by Peter Tonkin
They were still twenty feet away when the shark began its first charge. It had been swimming parallel to the lifeboat and gaining on it slowly but surely, when it turned abruptly and cut across the bows, going straight for Jamie. The change of course was so sudden it took them all by surprise, but Nico was quickest on the uptake.
‘Full ahead,’ he yelled at the top of his voice. The lifeboat gathered way, its engine screaming. ‘Come left, left,’ he bellowed, waving his left arm wildly. The boat came round onto a convergent track, its sharp bow cutting towards the striped brown flank.
The shark disregarded it utterly. It was homing in on Jamie and was even beginning to roll, its vicious mouth agape.
Nico forgot all about looking for the flares and leaned as far out on the whaleback bow as he dared, using his weight to force the wooden blade down deeper into the water. So that when they came together, the lifeboat actually hit the thing right on the head, immediately behind the tooth-packed maw. The boat bounced up, and Nico was lucky not to be thrown into the water himself. The keel grazed the fish’s flank and there was a kind of thudding shock as the propeller bit into one of its fins. Then they were past it and looking back, praying one and all that the impact had been enough to scare it off. With a pettish flick, sending up a wall of water like an irritated child splashing in its bath, the fish turned away.
Moments later, the fainting body of the cadet was safely aboard and the lifeboat was heading back towards Clotho as she pulled herself up over the low horizon.
Nico was on his knees in the bottom, his face folded into a frown of confusion. He was the man in charge of the provisioning of these vessels, and he had checked this one, checked them all, less than two days ago. But someone else had been through these carefully filled lockers in the meantime, and they had taken a whole range of stuff.
Who?
Why?
*
‘Abandon ship! We got to sound “abandon ship”.’
‘Don’t be such an asshole, Yasser. How the fuck are we going to abandon ship in this crap? The lifeboat wouldn’t last a second even if those morons below could get them out in the first place.’
Another massive sea threw Atropos up into the air and Ann only stayed standing because of the grip she had on the edge of the chart table.
‘We got to do something! We’ll die.’
‘We won’t die, you schmuck, unless you fuck this up. Now shut the hell up and let me drive this son of a bitch!’
It was eight o’clock in the morning and First Officer Timmins was trying to relieve Third Officer Reynolds. And Ann, for one, didn’t want him to. Reynolds was a sexist little shit, a porn merchant and a drug dealer. She had been in his cabin on one occasion only — in the spirit of accurate research — and she had seen the kind of pin-ups he favoured. Only those over the vile O’Brien’s bunk in the crew’s quarters were more explicit. And, during that visit, the cocky little officer had taken the opportunity to say that he could ‘fix her up’, though the precise meaning of the offer was something Ann had been happy not to think about. But still and all, from what Ann had seen, Reynolds was actually the closest thing they had to a genuine sailor aboard and she really did not want anyone else in charge of the wheelhouse just at the moment.
Eight o’clock. It might as well have been midnight. There was nothing to see beyond the bridge windows, only the reflected brightness and their shadowy figures within them. They couldn’t even see the waves which were chucking their bows up at the skies every few minutes, or the troughs which pulled them halfway to hell in between. Hogg was leaning over the radar bowl and Ann hoped it was as robust as it looked because he kept throwing up into it — though, for the first time in years by the look of things, his belly seemed to be empty now so at least there wasn’t enough vomit to obscure his electronic view of the icy seas around.
And ice was all there was to see; the ocean was otherwise absolutely empty. Empty of shipping, certainly. Every other vessel — every vessel blessed with even a half-sane captain — had run for port. Nobody in anything like his right mind wanted to get his ship stuck in a south-easterly gale six days out in the Labrador Sea with nothing to the lee downwind except millions of tons of ice. Ann understood little enough about ship handling, but the only good thing that seemed to have happened recently was that Reynolds had finally turned almost due south and tried to run out of the danger area. The black walls of water which had been thumping into their starboard quarter, forcing them north towards the ice and the forbidding, glacier-bound cliffs of the Greenland coast, were now punching the port, forcing them west back towards their all too distant home. And at last they were heading south towards safety.
So Timmins wanted to abandon ship.
‘Get that goddamned woman off my bridge!’ said a cold voice, quivering with outrage. Captain Black had arrived. Ann stared at him.
‘Captain —’
‘Reynolds, your watch is over. Get her out of here.’ He stood just inside the chart room door, tall but tubercular, a grey vision in an old uniform, refusing to acknowledge that she even existed, except as a thing he wanted removed from his bridge.
For a moment, Ann thought the Wide Boy was going to stand up to him, but that was never really going to happen.
‘Yes, Captain,’ answered Reynolds and crossed towards her. She met his eyes and shrugged. They both knew when they were beaten.
As they exited through the door into the bridge deck corridor, a lull in the banshee screaming of the wind allowed them to hear Tightship say to Timmins, ‘Now, how’s she heading?’
The next few seconds of conversation vanished under the sound of the next squall, but there was no mistaking the captain’s scream of ‘Reynolds!’ a moment later. The third officer gave Ann a weary shrug and went back into the wheelhouse.
Ann was a reporter. She stood outside the door and spied. There was nothing to hear because of the wind, but there was no mistaking the fury in Captain Black’s gestures as he berated the young officer. This was the sort of thing Ann had come to expect. Her experiences in the gym four long, dark days ago had showed her the kind of people she was dealing with, but it had come as something of a shock to discover that they all treated each other with the same lack of respect, trust and courtesy with which they treated her. She had fondly imagined a ship’s crew to be like a team led by an echelon of officers who were a unit almost combat-hardened by their experiences of the sea. What Atropos had was a group of self-important, arrogant individuals who tried with a marked lack of success to disguise their own shortcomings by picking on everyone else’s. So Reynolds’ bold attempt to get the ship out of trouble had had to be done without the captain’s knowledge, for it contravened the captain’s orders.
As Reynolds came back across the wheelhouse towards her, she turned away and walked to the head of the internal companionway. Halfway across the corridor she felt the movement of the deck beneath her feet begin to change as Atropos came round onto her original course due east towards Kap Farvel.
She had seen Reynolds take a dressing down from the captain before and shrug it off easily enough, but now his mood was as foul as the weather. They ran down the stairs side by side until she could take his thunderous silence no more. ‘What is it?’ she asked, betrayed by concern for him because he was young and good-looking and because he had seemed to be doing the right thing when he changed onto the safer course.
‘I got to check the fucking cargo,’ he spat.
‘What? Why?’
‘Because old Tightshit up there says I might have shifted the fucking filth when I came round onto the new heading! Bastard son of a bitch knows better than that. He’s just rubbing my nose in it.’
‘Are you going out onto the deck?’ On Napoli, this had been the only way to check the holds to see if the cargo might have shifted.
‘Are you out of your mind? Out on the deck in this? Not even for the best lay in Las Vagas, honey.’
She hated it when he did that. He thought it was sma
rt and it set her teeth on edge almost more than she could stand. It was little enough among everything else that was going on around her, but he just kept on and on and it was sending her insane — not for the best ass in Albuquerque, the best tits in Toledo, the best tail in Tallahassee.
‘So, how do you do it?’
‘There’s an inspection tunnel. Under the weather deck. I’ll get that idle son of a bitch LeFever and we’ll go in from the engineering section. Sure as hell be no fucking engineers down there.’
‘Can I come?’
That stopped him dead in his tracks. ‘Well, I don’t know. Ain’t no fucking picnic down there. Though if the cargo’s broken open it might just be a barbecue!’ He thought that was extremely funny.
The idea of being roasted alive by nuclear radiation did not amuse her, but she had been closer to the reality of it than most.
‘Come on, Reynolds, I won’t tell.’
‘It’ll be like screwing in a coal sack on a roller coaster.’ He was weakening. Her carefully chosen phrase had reminded him how much it would upset the captain if he let her come.
*
LeFever was in his cabin, and when he saw who had come calling, his long face crinkled into an engaging grin which seemed to touch something rather too deep within her for comfort. He had no station to be at in an emergency and until Yasser Timmins actually convinced Tightship to sound ‘abandon’ there was nowhere else he had to be. He took surprisingly little convincing to come with them. ‘I didn’t know whether to die of boredom or have a nervous breakdown,’ he cheerfully informed Ann. ‘It’s too rough to read — can’t hold a book steady. Can’t even write a letter. I have to tell you, Reynolds, I don’t like the way you’ve got your boat here going up and down!’
‘Hey, me neither. And you can lay your linguini on that.’
If anything, the dipping and swooping was getting worse. The three of them were bouncing off the stairwell walls with bruising force as they stumbled down into the engineering areas. As Reynolds had surmised, they were deserted. The engine was set on automatic. Chief Lethbridge and his men would be here from nine to five, as per contract, but it was nowhere near nine yet, so, as the cook had announced there would be no hot meals until the storm calmed, the engineers were either eating bread and butter or they were doing whatever idle engineers did for fun. Ann hadn’t got to know them as quickly as she had got to know the deck officers. She just knew that one set seemed to loathe and despise the other. It never ceased to amaze her how hard the men of this crew worked against each other.
At least Reynolds and LeFever seemed able to co-operate. And they needed to. A big bulkhead door at the front of the first engineering deck opened into a short tunnel which ended in another heavy door. It really required two to open this door, and the reason it had been sealed so carefully was apparent as soon as it was open and the first set of lights was switched on. It led onto a walkway suspended from the ceiling of the first cargo hold, illuminated from high on the port side by the harsh glare of practical, low-maintenance, shatter-proof lighting. Wedged into the angle of the deck above and the starboard side on their right, the walkway was like an enormously long gallery with a see-through grating for a floor, opening on the left over a safety rail to a view across the tops of the cargo containers which nearly filled the hold. Walking along here would have been a cramped, uncomfortable affair in a dead calm with nothing so potentially dangerous just beneath their feet. As it was, Reynolds was quite right: this was no picnic. The gallery was too low for them to walk upright. This fact was further emphasised by the sharp-edged cable conduit which stuck out of the angle where the deck met the wall — perfectly designed to brain the unwary. There was nothing on the cold metal to protect their heads and bodies as Atropos pitched and heaved. There was nothing to hold on to with the right hand and the waist-high railing on the left seemed more interested in breaking their ribs than in protecting them.
Immediately inside the door, above the light switch, a Geiger counter had been clipped to the wall. After he and LeFever had closed the door behind them, Reynolds made things worse for himself by carrying this forward and checking the cargo as he had been ordered. LeFever had brought his own and he checked the third officer’s readings. They communicated satisfaction with the results in a kind of pantomime, for the sound of the sea on the side of the ship by their head and the weather deck immediately above them was overpowering. Ann shoved her lips to LeFever’s ear and yelled, ‘Isn’t there an automatic system to check this?’
‘Sure ... Captain ... Reynolds ... Checking the system ...’ was all she got by way of reply.
At the far end of the gallery was a solid steel wall stretching from side to side and deck to keel, with a heavy door in it leading through to the next hold.
The two men wrestled with this door, which seemed, if anything, more securely fastened than the first. A particularly foul sea threw Ann up onto LeFever’s back, as though she were playing leapfrog with him. Only the unforgiving steel of the conduit beneath the roof stopped her going right over him — at the cost of a dizzying headache.
And all for nothing, it seemed. Or nearly so. The only thing they found amiss was a section of that lethal, sharp-edged conduit partially adrift. It was a pathetically little thing to have come all this way to fix, which was why the two men almost fought each other for the privilege of doing it, Ann supposed.
From hold to hold they went, along the length of the ship. And not a container had shifted. The needles of the counters remained safely in the green. The captain’s petty punishment gained its point from being pointless. But then, back in the first hold, in the very spot where Ann and LeFever had had their brief conversation, they stopped again and this time there was something to look at, some point to their being here after all. From beneath the edge of the hatch above their heads a waterfall of water was cascading into the hold. It hadn’t been there when they came through this way the first time.
So far, Ann had been subconsciously impressed by the dryness of the holds; by the reassuringly waterproof nature of the good ship Atropos. She looked at the leaking water with something akin to horror, mesmerised by the unsteady fall of it swinging left and right according to the pitch and heave. She was fascinated by the apparent silence of its impact exploding balletically into misty rebound against the drenched tops of the containers and vanishing like quicksilver into the cracks between them. Then she shook herself free of the hypnotic power of it and turned to look at LeFever. His normally open countenance was scored with frown lines. Reynolds looked furious and his lips were moving. Ann was very glad indeed that she could not hear what he was saying.
She heard soon enough as they climbed out into the relative quiet of the engineering areas, however.
‘... out onto the fucking deck and batten it down!’ he was yelling at LeFever.
‘Why you? Report it to the captain. He’ll send a work crew.’
‘The hell he will. He’ll send me. Only by that time it’ll have opened up some more and it’ll be really fucking dangerous.’
‘Take an engineer.’
‘I wouldn’t trust Lethbridge’s lot to piss in a pot.’
‘You can’t go alone.’
‘It’s the nearest hatch cover. I rigged good safety lines. I’m a first-class fucking deck officer and that is no damn shit.’
Ann felt like screaming at him, ‘Can’t you even be brave without all this foul-mouthing?’
‘Okay,’ said LeFever, ‘I’ll come and watch your back.’
‘In and out. Quick.’
‘Quick,’ said LeFever emphatically and Ann found she was suddenly feeling sick.
They seemed to have forgotten all about her. She followed doggedly as they fought their way back up towards the weather deck. The three of them paused inside the huge bulkhead door at the starboard end of the long, lateral, A deck corridor. Inside it, there was a pile of safety harnesses and the two men caught them up and buckled them on as they waited for a lull in the wind lo
ng enough to let them swing the heavy portal open. Numbly, Ann found herself mimicking their action, as though she, who had followed this far, was also going out onto the deck. LeFever saw what she was doing and caught Reynold’s gaze. All at once Ann found the third officer’s face thrust into her own. His dark, Latin eyes were almost black. ‘When we open the door, clip on to the safety line, but stay inside,’ he bellowed at her.
‘I —’
He shook his head. He didn’t have time for this. ‘If we don’t come back in in three minutes, you go tell the captain. It’s important. Vital. We’re relying on you, Gottit?’
‘Yes!’ she screamed. And her scream was suddenly loud. The wind had died.
The two men threw themselves at the door and it burst open to slam back and catch on a hook against the outer wall of the bridgehouse. They paused in the doorway for an instant, hands busy, then they were gone.
Ann stepped unsteadily forward and fastened the quick-release of her harness where the others had snapped theirs on, then she wedged herself in the doorway as best she could with spread legs and crucified arms. She was not a moment too soon, for the icy fury of the wind returned and all but tore her free. The freezing cold of it blinded her with tears but she would hardly have had leisure to look around during those first few moments in any case. It took all of her concentration and will simply to stand up in the face of it. Then it moderated for a moment and she could blink the hot tears away to roll freezing down her cheeks and look out into the dark heart of it. There was just enough light to see the flat coal-faced clouds seemingly as near her head as the deck had been on the walkway. The waves loomed, every bit as dark as the clouds, like a range of obsidian mountains rushing in towards her. Atropos reared back, almost as though her bows would pierce the scurrying whirl of the clouds, and white water boiled past the doorway to cascade in over Ann’s feet, shockingly cold. Then the long ship threw herself forward, seeming to twist her right shoulder down into the massive seas.