by Peter Tonkin
‘Mariner.’
He had been so busy daydreaming he was surprised when she answered.
‘Hello, Mariner.’
‘Hello, darling. I hoped it would be you.’ He heard the familiar sounds she made as she sat on the sofa.
‘Sorry I didn’t get through last night.’
‘Bit of a crisis?’
‘You could say that. How are the terrors?’
‘Terrible. They miss you. We all do. Even Ashenden gets lonely after a while.’
‘I’ll be home soon.’
‘Do. Or we’ll be coming out to Mawanga.’
‘Don’t do that! It’s going to be a circus.’
‘No, I was joking. I don’t want to put the twins through all those jabs yet. What crisis?’
He began to tell her a little, making light of it, playing mind games with himself as he always did when he was less than honest with her, worrying that he was being over-protective and patronising, suspecting acutely that she could read him so well - even at this distance on a crackly line - that she would go to the other extreme and imagine that his reticence covered things which were much worse than they actually were.
‘But you’re in safe hands.’
‘Yes. I’m with Asha and she’s got every expert the UN can contact to advise her over the phone.’
‘But they don’t know what it is.’
‘Not yet.’
‘And the skin is coming off your hands and face.’
‘Not all of it; it’s just as though I’m peeling a bit after sunburn. That’s all.’
‘Off your hands and face.’
‘Well, not so much my face as my neck, you know . . .’ His voice trailed off.
Silence.
‘Maybe I’ll come out after all,’ she said.
‘Oh darling! There’s nothing you could do!’
‘I could take over your command for a start. I hope you’re paying poor Sally Bell captain’s rates because she’s been in command of that ship for longer than you have, by the sound of things.’
‘Talking of that. . .’
‘Talking of Sally?’
‘Talking of taking command, I’ve got a bit of a conundrum, and I’d like your advice, as the most gifted ship handler in the family. . .’
Next morning’s captains’ conference was held on the walkie-talkies - on the ‘party line’, as Bob Stark insisted on calling it. This was by no means an unusual procedure. Since die loss of one helicopter and the difficulty, and time wasted, of hopping from one ship to another, the conference had often been held this way. But this one Richard would have preferred to hold face to face. Even though he could and did fax all the calculations and the sheets of lading schedules to everybody as they discussed what he and Robin had worked on until late last night, he would have preferred to see their faces as he talked. But he was able to tell a good deal from their tone of voice and had to satisfy himself with that.
‘We’ll have to completely rebrief the line watches,’ Peter Walcott began. Richard was beginning to understand what strain Peter was under and why he was always automatically negative on first knockings.
‘All on the schedules going round on the fax,’ answered Richard.
‘Obviously we’ll have to check and recalculate them for ourselves,’ said Gendo Odate, under similar pressure to Peter; also negative, first off.
‘Yes, you will, Gendo. If we’re going to make much of a go of it, we’ll have to be fast, but yes, you’ll need to recalculate.’
‘Hard work for first officers all round,’ mused Bob Stark.
‘Yes.’
‘Still, that’s what first officers are for. What are you going to do about Sally Bell, though? She’s lading officer and acting captain all rolled into one.’
‘Let her talk for herself, Bob. Sally?’
‘I don’t know, Richard. I could sleep less, I guess.’
‘I could lend you Steve Bollom,’ interposed John Higgins. ‘He could work for you and I’ll sort out my end myself.’
Richard chuckled to himself. He had known in his bones that John would find it hard to let anyone else look after something as complex as this.
‘OK, John, but I’ll need you to recheck some of the figures anyway, especially the figures on line pay-out. Don’t over-tax yourself.’
‘No. I won’t.’
‘Because you’ve got another set of calculations to make in any case.’
‘When we start to slow Manhattan down so that she doesn’t shove Africa a couple of hundred metres east when she hits? Yes, I know. I get faxes from the Mau Club all the time.’
‘Any use?’
‘Might make decent toilet paper, I suppose.’
‘They’ve got mathematicians, not ship handlers,’ soothed Richard.
‘No, they’ve got ship handlers. The best ship handlers in the world. But we’re all out here,’ said Bob Stark.
‘Very funny,’ said John.
‘No,’ said Bob. ‘I mean it.’
‘Is this relevant?’ demanded Katya Borodin stiffly. ‘Captain Higgins will do the relevant calculations for slowing Manhattan’s progress at the relevant time. What we have to worry about now are the figures we have in front of us. Why is this so urgent that we have to work all night?’
‘If my figures are correct, and Dr Ross’s melt and runoff figures as updated yesterday are accurate—’
‘They are, Richard,’ interposed Colin Ross gruffly.
‘And the most interesting discussion I had with Dr Maille on the way south in the Westland holds water, then the runoff is simply a big discrete pool of fresh water marked clearly for us by the sand it contains. It will not have mixed with the sea water around it because of the difference in specific gravity and temperature, and it should all be available for use if we can get it all aboard. The runoff so far should come to about two full loads for all of us.’
‘Yes, I see that but where ...’ Katya Borodin, unimaginatively for her, asked the obvious question.
‘That’s the rub, Katya. I’ll have to call Mawanga city and see if there are any coastal tankers we can offload into.’
‘It seems quite likely that there would be.’ Her mind was obviously hotting up. ‘After all, they are clearing all shipping out of the inner harbour in anticipation of our arrival. And if there are?’
‘Then it would be possible to load fully within the next twenty-four hours.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ she agreed.
‘And unload in two days’ time.’
‘Da! I see!’
‘And reload so that we come into Mawanga fully laden again.’
There was a slight silence, then careful John summed it up, nominally to clear his own mind, actually to ensure that the others understood exacdy what Richard was proposing. ‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘we pump the clear water aboard out of the ocean around us on the assumption it has not been contaminated with brine and that the sand will settle out of it. We try to drum up enough coastal tankers to offload one and a half million tonnes of water in a couple of days’ time, then we fill up again on the way down to Mawanga.’
‘That should save about all the runoff it’s possible to save, yes . . .’
‘But it does require some interesting mathematics, doesn’t it?’ said Peter Walcott drily. ‘Especially for those of us who’ll be bobbing up and down in relation to the iceberg which is continuing to bob up and down in relation to us - at a different rate!’
‘We’ll go through the figures again, of course, Peter. I think, if you look, you’ll see that you and Gendo have two complete schedules each. One for the bow line and one for the stern; and they vary depending on your preferred sequence of lading.’
‘Yes, I see that.’ Peter Walcott was mollified by the amount of careful calculation that had already been done on his behalf. ‘You’ve thought this through pretty carefully.’
‘I had help.’ Richard let it rest at that, looking down at the sheets of figures in front of him, waiting for the fina
l reaction to his scheme. It came from Peter Walcott, the hardest to convince of all of diem.
‘If you get this amount of work done when you’re sick,’ said the Guyanese captain, giving in with a dry laugh, ‘I’d hate to have you aboard when you’re one hundred per cent fit!’
~ * ~
The harbour master at Mawanga port was a Kyoga of the old school, rude and officious. And he was not particularly enamoured of Richard, or of the United Nations, for between them they had turned a restful sinecure into the most demanding job on the west coast of Africa. He soon made it absolutely clear that he had no intention of giving Richard any of the information he needed. He had not time, he stated stiffly, in thickly accented English, to give callers on the telephone the registered owners of shipping of any kind in his harbour, let alone to discover which of the tankers nearby had no cargo and the capacity to carry water. No, he certainly would not pass on the names of their commanding officers. Or even the names and ports of registration of any ships of more than ten thousand deadweight tonnes. Captain Mariner had best contact some of the United Nations officials with which his port was currently being overrun and ask them!
Captain Mariner tried. It was still the morning where he was, though it was early afternoon in Mau. More importantly, it was not yet breakfast time in New York, so he could get the names of no UN personnel on the ground, let alone their telephone numbers.
But then, at the end of his tether and out of patience, he remembered. He already had the name of a United Nations officer in Mawanga. With a smile of relief, he called the radio officer. ‘Get me Mawanga Directory Enquiries, please,’ he ordered.
It came through at once: one of the new breed of Kyogas, a woman speaking in English. ‘Directory Enquiries. What name, please?’
‘Can you tell me the number for the Mawanga Hilton, please?’
‘Is that Reception at the Mawanga Hilton, sir?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘I can connect you directly from here, caller.’
‘Please do so ...’ He was cut off at once.
‘Hello? Mawanga Hilton Reception.’ A woman again. Perhaps not a Kyoga this time. Speaking in English with a slight American accent.
‘Good afternoon. My name is Richard Mariner. Can you put me in contact with Emily Karanga, please?’
‘Can you hold for a moment, Mr Mariner? I will see if I can find Ms Karanga for you ...’ The line went dead.
Richard was long past feeling surprise at the ease and precision with which it was possible to communicate across the world these days. His call to Bill Heritage at the United Nations had been no more complex than a call home, necessitating only a multiple-number dialling code. The old man had picked up the phone himself. It was fantastic.
‘. . . Karanga here. Is that you, Richard?’
‘Hello, Emily? Yes, it’s Richard here. I wonder if I might ask a favour?’
‘Yes, of course. Name it.’
‘There’s a crusty old harbour master down at the port I need to have charmed out of his tree.’
‘Well...’ Emily didn’t sound all that impressed.
‘Look. This is more important than it sounds. We’ve come up with a scheme for bringing meltwater aboard here. We need some small coastal tankers to put it onto. We can offload one and a half million tonnes of fresh water. If we can do that, then we can bring in the same again - an extra three million tonnes in all. That’s a good-sized lake, for crying out loud! But I can’t get the harbour master to tell me the names of any tankers. Not their captains or their owners. And he’s got all the information I need.’
There was a brief silence while Emily assimilated the information and thought about how best to deal with it. Then she said, ‘Right. Is there any special sort or size of tanker you need to know about?’
‘Yes, indeed there is . . .’
As he began to explain, he felt the weight of a certain amount of responsibility lift off his shoulders. And he was relieved.
~ * ~
While the afternoon rolled by and the convoy with Manhattan at its heart came past Harper, Liberia, past Cape Palmas, and then past Tabou, Ivory Coast, Richard went through with Asha his current condition and applied ointment under her direction, then worked at arranging the final details of his office. When everything was exactly as he wanted it to be, he sent up to the bridge for the Admiralty chart of the west coast of Africa and, together with the Admiralty Pilot, began to go through the fine detail of what exactly would be involved in delivering Manhattan safely into the interior anchorage of Mawanga harbour.
At four, he phoned round all his captains again and checked up on how their calculations from this morning’s meeting were going. After the others had rung off, Colin Ross stayed on the party line, but it was clear that he was trying to ensure that no one else could overhear what he was saying. ‘You know, Richard,’ he began, and Richard knew him well enough now to recognise that slight Scottish burr as a sign of worry, ‘the melt rate figures I gave you have a wider relevance than simply the tonnage of fresh water you can pick up.’
‘Yes, I know that, Colin.’
‘I mean to say, I don’t think we’re going to make it as we are. I can’t be absolutely accurate of course, and not even Kate, who’s as experienced in this area as I am myself, can give me any guidance.’
‘It’s in the lap of the gods, Colin.’
‘Aye, you can put it like that if you want, but it will affect all of your calculations about the depth and width of the harbour entrance. It will have to affect your sailing orders - everything. Will we need to warn the coastal areas? I mean, God knows what will happen.’
‘As I understand it, that will depend on whether it rolls to the north or to the south.’
‘That it will!’
‘Well, the best I can offer is this. When Manhattan is sitting so high that it looks from your figures that she’s going to roll, I’ll ask the ships to cut themselves free in a carefully calculated sequence.’
‘Psyche last.’
‘Psyche and Niobe last.’
There was a short silence, then Colin observed, ‘That would be dangerous.’
‘Yes. But it comes with the territory. I’ll have to call the odds between two ships and eighty lives, and the probable damage to the whole of the coast north of us if it rolls the other way.’
‘But you recognise that it will roll. Before we get to Mawanga. All my figures point to it.’
‘I know that, Colin. We all knew it was a probability right from the outset. Now it’s just something else I have to try and include in my calculations.’
‘Talking of calculations, I have another set of schedules which allow for a wide range of melt rates.’
‘Fax them over to me here. I’ll go through them and see if I can calculate the critical point. I’m the one responsible, after all. I have to warn the captains - give them an accurate countdown if I can.’
‘Rather you than me!’
‘What can I say? It’s what I get paid for.’
‘You don’t get paid enough. Believe me!’
Richard looked at his left hand - his right was holding the walkie-talkie to his ear - and saw through the light gauze of the bandage that the skin was still soft and full of blisters. His blood ran cold and he shivered with revulsion. ‘I believe you,’ he said feelingly.
~ * ~
He was holding the walkie-talkie, getting ready to phone Robin, when Emily Karanga came back through.
‘Hello, Emily?’ he said, his spirits lightening just to be talking to her. She was such a dynamo that it was possible to soak up energy from the simple idea of her.
‘Hi, Richard. That information you wanted is on its way over by fax. He wasn’t such a bad old guy. He just needed someone to appreciate what an outstanding job he was doing, and in extremely difficult circumstances, too.’
Richard wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said noncommittally.
‘Certainly. We Kyoga are a badly
underrated tribe. We’ve always done all the work here and never received any of the recognition due to us. It is most upsetting. Even the United Nations is really only interested in saving the lives and property of thousands of worthless, feckless N’Kuru peasants who have never been anything but a drain on the state. If we Kyoga had our way, they would all be used for what they are best suited for - manure.’