot. “He’s dead ahead.”
“Not a whisker, Captain,” said Dix.
“OK, O’Reilley, tell him we’re coming and give him an ETA. Chief,” continued Bob coolly, “can you get a knot or two more out of her?”
“I can try, Captain.”
“Pile on a couple more dilythium crystals, Scottie,” advised Harry quietly.
Once O’Reilley established direct contact, he should have been able to elicit some details from his opposite number, but the Calcutta appeared to be in such a bad way that it was as much as the crew could do to keep calling for help. So it fell to Harry to employ the full wonders of her machinery at Bob’s increasingly concerned command.
She confirmed the location of the yacht, then did a quick scan of sea and sky conditions, factored in the Magellan and weather sat information and so began to build up a detailed picture of the exact sea and weather conditions around the yacht. Calcutta seemed to be lying at the centre of a calm and she was burning sufficiently fiercely to register as a hot spot with the weather sats. There was an area of high pressure above her which the weak front they had overtaken at lunchtime would not disturb until tomorrow. She bobbed sluggishly in the big swells which ran eastwards here even in the calmest weather, but the swells were at their lowest setting, for two miles and more of ocean lay under her keel and the great submarine wheels of water which produced the relentless waves would not rise until they ran up the continental shelf and onto the cliff-backed beaches of Ireland. Between the surface and the sea floor only the Gulf Stream moved, but even that great fecund river would only push charred wreckage onto the Kerry coast in a week or so’s time, judging from its speed as registered in the figures on Harry’s screens.
Hell Gate (Richard Mariner Series Book 9) Page 7