The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  The telephone headset erupted with a happy shout. “Contact!”

  Quickly he put a new gasket on the door and resealed the junction box. Gathering his tools into his sack, and making sure that he had left nothing behind, he climbed the ladder back to daylight, where his subordinates greeted him with a new warmth. After showering the stink of the oil out of his hair, he changed into warm clothing, found Ogilvy on the bridge, and reported the malfunction repaired.

  The wind had freshened. Ogilvy said nothing for a while. Then he nodded at the sea.

  “Weren’t you the chap who suggested that the man on the sailboat might attack somewhere other than the bulge of Africa?”

  “I didn’t see how you could be so sure, Captain.”

  “Look at that.”

  Fierce lines of rollers marched implacably through the flashing whitecaps that leaped in their troughs. Spray, whipped from the crests by the wind, skidded smokily across the gray water like fine snow blowing over ice.

  The sun moved behind gathering clouds. The waves seemed sharper, the water darker. Jagged peaks rose on the horizon like distant mysteries, fearsome, remote, but filled with the menace that they might come near. The water looked cold and forbidding, the mist penetrating, the sea like an undulating stone overlaid with a white net of spray and torn crests.

  “I would remind you,” said Ogilvy, “that we stand two hundred feet above the water. Can you imagine what these seas would look like from the deck of a thirty-eight-foot sailboat?”

  The Swan battled two oceans as it swung east-southeast toward Capetown and dared the advance storm winds with double-reefed mainsail and a heavy jib. There was the ocean of the great, widely spaced rolling swells—Cape rollers—marching from Antarctic seas to the tip of Africa. The giants were breaking now. Their tumbling crests seethed with foam. They chased after the Swan, lunged at her starboard quarter, lifted her high as Hardin spun the wheel to keep her from broaching, and raced ahead with mechanical regularity.

  The second ocean was between the rollers, and there the Swan fought her worst battles. The wind whipped it to a fury, and though the sun glowed through the high cloud cover, it was often impossible to see from one steep wave to the next through the loudly hissing, smoky mist blown from the spiky crests. The Swan pounded from wave to trough, plowing, smashing, heeling, and pitching. A roller lifted her momentarily above the chaos—eased her passage even as it tried to turn her sideways and capsize her— then returned her to the cruel chop and the blowing spray.

  The great rollers had been nourished by the storm that was driving the Swan’s barometer ominously lower, but the seas between them were the children of the wind. The wind filled the air with a thick, blowing mist. The mist was often impenetrable and made the cockpit misery. It was cold and wet, and clogged the nostrils and stung the eyes, and it worried Hardin more than the wind and the seas and the oncoming storm. He’d come this far in the Swan seeking rough conditions where they wouldn’t think he would attack, but what he feared was being unable to see LEVIATHAN through the spray. He would have to get very close.

  Miles Donner knew the growth of the seas by the weakness of Hardin’s radio signals. He had been manning the transmitter on the top floor of an old office building in Limehouse for four days since Hardin had unexpectedly broken silence. He was a thousand miles west-northwest of the Cape of Good Hope, driving east-southeast toward Capetown in heavy seas. He wanted LEVIATHAN’s position and heading.

  As Donner tracked LEVIATHAN in the days that followed, Hardin’s signal grew more and more erratic, fading in and out, silencing for minutes at a time. It wasn’t a matter of distance or atmospheric attenuations, Donner’s radio operator explained, but rather the result of the aerial on Hardin’s mast dipping beneath the steepening crests. When the signal was strong, it carried the heavy roar of the ocean.

  Since the convulsion the Mossad had suffered, Miles Donner had created an informal network of friends and helpers within and without the intelligence organization. They included Mossad people like Grandig in Germany, sympathetic English civil servants, and a number of El Al airline personnel. He worried about the danger of fragmenting the Mossad, but felt the initiative was necessary if Israel was to launch bold and creative espionage efforts. It was this private network that he used to track LEVIATHAN.

  An El Al navigator who was also Mossad had a contact in the United States. She worked in a map room at Strategic Air Command headquarters. She observed LEVIATHAN on the spy-satellite television and radar maps. The giant ship was easily distinguished from the smaller shadows and blips sprinkled around the African coast, but only an interested observer would have noticed that the tanker was slightly west of its usual route.

  Once a day, the woman at SAC relayed the tanker’s position. When she was off duty, Donner and the El Al navigator employed the services of an English meteorologist who had access to weather-satellite pictures of the South Atlantic. By the end of the second day, the navigator was able to plot the remainder of LEVIATHAN’s likely course using the information received, the ship’s known speed of sixteen knots, and its destination.

  Donner drew that line on a South Atlantic chart and then had the navigator plot the tanker’s likely position at hourly intervals. They drew a second line indicating Hardin’s east-southeasterly heading. The lines crossed at eleven degrees fifteen minutes and ten seconds east, and thirty degrees, twenty-nine minutes south—a point in the South Atlantic five hundred miles northwest of Capetown.

  Hardin reported that he was making five or six knots. If he could hold that speed, calculated the navigator, Hardin would reach the vicinity of the target area half a day ahead of LEVIATHAN. Even through the static and the roar of the seas, Donner could hear the elation in Hardin’s voice.

  The El Al navigator was less sanguine. While Donner watched, he muddied the clean precise point of intersection by adding swirling lines to the chart, penciling in the progress of the Antarctic storm. Inexorably, the falling barometer, the rising wind, and the burgeoning seas were creeping up on Hardin.

  They were pooped suddenly.

  Hardin was at the helm. Ajaratu was climbing the companionway with a thermos of hot soup. He saw surprise in her face—an expression of utter disbelief—and he turned to look back. He never made it around. With a crash that shook the boat and a deluge of bitter-cold water, a giant sea buried the stern.

  The wave slammed him against the wheel, his arms tangled in the spokes. His head smashed into the binnacle. Then the wave pounded him to the cockpit sole. He came up swimming, thinking he had been swept overboard, but he was only in the flooded cockpit.

  Ajaratu was gone. She hadn’t yet fastened her safety line. Hardin floundered out of the cockpit and looked down the companionway. She was sprawled on her back in the water on the cabin floor. He started to help her, but the Swan lurched heavily, bow down, throwing him against the hatch.

  The boat was lying beam to the seas, her mainsail swinging madly over the water, her jib sheets tangled. A big roller was bearing down on her.

  Hardin slammed the latch shut and dove for the helm. She answered grudgingly. He locked it far over and hauled in the main. Then he steered her stern around to the oncoming sea, staggered forward on the leaping deck, and untangled the jib. He set the selfsteering and raced below.

  Ajaratu was sitting wedged in the corner of the galley, cradling her left forearm, her eyes shut. She gasped, “I think it’s broken.”

  “How’s the rest of you?” He knelt beside her, his teeth chattering.

  “All right, I think.”

  He pulled off her foul-weather parka and cut away her sweater. Draping her bare shoulders with a dry blanket, he examined her arm in the glare of his biggest flashlight.

  “Simple fracture?” she asked, her voice trembling with pain.

  “Looks that way. There’s no bruising.”

  “Thank God.” She smiled tightly. “I don’t fancy a closed reduction by a doctor who doesn’t practice.”


  “Will you accept a splint?”

  She tried to smile again, but her ash-gray lips wouldn’t hold it. She nodded and shut her eyes again.

  He splinted her arm with a thick magazine, electrical tape, and rubber shock cord. Then he helped her to the settee, stripped off the rest of her wet clothing, wrapped her in blankets, and eased her up into his bunk.

  “I’m so sorry, Peter. I won’t be much help to you now.”

  “We’ll do fine.” He wedged pillows around her so she wouldn’t roll, and strapped her in with the safety belts. Her mouth was tight from pain. He gave her an injection of morphine and covered her with another blanket. Her eyes began to cloud as she watched him towel dry.

  He knelt on the settee and kissed and caressed her until the drug put her under. Then he worked the bilge pump behind the nav station. It took an hour of steady pumping to empty what the sea had driven through the open hatch.

  Ajaratu was fast asleep when he was done. He counted her pulse. It was stronger than before, indicating she was beyond the danger of severe shock. He started the engine to run the generator and tried to radio Miles. The deepening seas were blocking his signal. He had the same problem with the loran, but he managed to receive a position signal while the boat teetered on a high crest.

  Donner’s navigator wrote in the wave heights. Five meters (sixteen feet) then six, and seven. Two days before intersection seas of twenty-five feet were being reported in the area and all shipping was being warned away from the middle of the South Atlantic to the coast of Africa. The navigator replotted the point of intersection because Hardin’s speed had dropped to four knots, and Donner radioed the revised course. Hardin had to sail more southerly to meet LEVIATHAN, closer to the storm.

  “Do you think he’ll make it on time?” said Donner.

  The El Al navigator knew Hardin only as a reedy voice on the radio and a pencil dot on a very large chart. He tossed the most recent wave-height report onto the stack.

  “Time will be the least of his problems.”

  “He won’t reach the ship?”

  “He won’t reach anything.”

  16

  Pursued by tumbling seas, the Swan ran before a cold gale. Mountainous rollers chased after her, breaking in gigantic crests hundreds of feet long, frothing and foaming with an unearthly roar.

  They were shifting from the southwest to the west, directly astern Hardin’s course to intercept LEVIATHAN. He thought that was a good break, at first, because the only way to survive their awesome power was to hold the Swan’s stern to the advancing rollers so she would rise with them before they broke over her. But when she climbed their steep faces, her sleek racing hull betrayed her.

  She was simply too fast. As her stern rose with each following sea, her bow angled down toward the bottom of the trough, her speed accelerated, and she rushed along the steepening slope so fast that she was in danger of ramming her nose under water and pitchpoling end over end.

  He had to slow her. He took down the storm jib and, to reduce windage, refurled the main stormsail more tightly around the boom and replaced the self-steering vane with the smallest one he had. It had little effect.

  Bare-masted, the Swan still raced, so he brought up his heaviest line—a one-inch nylon anchor rope—bent a big loop in the end, weighted it with one of his spare anchors, a heavy plow, and trailed it over the stern. Dragging deeply, the long, thick, weighted line slowed her by a knot.

  He broke out more lines and streamed them. While searching the stern lockers for something to weight them with, he came across the torn cargo net he had found in Rotterdam. He tied it to his last one-inch nylon and let it out two hundred feet astern.

  It was night when he had finished. Heavy clouds blocked the stars, and only the glow of the seas breaking around the stern relieved the blackness. The trailing lines and the net had slowed the boat enough to give him some control. He set the self-steering and went below to rest.

  Ajaratu was asleep, breathing regularly. It was oddly quiet in the cabin. The rumble of the sea was muted, the hiss of the crests muffled. He needed dry clothing, but he needed nourishment more and he didn’t know how long he could stay, so he strapped on the galley safety harness and boiled water and made a concoction of tea, bottled lemon juice, and honey. He drank two mugs of the hot syrupy liquid, then brought some to Ajaratu and raised her head to the mug. She swallowed groggily and fell back to sleep.

  A humming sound began to reverberate in the cabin. It was the wind on the stays, blowing harder. He looked at the barometer. The needle was sinking. It dropped farther in the time he took to strip to the waist, towel dry, and put on his last dry sweat shirt, a heavy wool sweater, and his foul-weather parka. Not knowing when he would next have a chance to eat, he ate several spoonfuls of honey and peanut butter, gnawed some blue-molded cheese, swallowed a single amphetamine, and climbed back to the cockpit, timing his exit from the cabin so that the boat was clear of a breaking sea when he opened the hatch.

  He took the helm just in time. The wind, which was gusting to sixty knots, began marching around the compass. It wasn’t long before the seas responded. Quarter waves, cross seas, eddies, and breakers opposed the Swan. Running blind, Hardin saw many of them too late to steer away. They covered the bows, staggering the boat, and swept over the sides, flooding the cockpit, soaking him again and again. But always, the thrust of the storm-whipped Cape rollers was dominant. Hardin stayed all night at the helm and in the end, when the wind had settled down to a steady gale from the west, he was alone with his first enemy.

  Dawn broke, weary gray, and the rollers were bigger than ever, tall as houses, and traveling fast. Here and there they flung secondary higher waves to the sky like pincers reaching for giant birds. And they were getting steeper, pushing the Swan too fast again. She was pitching bow down, threatening to tumble.

  The rumbling, growling seas were still building, nearing heights and steepness that no yacht her size could survive. A wave broke over the stern, drenching him, filling the cockpit. Before the drains could empty it, she yawed, coming beam to the sea. He tried to steer her back, but she responded sluggishly, impeded by the trailing warps.

  With a calm that surprised him, he began to admit that it might be the end. Though her hull was intact, and her rigging still erect, she was reaching her limits. He was determined to hold on as long as he could, for he hated that LEVIATHAN would escape, but death did not frighten him. He had concluded that bargain when he had declared war on the tanker.

  He regretted that death should take Ajaratu. He wanted to go below and comfort her, so that she wouldn’t die alone in the cabin, but he couldn’t. To abandon the wheel would be a kind of suicide, to deny survival, a hastening of the event.

  A massive sea towered over the sloop. He fought the wheel, pulling her around. One of the streamed lines snapped at the cleat, releasing the cargo net. The stern turned to the sea, and Hardin saw that another had parted in the night. Now only two were holding her back. She accelerated and buried her bow at a steep angle.

  Green water engulfed the deck from the bow to the mast. Then the sea behind broke and crashed onto the stern, flinging Hardin across the cockpit, smashing his knees on the seats. For several moments, as he struggled in the water, he saw nothing but the boom and the mast. The Swan was entirely underwater. The bow rose, and then she surfaced, low in the stern, yawing, beam to the rushing sea.

  Hardin dragged himself to the wheel and fought to bring her stern back. The boat turned too slowly. An enormous wave bore down on her. It caught her at an angle, half on the beam, half on the stern. She heeled until the mast seemed horizontal and the spreaders were poking a wave top. A second crest clawed the sky, hastening to finish her. This was it.

  But the sloop skidded on its side and surfed ahead of the looming wave. Startled by her sudden burst of speed, and unable to stop her, Hardin waited for the bow to submerge for the final time. But instead she raced the wave until, gracefully lifting her stern, she let it pass under
her.

  Hardin steered her stern-on to the seas again. Again the bow submerged, buried to the cabin. Haltingly, staggered by the tons of water, the Swan struggled to surface. Hardin looked back and his stomach clutched. A bigger sea was rocketing after him, and behind it a great shaggy comber—a freak—almost twice as tall as the monster it was following.

  The Swan sped forward, dragging the lines like broken harness, desperately lifting her stern, pointing down the stormy mountain. She started to slip under, cleaving a deeper and deeper bow wave that began to curl over her decks.

  Hardin tried to steer her out of the dive. But, underestimating her speed and spooked by the freak sea which was rising like a cliff, he made the mistake of oversteering. Before he could correct, she had heeled sharply. Her bow lifted, and in an instant she was surfing on her side, heeled far over, skidding ahead and then over the pursuing crest. He was trying to figure out what had happened, when the shadow of the second gigantic comber fell darkly on the sea.

  The Swan tried. Gathering speed, she began lifting her stern to the towering monster. It carried her high, so high that Hardin caught a glimpse of the miles and miles of raging sea. But the higher she climbed, the more steeply she pointed down and the faster she went.

  The crest began to curl overhead and Hardin knew it would finish the job, turning her over and slamming her down on her mast. The nylon lines streamed taut from her stern, as tightly as if they tied her to the bottom of the ocean, but not tight enough to stop her lethal acceleration.

  Suddenly, he understood what the Swan had shown him: The waves were driving her forward at great speed, but whenever they hit her stern, at an angle, she heeled, drew her bow out of the water, and skimmed on her side. He realized, to his astonishment, that the heeling boat was actually safer the faster she skimmed, because the greater her speed, the more slowly and with less force the waves driving her passed under her.