The O.D.

by Chris James

  Only fifty feet separated peak from trough now, but even so, it would require skillful flying to lift six people out of a rubber dinghy that was travelling up and down like a yo-yo.

  The figure underneath the helicopter was winched down to a point where the dinghy had, a moment before, been at the top of the swell. As the dinghy descended, the man on the winch remained dangling in his fixed position, like a worm on a fishhook. The flotilla’s rotation soon brought the rescue operation back into normal vision, and those who could see it from their seats lent commentary to those who could not. There were audible sighs on board as the first attempt failed.

  The dinghy, the sinking Shenandoah and the fourteen-barge flotilla dropped down once more, leaving the helicopter pilot to work out what he’d done wrong. Whatever it was, he compensated for on the next run, for, when the dinghy peaked again he was able to drop his man into the water just an arm’s length from the inflatable. Within seconds he was harnessing the first person to the wire. On board the helicopter the line was fed out as fast as the dinghy was descending. When their man signaled that the harness was secure, the brakes were applied slowly to the winch and two bodies were left suspended in the air as the dinghy carried on falling.

  A huge cheer broke out on Ptolemy as the first survivor was winched aboard the helicopter. Ten minutes later the scene was repeated with a second successful rescue, but that was it. They lost visibility of the dinghy and the Sea King, both actual and via the four cameras.

  Inside the jumbo, the braver occupants felt they were beginning to get the measure of the ride and started talking and laughing nervously. The surges they were experiencing now were no worse than the first and may even have been easing off.

  Pilot tried to imagine what was happening around them, but the scale was so vast, he could only guess. Their vertical movement and even keel suggested that whatever was happening under the earth’s crust, was happening directly below them. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane while all around them the most horrendous seas were radiating outwards. He wondered how long it would take the first ones to hit mainland Europe and tried to calculate the height of the tsunamis by estimating the speed and duration of the next descent. As a guide he used the pressure his stomach exerted on the underside of his diaphragm, but in the end he gave up.

  By three o’clock it was obvious the seas were diminishing and half an hour later, trough to peak measured less than ten metres.

  Fifteen hours of welcome calm ensued…

  By first light, things had taken on the atmosphere of just another transatlantic jumbo crossing− with turbulence. Croissants and coffee were being dispensed to those who were awake and Pilot was beginning to wonder if the solar tide had failed to exert sufficient pull on the magma to deliver Eydos. He imagined the scene at the IGP− Vaalon and his team monitoring the situation on their computer screens with worried looks on their faces, like NASA mission controllers hearing Lovell’s portentous transmission, ‘Houston, we have a problem’.

  Forrest could have got this wrong, Pilot thought, picturing the barge masters returning in the morning to take them all home.

  Just fifty miles to the east, the French ocean research vessel Largesse, which had miraculously ridden the waves, was almost upon what, from the air, looked like a small islet wrapped by Christo in red rubber bobbing about in the Bay of Biscay.

  Pilot decided that if one person had to remain positive in this flotilla, it was he. Attributing the calmer seas to a natural ‘stutter’ in the movement of the magma, he began to re-read Items 56-79 under the heading Making Landfall. He was just beginning the instruction on disembarkation when Josiah Billy tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out of the window. Everyone on the port side was craning to get a glimpse of the horizon. It had a strange bow in it to the southwest that was difficult at first to process until Dubravka ‘Dubi’ Horvat, the daughter of Vaalon’s Dubrovnik housekeeper, calmly announced, “I think it is tidal wave.”

  A wall of water stretching a full quarter of the compass appeared to be running in their direction. Pilot could see it swallowing up the smaller waves that were still echoing from the upsurge of the previous day. In the main cabin all conversation stopped, replaced by a swooning sound and expletives of the terrified as opposed to the angry kind.

  Pilot raised his binoculars to his eyes and fastened his gaze on a smudge of foam on the surface just in front of the wave. He followed it up the wall to the top and watched it disappear over the other side. Then the swell took them down again and he could see no more.

  “When do you think it’ll hit us?” A voice asked no one in particular. There was no answer. Everyone was thinking the same thoughts anyway. Pilot hurried downstairs and stood at the head of the aisle. “CRASH POSITIONS.” He returned to his seat and attempted to gauge the wave’s size and speed as it rolled inexorably closer. It had probably been ten to fifteen miles away when it was first noticed, and was now nearly upon them. It could be traveling at anything from twenty to thirty knots, with a height that was impossible to judge. He was more worried about the steepness of its leading face. If the angle weren’t too extreme they could conceivably ride it, whatever the height. But if it were−

  When the jumbo rose up on the next swell and the scene unfolded outside the windows, Pilot saw nothing but water curving upwards and away as far as the eye could see. The wave was so close now that it blanketed half the sky and he only just got his head down and between his knees when it hit.

  First, the rubber barrage and three outer portside barges were tilted up forty-five degrees to the rest of the convoy. The three vessels inside them followed a split second later and so on across the pack. The pressure on the bulldozer tyres was enormous, but they absorbed it as effectively as the cartilage between the vertebrae of a gymnast doing a forward roll.

  Because the flotilla was meeting the wave sideways on, less pressure was placed on the spines of the barges. A hit forward would surely, in Pilot’s opinion, have cracked their backs. When the wave hit them, it swept them up from zero to twenty-five knots in little more than a second. This sudden acceleration, coupled with the boat’s extreme list, was as dramatic as it was traumatic. The interior of the jumbo was a jumble of minds, spirits, bodies, and personal effects. There wasn’t an honest soul on board who did not think they were about to die.

  The rubber barrage had prevented the mammoth wave from inundating the portside barges, but in doing so had sent up thousands of gallons of water in the form of spray which was hitting the windows of the jumbo with the force of hail and blotting out the entire scene from view. For the people inside, it seemed as if they’d capsized. Pilot shuddered at the carnage the wave would deliver when it hit the mainland. As it carried them forward at speed, the flotilla was slowly climbing up the wall, like the foam Pilot had witnessed earlier, though of course he was seeing nothing now. After a minute of excruciating fear and physical discomfort, the occupants of the plane found themselves ‘above the clouds’ and in daylight once again. The acceleration had dropped, along with their stomachs, and they’d leveled off, too.

  “We made it,” someone shouted. “We’re on top of the wave.”

  No sooner had the words been uttered than the outer barges fell away down the back slope of the mountain. As they did so, their hulls, far below the water line, crashed into those of the barges inside them. In quick succession this happened all along the line to the far side of the flotilla. Ptolemy took a blow on her port side from Bimbo’s Kraal so hard that the shock wave dislocated Dubi Horvat’s shoulder. She’d been placing too much weight on her elbow in an attempt to get a view out of the window.

  The wave reminded Pilot of the first surges they’d experienced, and he knew there’d be another hurdle right behind the one they’d just straddled. As had been the case earlier, the second strike didn’t seem to be as bad as the first, only because they were prepared and knew what to expect. In truth, the second wave was higher than its predecessor.

  There were t
hose on board in whom panic killed all forms of logic and detached observation. With faces buried between knees and forearms, they were unaware when the flotilla hurdled the second wave successfully. However, as they dropped down the other side, the barges swung around so that they faced the oncoming third wave head on.

  From Pilot’s position in the cockpit, the distance to the bow of the leading barge was ninety metres. Twenty metres above that point was the awesome peak of the third wave over which the entire surface of the sea was rolling, separate and detached from the mass of water beneath.

  As Pilot braced himself for the impact, he didn’t feel in the least confident that his convoy would survive this hit. Whatever modifications Vaalon had devised to reinforce the hulls of the barges, the approaching leviathan would be their ultimate test. And so it was.

  With an impact equivalent to a car crash at twenty-five miles an hour, the flotilla hammered into the wall of water and was pitched upwards and thrust backwards at the same time. The four leading barges were lifted fifty degrees, shredding seven fenders at their sterns, before being followed up the watery wall a split second later by the second row of barges, with Ptolemy in the middle, and then the third. When the spray hit the windows, all visual reference to what was happening to them was lost. The noise from outside and within assaulted the senses with an intensity and a menace no one could afterwards describe.

  Pilot had been convinced that the leading hulls, at least, would have been snapped in half by the impact, but despite the severe shuddering and the painful sound of rivets and plates screaming to part company, all appeared intact.

  The fourth wave was much less powerful than its predecessor, and when it rolled away behind them, audible sighs of relief were expelled. Pilot unbuckled and put his face to the window to get a better view of the seas ahead. There was another wave coming, but it was the runt of the litter. Then he noticed something strange about Earthmover II at the starboard corner of the formation. “Josiah, look,” he said, pointing. Billy unbuckled and joined Pilot at the window. “Looks like she’s shipping water.” The foundering barge, with her heavy cargo of Irish topsoil, was two metres lower in the water than Ocean Queen on her port side.

  The two resumed their seats and buckled up in preparation for the fifth wave. When it was successfully ridden and behind them, it was clear that the worst was over. Apart from a few bloodied noses and cut lips and tongues, where faces had collided with knees, everyone seemed shipshape. Not so, the flotilla.

  Pilot and Billy returned to their viewpoint and were horrified by the sight before them. Not only was Earthmover II submerged, with just her wheelhouse and a few cranes and masts visible, but she had also begun to pull Ocean Queen down with her. “Jesus Christ, Lonnie,” Billy said.

  Pilot calmed himself and began sizing up the situation. The chains attaching Earthmover II to the barrage were holding, unbelievably. Although King Solomon at the barge’s stern was being pulled down at the bow, her extra buoyancy through having a light cargo was aiding in keeping Earthmover II afloat. Ocean Queen was not faring so well. The water level was beginning to crest her deck and she was listing badly to starboard. Pilot could see nothing but dominoes before his eyes. “Titanic sank because five of her sixteen watertight compartments had been breached,” he said. “Two of our fourteen barges are sinking.”

  “I was thinking the exact same thing,” Billy replied.

  They watched in stunned silence as the sea began to wash over Ocean Queen’s decks and she, in turn, began to pull down Baltimore, the barge directly in front of them.

  “It’s a race between us and the shelf now,” Pilot said with a calmness that surprised him. “Will Eydos get here before we sink, or will we be making our landfall half a mile underwater?” Part of his stoicism was due to a gut feeling that the shelf did not have far to come now. He reasoned that, as the volume of water between the surface and the rising shelf lessened, so too would the waves. The sea would flatten out first and the water would fall off in whichever direction the tilt of the shelf sent it – in this case probably northeast, at right angles to the edge of the shelf and towards the mainland – the same direction the waves were traveling now. On the other hand, the wave sequence might be the result of this very run-off, the shelf already having broken the surface somewhere up ahead.

  As Pilot wrestled with the mental aspects of the experience and the visual evidence that his flotilla was sinking under his feet, his companions were grappling with their own inner turmoils. Riding the waves without personal injury had been each person’s primary concern, but the moment they pulled themselves up on the ropes, they’d been knocked down again. With grim apprehension, they remained in their crash positions waiting for the other shoe to drop. If they could have seen what Pilot was now watching – Ptolemy’s bow now being pulled down by the three barges in front of her – they would have taken to the lifeboats without a second’s thought. Only, there were no lifeboats to take to.

  “SHIT, MAN,” Billy shouted seconds after the shock waves from an explosion almost blew the cockpit’s windows out.

  “One of the barrages just popped,” Pilot said, assessing the situation in seconds. “We’re wide open to starboard.”

  The waves, which earlier had been broken by the barrage ring, were now inundating the three sinking barges of the front row. Only their radio masts remained above water. Pilot knew it was only a matter of time before Earthmover I, King Solomon and Chiswick Eyot were also submerged and wondered when the crucial sinking point would come. The remaining barges couldn’t keep the others afloat forever. There was a section in Pilot’s instructions headed ‘Abandoning Ship’, and he reluctantly began to read it.

  Ten minutes later, with five of his fourteen barges now underwater, Pilot was seriously contemplating throwing the switch that would turn their landing module into a lifeboat. Vaalon had assured him that the jumbo would stay afloat indefinitely once jettisoned. Before he could act, something changed beneath him. Severe vibrations began to all but shake the flotilla to pieces. They were not being caused by the rough seas, but were the physical manifestation of shockwaves being transmitted from the seabed, through the intervening water and into the body of the convoy. Nobody on board had ever experienced an earthquake at sea.

  ‘It can’t be far away now,’ Pilot thought, glancing at his watch as a way of summoning their salvation. But so violently was he being shaken, he had great difficulty reading the time. He held the tarnished old timepiece once worn by his grandfather up to his ear, but what with the noise from protesting bulkheads, spray pelting against the windows and the general uproar in the cabin, he couldn’t tell if his watch were ticking or not.

  Whatever the actual time, he knew it was only a matter of minutes before the transponder in the nose cone would be activated and Geirsson and the others would stake their common claim. From then on the eyes of the entire world would fall forever on this unlikely band of colonisers – aground in the Bay of Biscay on fourteen trussed up barges and half a jumbo in a rubber ring.

  ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law ...’

  With a jolt Pilot realised he was getting ahead of himself and that the only thing they were in possession of at that moment was a floating barge cemetery that was fast sinking. So intense were the vibrations that Pilot had lost track of his observations of the wave pattern. When the next one washed over the front row of the flotilla, he knew that the worst of their ordeal was over. This assessment was confirmed over the next few minutes as consecutive waves shed power at a rate that could only, by Pilot’s reasoning, be explained by there being a sudden and massive loss of water volume beneath them.

  The shockwaves had also taken on a different expression – not so frenetic and brain-rattling now. It was more like feeling and hearing an underground train through five feet of earth. All around them the sea was a jumping mass of whipped up foam. A snow-white circular wake was spreading out from the convoy as if churned up by a thousand propellers set all round them. Beyond th
is wake and all the way to the horizon it was as if a billion tuna were thrashing their lives to extinction in two feet of water.

  “HERE IT COMES.” Pilot shouted. “CRASH POSITIONS.”

  He tore his eyes from the drama outside and clamped his head in the vice of his knees and hands.

  Amidst the noise, the vibration and his own almost boundless excitement, he noticed that the entire flotilla was rotating, and he couldn’t resist the temptation to look out the window for a sign.

  When he lifted his face, there were the ‘thrashing tuna’ as before, but as the jumbo rotated, the random display of white water began to take on a definite ripple pattern. Thousands of tiny whitecaps were marching in close formation as if breaking across a very shallow sea.

  As the plane continued its pirouette, the next vision to assault Pilot’s eyes nearly stopped his heart. In the fading light, his immediate reaction was that it was another giant wave. But, as the setting sun broke through the cloud canopy at last, it wasn’t water that Pilot saw before him, but land.

  A trick of the eye made it seem as if they were flying low over the sea towards an island runway – an illusion of speed and direction caused by a shoreline moving towards them at fifty miles an hour as the continental shelf rose majestically from the sea at an angle of two degrees and the emerging island reached across to take the flotilla ashore.

  PART TWO

  VIII

  Earthmover II, Ocean Queen and Baltimore were unrecognizable as sea-going vessels. They had taken the brunt of the collision, being lower in the water on impact, and had come apart at the seams. Their cargoes had been shed in a strangely appropriate christening of the new land, with six hundred tons of hard core, gravel, sand and topsoil-turned-mud from Earthmover II lying in random piles across the solid rock as if in preparation for laying down. Next to them, Ocean Queen’s tinned goods, rehydratable ‘space meals’ and freeze-dried foodstuffs had formally taken possession of the island in the name of 21st Century convenience. Three panels of the all-green Douro in the back row had also split, allowing forty-seven saplings the distinction of being the first living things ashore.