by Paul Kearney
“Go on, quick now,” Cutter pressed him.
“I’ve redirected a few of the console energy sources, the ones which are just jam really; they make the lights blink and whatnot. I can pulse the mainframe for short bursts and —” He hesitated. “Well, I won’t really know if it’ll make much difference until I try it. But in theory —”
“This is not a Meccano set, Connor,” Cutter said. “This thing is important.”
“But it’ll work, I know it will. I’m nearly done here, Professor. A few more minutes and I can give the mainframe a pulse. Just one shot — that’s all I ask.”
“This pulse of augmented energy —”
“Well, it’s not just juice. I’ve rewritten the basic code to compensate for it, electronically. Simple, really. You just —”
“You’ve rewritten the basic software of the detector?” Cutter’s ginger eyebrows shot up his forehead.
“Well, just a little,” he admitted awkwardly.
Cutter turned away, and stared back at the great plate-glass windows that surrounded the well in which the anomaly detector rested. The detector itself looked like the most desirable home-cinema system ever invented, married to a block of grey steel cupboards which concealed the thing’s innards. No one in the surrounding offices was looking their way; no one had yet noticed that the usually blue flickering screens of the detector were now black.
Cutter turned back, his jaw set, the ever-present lines under his eyes accentuated by the harsh lighting.
“Connor, I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’?” Cutter asked.
“Aw Professor, how can we make progress if we don’t tinker with things, see what they’re capable of? Where would the fun be?”
Cutter looked back at the detector. It appeared as though a fair tranche of its guts had been yanked out, chopped up, and scattered over the floor in fragments of copper wiring, discarded transistors, and brightly coloured rubber insulation.
“God Almighty, Connor, if you’ve broken this thing, Lester will have you banged up for life.”
Thus encouraged, Connor dropped to his knees, one hand scrabbling for the smoking soldering iron.
“Ten minutes, Professor — fifteen at most. And then I’ll have her up and running again. Honest.”
“Get on with it,” Cutter said with an unwilling smile, and when Connor grinned up at him, he snapped, “Well, go on!”
Connor disappeared back into the belly of the machine. Abby shook her head.
“Can’t we just put him in a room with some Lego?”
“He built it,” Cutter replied, his voice low, careful not to let the younger man hear him. “He knows what it can do.”
The wind had dropped a little, James thought, and there was a grey light in the sky that hadn’t been there a half hour before. Dawn wasn’t far off.
“Long night,” his son said, braced against the wheelhouse door with water still swirling ankle-deep about him. He had donned his orange survival suit, as had all of the crew. Kieran liked to joke that it went with his hair, while the two Murnahan brothers were too small to properly fill theirs out.
“Long night,” James agreed. His eyes were stinging with salt and tiredness. “Light me up one, will you Michael?”
His son extracted a bruised roll-up from the tin on the binnacle and lit it with a plastic lighter, puffing blue smoke and grimacing.
“These things’ll kill you,” he said to his father as he set it between the older man’s lips.
“Not today they won’t,” James Mackey answered, sucking down the smoke gratefully.
Under them, the Cormorant was moving more like a rational thing now. The waves she rode upon were still monsters, but the wind no longer threatened to broach them every time they came up upon the crests. It was still pulling thirty knots, but that was nothing sensational for the North Atlantic at this time of year. The shriek of it, the roar of the sea, now competed with the snarling rattle of the engines and the dull thud of the bilge pumps working nonstop.
The ship was alive. She was fighting the water and the wind with a valour that warmed James Mackey’s heart.
Kieran came up the companionway, splashing through the water.
“We’re holding our own,” he said. He no longer had to shout so loud to be heard. “The extra pumps did the trick, though Liam and Sean are about to have their arms drop off with the pumping.”
“What do we have?” James asked him.
“There’s a foot still in her down there, but we’re keeping pace with it. What’s our position, Skipper?”
James nodded to Michael. But he didn’t take his eyes off the great swells breaking before him, the bow powering up them as though the ship were climbing the black, shining back of some vast beast. His son bent over the GPS screen, tapping it with an impatient forefinger.
“We’re 240 miles out, south-southwest of Bantry.” He checked the weather on the other screen; the meteorological station at Cork Coastguard updated it every few minutes. “Guns Island is twenty-five miles to the northwest of us.”
“Thank God we missed that,” James said, puffing. “I’ve heard tell of ships than ran full tilt upon it with a northeaster at their backs. It’s so black you can’t see it at night.”
“I thought it had a beacon,” Kieran said.
“It did, but it’s been out of commission for months now. They’re arguing over who owns it, us or the French, so no one’s allowed to go out and fix it until it’s settled in Brussels. So I hear anyway.”
“I heard the Brits took it during the war, and made a secret base on it,” Michael said.
“Don’t believe all you hear. There’s nothing on it now but about a million gannets, and it has thousand-foot cliffs all around. Whoever wants it can have it, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Two forty miles,” Kieran said. “What speed are we pulling, Skipper?”
“Twenty knots.”
“Will we make it in before the catch spoils?”
“With a little luck, and if —”
Suddenly a massive concussion knocked them all off their feet. The ship shuddered, and groaned like a living thing, slewing round in the water. From below, the voices of the Murnahan brothers sounded out in fear and pain.
“What the hell?” Michael yelled, splashing around in the flooded wheelhouse on his hands and knees.
Another crash, this time deep in the hull. It was as though something was butting against the timbers of the ship, like a bull charging a gate. The Cormorant was shoved side-on through the water, and the angry waves she rode upon fountained up in explosive geysers of spray as the keel smashed through them.
The trawler canted to starboard, and in the wheelhouse James, Michael and Kieran tumbled over each other like sacks, cannoning into the bulkhead. James’s head struck a stanchion hard, and it was opened up in a red flower of blood, a spray that painted his son’s face scarlet in a second.
“Da!” Michael screamed.
Another crash, this time on the bows. The stern of the ship rose out of the water and foaming green seas swallowed up her bow. Above the chaotic bellow of the storm another sound arose — an animal roar.
The windows of the wheelhouse were smashed in and the sea rushed through, a white fury of surging water. In seconds the wheelhouse was waist-deep, then chest-deep. The water poured down the companionway and flooded the lower compartments, the engine room. It filled the ship, killing the diesels, drowning the batteries.
The lights went out. The Cormorant, groaning in protest, tilted further to starboard, like a tired animal laying down its head.
Michael Mackey reared his head up above the water.
“Da! Kieran!” A body in a survival suit was floating face down before him in the dim grey light of the shattered wheelhouse. He grabbed at it, but then something huge and dark came crashing clear through the bulkhead, smashing through the nine-inch timbers as though they were kindling; something like a black missile. With
it came a noisome smell, like that of ancient, rotting seaweed, or fish left in the sun.
Michael saw teeth like spearheads, a glimpse of a red maw, and then it withdrew again. He stared, frozen in shock, and the water rose up to cover his head.
The Cormorant rolled over with a long, rending groan of laboured timber, capsizing as the hundreds of tons of water within her finally dragged her down. A great wave washed over her upturned hull, and the hole which had been smashed through it.
As the ship went down, Michael scrambled out of the broken wheelhouse, lungs bursting, mind white and empty with the shock of it all. The survival suit lifted him, and his life jacket inflated about his shoulders, drawing him upwards, away from the wrecked carcass of the doomed trawler. He gave a great whoop as he broke surface, sucking in air and spray, coughing as the salt water fouled his mouth.
He bobbed there in the grim grey light of the hour before dawn, the strobe on his life jacket blinking, the cold of the Atlantic penetrating even the rubber confines of his suit.
“Da!” he screamed to the racing sky. “Kieran!” But there was no answer.
And then something broke the surface beside him. So vast was it that for a second he thought the trawler was coming up again. A sleek black shape, forty, fifty — perhaps sixty feet long, black as a submarine. Michael stared wide-eyed and frozen at it in the spray-lashed morning. Even as he watched, it submerged again. He caught a glimpse of a blunt tail. There were no flukes on it — this was not a whale — and then it was gone.
He floated alone again in the middle of the desolate Atlantic, the cold water slowly taking him to his death, his mind as numb as his freezing limbs. Why wouldn’t the radio work?
It was the last conscious thought of his life.
THREE
“Do I have to ask what’s going on, or is someone going to be good enough to tell me?” James Lester demanded. He stood twiddling the signet ring on his little finger, his Dunhill suit hanging impeccably from his shoulders.
“I see the cleaners have been doing their usual bang-up job,” he added, peering at the jumble of wire and plastic circuit boards that littered the floor.
“We’ve been adjusting the anomaly detector,” Cutter told him. “Just some fine-tuning. Everything’s fine.”
“Fine,” Connor repeated, grinning nervously.
Lester looked at the blue screens of the detector, pursing his lips.
“What a meaningless word that is. Everything’s fine nowadays, when it’s not okay. Yet it looks to me — a layman — like our little programmer here has been playing with a toy which doesn’t belong to him...”
“I built this — I made — I mean, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” Connor started out indignant, but at the look on Lester’s face, he subsided to a mutter.
“So long as it’s working,” Lester said with a touch of weariness edging his voice. “Is this all you brought me down here for, to look at the litter on the floor?”
“We’re about to try something,” Cutter said. “We thought you should be here. Clau...” He paused for an instant. “Jenny and Stephen are on their way.”
Lester caught the verbal slip, and stared at Cutter, his pale face intent for a moment.
“I trust you’re feeling well, Cutter? No mindstorms, no little lapses of rationality?”
“I’m fine — perfectly in the pink,” Cutter responded with a snarl in his voice.
“Glad to hear it.” Turning away, Lester beckoned over a white-clad technician who had been hovering in the background, clipboard at the ready. “Make yourself useful, man. Bring me a coffee. Black, no sugar.” And when he hesitated, Lester snapped, “Run along now. I pay your wages you know.”
The man sped off.
“Well, I send in appropriations at any rate,” Lester said with a shrug. Then he smiled a little. He had a gift for it, smiling without humour. He leaned forward and stared at the cluster of flat, flickering screens that were the displays of the anomaly detector. Upon them, maps of the United Kingdom wheeled back and forth, and tables of figures and graphs of undulating frequencies came and went. “It looks just the same as always to me.”
“There’s a new button on the console,” Connor volunteered. “The red one, just there — but don’t touch it!”
“I have no intention of doing so,” Lester said, straightening. “Civil servants and red buttons do not go well together. I shall be perfectly happy to leave it to you.” He looked at his watch. “But not for much longer. Cutter, I’m a busy man —”
The clack of heels on concrete made him turn his head. Jenny Lewis came walking down the reinforced ramp which led to the central well of the ARC. She was wearing a short skirt, an ivory-coloured blouse and a string of pearls. Her dark hair was tied up in a bun and she strode down the ramp as though it were a catwalk, head held high, eyes flashing. All three men standing around the detector paused to watch her, their gaze travelling from her legs to her face and back again.
Abby rolled her eyes.
“I was in a meeting,” Jenny said. “What’s so all-fired important?” Behind her Stephen Hart jogged down the ramp, t-shirt sticking to his lean torso, sweat shining his smooth, clean-shaven face. His eyes were bright beneath dark brows.
“And I was out for a run,” he said. Behind him, at the top of the ramp, the technician reappeared.
“You carry your mobile when you’re running?” Abby asked him.
He held it up, breathing heavily.
“Of course. You never know when some enthusiastic person is going to call you and tell you to drop everything,” he said tartly. “So what’s the rush? There’s no alarm is there?”
“We’re here to watch Connor press a red button,” Lester said dryly. He accepted his coffee, waved the technician away without thanks, and grimaced as he tasted it. “All right Professor, we’re all here, so dazzle us.”
Cutter looked at Connor and raised an eyebrow.
“She’s your baby,” he said, not sounding entirely confident.
“Try not to electrocute yourself,” Abby said.
“Very funny,” Connor retorted. He licked his lips and set a finger on the red button. “Now what’s going to happen here is that —”
“Just do it, Connor,” Cutter snapped.
Connor pressed the button.
And around them, all hell broke loose.
The Sea King bulled its way through the storm like an angry dragon. Painted a bright red-pink, the helicopter belonged to the Irish Coast Guard, and was on the last leg of its search box, snarling its way across the North Atlantic at 200 feet, the pilot swearing as he fought to keep the aircraft straight and level.
“Eleven minutes to PONR,” the copilot’s voice crackled, and the pilot nodded, scalp sweating under the heavy helmet, his flying gloves soaking up more perspiration as they grasped the cyclic and collective. He turned his wrist a little, and the massive Rolls Royce Gnome turbines roared harder as the throttle was opened. The wind was trying to force the helicopter’s nose up, and the pilot was continually inching the cyclic down to maintain forward flight.
“Windspeed fifty-six knots,” the copilot said.
“I need a beer,” Jeff, the pilot, told him, grinning weakly while his eyes were fixed out of the rain-lashed windows.
“We get home from this one, and I’m buying.” This was the voice of the third member of the crew, the winchman. There was a pause as the three men concentrated on their jobs. Finally the copilot spoke.
“Skipper, we’re six minutes to PONR,” he said. “Suggest we make return heading of —”
“I see something!” It was the winchman. Despite the chaos outside, he was leaning out of the open side door of the aircraft, securely tethered in his harness, and he was wiping the rain and spray from his goggles. “Jeff, I see a body in the water, broad on our port side. I see a survival suit. Maybe 300 metres away.”
“Coming round. Dave, best get in back.”
“Roger that.” The copilot unstrapped himself
from his seat and made his way aft, staggering as the heavy aircraft was thrown around by the storm. “Will this bloody wind ever drop?” he muttered, his words coming through the headset.
“The low systems are coming in from the west, a whole rugby team of them. It’ll be like this for days yet; weeks maybe,” the pilot replied. The strain was audible in his voice.
“I’m at the winch,” the copilot said. “Mike, you ready?”
The winchman slapped him on the shoulder. “Just tell me when to jump Dave, and hang around to pick me up.” They both looked down at the raging surface below.
“Where’d he go?” the copilot shouted. “Christ, yes, I see him. Now Mike, go go go!”
The winchman jumped, feet first, arms folded around his torso. He arrowed into the sea and disappeared.
“Hold hover here,” the copilot shouted into his comms. “We’re in the water. I see him. We are making our — damn —” Suddenly the helicopter was shunted aside by a fist of wind that caught it broadside-on.
“Sorry about that Dave,” the pilot said. “It’s playing with us. Coming back on station.”
“Port twenty metres” the copilot said. “He’s waving. Dropping winch now.” He hit the button and the heavy cable with its harness attached began to unwind towards the sea below.
“Starboard five metres. Hold it. Hold here — hold hover Jeff. He’s attaching harness. He’s having trouble. Christ, Mike, hurry up.”
“Fuel is in red. Bingo fuel in eighteen minutes. We have to move on this one Dave,” the pilot warned.
“There’s a problem. He’s attaching the harness. He’s — damn it, he’s lost it again. What the hell is his problem? He’s faffing about like an old man. Wait, wait — I have thumbs-up. Raising winch now.” The copilot thumbed the winch control and the cable began to wind in on its drum, raising the winchman and his catch to the helicopter’s open door.
“My God, my God,” the copilot said as the cable came up from the sea.
“Dave, what is it?”
“Maintain position. He’s at the door now.”