by Peter Tonkin
He was concentrating on the near-impossible task so absolutely that he did not notice the warning light flashing from the radio room and it was not until he tore the wrapping free that he looked up. As soon as he did so, he dropped the unprotected sandwich and ran forward. The still wrapped pair went onto the watchkeeper’s chair as he went past and he was wiping butter and Coleman’s English on his lapels as he went in, in case he got the chance to transmit. It was the short wave. He turned the volume up until the hiss was like a big wave breaking, and right at the back of it, far, far away, he heard a whispering pulse: ... dot dot dot ...
He was in the seat at once, twisting the volume up until it was like sitting under Niagara Falls: ... dot dash dash ...
He caught up the handset in direct communication with the radio officer’s cabin. He didn’t even have to dial; just picking it up rang Sparks’s bell.
He found he was whispering, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ But whether he was talking to Bill Christian or to the signal, he never knew.
... dash dash dot dot ...
‘Yes?’ So loud, it made him jump almost out of his skin. ‘Bill, I’ve got something. Morse. Sounds as though it’s coming in from Mars.’
‘On my way.’
Richard put the handset back. His lips were moving with the Morse pulses, saying letters. His hand was scrabbling for a pencil, ready to write the letters down as soon as he understood them.
... dot dot dot ...
‘S.’
... dot dash ...
‘A.’
... hissss ...
‘Missed it! Come on, come on!’
... dot dash ...
‘A again.’
... dash ...
‘T. It’s T. God ...’
... dot dot dot ...
‘S. It’s an S.’
When Bill Christian came dashing onto the bridge, he heard his captain in animated conversation with the radio, yelling jubilantly over the thunder of static. When he swung round the door to look down into the radio shack itself, he saw Richard aglow with almost uncontrollable excitement.
On the pad in front of him were the capital letters written in his clear, bold hand:
A T S A T S A T S.
‘ATS,’ said Richard, beginning to calm down a little.
‘It’s Atropos’s call sign. We’ve got her, Bill, we’ve got her.’
*
They woke Andrew McTavish long enough for him to get them under way and put the engines on automatic, then Richard turned the wreck of Clotho’s bows towards the ice barrier and they began to feel their way northwards, following that scarcely audible Morse code call sign, with Bill Christian sharpening up the reception and broadcasting Clotho’s Morse call sign CLO in return.
Once they were safely under way, Richard split his time between the helm and the chart table. To begin with, they simply followed the bearing where the reception was strongest, but this, even if it was giving them an accurate direction, only gave them the line Atropos was lying on, somewhere between Clotho and the North Pole. Once Richard was confident which direction the signal was coming from, he started to swing more and more widely off course to east and west, checking the new bearings which Bill gave him, trying to make that all-important triangle on the chart at whose point Atropos would be lying. It was slow, painstaking work which nevertheless required fierce concentration on the part of both men. The night fled by and it was not until the signal began to fade with the first hint of light that Richard realised he had given Nico considerably more of a lie-in than he had intended.
He sent Bill Christian down to bed, then went round the bridge one last time himself. He ended up staring disconsolately down at the bearing lines chinagraphed on the clear sheet over his chart. Where there ought to have been a dark-sided, clear triangle, there was something which looked more like a hedgehog. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make the darkest part of the figure coalesce into something positive, with no great success. Still, he had a ballpark. He would find the diamond later. And the striking plate, in due course.
Trying to coin an equivalent English analogy using cricket pitches instead of baseball parks, he walked over to the helm, pressed the communications button beside it and summoned Nico onto watch. When the Italian arrived, much refreshed, Richard explained how he and Bill Christian had spent the night. While he did this, he punched a course into the automatic pilot which would take them straight towards the point where most of the lines on the chart seemed to come closest to crossing each other.
Then he went to bed. ‘Wake me in four hours,’ was his final order. ‘I want to look at the bows before we get anywhere near the ice barrier.’
Nico nodded, watched Richard stagger into the captain’s day room behind the chart room, walked over to the watch-keeper’s chair and proved how wide awake he was by removing two beef sandwiches from the seat before he sat in it.
*
‘Captain Mariner went right over and climbed around on it,’ said Nico, four and a half hours later.
‘She would,’ said Richard. ‘But you won’t get me over there, Nico, so don’t draw up any plans to resume your command just yet. Still, that’s a hell of a mess. What about the hole into number one?’
‘It should have sunk us. We were lucky. But ...’
‘But?’
‘The two who were down here at the time. They were not so lucky.’
Richard nodded. He had known Jamie and had met his parents; he had not known Biggs personally but he felt their loss equally keenly. They had both been Heritage Mariner men. More than that, they had been Crewfinders men.
Clotho was ploughing determinedly along the course Richard had set. Johnny Sullivan was on watch, Bill Christian was trying to raise Heritage House and Andrew was working on the pumping system with Harry Piper. They were sailing deeper and deeper into the area of high pressure. The conditions were idyllic. High, clear skies of picture-postcard blue, and long, quiet seas one shade of green off the same colour. No wind to speak of, and a high, bright, early afternoon sun. The two men on the battered deck should have been wearing shorts and T-shirts, not the cold-weather gear they still required if they were going to be outside for any length of time.
Any thoughts of summer wear, however, were cancelled by the view dead ahead. The barrier was just below the horizon, but it made its presence known with breathtaking power. There was the faintest haze of fog above the corrugated raft of ice. It was hardly thick enough to be called cloud, but the suspension of water droplets and ice crystals extended quite a long way up the sky. Sunlight blazing off the dead-white surface below lit the fog like neon so that only Clotho could bear to look directly towards where they were headed. There the blue of the sky faded as though it was increasingly frosted over itself. At its lower edge, pale blue became blazing white and that whiteness seemed to contain the brightness of a chain of nuclear explosions burning all along the very top of the world.
‘Have you checked the hole at all?’
‘No. Like I say, Captain Mariner went over. But I won’t.’
‘Neither will I, but we need to have a look. I think we might be able to make a full assessment from inside the hold itself.’
‘You don’t think it’s enough that we know the water has stopped coming in, that we have balanced the weight with the pumps so that the hull sits well in the water and we know we can sail safely forward? Why do you want to look at the hole?’
‘How near the surface is it? Will it start to let in water if the conditions get to force five on the Beaufort scale? Force six? Will we be safe in a force-nine gale? Force-ten storm?’
‘What storm, Captain? Is dead calm —’
‘How is the ice-strengthening at the waterline? Does the hole come through it? Over it? How far over it? Yes, it is a dead calm, but we’re heading into ice. What thickness of ice can we go through? Six inches? Will she ride over six feet?’
‘The hole into number one hold won’t tell you much about that, Captain.’
‘But it will tell me something. And, when we get nearer the ice, I might well find ways to look more closely from the outside. Looking from the inside now will save time then. And it might tell us something we could find useful in the meantime. Was this hatch closed when the hold broke open?’
‘No. I came down and closed it later. Hard job, too, in the dark with the safety lines all tangled here and where the gantry went overboard. Tow line writhing around on the deck like some great big snake. I don’t like your Western Ocean. I prefer the quieter seas. I am a Mediterranean man.’
‘Yes, I know. Well, you’ve got some nice Mediterranean weather today.’
‘Don’t get that much ice off Napoli, Capitano.’
Section by section they rolled back the McGregor hatch and daylight flooded in to reveal a dark, dirty-looking little sea of water restlessly heaving down in the number one hold. Striking in across the wave tops and throwing them into stark relief was a searchlight beam of brightness from the hole in the forward wall of the hold.
‘That’s enough,’ said Richard after three sections were back. ‘I only want to go down the forward wall and look at the hole itself.’
‘Ladder don’t look too safe no more,’ observed Nico. ‘You’d better wear a lifeline if you don’t want to go swimming.’
‘Good idea. It’s a bit cold for a dip.’
A few moments later, Richard had clinched the line round his waist and Nico had tight hold of it. Then Richard carefully climbed over the raised edge of the hatch and put his feet on the first rungs of the ladder. It had been attached to the forward wall of the hold but the inrush of water through the hole had ripped a good deal of it free. After the first few steps, he found himself apparently climbing down a ladder made of rubber, which bounced and wavered with each new step and movement, no matter how slow and careful.
But Richard wasn’t really concerned with this. There was no real danger, simply the outside chance of an unwelcome swim. Only if by some unimaginable accident was he thrown through the hole in the wall before him down into the Labrador Sea was there any actual chance of him coming to harm. By the look of things, the hole was quite big enough for him to fit through. It was near the top of the wall, centred perhaps two-thirds up from the inundated floor. It seemed to be very roughly circular with a radius of perhaps three feet. The edge was an obscene bloom of twisted metal petals not only from the hold wall but from the ruined bow immediately beyond it. In a strange way, the damage seemed to be acting almost like a monstrous rivet, joining the two layers of metal together.
Another few careful steps down brought him to a position from which he could see almost vertically down the cutwater of his ship to the creamy mess of her bow wave.
It was very difficult to judge distances in these circumstances, but it seemed to Richard that he had about eight, maybe ten feet of solid bow there between the hole and the wave tops. There was even a section, maybe a metre, of seemingly undamaged bow immediately above the tumbling foam. He would have to consult Andrew McTavish about that. ‘Nico,’ he called up, ‘did Robin say anything about an undamaged section just at the waterline?’
‘No, Captain. But I think she is riding much higher in the water since she lost the gantry.’
‘That would make sense. Okay, I’ll just go down a step or two more, then I’ll be up again.’
Here, in fact, the ladder was almost horizontal, bent far back by the force of the water which had burst through the wall. Its base was another ten feet down in the water, bent back in towards its original attachment points. But it was no longer actually riveted to the wall, and really it should have been jumping up and down much more actively under Richard’s weight. He had no way of knowing it as he moved across the twisted rungs like a monkey on a trampoline, but he was being held safely in place by the inertia of two dead bodies whose safety lines had bound them to the metal. But the more he moved, the more these bindings were loosened, so that, just as he decided that there was nothing more to see and began to climb back up, the body of Jamie Curtis followed him in ghastly pantomime up the rungs from under the water, the handle of the assassin’s knife chiming faintly against the hollow rungs as he moved.
‘What was that?’ Richard called up to Nico.
‘What? I heard nothing.’
‘I don’t know, a kind of ringing ...’
As he spoke, Nico’s walkie-talkie buzzed urgently. The Italian turned as soon as Richard’s head came out of the hold. ‘Pronto?’
As Richard pulled himself onto the deck, Johnny Sullivan’s voice boomed out excitedly, ‘Tell the captain I think we’ve got Atropos.’
They left the hatch as it was and ran up the deck without a further thought. In the wheelhouse, Sullivan was standing with a big flimsy printout. ‘I think this is it,’ he said as they charged breathlessly in. ‘The conditions are so perfect that the satellites are sending down brilliant weather pictures.’
He spread the printout on the chart table and Richard could see what his lieutenant meant. He was looking at an enhanced weather picture of the Labrador Sea. Not a whole picture but a highly enlarged section perhaps ten miles by ten on the earth’s surface.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘We’re back in contact with Heritage House. Not just the radio. The machines too. They enlarged it. They faxed it over.’
Richard nodded and leaned forward.
The picture, in stark monochrome, showed a long tongue of white ice. To the south of it was black water. To the north of it, black water, which gave way almost immediately to a stippling of white which thickened relentlessly until the top of the picture was dead white again. To the east, the ribbon of black water was wider before the stippling warned of gathering ice floes. To the west, it was narrower, and right in the north-western corner there was something else. What this extra section could be was not clear, but it was big and it seemed to be pushing the floes down in front of it — which meant that it was moving.
And that was worrying, for, nestled against the straight edge of the ice barrier immediately in its path was a tiny speck of brightness too vivid to be a floe. Too vivid, in fact, to be anything but Atropos.
21 - Day Ten
Friday, 28 May 00:00
Robin hauled herself up out of a seemingly bottomless black pit of exhaustion to find someone was shaking her. That was the first thing her reluctantly wakening body realised: that she was being shaken very forcefully by the shoulder. Then other sensations came — the fact that the shoulder was bruised and tender, the fact that she was in a warm and comfortable bed. The fact that the bed was on a ship.
Her eyes opened and a face slowly pulled itself into focus, broad forehead frowning with concern, wide blue eyes which crinkled at the edges into laugh lines stretching back to the ears. High cheekbones, with long valleys joining them to a square chin with just the hint of a dimple under the gold-dust stubble. The firmly sculpted mouth, its top lip framed by a moustache, was talking to her, revealing perfectly even teeth. ‘Stone says he thinks he’s getting through to your home base, Captain,’ said Henri LeFever. ‘Hogg wasn’t sure whether to wake you but I figured you’d want to know.’
‘You figured right. What time is it?’
‘Just gone midnight.’
‘Time I was up anyway.’ She swung herself out from under the blankets without thinking and was relieved to find Ann had put her in a long silk nightgown. She rose and crossed to the pile of neatly folded clothes on the chair beside the doorway into her main cabin. ‘I’ll be on the bridge in five minutes,’ she said and turned to face him. Something about his eyes made her look down and she realised that the light coming from behind her made the gossamer confection she was wearing almost transparent. ‘Five minutes, Mr LeFever,’ she snapped.
‘Aye aye, Captain,’ he answered and went past her looking studiously at the floor.
She dressed quickly, not quite certain whether she was angry with the scientific officer or not. It was strange that, after thinking that sh
e might join Ann as ship’s sex object if Captain Black recovered, she should find herself being so observed by the one man aboard she had not thought of as a rabid sexist. Perhaps she had been over-impressed by LeFever after all. Or perhaps she had been so busy being a captain that in a way she had forgotten that she was a woman. She had not forgotten her femininity, she had simply moved it down the list of priorities a rung or two. It was not a question of how she saw herself, it was a question of how she wished others to see her. When she walked into a ballroom, she wished to be seen primarily as a woman. When she walked into a board meeting, she wished to be seen primarily as an executive. On a powerless ship, out of communication with home base, tied up against an ice barrier in the Labrador Sea, she wanted to be seen simply and solely as the captain. Not the short captain or the tall captain or the well-groomed captain or the scruffy captain or the white captain or the black captain or the weak captain. The strong captain; yes, certainly the strong captain. But not the woman captain; not the pretty captain; not — heaven forfend — the sexy captain. Just the captain. As in ‘Yes, Captain! No, Captain! Three bags full, Captain!’
This was something she had achieved in the Heritage Mariner fleet, to such an extent that she never gave it a second thought because no one else seemed to either. But LeFever’s look showed her that she might still have some work to do here. The thought was very unwelcome; she had so much other difficult work to do. She missed her officers from Clotho. Had she not had so many of her crew aboard, she might have felt isolated.
Still lost in these thoughts, which had much of their basis in the fact that she was so tired and for once in her life had not sprung fully awake at the first touch, she walked out of her cabin onto the corridor and found herself face to face with Captain Black. Later she realised that this was hardly surprising — Ann Cable had put her in the captain’s cabin and the drug addict had woken in Reynolds’s accommodation and was trying to return to familiar surroundings. But it gave her a shock at the time.