The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  The stern cabin contained tools, bottom paint, fiberglassing supplies, lengths of oak and teak, an extra propane gas bottle for the galley stove, two five-gallon plastic freshwater cans to augment the fifty gallons in the boat’s two tanks, and spare diesel fuel, as well as extra food—enough canned goods for Hardin to stay a long time at sea after he dropped Dr. Akanke at Monrovia.

  She was putting her things in the stern cabin. It was private from the main cabin where Hardin was bunking, and Culling was sure that unless the port took hold one night, the arrangement would stay that way. From what he could see, she was little more to him than a willing deckhand.

  Hardin was often reminded during the last hectic preparations of doing the very same things—stripping purchases of their excess cardboard and plastic packaging, stowing and restowing to distribute weight evenly, cataloging their locations—just two months ago when he and Carolyn had loaded the old Siren and pointed the ketch toward Europe.

  As dusk gathered, and the hills of Fowey and Polruan lighted gently, he eyed the way the wind snapped the square black telltales that fluttered from the shrouds. He used to use strips of Carolyn’s stockings, but he had discovered by accident on the way back from Rotterdam that black showed up better against the night sky.

  The wind would be stiff on the Channel.

  “Number three jib,” he said to Ajaratu.

  She ducked into the cabin and appeared in a moment on the foredeck with the sail. Hardin hanked it on slowly, repeating the process aloud so she would learn. He felt very calm. His preparations were complete, and in an odd way her presence seemed to postpone the pressure he knew would come after he had left her and the battle had begun.

  Suddenly, when the jib was attached, they were ready.

  Nothing was left on the quay. The decks were clear. The job was finished. As if in encouragement, the tide ended its slack and pulled Carolyn from the dock, tightening the mooring lines, tugging toward the mouth of the harbor. It was almost dark.

  Ajaratu stepped onto the quay and embraced Culling. He patted her shoulder, but when Hardin took his hand to thank him, he seemed embarrassed. Facing the hills from which the breeze was blowing, he said, “You’ve got the wind and tide, Doctor. Not much more a man can ask.”

  Hardin hoisted the mainsail, letting Ajaratu winch it the last few feet.

  “I’ll sail her off,” he said.

  He loosened the bowline, wrapped it once around the cleat, and handed the tail to Ajaratu. Culling manned the stern line. Hardin took the helm.

  “Cast off, Ajaratu.”

  She tossed the line to the quay.

  Hardin sheeted the main. It bellied, pulling the boat from the dock.

  He nodded to Culling.

  The old man loosed the stern line and the Swan was free.

  9

  “You missed him,” said Culling, warily eyeing the three men who had crowded into his little office at the front of his main shed.

  “When did he sail? ” asked the older one in the middle.

  Culling scratched his head. “Oh, some time in the afternoon, I recollect.”

  “What time?”

  “Four o’clock or thereabout. Are you gentlemen friends of his? ” “He sailed against the tide?” asked the man in the middle.

  Several hours after they left Fowey, the Swan’s bow began to rise and fall.

  “What’s that?” asked Ajaratu. On their first sail they had gone east.

  “The Atlantic,” said Hardin.

  “Already?”

  It was very dark and he sensed more than saw her next to him. He said, “It’s telling us it’s out there.”

  “Am I going to be seasick?”

  “I hope not.”

  “That’s not encouraging.”

  “You ought to get some sleep.”

  She fell silent.

  He heard the mutter of a boat engine in the dark. It seemed to come from behind and he craned his neck to make sure that the shielded stern light was on. It was. A cloud covered the star he was steering by. For several minutes he used the direction of the waves and the wind as his guide, waiting for the star to reappear. When it didn’t, he flicked on the dim red binnacle light and checked his compass heading.

  Neither his red and green bow lights, nor his white stern light, were visible from the cockpit. They were shielded to show only twenty points off the bows and twelve from the stern. The sound astern grew closer and louder, then changed pitch; the boat had spotted his stern light and was veering to pass him at a safe distance.

  His star returned. Just starboard of the mast, exactly where it should have been. He began looking for a replacement. Steering by a star was much easier than trying to follow a compass needle, but you had to trade it for a new one every fifteen or twenty minutes; otherwise, as it moved across the sky, you’d follow it to places you didn’t want to go. He explained what he was doing to Ajaratu, and let her find a new star.

  The wind was stiffening, still north from the land, blowing away the sound of the overtaking boat. But despite the Channel chop which ran across the fledgling Atlantic rollers, the Swan was riding comfortably. They were sailing between the outbound shipping lane and the coast, hugging the channel to avoid the charted rocks. The lights of giant ships studded the blackness to port. The coast was mostly dark.

  A silent explosion of white fire obliterated the black sky and water.

  “What is it?” cried Ajaratu.

  A powerful engine thundered alongside. Icy spray drenched the cockpit.

  Hardin shut his eyes and tried to shake the blindness from his head.

  “Douse that light!” he bellowed.

  A crisp English voice echoed through a loud-hailer.

  “Yacht Carolyn. Yacht Carolyn. Heave to for boarding.”

  “Shut if off!” yelled Hardin. “I can’t see a goddamned thing.”

  The light turned away, illuminating the sea in front of the Swan. Hardin squinted at the silhouette of a fast cutter in the reflected-back glare. The loud-hailer cracked again.

  “Coast Guard! Heave to!”

  Now, as the cutter closed, Hardin could see several uniformed sailors preparing to secure to the Swan. One of them carried a light machine gun.

  “What the hell do you want?” Hardin yelled angrily, his eyes still aching from the light.

  “Coast Guard weapons search,” cracked the loud-hailer.

  Hardin could see that it was held by an officer in a dark pea jacket. Weapons search? Could he talk them out of it? For a wild moment he wondered if he could come about and knock them off the cutter with the flying boom, but then what? The Swan could sail forever without fuel, but it could never outrun a power boat. He’d have to talk them out of it. Certainly, stocked the way she was, the Swan looked innocent enough.

  “Okay,” he said to Ajaratu. “I’ll head upwind. Get ready to pull in the jib. . . . Now!”

  He winched in the main. The Swan straightened up and began to pitch. The cutter loomed alongside, three feet higher out of the water, but expertly steered. The boats touched gently and the sailors scrambled aboard, cleated a pair of lines fore and aft while the officer and the sailor with the gun watched. As soon as the boats were made secure, the launch engine quickened slightly and they ran in tandem with just enough speed to point their bows to the waves.

  The officer handed his loud-hailer to one of his men and scrambled into the Swan’s cockpit. He was middle-aged, with a full, sensitive face.

  “There are safer ways to stop a boat than blinding its crew with a spotlight,” snapped Hardin.

  “Awfully sorry,” replied the officer, his eyes flickering toward Ajaratu. “Weapons search.”

  “You’re out of your territory,” said Hardin.

  “Actually, we’re still in the limit. We don’t ordinarily bother yachtsmen, but we’ve a report of an IRA cell smuggling French explosives into southern Ireland. Won’t take a minute. If you would just take me below, sir, and show me your papers, we’ll get it ove
r straightaway.”

  “Your hull is pounding mine,” said Hardin.

  The officer signaled and a muscular young man whose arms bulged through his dark sweater slipped aboard.

  “Bosun Rice will man your helm while we go below. Are you all right up here, Miss?” he asked courteously.

  “Yes,” said Ajaratu. “Do you want my passport?”

  “We’ll get it below with the gentleman’s, thank you. Cast off, Rice.”

  The sailors jumped back onto the cutter with their lines. Rice took the shiny wheel with an appreciative grin and headed the Swan away from the wind, allowing the backed headsail to fill. Rice glanced at the binnacle.

  “Two forty?” he asked Hardin.

  “Good enough,” said Hardin. That Rice was a competent seaman was apparent in his stance. Hardin led the officer down into the main cabin and opened one of the drawers under the chart table for their passports and the Swan’s registry.

  The officer reached up and slid the hatch shut. He nodded at the settee.

  “Sit over there, Dr. Hardin.”

  Hardin straightened up with surprise. “How do you know—”

  The man produced a small black gun and repeated, “Sit!”

  “What? Who the hell are you?”

  “Where is the Dragon?”

  “What?”

  “Sit down, Dr. Hardin.”

  Hardin sank to the settee, his mind whirling. The officer nodded toward the hatch.

  “I don’t believe that lovely woman up there is absolutely important to your plan. I will throw her overboard if you don’t cooperate immediately. I’ll drown her the way your wife was drowned.”

  Hardin rose trembling from the settee. The gun receded into the protection of the man’s waist.

  “What do you want?” Hardin whispered.

  “Where is the Dragon?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The soldier who sold it to you was arrested. Where is it? ”

  Hardin sat heavily. “You’re standing on it. It’s under the sole.”

  “Show me.” He stepped back to the chart table and watched carefully while Hardin disassembled the drop-leaf table and pulled up the floorboards. Hardin showed him the wooden box. “Inside,” he said. “Sealed. Watertight.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Yes, it works.”

  “Can you use it?”

  “It’s a simple weapon.”

  “And your target is enormous.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Does the woman know?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you take her?”

  “To conserve my strength.”

  “Good.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I want to help you.”

  Hardin didn’t believe him, but he said, “If you want to help, you can get off my boat and leave me alone.”

  “Without my help, your venture is too chancy.”

  “I’ll worry about that.”

  “How do you intend to locate your target?”

  “What target?”

  The man smiled thinly. “I don’t think you fully understand the sheer indefensibility of your position, Dr. Hardin. That launch is armed. Those men are mine.”

  Hardin glanced out the porthole. The launch was barely visible, a lean shape between the dark water and the black sky, its engine muttering idly, barely ticking over to pace the sloop which was plowing through the Channel under full sail.

  “Why?” asked Hardin.

  “We can shoot you. We can sink you. We can drown you. And your companion. No one will ever know. . . . How do you intend to locate your target?”

  “Screw off.”

  “Or I can turn you over to the authorities.”

  Hardin felt his face betray him.

  The man smiled. “Oh, that you believe? You can believe it all, sir, but we’ll use that as a wedge.” His smile vanished. “How do you intend to locate your target?”

  “Radar.”

  “What range?”

  “Fifty miles.”

  “Fifty miles? That’s rather optimistic for radar.”

  “I built it.”

  “Fifty miles. Three hours’ warning if your target travels at sixteen knots. Provided you close within fifty miles to begin with.” His eyes slitted almost shut and he stroked the underside of his chin with his thumb. “That’s not good enough. I can’t allow such hit-or-miss conditions.”

  “You can’t allow?” Hardin exploded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I want you to succeed.”

  “Then let me go.”

  “I insist that you succeed.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  The man smiled. “You’ll do more than keep it in mind, sir. You’ll do exactly as I tell you.”

  “No,” said Hardin. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

  “We’ve already discussed my options.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want what you want. And I can help. I can track your target. I can alert you to any changes in its departure, or route, or destination. I will know its whereabouts every moment and I will give you ample warning to attack.”

  “What do you really want?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I really want, Dr. Hardin. I’m giving you LEVIATHAN on a silver platter.”

  The man pocketed his gun and worked his way down the tilting cabin sole to the radio above the chart table. “Come here, Dr. Hardin.” He turned on the radio and manipulated the dial.

  Hardin joined him. The man sat at the teak table, located a pencil and scratch paper, and wrote GMHN. “It’s a good radio,” he said. “I’m giving you a false call sign. GMHN. Golf-Mike-Hotel-November. I’ll make the arrangements to document it. Reverse it for my call sign. When do you intend to attack?”

  “Three or four weeks.”

  “I’ll call next week and the week after. Then every night. Eight o’clock Greenwich Mean Time. Twenty hundred hours. We’ll arrange a code because we’ll be on an open line through the Por-tishead Overseas Station.”

  “What if I don’t answer?”

  “Once I get off this boat, Dr. Hardin, I obviously can’t force you to do a thing. But I find it difficult to believe that you would ignore information on LEVIATHAN’s exact position. Am I wrong?”

  “You’re right,” Hardin conceded. And then, even though he knew he would not get an answer, he said, “But I want your name and who you’re working for.”

  A staccato drilling sound interrupted the static hiss of the open radio channel.

  “Bloody hell!” snapped the man. He turned it off.

  “What was that?” asked Hardin.

  “The Russian Woodpecker. They’re testing a new over-the-horizon radar to track the United States Cruise missiles, and it’s balling up shortwave all over England. If it disrupts our broadcasts, I’ll try again in five minutes. They never last very long.”

  “Who are you?” Hardin repeated.

  “Rather than concoct a lie, let me say that my name is Miles and that I am associated with a democratic state in need of a new weapon.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” asked Hardin.

  “You’re the prototype.”

  “Prototype for what?”

  “The weapon.”

  BOOK TWO

  10

  The wind tested the steel cables that spiderwebbed between the ship’s towering mass and the spindly-looking refinery pier. The wind was light, a gentle July evening breeze, and the cables were thick, but LEVIATHAN’s hull, a wall one hundred feet high and eighteen hundred feet long—over four acres of windage— tempted it like a giant sail.

  The strain on the cables was enormous. Double bow and stern lines, breast lines, spring lines, and midships cables, twelve in all, shared the load. They chafed against the ship’s chocks and tugged relentlessly at its shock-absorbing mooring winches. Heavily greased wherever they touched m
etal, they stretched tautly between the mooring winches and the chocks, dividing the vast deck like low fences, a series of obstacles too low to crouch under and too high to step across without an effort.

  The wind was from the southwest and as LEVIATHAN was pointing north, up Southampton Water toward the city where the rivers Test and Itchen meet, the greatest strain was on the stern cables, over which a group of Pakistani stewards were manhandling crates of fresh meat and vegetables. The wind speed increased from three to five knots for several seconds. On the bridge, the Doppler radar’s LED screen showed that the ship’s stern had moved three inches farther from the pier.

  There was something indecent, thought the Southampton harbor pilot, about a ship in ballast. Empty, LEVIATHAN rode high in the water. The upper fifty feet of its hull was clean matte black, but underneath that was another fifty feet painted red, the underwater part concealed when the ship was laden. It was scarred where the mechanical scrapers had stripped off moss and shell life, but what was worse was the great bulbous protuberance which jutted from the bow, a fat, unseemly growth ordinarily draped by the sea. The pilot felt as if he were privy to a secret of nature, an impossible sight like the underbelly of an iceberg.

  One of his colleagues had piloted the monster in the night before and he had been outspokenly angry; it was sheer arrogance to float a ship that big, much less bring it into Southampton Water. LEVIATHAN dwarfed the refinery, demanding attention, tearing the eye from the twisted miles of silvery pipeline, the squat storage tanks, and the tall, spiny catalytic crackers that covered the gentle hills like weed and shells scattered by the tide.

  Bad enough lumbering through the open sea in the grip of its momentum, but insanity in harbor, mocking the very term haven, because no place the monster docked could ever be safe until it had gone. The winds, the tides, and the currents exerted their force according to resistance. They bowed to grace, but never bulk.