by Peter Tonkin
On the other hand, thought Richard grimly, if many more such bargains had to be struck, then the sister ships would drag Heritage Mariner into the bankruptcy courts. But it was unfair to blame the ships for the actions of a nameless group of terrorists and a few thousand protesters. His hand jerked towards the horn yet again, only to slam painfully against the steering wheel’s rim as he overcame the automatic gesture. The people in front of them knew well enough that the Range Rover was there. Blasting the horn at them would only sour the boisterous good nature of the demonstration and with Robin beside him and the twins behind, Richard didn’t want to risk that. It wasn’t much further now.
‘You’d think they’d realise,’ said Robin, bitterly.
Richard shrugged stoically. ‘There’s nothing we can do, so there’s no point in getting upset.’
‘But I mean to say, the proper, careful shipping and handling of the stuff is the only way forward. If they stop Clotho from sailing fully laden and disposing of the waste properly, they’re only making certain some cowboy outfit like Disposoco dump it in the sea or on some deserted Third World beach. It’s criminally shortsighted!’ Her voice rose with simple rage and he was tempted to take her in his arms — to look across towards her at the very least —but he could not do so without running the risk of killing someone in the road ahead. His heart was wrenched by the imminence of their separation and his inability to comfort her. It was so sad, he thought. The dazzling girl he had loved so much for so long seemed to have gone away for a while. The new Robin seemed to be so much less confident and cheerful. Her overpowering enthusiasm and lust for life were diminished, almost exhausted. She had started to look upon the dark side automatically, always expecting the worst, as though simply waiting for the next blow thrown at them by a bitter Fate.
He glanced across at her, brooding silently beside him, then away right as he swung off the A595 and into the little B5344 leading down to the coast. The cottages of Gosforth village where the two roads joined had never seen so many people in the centuries of their existence, he mused. Then his mind turned back to his own concerns. They had been so lucky, he thought. He had been more than lucky to survive the loss of the Napoli with little more damage than a ruptured eardrum and a bad case of the bends. He spread his right hand and looked at his shortened middle finger, the top of it lost in the Gulf War. He had been lucky to live through that war, even though he had watched most of it from the sidelines. Behind him, the twins were doing their best to imitate the chant of the people outside. They were lucky to have the twins. So lucky still to have the children and each other after the bomb in Belfast. Their good fortune seemed incredible to him. But at the moment Robin seemed incapable of seeing it. All the blessings Richard could think of seemed to be the opposite to her. They had talked it all through often enough for him to know her thinking perfectly well.
Why had he got involved with Napoli at all? Why was he still involved with those sharks who had owned her? Why had he got involved in the Gulf War? It had damaged him far beyond anything she could bear. How could the twins be such a blessing (she asked this only in her darkest moods) when they had almost cost too much? How could he look at his survival in the Harland and Wolff shipyards as such a miracle when it had cost him two close friends, several respected colleagues and so much pain and grief? How could he love Clotho and Atropos so much when the sister ships stood a very good chance of destroying the great company her father, he and she had worked so hard to establish? And when Clotho was about to pull them apart again just when they needed so badly to stay together?
Even as he thought of Clotho, the Range Rover breasted a low rise and the bay of the anchorage at Seascale opened out in front of them. The coast here was low and shelved gently out to sea. Further north, the river estuaries were so wide and shallow that the incoming tide could travel across the sands faster than a horse at full gallop and many an unwary traveller had been swept away by the terrifying inward rush. Here the bay had been artificially deepened so that the big ocean-going freighters like Clotho and Atropos could come close to the dock and load directly from the shore.
But Clotho was riding high and unladen. She looked arrogantly massive towering above the docking facilities around her, casting the power of her presence across the security fencing and over the protesters gathered at the wire-mesh gates. There was no singing here, only a silent stillness like the utter hush before a thunderclap. The Range Rover grumbled forward and the crowd fell apart. When the bumper touched the wire mesh, a line of uniformed security men appeared from a guard hut nearby. At once a sigh passed through the waiting mob and Richard’s mouth suddenly went dry. The prospect of just such a confrontation was what he feared most.
Even as he gathered himself to jump from the vehicle and dismiss the guards at once, another line of uniformed men appeared: the crew of Clotho herself, come to welcome their new captain. Through the wire diamonds, behind the mob of cheerful sailors, he could see the square figure of Nico Niccolo, the first officer, sending the security guards away. Richard looked across at Robin and he saw that she too was watching the stocky Neapolitan with every sign of approval on her thoughtful countenance. But her glance rested on the officers and crew for only a moment before it was pulled up and away inevitably by the powerful magnetism of Clotho herself.
They hadn’t seen much of the ships since the launching. In the interim, all the bomb damage had been repaired or hidden; the ships had been refitted and repainted in the house colours of Heritage Mariner, with that great eye instead of a figurehead on her forecastle. The only other ships in the world which looked like her were the massive supertankers of the Heritage Mariner shipping fleet and Clotho seemed to gain scale from the association though she was only one-tenth of their deadweight tonnage. But she was by no means merely a tenth of their size; she was more than five hundred feet from stem to stern and nearly a hundred wide from outside rail to the rail of her bridge wings. She was more than forty feet deep from deck plates to keel and nearly fifty feet high from main deck to radio mast. Her bridgehouse sat three-quarters of her length back from her forecastle head. Halfway down her deck sat a mobile gantry capable of moving on its rails from one end of the main deck to the other, carrying containers of pre-packed waste for lowering into her holds. On the top of the gantry, atop two great struts folded shut like an elbow, the control cabin could be extended out over the side to act as a dockside crane. But, from where they were looking, the crane, the gantry, the effulgent white of the accommodation and navigation decks were almost obscured by the high flare of her super-strengthened icebreaker’s bow.
The gate in front of them opened and two white-overalled figures came towards the Range Rover. Neither wore any badges of rank, though they both had the air of men used to command. The way they moved, the unhurried calm of their steps and the air of authority they exuded made the the crowd fall back for a moment and Richard let the Discovery roll forward almost silently. The two men, First Officer Nico Niccolo and Chief Engineer Andrew McTavish, turned and fell in beside them, escorting the Mariners through the gate and across the dock to the foot of their gangplank. Only when the gates were closed did the people outside begin to call out and chant their protests into the faces of Clotho’s crew who proved cheerfully ready to reply.
As Andrew courteously handed Robin out and then turned to help her and Nurse Janet with the twins, Nico aided Richard in his rather more laborious descent, then handed him his walking stick and slammed the door. ‘The dunnage is in the back, Nico,’ said Richard, easing himself gingerly onto his stiff joints. He usually needed two walking sticks — he was using one at the moment out of sheer bravado. He looked up the slope of the gangplank and poignantly regretted the decision.
Janet and the twins went first — they unstoppably and she hurriedly. Robin and Andrew McTavish followed, deep in conversation — the chief engineer had been a fast friend for all of fifteen years. Last came Richard and Nico Niccolo. ‘Have you heard from Ann?’ asked Richard courte
ously, but his eyes, and his mind, were busy about the ship.
‘Yes,’ said the Italian. ‘She went aboard Atropos yesterday and came through on the radio last night. Very cagey about first impressions. She feels a bit isolated.’ He gave one of his minuscule, eloquent, Neapolitan shrugs.
Ann Cable was coming across with the Canadians aboard Clotho’s sister ship, hoping to write a sequel to her best-selling book on the loss of Napoli. It was hardly surprising she felt isolated, thought Richard grimly. The sister ships were crewed and owned by different partners in the consortium. A fierce rivalry was developing between them, and there was Ann, all but engaged to Nico, first officer of the rival ship, close friends with the Mariners, masters and owners of the rival ship, and an investigative journalist apparently — and actually — looking for every failure of procedure and flaw of routine. She must be about as welcome as the plague aboard Atropos. No wonder Nico sounded concerned.
As Richard reached the deck, all thought of Ann Cable left his mind. It was mid-afternoon now and the sun was beginning to creep down towards the western horizon. It was the first really warm day of spring and the whole of the Irish Sea seemed calm and turquoise under the pale blue sky. Only the shadowed faces of the larger waves took a really green tinge and their crests were a cheerful riot of silver and gold as far as the eye could see. There was little discernible pattern, but the waves roared against the dockside in steady series and there was a swell just regular enough to make Clotho stir at her moorings. The Point of Ayre, the northernmost point of the Isle of Man, lay just below the horizon, and beyond that lay Ulster. Richard’s knees gave a twinge at the thought of it and he returned his mind to the ship.
Robin and Andrew McTavish were halfway to the bridgehouse, in the shadow of that massive central gantry, and the twins had already vanished into it. Richard turned and followed, with Nico still by his side. ‘What do you think of her?’ asked Richard.
‘She’s very pretty,’ said the first officer but Richard seemed to hear something below the bland answer. Some criticism or reservation implied. He frowned.
‘Everything up to scratch?’ he probed.
‘You’ll go all over her. You’ll see. I never been on a ship fitted like this one. She’s like a palace. A very practical palace.’
Again, just a shade of reservation, like one of his tiny, telling shrugs.
‘So there’s nothing wrong?’
‘Niente. Nothing.’ But the double negative was just not quite satisfactory.
Richard thought about Nico Niccolo — the typical Neapolitan, cool, worldly-wise, cynical, a shade sarcastic and utterly superstitious.
‘You think she’s bad luck?’
Nico held the A deck door open for him. ‘Are you mad to say such a thing, Capitan?’ he asked quietly as Richard stepped past him into the bridgehouse. And it was not until they were in the lift, purring up towards the bridge deck, that Richard realised that there was more than one way to take that remark.
The wheelhouse and navigation bridge were sparse but not spartan. The equipment stands seemed barely adequate for the safe navigation and control of such a vessel, and yet closer inspection showed how well-equipped Clotho actually was.
There was a complete communications stand, quite apart from the radio equipment. The bridge could at any time be in communication with head office through the fax machine. At the same time it could be in communication with one of the low-flying weather satellites, receiving detailed weather information for their immediate area. The collision alarm radar had three settings, at radiuses of five, ten and twenty miles, as well as a ‘big picture’ facility. It was specially enhanced to see almost as far both beneath the water and in the upper air. And it was super-sensitive, to pick up the slightest trace of ice at the earliest moment.
Below the broad, angled clearview, in the centre of the forward bank of instruments, stood not one steering control system but three: one to control the rudder and the pitch of the great single screw at the stern; another to control the smaller manoeuvring screws beside it and at the bow; a third to control the extra thrusters on the sides. Even the binoculars which sat so snugly in their pouch by the comfortable black leather of the watchkeeper’s chair on the port side of the bridge had electronic rangefinding facilities and image intensification systems for enhanced watchkeeping in poor light.
The whole ship was the same: all glittering, spacious work areas whose size was emphasised by the miniaturisation of the high-tech work aids. The engine control room seemed to have nothing more than a couple of computer screens in it. Yet those screens could call up a graphical representation of every working part of the engine, together with a readout of its efficiency, past, present and projected. And within the invisibly mounted but massively powerful computers, all such monitoring went on constantly so that any failure likely to occur could be foreseen and an automatic warning given before anything actually went wrong.
While the twins ran riot around them, Richard and Robin went with Nico and Andrew all over their ship. They examined everything from the exquisitely fitted galley to the massively strengthened bow, from the spare propeller clutched in its clamps behind the forecastle head to the weight-training facilities and the sauna in the gymnasium which overlooked the swimming pool area currently covered over aft of the bridgehouse. As the inspection proceeded, Nico and Andrew fell back and allowed them to walk together side by side. After a while, Robin slid her arm round Richard’s slim waist and took a little of his weight on her shoulder — she too had been worried about the bravado which had left his second walking stick behind. And he was glad to wrap his arm round her shoulders and hold her close.
At last he slowly turned their steps through the now familiar passageways back towards the main deck and the companionway. It was time for Clotho to set sail.
‘All ashore who are going ashore,’ he said quietly, and Robin’s eyes caught Nurse Janet’s. The nanny hustled the twins away towards the dockside and the Range Rover.
They stepped out onto the main deck and into the first truly beautiful sunset of the year. There was not a cloud to spoil it; simply the dying fire of the westering sun half drowned in the vivid waves. Far to the east, immediately above the sullen crags of the Lake District, stood the evening star like a lighthouse on a distant shore, casting its steady gleam across a sea of shadows. The evening wind stirred against them as they walked across the deck together, still with their arms wrapped round each other, and their quiet words were all but lost beneath the low rumble of the surf and the high, sad keening of the black-backs and the herring gulls.
At the top of the companionway they stood alone, lost in the sadness of their parting.
‘I love you, Richard,’ whispered Robin, her grey eyes like still pools, brimming.
‘I’ll miss you, darling, more than I can say.’
‘The case ...’ she was reluctant even to name the Napoli and the vicious court case Heritage Mariner was so deeply embroiled in over her loss. It was yet one more thing which she feared would go wrong and do them irreparable damage.
‘Sir William and Sir Harcourt have it all sewn up, don’t worry,’ he said quietly.
They exchanged one last, crushing embrace before surrendering to the demands of time, tide and duty.
Then Captain Mariner came up to full height and turned away to stride back across the deck towards the bridgehouse and the navigation bridge. Already, family was being thrust aside by thoughts of the North Channel, the Western Ocean and the St Lawrence Seaway.
But when the tears on her cheeks called her back to the present for a moment, she turned and looked at Richard still standing at the head of the companionway, watching her walk away. ‘Don’t forget to kiss the twins “Good night” from me every night,’ she said.
It was her first command as master of Clotho.
*
The control room of the gantry, nestled on its folded arm nearly fifty feet above the main deck, was exactly that: a room. It had a wide window through
which could be seen the wheeling horizon and the sun setting beyond it. Below the window was a complex control console, the controls idle and useless now because the ship was sailing unladen, but vibrating slightly with latent power as the ship got under way. Behind the console was a bench seat long enough to accommodate four people easily. On the padded seat lay a sleeping bag, unrolled and unzipped. Behind the seat, hidden from the eyes of all except the circling, incurious gulls, was a small work area. Here was set up a kind of camp: a small primus stove surrounded by pans of food and water. There were tins and packages of all kinds. They looked plentiful but in fact they would have fitted comfortably in a well-filled backpack, leaving plenty of room for the sleeping bag and the plastic containers full of Semtex high explosive neatly piled beneath the bench with the detonators and timer in a little Tupperware box beside them. The detonators and the timer took up hardly any room at all. There had even been room for the stowaway to bring aboard a book with her when she had climbed, unobserved, up from the seaward side while all that excitement on the dock had been going on. She got it out now and began to read, contentedly. It was Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and it was in the original French.