by Peter Tonkin
Under the watchful eyes of the captain and the first officer, each of whom held a stopwatch in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other, the boats’ crews lined up beneath their pendant keels and waited to be dismissed. They were ready to abandon in a matter of minutes and felt that the next natural step should be the stowing of the boats and the completion of breakfast.
Why she let the exercise run on she would never know. Perhaps the crew were too confident. Perhaps she felt the whole Heritage Mariner atmosphere was too cosy. Perhaps it was because the crystal stillness of the morning was perfect for the full practice — and they could do with a full practice. Perhaps it was because of that sinister mist wall closing from dead ahead, warning so vividly of a terrible change in the weather and sea conditions to come. Perhaps she had an inkling of what was to come.
When stillness settled on the scene and silence fell, apart from the throbbing of the huge engine and the whisper of the wake as Clotho surged onwards to the south of Kap Farvel, Robin’s eyes flicked up to glance along the line of rigid profiles under number one boat. She glanced across to Nico Niccolo whose position matched hers exactly and saw that he was waiting too. ‘Proceed, Mr Niccolo,’ she said.
The groan came from the davits as they swung full out to suspend their burdens over the sea, but it might just as well have come from the throats of forty hungry sailormen seeing their breakfast disappear. At once the scene closed down. Up until this point the captain had overseen the whole. Now the officer commanding each boat took his responsibility for its correct launching and for the safety of all within it.
Robin strode forward and stood by the radio officer, Bill Christian. Beyond him, Andrew McTavish was keeping a wary eye on the group of GP seamen who made up the rest of the lifeboat’s complement. Robin knew three of them — old hands all: Sam Larkman, his narrow face set hard as stone and his thin lips tight closed on some blistering thoughts about officers in general and captains in particular — female ones being the worst of all; gentle Joe Edwards echoing Sam’s every movement, though probably none of his thoughts; big Errol Jones, the only black person aboard in spite of Heritage Mariner’s positive policies with regard to race, sex and background. The others were not so familiar, but they seemed to know what they were doing well enough. While Joe Edwards and Errol Jones held the falls and lowered the boat until it was level with the safety rail, the others crowded forward and stripped the canvas covering away to reveal the neatly disposed contents.
Once again they paused, and this time Sam Larkman actually glanced up at her, though she realised later it was a simple glance of enquiry and probably held no thought of a complaint at all. Her eyes met Sam’s for a moment and she felt her eyebrows rising. Her own lips set to a thin, pale line. She switched her gaze to Christian’s and gave a brief nod. The radio officer swung the lifeboat’s radio out of the doorway and onto the first thwart with a convulsive movement. Then he was in after it. ‘Look to the falls,’ snapped Robin and two of the nameless seamen joined Joe and Errol while everyone else climbed in.
‘Lower away!’ She called it loudly enough to carry to all the boats so that the other officers would know how far the practice was proceeding and how fast her crew were working. She stayed on the deck and noted the time when number one lifeboat’s keel kissed the water — though she did not stop the watch until the second starboard boat was in the water too. Then, with a curt ‘Stay there, please’ to the teams on the falls, she crossed to the port side.
Here, too, the boats were in the water and beginning to trail behind the ship. Nico stood above the fourth one, obviously surprised that young Jamie Curtis had got his into the water as quickly as everyone else. Jamie, too, was jubilant and he stood in the bow of his command, his left hand holding the double fall above his head, and waved up at his captain with youthful glee. She gave him the same curt nod she had given Christian, though in fact her mood was quite light. She turned and met Nico’s watchful gaze and at last allowed herself to thaw a little. A glimmer of a smile crinkled the corners of her eyes and stirred the corners of her lips. ‘Well done, Nico. Bring them in,’ she said.
Being a Neapolitan, he appreciated that tiny smile as much as if she had laughed aloud. Being an officer, he was pleased at last to see some of his captain’s gloom beginning to lift. And being a man, he considered basking a little in the sunshine of her approval. He got less than a second to indulge these feelings before young Curtis went overboard into the water.
It was an easy enough mistake to make. The cadet had stood up on the whaleback covered bow of his boat without noticing that there was a loose loop of rope from the fall beneath his feet. As soon as the men aboard Clotho tightened their grip, ready to lift the lifeboat back aboard, the loop jerked up tight, caught his foot and catapulted him overboard. The second engineer, now in charge of the boat, was caught completely by surprise and the seamen crewing her weren’t too quick on the uptake either. Nico thrust past Robin who had her back to the incident and crossed to the rail. ‘Let go the falls,’ snapped the first officer, but the men on the deck, thinking to help, simply let go of the ropes instead of releasing them correctly. The pull of the lifeboat was enough to whip the ropes through the block and snarl them hopelessly. Nico swung back, suddenly infuriated, and opened his mouth to bellow a string of orders only to find his captain standing calmly just behind him.
‘Over you go, please, Nico. Take your boat and go after him. I’ll be on the bridge and I’ll bring her round at once.’
Nico was in action as soon as she finished speaking.
‘You men,’ said Robin in the sort of tone she might have used to discuss pruning roses with her gardener, ‘cut the falls below that mess, but don’t let the boat break free.’
Down the side of the ship from the main deck to Nico’s lifeboat was a Jacob’s ladder. Nico swarmed down it as fast as he could, almost shocked by the calm firmness with which Robin was handling the emergency. This was certainly the way to be proceeding: exactly by the book. She should be pounding up the companionway towards the bridge about now, walkie-talkie to her lips, commanding Sullivan to bring Clotho round in a Williamson turn and to sound ‘man overboard’. She could rely on Biggs and McTavish to get the other two boats up with a minimum of fuss.
The Neapolitan stepped down into his boat. ‘Let go, all,’ he called to his men. Then he looked down to the second engineer crouching over the motor, ready to go. ‘Full ahead,’ he ordered, and caught up a yellow life preserver as he spoke.
*
Jamie Curtis exploded wildly to the surface and forced himself to calm down, lie still and float quietly, all too aware of the fact that he should have been wearing a life jacket, but he had been too excited to go to the bother of putting one on. It required an enormous effort of will to remain calm, which it never occurred to him was actually almost heroism. He had never realised that the sea could seem so big. That a ship as large as Clotho could become so small so quickly. That she could sail away so fast.
He hung motionless in the water, looking after her, fighting to believe that this was actually happening. He gasped in a breath, knowing that his face would go under the water again during the next few seconds. He closed his eyes and went into convulsive movement once more. Three seconds later, he had kicked off his shoes and was hanging in the water again, waiting for his heart to slow. The next thing he should do, according to the theory, was to take off his trousers, tie knots in the legs and inflate them. But he was wearing a white boiler suit and a cursory experiment soon revealed that his water-clumsy fingertips couldn’t undo any of the buttons or even loosen the belt buckle. Any thought of taking it off and inflating it was out of the question. Thank God. Getting out of his shoes had been bad enough and they had been loose slip-ons.
He was young for his eighteen years and this was his first long period away from home. His parents lived in Portsmouth and he had gone to school and college there. His cadetship with Heritage Mariner had begun with the year and Clotho was his first p
osting after four months of further training ashore. He was a quiet, sensible, reliable young man and was already establishing himself as a popular shipmate and something of a ship’s mascot. He was unaware of the way his shipmates viewed him, however, and his first thought after the initial panic had washed over him was anger at the stupid bravado which had made him do such a silly thing — and without a lifebelt, too! God alone knew what the captain would say when she got him back aboard. The fact that she was a woman only made things worse. Jamie’s father was a small, quiet businessman who rather tended to indulge his intelligent, clear-minded son, so Jamie’s mother had been left to exercise discipline in the Curtis household. It did not seem likely to Jamie, therefore, that his captain’s femininity would make her a soft touch.
These thoughts all raced through his head in a very little time and many of them were barely conscious in any case. They hardly impinged on the enormity of what was happening to him; what he could see, hear, taste and feel was so overwhelming that it made what he was thinking seem utterly insignificant.
He was looking after the Clotho, along the line of her wake, so he was facing the set of the sea. The surface of the water was just below his chin and he could only see beyond the face of the next wave during those few seconds when he was held up by each round, green crest. At these moments, he could see a seemingly endless series of turquoise waves washing up towards him from a horizon which was only a mile or two away — a horizon below which Clotho was already hull down and vanishing fast. Apart from her darkly silhouetted upper works, there was nothing else to see except for the endless ocean.
From nowhere, a picture of the chart leaped into his mind. He saw it as he had seen it at seven thirty this morning when Nico Niccolo had showed it to him before breakfast. The tiny mark Clotho had been, one hundred and fifty-six hours out of Seascale, just over a hundred miles due south of Kap Farvel in Greenland. Cape Farewell indeed, he thought. Farewell Jamie Curtis.
At least the water wasn’t too cold. That was a relief, and something of a surprise. But then he remembered what Nico had told him about the Gulf Stream and why the weather here was clear and so foggy so close to their starboard beam. A wavelet slapped him in the face and he tasted salt and choked, but it cleared his mind a little and it finally occurred to him to stop floating and to start swimming. If he followed Clotho’s course, he reasoned, then he would bring himself closer to the rescuers who must be coming back after him.
As he took his first clumsy breaststroke, panic washed over him again. The ocean was so unimaginably enormous. So unutterably deep. Angling his body as though he were in his local swimming pool suddenly made him think that there wasn’t fourteen feet of water beneath him but more like two thousand metres down to the Eirik Ridge. That was more than a thousand fathoms; more than six thousand feet. The weight of these terrible figures all but pulled him under the surface.
*
The Williamson emergency turn was something of a turning point for Robin herself. She stood on her bridge, calmly quiet, eyes everywhere, but implicitly trusting Johnny Sullivan who held the watch and Sam Larkman who held the wheel to know what to do. The practice had gone well enough and even Jamie Curtis’s accident could not undermine that. In fact, it was the sort of thing that could happen all too easily and there was no sense in getting upset. If they got the snagged lifeboat up safely, if they got Nico’s boat back and, most importantly, if they got the cadet safely out of the water, then it would have been quite a satisfactory morning’s work. They would have proved themselves to be just the sort of crew she would be happy to lead through that mist wall into the ice-bound maelstrom of the Labrador Sea. For the first time since coming aboard, Robin got the impression of her command working under her quietly but efficiently, like the movement of Richard’s old steel Rolex watch.
The thought of Richard caught her with unexpected force and she suddenly found herself trembling with desire for him. Literally knocked breathless by an overpowering need to feel his hands upon her. It was a feeling which was by no means new to her, but not since pregnancy had rearranged her hormone doses had she felt overpowering lust for him like this. It was most distracting.
They had been in contact at least once a day and he had updated her on Harcourt Gibbons’ death and the fact that he had approached Maggie DaSilva. She knew and liked the young woman barrister, but the sudden, tragic death of her father’s old friend had only served to darken her view of the current situation further.
Her contact with Atropos and its headquarters at Sept Isles had been hardly more satisfactory. The Canadian vessel had set sail late and then fallen further and further behind schedule as the weather closed in. The organisation in the small Canadian city seemed to be an utter shambles, one which had lasted far longer than it should have done, even after Dan Williams’ death. As for herself, she knew she had had an easy ride of it so far; she was well aware that things between here and her destination would all too likely be the exact opposite.
Bill Christian stuck his head through from the radio shack and called her back to the present. ‘No ships near enough to help with the man overboard,’ he reported. ‘And Atropos’s eight o’clock report has still not come in. But the weather report has. That high pressure ridge over Greenland has a bitch of a storm trapped right over their heads. They’re in deep shit over there. And we’ll be in it with them in four or five hours’ time. Ah. Sorry about the language, Captain.’
‘Okay, Bill, thanks.’ She was back to the present but still too distracted to be irritated by his embarrassment over his mild swearing — one of the few aspects of sexism currently extant aboard. She would check on Atropos’s situation when they had Jamie back aboard. She thumbed the SEND button on her walkie-talkie. ‘Nico?’
‘Here, Captain. No sign.’
‘I have a clear trace from the first officer’s boat, Captain,’ said Rupert Biggs from his position beside the collision alarm radar. It would be too much to expect him to see Jamie too, though the equipment was almost magically powerful.
‘Keep feeding bearings to the helmsman until it’s dead ahead,’ she ordered, and crossed to the watchkeeper’s chair. There was nothing she could do until Nico found Jamie and Atropos found Nico. She settled back into the black leather executive chair and let her mind drift a little.
For the first time in two years she didn’t feel fat and dumpy. She hadn’t dictated any special diet, indeed she was eating like a pig. She hadn’t lost any weight. Her body hadn’t changed at all. She had simply ceased worrying — indeed, thinking — about it. She had had six nights of uninterrupted sleep — again, for the first time in two years. Although Nurse Janet slept on one side of the nursery, Richard and Robin slept on the other side and it was a rare event for the twins to sleep through. Or, once they were up, that they would be satisfied with anything less than being carried through to their parents’ bed. Only on the nights before the most important meetings did Richard and she let Janet try to handle the monsters on her own.
And there had been quite a few important meetings for Robin as Richard seemed to have been convalescent in one way or another for the last eighteen months. Her father, Sir William Heritage, and the chief executive, Helen Dufour, had kept Heritage Mariner well on track, but times had been hard in the City and it could not have happened more unfortunately that both Richard and she had been pulled away from the office. Neither of them had been on a Heritage Mariner vessel for far too long. Richard had been ashore since the Gulf War and she had been beached since her involvement in the recovery of the Heritage Mariner flagship supertanker Prometheus more than two years ago. And, for the first time since then, it seemed, she felt wide awake, fit and confident. A different person to the woman who had examined herself so glumly in that mirror in a Belfast hotel bedroom three months ago, and yet the change had started in less than a week.
It was simply wonderful to be back at sea.
To be free.
The walkie-talkie squawked. ‘Yes, Nico?’
‘I think we have him ... I think ... What is that?’
A distant voice behind Nico’s came over the walkie-talkie faintly, but the words, and the tone in which they were said, were clear enough: ‘It’s a shark!’
*
At first Nico couldn’t believe it. A shark seemed so unlikely in these waters that he was about to dismiss the triangular fin as belonging to a dolphin or a small whale when he saw the telltale second point which told of a vertical fish’s tail. The tails of all whales and their cousins lie horizontal. This certainly was a shark.
‘What sort of sharks are there in these waters?’ he asked his crew. ‘Basking sharks? Whale sharks?’ Neither would harm the boy; they were both toothless and fed on krill or plankton.
‘That’s a tiger shark,’ said the man who had first seen it. And even as he spoke, one of the other lookouts called, ‘There he is, sir!’
The only thing they could do was to go for Jamie as quickly as possible, taking care to keep the lifeboat between the man in the water and the shark. The man-eater’s senses were not so easily fooled, however, and it began to make a race of it, clearly attracted by the signals given out by Jamie’s attempts to swim. The boy was practically asleep by the look of things. His body appeared and disappeared up and down the backs of the rolling green waves, and it continued a slow, automatic breaststroke and gave no reaction at all to the chorus of shouts and warnings which all aboard the lifeboat were giving.
Nico began to look around for a way to scare the fish off. ‘What the hell is a tiger shark doing this far north?’ he muttered as he worked, pulling out all the survival gear, looking for the packet of distress flares which were all he could think of that might help. But he wasn’t really asking, for he knew the answer well enough: it was the Gulf Stream. The shark had simply cruised up out of its normal home waters and been pulled north by the warm current. And that current was the only reason Jamie was still alive. He had been in the water for nearly ten minutes now and if he had been swimming ten miles north of here, in the waters of the Greenland Current, he would have been dead for some time.