by Dayle, Harry
“Ah, here you are! Sit down, sit down. Take the weight off. Now then, we didn’t have time to be properly introduced before. You are?”
“Jake Noah. First officer aboard the Spirit of Arcadia, and until recently, I was acting captain of that same ship.”
He extended his newly bandaged hand and the captain shook it heartily, causing Jake to wince with pain. All three men sat at a long table.
“Welcome aboard HMS Ambush, Captain Noah. Dreadful name if you ask me. A nuclear submarine fleet is an excellent deterrent against acts of war, but they gave us such an aggressive moniker. That’s the admiralty for you. But, I digress. We followed your message in the buoy. I must say we were rather hoping we might find an entire passenger ship, not just a single raft. Not that we’re not pleased to have you aboard, you understand! Delighted, yes, delighted to have you here.”
“The buoy?”
“Yes, the buoy. Very clever, by the way, putting an emergency transmitter in a buoy like that. Who knows if we would have found you otherwise?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I follow. What buoy are you talking about?”
“Russell, would you find Eric and get him to bring us the buoy? Good chap, thank you. Ah, excellent doctor, our Mr Vardy, very experienced. Splendid bedside manner. Poor chap doesn’t get to practice much medicine here, of course. A few cuts and bruises, minor things. Quite a lot of burns. Not from the engine room, as you might expect. It’s our chef. Awfully accident prone. He does make a particularly good curry on Wednesdays though, so we can forgive him for the odd saucepan of soup ending up on the floor!”
Coote roared with laughter. Jake smiled politely.
“Captain Coote, my ship, the Spirit of Arcadia, it’s in real danger. This is going to sound crazy, but it’s been taken over by a madman. He’s a religious nutcase. Sorry, I don’t mean to suggest all religious people are mad…” Jake flushed red, worried he had just insulted the man opposite him.
“No, no, of course not. Don’t worry, Jake, you can speak freely here. All views are tolerated. We have had many a debate about such matters. Passes the time when we are stuck at the bottom of the ocean. Carry on.”
“This man, Flynn, he’s called. He framed me for murder, became captain, and is now sailing the ship off to goodness knows where. He plans to starve most of the passengers to death. All except the women, and a few of his friends. He says he’s doing God’s work. Starting again. Building a new Eden, he says.”
“I see. Yes, I can understand your choice of words in describing him as a madman. Ah, here’s the buoy!”
The doctor had returned. He handed a bright pink buoy to Coote. He had also brought a tray on which was a bowl of soup and a couple of bread rolls.
“Here we are. And something for you to eat too, excellent. Now, let’s see. Yes, very clever. An emergency radio transmitter inside, and a note.”
As Jake tucked into the soup, Coote pulled open the flap that had been cut in the side of the buoy, pulled out the piece of paper, and read from it.
“Spirit of Arcadia. Cruise liner. Approximately three thousand survivors. Departed from this location for Longyearbyen, second of May 2014. Then some coordinates for Longyearbyen. So you say this wasn’t you?”
“No. But I think I can guess who. May I?”
Coote handed the paper to Jake.
“Lucya. It’s the handwriting of Lucya Levin, our chief radio officer. She never told me. She must have dropped this when we left the pole. That explains how you found me. There’s one of these in the life raft. She must have stuck it in there before he took her. I had no idea there was a transmitter inside.”
“We picked it up this morning,” Coote said. “We were heading back to our base in Scotland to see if there were any survivors.”
“How much do you know about what happened?” Jake asked. “I mean, if you were submerged, do you get to see the news? I have no idea how these things work.”
“Just as well!” Coote laughed heartily. “We can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Harry knowing military secrets, now! No offence, no offence. Well, you’d be surprised. Provided we don’t dive too deeply, we can pick up a lot of communication traffic. That is a lot of what we do, intercepting communications. As soon as we started hearing reports of that damned asteroid, well we surfaced so that we could get a better picture of what was happening. We saw the television images. I expect you did, too. Terrible business. Terrible. We dived again before it reached our location. Went deep, took cover, you might say. Stayed down for twenty-four hours, then came up very slowly. At first we thought our communications equipment was damaged, we couldn’t hear anything. So we surfaced and found that there was nothing to hear. Now we have to go to Scotland. But it sounds like your ship is in danger?”
“Captain Coote, there won’t be any survivors in Scotland. Or anywhere else. Everything is gone. We landed at Longyearbyen. Well, where Longyearbyen used to be. It’s turned to dust. But it’s worse than that. The asteroid scattered ash, thick ash. It’s toxic, dangerous. Acidic or something, I don’t know. I lost two people to that ash. It melted their skin. Trust me, there’s nothing in Scotland for you. But we can save three thousand people on that ship.”
“Tell me,” Coote said. “How did you end up in the raft?”
“I’d better tell you the whole story,” Jake said.
He recounted the events from the time the asteroid flew overhead. He explained about Melvin, Flynn, the landing party, as well as how he had been framed for murder. He told the captain about being thrown into the raft, being cast adrift.
Coote remained silent for a long time. He looked at Jake, studied him.
“It’s a heck of a story. Now, don’t get me wrong, old chap, but how do I know you’re not the madman and you want our help to take control of a perfectly well-run ship?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that. But you have to look at this from my point of view. I find you battered and bruised, in a life raft. Perhaps you were thrown overboard for good reason? Perhaps you are hoping to use the force of Her Majesty’s Navy to exact revenge? What I am asking is this. If we find your ship, will we also find others who can corroborate your version of events?”
“We can do better than that,” Jake said, a smile spreading across his face. “If we find the ship, then I can give you absolute proof that what I have said is the truth.”
“Do you know where your mutineer plans on taking your ship?”
“No. Flynn just said he wanted to burn off the fuel. It won’t take them long. We ruptured a fuel-line, there’s very little diesel left. But Lucya had been scanning the radio frequencies, and I’m certain she would have activated the emergency beacon on board. If he hasn’t found it then surely you could locate them with that?”
“Aside from your buoys, we haven’t picked up anything else, I’m afraid. Did you see the ship sail out of the fjord? Did you see in which direction they went after that?”
“South. They definitely went south.”
“Then, Captain Noah, we shall do the same.”
Sixty-One
ONCE JAKE HAD finished the soup and bread, Captain Coote took him upstairs to the main deck, through the control rooms, and into his cabin. He explained that although the lower deck had bunks for every crew member, they were tightly packed and not comfortable. Jake would be able to get some decent sleep in the captain’s quarters. The cabin opened directly into a communications control room, manned by six crew members, but they didn’t make much noise. Besides, Jake was exhausted, and the painkillers were kicking in, too. He knew he wouldn’t have much trouble sleeping. And indeed, as soon as his head hit the pillow, he was gone.
While he slept, Captain Coote gathered all his crew who weren’t taking their sleep shift into the junior ratings’ mess. He relayed the information that Jake had provided earlier, telling them about the toxic ash, the fate of Longyearbyen, and the survivors on the Spirit of Arcadia. The news was difficult to deliver, and to re
ceive. The men were used to not seeing their families for long periods of time, but that did nothing to soften the blow of having it all but confirmed that they were almost certainly dead. Coote knew that keeping up morale was key to their own survival, and he put a great deal of emphasis on the mission ahead. They were to track down the cruise ship. The passengers were threatened. Weapons were involved. This was the kind of situation they were trained to deal with in the navy. Seamen rarely saw this sort of action once they left behind the surface skimmers for life below the waves, so the plan was met with enthusiasm. It was a welcome distraction from thoughts of the fate of those back home. There was work to be done, and everyone knew their place and their role. Coote’s sub ran like a well-oiled machine.
• • •
Jake was woken by a knock at the door. He pulled himself upright and twisted round to a sitting position, with his legs over the side of the bunk. His hand felt much improved, but his side was still very painful. He got to his feet and opened the door.
“Hi, Jake, I brought you some breakfast,” Ewan said.
He walked in with a tray and set it down on a tiny table. It was loaded up with buttered toast, jam, fruit, cereal, and black coffee. There were also some more painkillers. Jake picked them up straight away, knocked them back, and washed them down with a couple of gulps of coffee. It was instant, but he wasn’t complaining.
“Thank you,” Jake managed at last.
“You’re welcome. We don’t get many visitors. Nice to see a new face around here. It sounds like we might get to see a lot of new faces soon.”
“Where are we? How long was I asleep?”
“You’ve been out for about ten hours. As to where we are, somewhere in the Norwegian Sea, I’m not sure precisely where. They think they’ve picked up a signal from your ship.”
“But they’re not sure? Could it be other survivors? Another submarine, perhaps?”
“Unlikely. Even after the end of the world, protocol would prevent most submarines from broadcasting a distress signal unless they were genuinely in trouble. We’re detecting a search-and-rescue radar transponder, approximately thirty nautical miles ahead. No GPS location; we believe the satellites were taken out by the asteroid. We should have visual confirmation within the hour.”
“If you’re picking up the SART, then I guess we’re not underwater?”
“No, we didn’t dive. The antenna array works better out of the water.”
“Will they see us coming?”
“Not from this distance.”
“We’ll need to get close, though. Without being seen.”
“Not being seen is something we’re very good at.” Ewan hesitated; he seemed to be debating with himself whether to speak further. He made up his mind. “If I may ask, was it really that bad? At Longyearbyen? Was everything destroyed?”
“I’m sorry,” Jake said. He stopped eating, looking at the young sailor. He could imagine what he was thinking. “Yes, it was bad. But it must have been over quickly. Like being in the blast radius of one of your nuclear warheads. The town was vaporised. The people, they wouldn’t have felt anything. It would have been over very quickly, for them.”
Ewan nodded slowly. “It’s strange. We carry these weapons. We all know what they’re capable of, the damage they can do. And we all hope we never ever have to use one in anger. My father served in the navy all his working life. I was too young to really understand, but I knew he was afraid of all-out nuclear war. He never said it, of course. But I knew. When I joined up the Cold War was already over. Some of the older sailors, they talk about the old days. We talk a lot on here, there’s not much else to do. They tell me the same thing, about the fear they had that one day…one day they would have to launch these things, and that when the submarine surfaced, months later, everything would be gone. Us younger ones, we never had that fear. We’re told that the nukes, they’re a deterrent, to make sure the end of the world never happens. And despite all that, for all the money, the technology, the arms race, the standoffs, the world still ended. We couldn’t stop it.”
“Ewan, the world didn’t end. Not for everyone. You’re still here. I’m here. There are three thousand people on the Spirit of Arcadia. And who knows how many others? Other submarines. Maybe other boats. Perhaps some corner of the world got spared, just like we did?”
Coote stuck his head round the door.
“Ah, awake! Excellent. Very good. Ewan told you that we’ve picked up a signal? We’re tracking it on the radar, it looks like it’s your ship. That or a bloody big whale with a radio transponder! When you’ve finished your breakfast, Ewan will bring you through to the communications suite. You need to meet Ralf. He’s something of an ace hacker, but I expect you can find us a quicker way in.”
Jake nodded. “I’ll be right out.”
He wolfed down the rest of the food on the tray. The previous night’s soup had settled his stomach, but he still felt like he hadn’t eaten in a week. By the time he was done the painkillers were taking effect, and he was starting to feel human again.
• • •
The communications suite was one of the rooms he had passed through when he arrived. Men sat at floor-to-ceiling workstations that Jake thought looked surprisingly old fashioned for such a recent vessel. It was something about the solidity of the equipment. He had no doubt it was state of the art, but it wouldn’t have looked out of place on Ewan’s father’s Cold War ships.
Coote beckoned them over to the end station. A young man with a shaved head and tattoos up both arms was sitting in a swivel chair. He was the only crew member in the room not to be wearing a headset.
“This is Lieutenant Ralf Cormack, he’s one of our senior communications officers. Ralf can do things with a computer that even the makers wouldn’t think possible.”
Ralf held out a hand. Jake shook it, all the time thinking that the Lieutenant looked like anything but a hacker.
“We’re closing in on your ship. Coote tells me that you have the latest anti-piracy measures on board?”
“That’s correct,” Jake said. “I just hope Flynn doesn’t know that and hasn’t disabled them.”
“That’s what I’m here to find out, sir.”
“Jake, please. Call me Jake.”
“No problem. Does the system have a live feed, or record only, Jake?”
“Both, live and record. There’s also a facility for remote playback. It can be triggered externally. There’s a website interface, you just need a username and password. We can try mine, but I think it only works from an on-board terminal. The navy are supposed to have some kind of access, though.”
“We wouldn’t be issued with that. Fighting civilian piracy is a skimmer’s job, not something that us dolphins deal with.”
Jake looked enquiringly at Coote.
“Dolphins are submariners. Skimmers are surface ships,” he said. “You’ll have to excuse us, we have our own dialect down here.”
Jake was starting to sense how the crew really was like one family. Shared language, like code. Mutual respect, despite the banter he had heard around the place. He wondered if it had been like that for Lucya, when she was in the Russian navy, and whether she missed that camaraderie on the Spirit of Arcadia.
He brought his attention back to the task in hand, and reeled off some technical details to the communications officer, information about how to connect to the ship’s anti-piracy system remotely. Ralf bashed away on his keyboard at an impressive rate. The screen in front of him seemed even more incomprehensible to Jake than the submariners’ lingo. Tiny green text against a black background. But when Ralf hit “Enter” and sat back, the text was replaced by an image. It looked like a website was loading, but very, very slowly.
“We’re too far away to get decent bandwidth…good connection speed. It will improve as we close in,” Ralf explained.
“I think it’s about time we made ourselves less visible,” Coote said.
He picked up what looked like a phone hands
et from the console, punched a button and relayed orders. Before he’d even replaced the handset, red lights began to flash, a speaker crackled into life, and a voice called “Dive, dive!”
A klaxon sounded throughout the submarine, resonating around the confined space, blaring out its deafening message for ten full seconds before stopping as abruptly as it had started.
“You might want to hold onto something, Jake,” Coote said, smiling. “We’re about to dive.”
Jake grabbed onto the back of a chair. Ralf and Coote both burst out laughing.
“Sorry, old chap,” Coote said, grinning. “Couldn’t resist! We don’t see many newbies. At ease, sailor. This sub is as smooth as they come.”
Jake felt the submarine tilt very slightly towards the front as it pushed itself below the surface. A minute later, the ride changed entirely. Since he had spent months at sea it was quite an unusual sensation to no longer be rolling. The submarine slid through the water with such stability and precision it was as if they weren’t moving at all. To Jake, it felt for all the world as if he had stepped off onto dry land.
Someone called across from another console on the other side of the room.
“Sir, I believe we have established visual contact.”
“Come with me,” Coote said to Jake.
The two men crossed the confined space of the suite to find another officer operating a colour screen. There was an image in the middle. It was distant, magnified, and pixelated. But it was without question the Spirit of Arcadia.
“That’s her,” Jake said. “That’s my ship.”
Coote picked up another handset, pressed a button, and relayed more orders to an unseen helmsman.
“Maintain periscope depth and heading, reduce speed to 15 knots. We’re closing in on them.”