Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure

by Peter Tonkin

  Long before the first hesitation in forward movement – speaking to Richard of Sayonara’s bows hitting an incoming roller like a car colliding with a house and smacking his head against the wall once more – he had realized that his earlier, almost careless, speculation had been correct: Macavity’s interference with the computer systems meant that any warnings sent out by the weather satellite had not come aboard after all. Even if NIPEX had been alerted, the ship was almost certainly proceeding as programmed – into the heart of a severe typhoon. And he’d realized that he was likely to be the only man on board with the slightest idea what to do about it. Once he was certain of all this, all he had to do was to sit and wait for the big steel bulkhead door to open and for someone to get him up on to the bridge before Sayonara sank into the abyss, taking all hands on board down with her.

  35 Hours to Impact

  Alerted by the sound of the handles turning, Richard was standing ready, eyes half-closed, when the door opened and the lights came on. The instant these things happened, Sayonara lurched again, hard enough to make even Richard stagger, then she tossed her head up, heaving and hesitating before surging forward and pitching almost sideways. The way she yawed and rolled allowed Richard to begin the conversation even before he was certain he was talking to Macavity. ‘You have big seas coming in on the port forward quarter,’ he said, spreading his legs and standing fore-square. ‘From the ten o’clock position in military parlance. This means, unless you have changed course since you put me in here, you are sailing southwards along the Great Circle route as programmed into the leading edge of a large tropical depression which is in turn heading north. Depending on the composition of the depression and the eyewalls around it, you can expect stronger winds and much rougher seas from that quarter, swinging round to broadside-on from the port side until we get to the central eye. Then the weather will reverse and probably intensify even further. Not that we’re likely to still be afloat by then if this is anything like a serious storm, because even a ship this size will roll over or break up under those conditions. I don’t know how much worse you’re expecting things to become,’ he continued after a heartbeat, ‘but unless someone starts employing some elementary ship-handling immediately, we’re going to find ourselves swimming.’

  ‘Not waving but drowning, eh?’ quipped a familiar voice with a new, sneering tone.

  Richard opened his eyes fully. Dom DiVito was standing at Macavity’s shoulder, his face wearing a lop-sided grin. Richard’s head twinged. ‘Hi, Dom,’ he said, coolly, still uncertain of the best way to deal with this turncoat employee of one of his oldest and best friends. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ Then he switched his gaze to meet Macavity’s. ‘You won’t get a chance to wave. You’ll all go down so fast.’ As though in support of his words, Sayonara gave another lumpy heave, swaying, pitching and rolling all at once. Richard staggered again.

  ‘Come,’ said Macavity in his flat Dutch/Afrikaans-accented English. He gestured with a gun that Richard recognized. It looked very much like his own nine-millimetre Glock. He wondered briefly whether his watch and his Galaxy were close at hand as well. And, come to that, his men. Then he crossed the little room and stepped over the raised lintel into the main engine area. Macavity’s men crowded round him and he immediately smelt the stomach-turning bitterness of vomit. At least some of the pirates were seasick, then. Good. Serves them right. On a less childish note, he thought, That will make them less efficient. Maybe make them lower their guard. Give me an edge. He looked around the engine area. There was no sign of anyone except Macavity’s men and Dom.

  Macavity took the lead and ran them forward out of engineering into the lower decks beneath the stubby bridge house until they reached the lateral corridor bisected by the stairwell. Then, staggering every time Sayonara heaved over a wave punching in on her left shoulder, he ran them up the companionway. The little squad moved with such speed and confidence that Richard had realized before they were two decks up – coming level with the weather deck itself – that his worst fears must be true: Macavity and his men must now be in total command. He paused for a moment, his mind racing. But his thoughts were immediately overwhelmed by another howling assault from the gale outside, strong enough to make the air in the companionway stir despite the fact that the bridge-house doors and windows all seemed to be tightly secured. Macavity and his men paused when Richard did, stopping dead in their tracks by the threatening roar of the storm. Richard looked at Dom, but for once neither of them had a clever quote or quip to offer. There was a serpentine hiss leading to a watery explosion of sound as a big wave washed across the weather deck outside and broke against the door at the end of the passage like surf on a reef. Richard felt the whole hull shudder and try to swing to starboard under the weight of the pounding sea. The throbbing of the engines reached almost cardiac intensity for an instant and the engineering sections below seemed filled with groans and whines as the automatic steering system fought to bring the ship back on to her pre-programmed course. A course that was likely to kill her unless the motors gave out or the computers were overridden.

  If this weather continued or worsened, then it really didn’t matter who controlled the bridge, Richard decided, turning to pound upwards once more. Just as long as they were willing to allow the computer engineers to disable the programmes – if such a thing was possible – and give him control of the vessel before it was too late. And so it proved. For as the squad ran him on to the command bridge four decks further up, Richard saw masked guards at the doors and at the corners of the wide, cold command space. A glance told him that this had been the situation for some time. There was no evidence of Aleks and his men. Presumably they were somewhere down in the dark depths of the engine room too, listening to the labouring engines spinning the thrashing turbines and the protesting servos swinging the battered rudders, puking and praying in equal measure. Rikki Sato and some of his men were working on the computers under the guns of the pirates exactly as they had done under the command of the Risk Incorporated men. And they needed to work fast, by the looks of things. Unless they wrested control back off the recalcitrant computer programme soon it would be too late – if it wasn’t too late already. But, very worryingly indeed, they had been trying non-stop for twelve solid hours since they got on to the bridge here, thought Richard, frowning up at the ship’s chronometer. Trying off and on for thirty-five hours since they came aboard, with absolutely no success.

  Macavity crossed to the pilot’s chair and threw himself in it, looking morosely out through the clearview windows down the length of the foredeck. Dom stood behind him, holding on to the chair’s back. Richard went forward and came to stand beside Rikki Sato where the main computer access was immediately beside the helm and movement controls – the engine room telegraph on old-fashioned vessels. He steadied himself with his left hand on the rally-sized steering wheel of the helm. His gaze flicked down to the screens that automatically monitored all the systems on board – whether computers or people controlled them. He noted the engine revolutions coming up to the top of the green and the servos controlling the massive rudders already well into the red. His eyes flicked up to the monitor on the deck head above him that showed the rudders’ disposition. It was shaking as though it were made of jelly as the great fins battered this way and that under the turbulent waters of the wake. He glanced down again but before he could check on the pitch of the propellers something made him glance up through the clearview windows angling in from the top towards the control console immediately in front of him.

  All the ship’s lights were fully on outside, giving Richard a rather clearer view than he would have liked. The great white whaleback stretched forward into a maw of blackness; a huge, gaping, cavernous mouth fanged with lighting. Huge white bolts struck almost in series from port to starboard, giving the jaws of the storm ahead some kind of depth. Sheet lightning illuminated a roiling insanity of storm clouds seeming to stretch away forever ahead, starting just above the top of the br
idge itself. There was a second eyewall out there, a ring of thunderstorms standing immediately across their course an hour or so ahead. That was where the really big winds would be. And, of course, the really tall seas.

  Not that those they were sailing through at the moment were much less dangerous. Especially, thought Richard, given the dynamics released by that great whaleback standing along the foredeck. As the winds whipped across it, they seemed to be clawing at it as though it were a sail, pushing Sayonara’s head relentlessly round to starboard. And, in the face of the counter-pressure caused by her rudders, programmed to turn her back on course, the wind and weather was threatening to roll her over. The foam, spray, rain and spindrift lashed across it from left to right with a speed that made it hard to focus. And beyond, as Sayonara slid off the top of another great incoming comber, there was an immense, white-fanged wilderness revealed by the lights as they struck out ahead.

  The sound was incredible – howling, whining and keening through the upper registers to levels that only bats could bear, while at the same time booming and thundering through bass registers that Paul Robeson and Fyodor Chaliapin could only dream of. And the volume was more than overpowering. It was like being in the middle of a battlefield. Disorientating. Terrifying. Unless you were used to it, thought Richard. He was battle-hardened in ways these soldiers could never conceive of. Like the sea-sickness, the disorientation and naked terror might serve to give him an edge. If he survived for long enough to need one, that is.

  ‘… do anything?’ came Macavity’s voice like a distant whisper. Richard turned and was surprised to observe that what he could see of the soldier’s face was red with strain. Macavity had been bellowing at the top of his lungs.

  ‘Not unless Doctor Sato can find some way to give us back control,’ he answered, pitching his voice to ride over the cacophony with practised ease. ‘Come to think of it, you guys seem to have done the damage – can’t you undo it? Or tell Doctor Sato how to undo it?

  ‘No need. I will have control in ten minutes,’ promised Sato suddenly. ‘Perhaps less.’ Richard swung round, shocked, then suspicious. Paranoid, perhaps. After all this time trying with no success … The moment the going really got tough, suddenly Rikki got going. That made him wonder about the Japanese computer expert. Especially, now he thought of it, after what Sato had said about the master codes …

  ‘Ten minutes?’ He probed. ‘You can override the programmes in ten minutes?’

  ‘As I said, perhaps less …’ Rikki Sato nodded, his black hair falling over the dome of his forehead, glasses slipping towards the end of his nose.

  ‘Absolute override? Complete control?’ Richard could hardly believe it.

  Another huge wave came in from the ten o’clock position, jerking his attention away from the suddenly shifty-looking computer programmer. It smashed into the whaleback, threatening to tear the whole thing off. Spray exploded up and thrashed away down the wind so fast that Richard was able to see the way the incoming water seemed to split, a wall running back along the pathway he and Aleks had followed on top of the whaleback to get into the bridge before moonrise. It rushed along the flat top between the pipe walls to rear up against the clearview and blot out everything for a lingering moment with a wash of foam that seemed glued to the glass.

  The whole hull shuddered. Heeled to starboard. The port-side bridge wing made some very strange sounds indeed and Richard reckoned the foam from the incoming wave crest must be beating against the overhanging underside almost hard enough to tear it off. The bulkhead door out on to the bridge wing rattled in its frame as though an invisible giant were beating at it. And suddenly Macavity was out of the chair beside it and standing at Richard’s shoulder, Dom DiVito just beside him. Looking, with Richard, through the slowly-clearing glass as though they understood the full importance of what they could see. ‘Ten minutes, then, Rikki,’ said Richard, keeping his tone conversational even though he had to bellow to be heard. ‘Less would be good.’ Then a thought struck him. ‘All the controls?’ he repeated. ‘Did you say all?’

  ‘Yes. I will close down all computer controls …’

  Richard glanced over his shoulder. ‘When those controls come off,’ he bellowed at Macavity, ‘there will need to be men who know what they’re doing in the cargo control room. God knows what this is doing to the cargo. It’ll certainly be slopping about in these Moss tanks as wildly as the waves outside. The NIPEX men. Steve Penn from Anchorage, maybe. If there isn’t an experienced hand at the cargo control, the inertia of the liquid in the tanks will just become another force trying to roll us over or tear us apart.’

  Macavity nodded, then began to turn.

  ‘But even more important than that, I need guys who know what they’re doing down in engine control. Someone from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries who knows how the engine control system works, who can back up on my signal. I’m not convinced that the engine room telegraph will communicate directly to the engines if the computer systems are all down. But I can rely on the old-fashioned way, I think. What I set those levers to will come up in the engine control room and they can control the engines from down there.’ He gestured to the telegraph as he spoke, and Macavity looked wide-eyed at the levers with the timeless commands written beneath them. FULL AHEAD, HALF AHEAD, SLOW AHEAD, DEAD SLOW, STOP ALL, FINISHED WITH ENGINES …

  ‘It’s now set up for skeleton crew,’ insisted Rikki defensively. ‘Good control from here when all online.’ He too gestured at the helm, the engine room telegraph levers and the movement control systems.

  ‘A skeleton crew was supposed to dock her,’ emphasized Richard. ‘A skeleton crew with half the programmes still keeping watch on the cargo and governing the engine movements, the rudder settings, headings and so forth. A skeleton crew who were supposed to just put her into a facility pre-programmed to receive her,’ insisted Richard. ‘A skeleton crew was never supposed to bring her home through a typhoon with every support system on board shut down!’

  He rounded fully on the hesitating Macavity and met him face-to-face, staring down those cold, pale eyes. ‘And even if they were,’ he snarled, ‘I’m a slim captain. I’m not a bloody skeleton crew! I need Engineer Esaki, maybe Murukami – they know their stuff.’ Macavity got the message. He turned, gestured to Dom and one of the men by the door. The three of them vanished through the doorway in the middle of the aft bridge wall running down into the well of the companionway. Richard swung back to confront Rikki Sato. ‘How long?’ he grated.

  ‘Five minutes, Captain,’ muttered Sato, suddenly seeming to be nervous now that Macavity was away.

  But Richard had no time for speculation or confrontation – though he really wanted to tear apart the tissue of lies Rikki Sato seemed to be spinning. They were coming closer to the outer eye wall now and, ahead of the line of thunderstorms, the typhoon suddenly started throwing waterspouts at them. As Rikki wrestled with the last of the cut-outs preventing him from closing down his own programme, Richard began to wrestle with an increasingly responsive helm, trying to remember from what he had studied of the ship’s management systems how independent of the computer circuitry the command and control systems actually were. Out of the darkness at the ten o’clock position where the winds were coming from, he saw a tall, pale spout of spray-filled whirlwind suddenly join the heaving water to the roiling clouds.

  As sinuous as a snake dancing to a charmer’s flute, the waterspout writhed out of the wilderness towards Sayonara – a snake more than a hundred feet high. A snake whose tail in the water kicked up a circular wall maybe thirty metres across. Richard had never seen anything quite like it and found himself just for the briefest moment trying to work out what peculiar set of physical circumstances could have led to such a thing appearing under these conditions in this place. But then Rikki Sato said, ‘Hokay,’ and the helm sprang fully to life beneath his grasp and immediately set about trying to rip his arms off. Richard had planned for this moment. He knew what he was going to do – what he ha
d to do if he was going to save the vessel. He was going to maintain the engines on full ahead and use all the power at his command to ease the helm over to starboard. Perhaps play with the fact that Sayonara had twin propellers that could turn independently of each other. Vary the thrust from each to help with the manoeuvre. Look for help also from the conditions he was sailing through. He was planning to allow those big seas to help turn Sayonara’s head round until the weather was coming in from her stern, and then he would adjust the engine settings until he was running just a little faster than the wave-sets. He had enough sea room to run due west for the better part of a day if he wanted to. Though, judging by the speed with which the typhoon seemed to be moving, Sayonara would be past the eye within a day and able to reverse her heading to ride the counter-winds eastwards back on to her original course. It looked as though he would be at the helm himself for the next thirty-five hours or so, if they could even get back on schedule. But what he had called an exercise in simple ship-handling, let alone anything else, would have to wait until he had dealt with the waterspout.

  Richard pushed the right-hand lever of the engine room telegraph hard into the full ahead position, therefore, and pulled the left-hand lever to full astern, treating the sedate LNG transporter as though she were a frigate able to turn on a penny. He hauled the helm hard over to port and pushed Sayonara’s bows straight into the spray-wall at the foot of the waterspout. ‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ he said to himself. And so it seemed. At first. The spraywall swept across the deck, seeming to ooze up on to the whaleback before the veil of wildly whirling spray swept back towards the clearview. Through it, Richard was able to see the central column of the spout writhing on to the helideck at the forecastle head. It seemed to linger there for an instant, then it stepped sedately down on to the water to the starboard of the bow.