by Peter Tonkin
So, then again, perhaps the discrepancy was not in the equipment. And if that was the case, then even a low reading was worrying today, for it had not been there yesterday. And if a progression—a deterioration—was starting, then God alone knew what the reading would be tomorrow.
Napoli seemed to stand still. Spray exploded up and away on either side of her flared bow. John rocked forward on to the balls of his feet and smiled at the familiar motion as she swooped forward down the back of her first real Atlantic roller. It would soon be time to turn her head north for Liverpool and home.
And not an instant too soon.
17
Although they turned onto a heading north of west almost as soon as they exited the Strait of Gibraltar, they did not turn due north until they had cleared Spain and Portugal at 35.30N;12.30W. Soon after that, Salah himself swung them back eastwards, onto the heading they actually needed to follow in order to get round Biscay, across the Western Approaches and up through St George’s Channel to Liverpool. All through that time—and it took them another week to reach the English port—the prevailing wind was from the west and as soon as they came north of Coruna a north-westerly gale whirled in hard. This meant that waves and weather were always pushing them towards the distant coast—prevailing conditions which were at the root of Biscay’s reputation.
If the Mediterranean had taken them from unseasonal summer to dull autumn, there was no doubting that these were winter waters. Tall and grey, the Atlantic swells thumped relentlessly on Napoli’s port quarter, rhythmically, unvaryingly, except that, as the storm wound up, the power of their impact intensified. The wind, which also intensified as time went on, brought squall after squall of rain, so that the decks were never dry and even the containers standing twenty feet above them were awash with rain or spray.
Now it was easy enough to see the difference between the sailors and the landlubbers aboard. Of the latter, only Ann Cable remained unaffected. Even Asha went off her food and Faure’s scientists all seemed to vanish without trace. With or without them, twice a day, John and Ann clambered into the white protective clothing and checked the contents of the holds. This was a difficult procedure in the bulky suits with their thick gloves, cushioned boots and unwieldy compressed-air packs, but as the weather deteriorated, it became positively hazardous.
Even going on deck became dangerous, so much so that John, Cesar and Niccolo arranged for lifelines to be strung. Bernadotte cheerfully stayed snug and dry locked in his cabin, mysteriously supplied with an almost infinite selection of varyingly pornographic magazines, until John and Salah made a great show of relenting with the big seaman and released him. Then they put him to work with the gang rigging the lifelines. Cesar and John himself were in charge of this and for almost a whole watch, first one then the other worked out in the blast, faces numbed by the vicious rain and eyes slitted as though against sleet, heaving the lines tight against their anchor points with the deckhands grumbling and swearing around them. But everyone felt safer when it was finished.
Helping the crew to feel safe was increasingly important, for there was no doubt that Ann’s readings in the hold were accurate: the nuclear waste in its lead coffins jacketed in cement was stirring, like some legendary, long-dead vampire hungry for blood. The readings were slight, but the fact that they existed at all gave cause for concern. And that concern had an impact far greater than it actually warranted. It seemed to open unimagined doors, like positive proof of a haunting or a UFO. Ann kept her records meticulously and showed them to John, carefully explaining the precise meaning of the slight variations from the flat horizontal on her graphs. To John, the little peaks, the coming and going of reaction on her Geiger counter, looked like readings on a heart monitor. They looked like life. And even though she persisted that they were nothing to worry about, that they might even be residual readings from previous cargoes, he chanced to overhear her talking to someone on the ship-to-shore, making one of her routine reports to Greenpeace in London, and she sounded worried to him.
He did everything he could to spoil his nervous crew without making them actually suspicious of his motives. The chef was prompted to outdo himself with culinary delights, and the indisposition of the scientists meant there was more food to go round. As the weather worsened, day work was scaled down and John released more and more of the videos Parnethope had supplied along with the oil and food in Naples. He tried to have the television permanently retuned to some worthy, challenging, educational channel; his objective was to give the men something other than the cargo to think about, but whenever he left the set unguarded, it mysteriously returned to French or Italian game shows—especially those involving loss of clothing as a forfeit. Still, he would rather they thought about sex than fission. And, in truth, there was little or no day work to be done in these conditions. Above decks and outside the bridgehouse became increasingly no-go areas. Enthusiasm for making do and mending inside their own quarters was strictly limited. Niccolo nursed a burning ambition to get the engine up to scratch but El Jefe was jealous of his terrain and allowed only his engineers down onto the engineering decks and, with his leg only mending slowly, the first officer was no match for the chief engineer.
At the end of five dour days plodding up across the unforgiving ocean, they passed some fifty miles off Land’s End, a little less than twenty miles west of Bishop Rock, with the distinctive, fifteen-second flash of the light briefly visible between gale squalls which kept trying to attain storm force.
It was 18.00, the time when John and Ann now regularly inspected the holds while Salah stood at the wheel and Niccolo held the con. John had released a carefully calculated amount of liquor from the stores and, as on Heritage Mariner ships, the crew would now retire to the bar for a drink or two before dinner at 19.00. On the bridge, Niccolo stood uneasily on one firm leg and watched them walking along the deck. The wind was whipping so hard across the open expanse of green-painted steel that the paint itself seemed to be rippling, in danger of being peeled away by the blast. Even when the rain died down, spray still slid like sheet ice across the deck and the two white-clothed figures leaned at strange angles, moving awkwardly and keeping hold of the lifelines as though scaling a cliff face.
Out on the deck itself, communication was impossible. The wind buffeted out of the gathering murk of the early evening as though silent explosions were occurring regularly beside them. The water plucked at their feet and, whenever a wave broke over the hull to windward, tried to rugby-tackle their knees. The thickness of the gloves made the lifelines hard to hold but at least they protected hands which would otherwise have been numbed and torn. John followed Ann down the deck, pausing once in a while to wipe the spray off his face mask, taking a brief opportunity to look around. There was no real sense of sky or sea, merely a writhing greyness darkening and gathering in. Once, away to eastwards, he saw the flash of Bishop Rock Lighthouse like a star and it gave a kind of depth to the day, enough to make him feel insignificant in the face of the granite-coloured vastness. But then another squall closed down and it was gone. This ought to be the last visit under these conditions, he thought gratefully. They would have swung into St George’s Channel by the end of Niccolo’s watch and with any luck, the bulk of Ireland would give them some protection.
He opened the hatch only a little, just enough to let the pair of them scramble down. They had a simple routine which they had worked out nearly a week ago: he held the torch and she explored with the Geiger counter. As he stood at the foot of the ladder, keeping the broad white beam steady on her, he felt almost glad to be down here. Things were so foul on deck that the sepulchral stillness below decks was a positive relief. Stillness of air only. The double bottom was pitching and heaving beneath them. The seas were throwing themselves against the hull with thunderous force. It was not even dry; spray and rain from the deck above came drizzling in through the open hatch and fell through the torch beam like diamonds in the air. The metal beneath their feet was shallowly awash with
a dull, dirty little sea of water, made as agitated as its great wild cousin outside by the motion of the ship beneath it. After a few minutes, Ann was back at his side, shaking her head: no change in the reading.
It was the same in the other holds. The news should have cheered him, especially as they were little more than thirty-six hours from their destination, but something else was nagging at his mind. In the last hold before they went up and returned to the relative calm of the bridge and warmth and dinner, he paused. She stood at his side and waited as he flashed the beam of the flashlight up the dark grey metal walls. They were running with water, slick as sea rocks. Yes. That was what they reminded him of. As a boy he had been taken to the Wexford coast near Cahore Point. Of all the things he had seen there, what had impressed him most had been the look of the sea sliding over the black peat-stained clay where the rivers ran across the beaches. This looked the same: glassy water sliding over a black-grey surface. And, as it had at that seaside of his childhood, grains of vivid sand collected in the nooks and crannies; not much, just enough to emphasise their outlines. He knelt and pushed his gloved fingers through the restless surface of the water. His padded boots had disguised the fact that he had been standing on a thin sprinkling of sand which was washing over the steel. Frowning, he flashed the torch around and around again. There was nothing else to see but something of it stayed in his mind. Had the water in the holds simply washed the sand down off the concrete blocks, or was there more sand coming into them from somewhere else outside?
*
It was the lights that guided them up the Irish sea, though they could not be seen through the storm and in any case they fell back below the horizon as soon as the land did, into the Bristol Channel north of Land’s End. But their call signs were there for Jesus to contact as Napoli butted northwards. His radio remained tuned either to them or to his favourite fading station with its lilting Flamenco music. Round Island and Longships, then Pendeen, Godrevy and Trevose all came and went. Hartland Point and Lundy gave over to Skokholm, Smalls-Rock and South Bishop.
But the stately progress was constantly interrupted. First John bustled in for his evening call to CZP’s office in Palermo. Then he ordered Jesus to contact Heritage Mariner and route the call through to the captain’s office. Here he talked at length to Richard. The two men discussed the progress Richard was making on their plan to get Salah and Fatima into a new life together. They had little time to pull things off—Liverpool was less than thirty-six hours away.
When John was finished, Ann turned up. She contacted Greenpeace’s offices in London most evenings and, although she made no great show of secrecy, Jesus never quite managed to find out what she was saying. She was relaying her readings on the cargo—that he understood; but her reports sometimes lasted for twenty minutes or more.
Now that Salah had stopped trying to contact his erstwhile colleagues, that was all the outgoing business Jesus had come to expect. After seven he went down to dinner, and left the receiver on automatic for the rest of the night unless he wanted to listen to his Flamenco station before he went to bed. He could do this safely in the knowledge that the watchkeeper would inform him of any unexpected incoming messages. And all through the passage so far, there had been no incoming messages after seven.
Until tonight.
The first that John knew about it was the sound of someone banging on his outer door, calling his name. He sat up and groped for the light switch. ‘What time is it?’ mumbled Asha.
‘Not quite midnight.’
‘That’s Fatima,’ she said, waking up properly. ‘I’ll come out too.’
Fatima tumbled in through the door in a state of high excitement, halfway between elation and frustration. ‘Salah’s on the radio now,’ she gasped. ‘They want us to go at once.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s the PLO. Tewfik al Ashwari at last. He came through ten minutes ago. He wants us to go ashore now. He has a route to get us back.’
‘Ashore? Where?’
‘The Irish Republic. There’s a way to get us back along an IRA gunrunning route.’
Asha sat down suddenly, her face dead white. John too felt a little faint. The brush with the Tunisian gunboat was one thing—an episode with an almost dreamlike quality—but this was something else. This was uncomfortably close to home. The thought of these two being smuggled east by IRA gunrunners as though they were semtex being returned to Libya was deeply shocking and quite terrifying.
John opened his mouth to say something but then the phone in his office buzzed. It was Salah, speaking from the radio shack. ‘Has Fatima explained’?’ His voice was abrupt, yet vibrantly alive.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you do it?’
‘Where exactly do you want to go?’
‘There’s an estuary south of Cahore Point, the River Blackwater.’
John was stunned. He knew it. It was the very place he had been thinking of in the hold so recently, where the ribs of black clay ran out across the white sand beach.
‘Where are we now?’ he asked, his mind still reeling.
There was a rumble of sound as Salah called through into the bridge. Then, ‘Just coming up to 52.30 north, about twenty miles out.’
John closed his eyes. He could see the Irish coastline in his mind, cut across with the eastings. It was not only possible, it was easy. The rendezvous was well chosen. ‘Take the helm yourself,’ he ordered. ‘Bring her round to due west. I’ll give you a more precise heading later. Get Jesus to ring the chief. We need maximum revolutions. Is Cesar up there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell him we need a good man on the Collision Alarm Radar. I’ll be up in five minutes.’
In fact it was nearer ten. He dressed quickly and then, while Asha and Fatima continued their conversation next door, he squatted in front of the ship’s safe in his office. At the very back, in a small wooden case, there was an old but well-maintained pistol with a couple of boxes of cartridges to fit it. John knew little about guns, but he recognised this as a Beretta. It was, in fact a Model 34, chambered for the 9mm cartridge and marked with the letters RM denoting Naval issue. It had been issued to Captain Fittipaldi when he had been posted Lieutenant in the Italian Navy so many years ago.
As John pulled the box out into the light, something else came with it. A small book. John glanced at this, side-tracked. It was Gina Fittipaldi’s passport. That was a surprise—he remembered giving Gina her passport before she left the ship. It was Lazar’s passport which had been missing. He put the document back where he had found it. He would think this through later. He had more important business now.
On the bridge, he called Eduardo up to take the wheel while Salah went below to make his minuscule preparations. He had lost two sets of kit in little more than a week and had almost nothing left. Cesar remained bent over the Collision Alarm Radar. Niccolo appeared. Ann turned up.
John and Salah pored over the chart of the Wexford coast as the Palestinian explained what his mysterious contact had required of him. Once again, John was struck anew by the coincidence, but his surprise was immediately subsumed in his feeling of how lucky it was that he should know the area. The instructions were simple but even so, it would be a good thing to have a man with some local knowledge along. It never occurred to him that he should let Salah and Fatima go alone, though the thought that he might find himself confronted with active members of the IRA made his flesh crawl.
Napoli anchored off the mouth of the Blackwater at two and by the time the anchor had settled on the shallow silty bottom, the cutter was in the water and its motor was pushing them shoreward towards the little river’s mouth.
‘Ashy may never forgive you,’ warned Fatima, raising her voice over the slap of the waves, the grumble of the engine and the moaning of the wind. ‘I don’t know whether she was angrier about you coming or about you forbidding her to come herself.’
John shrugged, though the movement was all but invisible in the near dark. Above th
em, the last rags of storm cloud ran away from the waxing moon. In the bow, the hunched shape of Salah moved. There was a double click as he worked the action of the Beretta. John put all thoughts of Asha and their brief disagreement out of his mind and concentrated on the black rise of the shoreline and the river valley cutting between the dunes. The dunes were only twenty feet high and the river not much more than ten feet wide. The cutter drew eighteen inches but, even so, they wouldn’t be able to get all that far up—to the first great reed bed, that was all. He gunned the engine as they entered the river’s outwash; the force of the water had been intensified by the storm rain of the last few days. The west wind gusted past them, heavy with rich land smells. The little cutter pitched, then settled into the Blackwater’s dark stream, pushing them forward across the pale expanse of beach between the low black clay banks and into Ireland itself.
They got further up the river than he had thought they would, for he remembered it in summer drought whereas now it was winter flood. ‘A mile upstream,’ Salah had said. ‘Well behind the dunes. There is an old landing stage. If we leave the boat there, we can follow a path across the fields.’ This too John remembered, though what lay beyond it was vague. Even as a child, he thought grimly, he had remembered water, not land.
It took them thirty minutes to cover that mile, through the deserted, wind-whispering pastures. It was a short enough time, but for each of them it had a strange intensity. For John there was a dreamlike double focus given by his half-remembered memories of the place. For Fatima the quiet countryside falling away on either hand behind the dunes into rich broad water meadows was a mockery. So much gentle peacefulness was just a pathway for herself and the man she loved back into the violence she had thought they had escaped. For Salah, the whole short river voyage was the beginning of a test. A test of himself as he was now, of the past he had lived through, of almost the last friend he had in the Arab world. Though he was a peaceful man in spite of his warlike expertise, the Beretta still felt comforting in his hand.