by Peter Tonkin
‘The crew?’
‘All ready, too …’ There was some hesitation in Cheng’s voice, as though he could not see the purpose of the question.
‘No one demanding shore leave?’ Richard elaborated.
‘No, Captain. No shore leave. There was never any question of that.’
‘Very well. Are the logs up to date?’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Then I am happy to relieve you until the end of the morning watch. It will give me an opportunity to read the logs and make my plans. Then at change of watch, eight o’clock sharp, I will conduct my own inspection. I will want yourself and the chief engineer available as I do so.’
‘Yes, Captain.’ The young man hesitated, looked around the bridge and then – literally – bowed himself out.
Richard walked to the forward section – the area that had been forbidden aboard Queen Mary – and looked moodily out through the clear view over the square top of the gantry and along the grey-black Rubik’s cube of the cargo as the dull brightness of the leaden dawn began to reveal it. He noted precisely where Major Guerrero’s National Guard containers stood, estimating that there must be between seventy-five and a hundred of them in all.
Then, deep in thought, he crossed to the little side table beside the pilot’s chair and shook the kettle standing there. It gave a satisfying slopping sound, and the weight of it told him it was almost full. He switched it on and made himself the strongest, blackest cup of coffee he had ever sipped. At the very least it was going to be a long day, and three hours’ sleep followed by a hair-raising helicopter ride were not the best possible preparation for it.
He crossed to the chart table and opened the old-fashioned log book there. Punctilious in this as in everything, Captain Sin had clearly insisted that the log be kept in both Chinese and English, and that every detail of shipboard life be entered. The last entry in the English section – and, probably, in the Chinese – was the report of the captain’s illness, the arrival of the paramedics and the address and contact number of the hospital he had been taken to. Richard flipped back and began with the entries for the last few days, focusing on the way the weather had behaved as the storm tiger chased poor old Sin across the Pacific and finally cornered him here.
The detailed description of the air pressures, the cloud forms, the wind speeds, the states of sea and sky soon filled his head like a pattern, and he went through them almost like Sherlock Holmes looking for clues to a puzzle he wasn’t even certain existed. But he did see a pattern beginning to emerge – and one at variance with what Dr Jones of NOAA had been saying the best part of three days ago. He was so immersed in his detective work that it came as a shock when he turned over the last page to find he was back at the report of Captain Sin’s illness – there were no further meteorological observations at all.
Richard looked up, blinking a little blearily. Dawn was gathering more forcefully now. The ship’s chronometer above the binnacle told him it was coming up to seven thirty a.m. local time, which to be fair, he reckoned, was probably the time everywhere from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego – Pacific Standard Time. It certainly reached up as far as Alaska and the coast of Canada, and down as far as the parts of Mexico he was most deeply concerned with at any rate. He rubbed his eyes and sat back, scanning the bridge once more. On one corner of the chart table someone had placed a portable TV. It was probably a recent addition to the bridge equipment – Richard couldn’t see Captain Sin being too happy with the thought of his watch officers being offered such a potent distraction, even in harbour. And he couldn’t remember having seen it here on his earlier visits. But he switched it on now and the little screen was filled at once by the logo of KTLA5, the local TV station. Then, immediately, by the face of the woman he had just been thinking about.
‘So, Doctor Jones,’ said an interviewer currently out of shot. ‘Your ARkStorm seems to be less cataclysmic than you feared.’ A bit of an anticlimax, the interviewer’s tone implied. Richard was reminded of the taxi driver and his dismissive opinions.
‘We certainly seem to have been lucky so far,’ allowed the climatologist warily. ‘Though, as you know, there have been dangerous mud slides in Glendora and Azusa. Both of those neighbourhoods have been evacuated and we’re looking at moving more folks out of houses on the western slopes of the Sierras. Things will continue to worsen here if the rain continues like this. The Los Angeles River is on flood alert too, of course. An inch an hour is still a dangerous level of precipitation.’
‘But,’ purred the invisible interviewer, ‘we were informed you were predicting amounts in excess of two inches an hour. There have been no reports of that level of intensity.’
‘Yes, there have,’ Richard informed the television. ‘Down in Cielito Lindo and San Quintin and on down the Baja California there have …’
Then he stopped talking and sat silently for a moment as the most obvious truth of all hit him and the pattern he had been seeking in the log books became clear. ‘It’s gone south,’ he said. ‘Your ARkStorm’s not going to hit the coast of California, Doctor Jones, because it’s already hitting Mexico! It’s heading on south. Bloody hell!’
No sooner come to that conclusion than his cell phone started ringing. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw Robin’s face on the screen. Where in heaven’s name did she get a signal way out there? he wondered. Perhaps there were cell phone satellites as well as the NOAA weather sats in low orbit over the Pacific just at that moment.
‘Hi, darling. What can I do for you?’
‘We have a bad problem here, darling. We’ve lost Katapult8.’
‘Lost her how?’ He stopped wool-gathering and focused on what Robin was saying.
‘Well, you remember we had her on radar all last night, even though her AIS locator wasn’t working?’
‘I do …’ Richard thought he could see where this was going.
‘Well, they fixed the locator nearly two hours ago so we had them on both radar and the AIS equipment. They called in, and Florence issued another of their challenges. Really, darling, what have you started! Well, then Katapult8 took off like a bat out of hell. We lost her on radar but we still had her on locator. Then, suddenly, she vanished. Even the locator signal vanished.’
‘Maybe it just went offline again. Same problem as before.’
‘Maybe. That’s what I said, but Nic’s worried.’
‘Fair enough. You know what to do – it’s partly why you’re there, after all. Take no risks. Head for their last location as fast as you can.’
‘We are doing.’
‘Good. And watch out yourselves …’
‘Why?’
‘It looks as though this ARkStorm everyone’s been so worried about isn’t going to hit Long Beach and LA after all. It’s going to hit Mexico. Everywhere from Tijuana to Puerto Banderas and on down south. Wherever Katapult8 and the girls are, they’re likely to be right in the worst of it.’
EIGHTEEN
Katapult8 had topped forty-four knots soon after contact with Maxima ended. When she’d hit the whale she’d been sailing faster than she’d ever sailed before. The only parts of her that broke the surface were the J hooks and the long rudders. Under normal circumstances, the whale would have heard her coming and dived. Even had she not, the leading J hook would hardly have touched her and both yacht and cetacean would have survived the collision undamaged. But the whale was one of a hunting pod of nine powerful fifty-footers that had become wrapped in Pilar’s nets away south in the middle of last night. They were lucky to have survived so far – many of the other ocean-dwellers caught in the nets around them had failed to do so. But, working together, the bull, the cow and the near-grown calf of the main family group and the half-dozen others that swam and hunted with them had kept at the surface, still able to breathe as the polymer mesh billowed around them like a gigantic, undulating spider’s web the best part of a kilometre long.
Katapult8’s J hook bounced off the humpback’s head, doing only
a little damage to the whale. But it snagged on Pilar’s illegal drift net wrapped around its massive face. The leading edge of the hook was razor-sharp and it sliced through the net easily, cutting a hole large enough to let the family pod of whales swim free and offer the other six huge creatures a chance of escape as well. But even the slightest resistance interfered with the physical laws that Katapult8 relied on to keep moving in this manner at these speeds. The starboard hooks sank deeper. The net slid up the uprights away from the sharpest section. It began to bunch up and to offer more resistance. The hull sank further. The port-side hooks became involved. At first they too cut the net. But then they also began to sink and the net entrapped them.
One second Katapult8 was hurling across the wind at forty-five knots; little more than a second later her J hooks were enmeshed. A second later still, her rudders were trapped. The hull itself, under the pressure of that massive sail, strove to keep moving at forty-five knots. The hooks in the net were forced to come almost to a dead stop as they pulled the deadweight sea anchor of the drift net, made heavier still by the corpses of Pilar’s enormous final catch of hundreds of dead and dying tuna – and the energetic attempts of six fifty-foot humpbacks to follow their friends to freedom.
Before Liberty or any of her crew had the faintest idea of what was happening, Katapult8 pitchpoled. The J hooks snapped, pulling her bows downward. The three sharp forecastles punched into the back of a wave all at once. They stopped moving forward, as though they had hit a wall. But the sail did not. It pulled the stern and the women in the cockpit there out of the water as the rudders, still caught in the net, shattered, letting the poop leap up off the surface and high into the air like a rocket lifting off. Katapult8 stood on her nose for a nanosecond, with the sail and the stumps of the J hooks parallel to the water. The three hulls between them pointed their bows towards the bottom of the ocean and their sterns towards the top of the sky. Liberty, Flo, Emma and Maya were hurled out of the hull, flying through the air until their safety lines snapped taut.
Katapult8 flipped over. The top of the sail slammed into the water at a speed which made the surface seem as hard as rock. The sail snapped free of the central hull which somersaulted over it and crashed upside down into the water beside it with an impact hard enough to smash all three hulls open. The composite of which the hulls were made was as light as it was strong, but it was not as buoyant as the sail or the J hooks. Burst open, they were still weighed down with kit: microwaves, tackle which included their emergency equipment, distress signals, radio and supplies. The instant the air exploded out of them the three hulls immediately began to sink, dragging the crew, still secured by their safety lines, down into the depths. Even though their top-flight Gill ocean-going lifejackets began to inflate automatically, the stunned and disorientated women would all have died then. But the net that had put them in this terrible danger saved them – for the moment, at least. The sinking hulls became trapped in it just as the J hooks and the tall rudders had. A kilometre of net, with most of its floats intact, was more than enough to slow its descent. And, ironically, the net stopped the ruined hull from sinking, while there was still just enough length on the lifelines to allow Liberty, Flo and the others to reach the restless, choppy surface.
Liberty’s head burst through the surface and she pulled in a great shuddering breath in spite of the fact that her ribs complained agonizingly and part of the air going into her was compromised by saltwater foam. The sharp-edged chop which had seemed so trivial from Katapult8’s cockpit now seemed dangerously overwhelming. And, in spite of her deep-water clothing, it felt icily cold. Her field of vision was reduced from the furthest horizon to the nearest wave-top. She was still looking wildly around and preparing to call out when the next wave surged under her. Her head jerked back under water because the line still secured to Katapult8 was a foot too short to keep her above the wave crests. Cold pierced her eyes. Brine hit her adenoids like acid.
Liberty’s brain kicked fully alive and the adrenaline of shock and fear joined the cocktail of elation and exhaustion, coffee and protein in her blood. She began to look around for her friends. But the water was thick and salty. Her vision was limited. She could see vague shapes; some movement, and nothing more. The billowing net formed a lumpy, disturbing background to what little she could make out. She did not know it, but at least the whales had gone. It occurred to her that she should use this moment underwater to curl over, grab the handle of her safety knife and cut her line before she was dragged further down. It wouldn’t take much: two more feet and she would be a mermaid.
Fighting to ignore the pains in her chest and back, momentarily irritated by the fact that her buoyant PFD was fighting her every inch of the way, Liberty used the tension on the lifeline to pull herself down until she could reach the knife sheathed against her right calf. She slid it free and cut the line in one blessedly swift and fluid motion. At once she exploded to the top, seeming to burst out of the water until half her length was above the surface like a breaching whale. But then she settled back in, gasping, choking, blinking. It took her a moment to realize two extremely worrying things: she had dropped the knife as she exploded upwards. And as soon as she reached the surface, she started drifting, taken by the wind and the current.
Her next thought, once again, was for the others. ‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Can anybody hear me? Flo? Emma? Maya? Flo?’ A wave slapped her in the face and filled her mouth. She choked into silence, then remembered her basic first-aid training. You can’t help others until you are safe yourself. Kicking her legs wildly, waving her arms and wrenching her body, she managed to swing herself round in the water. And there, immediately behind her, sitting high on the wave-tops, was the solid composite sail. Lighter and less encumbered than the hulls, it was buoyant and steady. She kicked towards it desperately, fearing that the wind which had powered it so far would blow it beyond her reach. But no. After a moment or two’s exhausting effort, she found she had forced her unwilling body and recalcitrant personal flotation device through the restless water until she could touch it. The next problem was the sail’s height. Even lying on its side, it formed a disturbingly substantial wall. The thick leading edge rather than the slim aft blade was closest to her. Even flat on the surface, this section of the sail was more than a metre sheer. After a couple of convulsive attempts to get up on to it, she discovered that although she could reach up over its rounded black circumference, she couldn’t get a grip secure enough to allow her to pull herself aboard.
Such was her concentration on this dilemma amid the splashing restlessness of the icy water that she didn’t hear the first of her crewmates approaching until Florence appeared at her shoulder. ‘Feel for the footholds,’ bellowed the Australian. And as she advised this, Liberty’s fingers found a foothold. She closed her fingers to a fist, though they felt like sausages by now, and heaved herself upwards. Florence shoved a shoulder beneath her backside, risking a bruise or two from her thrashing legs, and shoved. Liberty slid up on to the flat surface. Spread-eagled herself at once and scrabbled herself round. Thrust her head and shoulders back over the edge. Held on like grim death with her left hand as she reached down with her right. A moment of frenetic activity later, Florence was lying beside her. ‘You seen the others?’ gasped Liberty.
‘Nope.’
Liberty gingerly gathered herself on to all fours, then slowly and carefully pulled herself upright on her knees. The sail beneath her heaved as she moved, but it was a surprisingly solid platform. It was the best part of twenty-five metres long with a surface area of several hundred square metres. It was light, but incredibly strong and solid. Even so, she didn’t want to risk standing upright, for the surface was so perfectly aerodynamic that it was also as slippery as ice – especially at the moment, when it was awash. She knelt there, looking back at the vacancy of choppy water, trying to work out exactly where the triple hull had gone down. Quite apart from anything else, if there was a chance of getting down to it, she might take t
he risk. Somewhere in the wreck was a proper life raft equipped with all sorts of signalling devices. But, unlike the Gill Marine lifejackets, it would only inflate if someone got down to it and pulled the emergency cord – a preference she regretted now, but one born of a panic aboard an earlier racing yacht where the life raft had inflated mid-race because some water had flooded into the cabin. That incident had cost her the race, a good deal of precious kit and very nearly her life. And in any case, Liberty was the sort of person who liked to be in control as well as on top and in the lead. So it looked as though the life raft was on its way to the bottom of the Pacific, along with everything else aboard. In the meantime, they only had the sail. And the AIS signaller on that would be out of commission once again.
At first she thought there was nothing left to mark the passing of her command and everything it contained. But then she noticed something that she hadn’t even considered. At first she thought it was a massive shark’s fin sticking up out of the water, and her heart gave a terrible lurch at the sight. But then she realized that it was the base of one of the J sections from Katapult8’s side. Like the sail, it was solid and buoyant. As she focused on it, she realized that there were two bedraggled women clinging to it. Her heart gave another lurch and her eyes filled with tears once more. ‘Emma!’ she bellowed. ‘Emma! Maya! Can you hear me?’
A wearily waved arm was answer enough. Liberty looked around. The sail she was kneeling on seemed far too large to try to control – even if they’d had anything other than their hands to paddle with. If the four of them were going to get back together, Emma and Maya were going to have to propel the J hook over this way, or abandon it and swim. The distance between them was not great, but for some reason beyond Liberty’s immediate understanding, it was widening. They were going to have to make the decision soon and take action immediately after that.