by Peter Tonkin
The first thing Richard knew of the Russian’s presence was a distant scream as a guard sprang awake to find himself confronted by a twisted figure which flitted out of the shadows and glowed slightly as it moved. Like many of his race, the pragmatic Chinese guard was superstitious by Western standards and he was certain that this was a genuine ghost. Thus Grozny was allowed to live on for a while longer, for neither of the guards even considered wasting ammunition on a creature so obviously already dead.
On that first distant scream, Richard rolled over and was confronted immediately by the equally wakeful Robin. They had gone to bed together almost hesitantly, but the four-foot approximation to a palatial double bunk, which was all the captain’s cabin had to offer, had soon forced them into the sleepy intimacy they knew of old. They were too exhausted to do more than lie side by side, but by the time they fell asleep they were snuggled together like a pair of spoons in a drawer. Now they sprang out of bed, instantly alert, moving as smoothly as a theatrical double act. They were dressed within seconds and out of the door in less than a minute. The lighting in this section of the ship was nonexistent but they knew every step, twist and turn with the familiarity of any competent commander. Luck Voyager, after all, was not so different from Sulu Queen.
The two captains and the two guards charged into the circle of light allowed by the little generator from opposite directions at more or less the same time. They confronted each other outside the sickbay door.
‘What is the trouble?’ called Richard urgently, his tone a weird mixture of bellow and whisper.
‘Ghosts!’ explained the terrified guards.
‘Ghosts?’ Robin’s tone was more robust than Richard’s — she knew everyone beyond the door would be awake by now anyway.
At this moment Su-zi and Lawkeeper arrived from the guest suite and the conversation suddenly switched into a jagged torrent of Cantonese.
The sickbay door opened and Sally, both patient and physician in charge, confronted them all. She was wrapped in a sheet which was more like a kilt than a toga and had thrown a white lab coat over it in order to cover her chest and her modesty. She looked almost as ghostly as Grozny, and almost as head-turning as a centrefold. The jabber of Cantonese faltered as the guards became distracted. But the need for it ceased in any case as Grozny, drawn to the light and the noise like a moth, staggered out of the shadows to collapse at their feet. In the sudden silence, the Geiger counter on the windowsill at the far side of the room began to shriek urgently.
‘Who is this man?’ snapped Sally, her voice rising over the urgent shrilling of the radiation meter.
In a few well-chosen words, Richard told her. As he did so, they all looked down at Grozny. He twitched and puked. None of them stooped to tend him. There was something deeply disturbing, almost terrifying, about him.
Sally saw at once that he was dying and needed urgent attention. She saw also that his presence here was endangering her other charges. ‘We need to get him out of here,’ she said.
‘Where shall we take him?’ asked Robin, practically.
‘Back out on deck. It’s a warm night. I’ll get the big flashlight and come take a look at him. But I don’t want him in the same enclosed environment as these others until I work out what to do. Jesus! Listen to that Geiger meter, would you? Su-zi, switch it off for a moment.’
And so, without a second thought, Richard and Robin picked up the sick man and carried him back down the A-deck corridor to the bulkhead door. It was the work of only a couple of moments to lift the fainting Russian out over the sill of the bulkhead door on to the covered section of the deck under the pendulous lifeboat falls. Providentially, they took him to port, going unconsciously downhill. And the instant they laid the twitching body gently on the warm decking, events overtook them yet again.
The water had receded as silently as a wisp of smoke moving in a column of still air. And as the tide fell inexorably, so, for the first time in several centuries, the broad shoulder of the Rifleman was exposed. And among its jagged reef lines, rock-strewn folds and coral outcrops, among its suddenly busy streams, its dripping overhangs and weed-choked rock pools, a tuneless orchestra of sucking, gasping, hissing, rippling and tinkling sprang up. Just at the moment Robin and Richard carried the dying lieutenant out into the night, it reached its full volume.
The two captains had half a century of experience between them. There was nothing about the ocean which one or the other of them did not know. Even so, what was happening here was so unimaginable that they might have hesitated fatally had not Robin experienced something so like it so recently on the Solway. Dropping Grozny’s feet, she ran to the side of the ship and looked down at the black-varnished, water-singing, moon-silvered slopes of the reef. A faint wind stirred, bringing the stench of long-drowned seabed to her nostrils. Distantly, a beached crocodile bellowed like a bull. ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, ‘there’s a tsunami coming.’ Richard joined her at once and together, for a lingering instant, they looked away across the reef. Edged in moonlight, the rocks gleamed like mother-of-pearl stretching in serried ranks until the bulk of the island rose, dry and dark against the far horizon. Away to their right, beyond the stem of the beached ship, Sulu Queen sat low in the low water. Disorientatingly, they had to look down to see her; down and far away. She had been pulled miles back towards the Chinese coast by the silently sinking tide. She was now so low and so distant that they probably would never have made her out at all had not the careful Daniel ordered riding lights to be lit.
‘How long have we got before the tidal wave hits?’ asked Richard.
‘No way to tell.’
‘It can’t have been like this for long. We’d have heard.’
‘I agree. You’re the one with all the historical knowledge, though. How long between low tide and the first wave?’ Richard’s eyes narrowed in thought. His memory was accurate, nearly photographic, and massive. But facts did not spring forward with the alacrity they once had done. He had a great body of knowledge about giant waves alone but nowhere could he find any sort of a lead as to the time differential between the sucking-away of the water immediately in front of a tidal wave and the arrival of the crest.
Not much more than half an hour, if that, was something that sprang to mind; but he had no way of knowing whether this was an authoritative opinion or not. The waves, he knew, could move at several hundred miles an hour, so time was bound to be very short. And the only safe place available was all too far away. It seemed suddenly grimly apt that only the unattainable island looked dry.
‘We might have half an hour,’ he hazarded because he could think of nothing else to say and could not bear to remain silent.
‘About enough time for a prayer and not much else,’ said Robin. ‘Is it worth calling Sulu Queen?
‘She’d never make it over in time, and if Daniel tried it, she’d never make it out of here again. She’s safer out there. If she’s in deep water, and she is, then the surge could be as little as a couple of metres high.’
‘But not up here.’
‘Not up here, no. The form of the wave will depend on the configuration of the slope of the reef facing it, and we don’t know for sure where it’s coming from.’ Richard paused for an instant, looking up away to the north. ‘Though, if memory serves, about half of the tsunami recorded have come out of Japan. So chances are it’ll be coming south.’ Robin looked northwards beside him. A wave coming south would hit the Luck Voyager first, when it was at its most destructive.
Richard continued, his voice miraculously steady, ‘A smooth slope leading into a funnel of high ground is the worst, by all accounts. No funnel here, of course, but if the Rifleman presents a smooth upward slope then the wave could easily crest at two hundred feet here. It’ll be falling off the sides of the reef as it travels forward, so there’ll be a hell of a backwash. But the main crest should peak at the leading edge of the reef and then fall forwards, downwards and outwards as it washes away down there.’ He gestured towar
ds the distant black bulk of the land. ‘And I guess that’s why Tiger Island’s still standing because a fair number of big waves must have passed by during the last few millennia.’
‘That’s where we want to be, then,’ said Robin decisively.
‘I agree, but how? We’d never make it on foot, even if all of us could walk.’
And the answer filled Robin’s mind in the simple vision of her father’s Bentley speeding across the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth to save herself and her son. And she realised she had never even had the chance to tell Richard how near he had come to losing his family that day.
There was so much ground to make up if they survived the next forty minutes.
Decisively, she turned back, to see Su-zi stepping out of the open bulkhead door and Grozny disappearing into the darkness. Robin took one step forward after the fleeing man and stopped. Their priorities had been re-ordered suddenly. ‘Are there any vehicles left aboard here?’ she asked Su-zi.
Lawkeeper stepped out behind Twelvetoes’ slight daughter as she shrugged and said, ‘No.’
‘There’s a range of vehicles on the deck of the Okhotsk,’ Lawkeeper prompted. ‘Richard even said he could drive — ’
‘My God!’ breathed Richard. ‘The BTR-80!’
Su-zi, Robin and the reluctant Sally got the wounded ready while the men went across to look at the big Russian personnel carrier. Richard was very much in charge on the foredeck of the Okhotsk. He knew how the container was secured in place and he saw at once how the eight-wheel troop transporter was secured within the crate by chains at each comer. Chains with quick-release D-clips.
The virtual reality training disk had providentially started with a vehicle orientation section so Richard was able to swarm up the side with confidence and lean down across the moon-bright upper section uncovered by the destruction of the crate during the collision. He reached with practised ease for the handle on the window shutter and heaved it up with one convulsive wrench. Its hinges were well-greased and the retaining catch clicked securely into place. He was on again at once, moving urgently upwards, all too well aware that nearly ten minutes of his theoretical half-hour were gone already.
The handle to the driver’s hatch was just where the unreal vision on the Virtuality machine had told him it would be, but the visualisation had not prepared him for the stiffness of the handle nor for the weight of the big D-shaped hatch. Wonder fighting with urgency, the one pushing him onwards while the other begged him to slow down and look around, he lifted the hatch and dropped down into the left-hand seat. Again, everything he saw was familiar; everything else he sensed was new and surprising, from the unexpected chill inside the big steel box of the machine to the showroom-new leathery smell of the still air within.
Of course they had left the keys in the ignition. To have done anything else would have been asking for trouble. Richard reached forward unerringly and touched them. They rang slightly, like distant bells. Then he reached down and reached for the gear lever. The momentary unfamiliarity of being in the left-hand seat passed as quickly as if he had been preparing to drive in France. He set the lever in neutral. He looked forward through the thick-glassed window, down the slope of the deck towards the black rock of the naked reef. ‘I’m starting her up!’ he yelled, with his quarterdeck voice.
He turned the key and the massive, 260hp diesel motor thundered into life at once. He let it throb twice before stretching forward with the same unerring reach for the illumination switches. Three sharp clicks later and he could see that he had power and fuel in plenty. The slope in front of him registered at more than 55 degrees, high on the clinometer but well within the specification of the eight big wheels below him. He flicked the next switch and the headlights came on. A great pathway of gold fell down the deck and showed him every detail of the rocks below. He slid the big lever, unhandy as a truck’s, into first gear and reached gingerly for the handbrake.
It was the simple power of the thing that Richard found so amazing. The Virtuality training had demonstrated positions and functions; the weight and the stiffness, the sound and the smell had all come as slight shocks to the system. But the sheer throbbing power at his command was amazing, and a little unnerving. The rock-solid progress as the eight great tyres — at full pressure, the internal regulator told him — rolled like limpets down the deck belied the lightness of the power steering and the rumbling promise of sports car performance if he wanted it. There was a drop of nearly two metres down from the deck to the rock, now that the tide was out. He did not hesitate; he pushed the big blunt nose over it and she went on down like a lady.
When he swung the wheel, the power surged through to the front four wheels and she came round almost too easily. This was easier than the trips he had taken driving crew around in various minibuses; easier even than driving a Range Rover or Robin’s big Vauxhall Monterey. Without thinking, he reached upwards and snapped on the big IR searchlight. Then he pulled the brown cloth crew-helmet off its clip over on the commander’s console and slipped it on. Feeling oddly like a WWI pilot, he depressed the button on the throat mike to the ALL HAIL position. ‘Ready and waiting,’ he bellowed, and was nearly deafened by the amplification as his words were broadcast inside the vehicle and outside.
No sooner had he spoken than he was out of his seat, clambering back past the gun-layer’s position to the main door in the middle of the aft compartment. He swung the upper catch over and pushed the top half of the door back against the upper surface, released the D-catch and let the drawbridge fall with a clang only slightly quieter than his still-echoing message. Should he go aboard Luck Voyager and see if he could help? he wondered. But at once he decided against it and went back to the front of the vehicle.
Here there was a short-wave radio designed for battlefield use but with enough power, he reckoned, to reach the Sulu Queen and warn her what to expect in seventeen minutes or so.
As he sat in the driver’s seat, with his fingers on the throat mike and the button depressed to RADIO, talking to the wakeful sparks on Sulu Queen, he heard the stirring of the first arrivals coming in behind him and beginning to arrange themselves in the cramped compartment. He did not look back to see who was there or what they were doing; instead he concentrated on the message he was passing to Daniel and the cogent seconds of advice which accompanied it. The stirring behind him became a bustle and he had to concentrate ever more fiercely to block out the combination of tired groans and excited conversation from his ears.
And, as they will under such circumstances, his eyes drifted out of focus and his vision wandered across the golden carpet made by the combination of the headlights and the searchlight on the top of the reef in front of him. Wandered, aimlessly, and then stopped.
He frowned. The message he was giving faltered. Memory stirred, like the movement of the Loch Ness monster far below the surface and maybe mythic in any case.
There, half cemented into the living rock by several centuries of steady coral growth, lay what looked for all the world like a string of massive pearls. One after another they led, their position emphasising the fact they all lay in a straight line leading directly towards the distant island itself. Six, seven, eight ancient cannonballs.
The commander’s hatch slammed up with startling abruptness. ‘Over and out,’ said Richard and replaced the handset as Robin’s lithe body dropped into the seat on his right. ‘That’s it,’ she said decisively. ‘They’re cramped and some of them’ll be lucky to survive. But they’re in and we’re off.’
As soon as she finished speaking, another slamming sound assured him that the double door amidships was closed. A stirring immediately behind him told him that the troop section was now full and that the last man in was pushing his way forward. The last, and least comfortable seat there was the gun-layer’s.
‘The Russian?’ Richard asked as he reached back and shrugged on the full harness seatbelt, snapping it in place as though it contained a parachute.
‘No sig
n,’ answered Robin as she did the same. ‘Forget him and let’s go.’
‘Right.’ Richard looked up at his internal rear mirror, meeting the eyes of Sally who was perched on the gun-layer’s seat, also strapping herself in tight. ‘Sally,’ he said to her quietly. ‘I’ll need you to look behind us, please. As soon as we’re moving, rotate the turret and switch on your targeting display. You should get augmented night vision at a range of magnifications. The rest of you, hold tight!’
Richard engaged first, released the brake, dropped the clutch and put his foot on the floor. The BTR took off like his old E-type Jaguar. The acceleration seemed, if anything, greater, and the suspension was much more sensitive. As the big vehicle leaped forward, easily clearing the irregularities it met, he rushed up the gears as though testing her out at Brands Hatch racecourse. Within ten seconds they were moving at 30 kph, within twenty, 70; they hit 100 kph some thirty seconds after he first dropped the clutch.
At such a speed, over such terrain, Richard expected the steering wheel to be wrenched out of his hands; he expected the head of the thing to be leaping up and down like the front of a tank. But no; the power system soaked up the battering the front four tyres were taking and the suspension soaked up the wild gyrations of the lower chassis. The massive strength of the steel-reinforced radials made them nearly indestructible, and in any case Richard knew he could lose up to three of them with no appreciable diminution in performance. The ride during the next three minutes was neither smooth nor quiet, however, and Richard for one was glad of his full-harness seatbelt. Sally, in the turret above and behind him, found herself being spun through one hundred and eighty degrees. A small monitor with mercifully padded edges which filled most of her view suddenly sprang to life and dazzled her with the clarity of its picture. In a range of greens varying between the paler side of lime and the near-black edge of bottle, she could see the curve of the reef with the tangled bulk of the wrecks like whales beached in mid-rut. As she looked, the targeting display switched in beside the picture and she began to sing out the ranges to Richard as though they really did mean to shell them.