by Justin Scott
Miles had given him a couple of letters from Ajaratu. He opened one the third day out, and read it several times.
Dear Peter,
I hope you will come to your senses, but I do not expect it. Your senses, of course, are the problem. I fear you will let them drive you to a violent, lonely death. You are a man possessed by the past, a lover without his love—my tragedy as well as yours.
Forgive my morbid tone. I mean to persuade you, not add to your unhappiness, but I miss you terribly already and it’s been but a week.
Here the ink changed from blue to black and she dated it a day later.
Her mood was different.
Thank you for your watch; and for your friend Miles, who removed me from the clutches of the South African racists in a most ingenious way. I’ll tell you about it sometime. A word of caution: Having seen him operate, I would not want him for an enemy.
Here I am being morbid again. Peter, please, please consider again what you are doing to yourself. There are moments I hate myself for not knocking you over the head and sailing you straight to Lagos. Is that why you never taught me how to navigate? But you did, didn’t you? You taught me so many things, I can’t remember them all.
I love you. Protect yourself.
Ajaratu
In a postscript she added,
I am determined to end this letter on a happy note. Here it is: You are a passionate and tender man. I want both. Come back to me when you can.
He folded it carefully, slipped it with the second letter, unopened, between the stained pages of the Swan’s log, and put them from his mind. Four days after they left Capetown, and greatly rested despite a rough passage around the Cape of Good Hope, he had his boat offloaded in Durban Harbor. He set sail and beat right back out the breakwater into the Indian Ocean.
He put far out to sea to avoid the strong Agulhas Current. Then, two hundred miles east-northeast of Durban, he found water in the bilges. Not a lot, not as much as many wooden boats would have had in such choppy seas, but much more water than he had ever seen in the Swan. The hand pumps emptied it easily, but when he checked again hours later, the bilges had again begun to fill.
The Swan was a different boat now, almost as if she knew she had been beaten. She carried a wooden mast because the proper aluminum mast couldn’t be obtained on such short notice, and while Hardin liked wood, he would be chary of driving her as hard as he had in the South Atlantic.
It was a simple matter to pump every four hours, but between times, when he wasn’t tending the sails, he looked for leaks. He plugged a suspicious joint in the forepeak where the deck met the hull, but the water persisted, even after seas were no longer splashing over the bow.
The real problem, he concluded, was that pitchpoling two or three times—he didn’t know which—had knocked the hell out of her in ways and places that couldn’t be seen. The result was that the Swan had been reduced to equal footing with more ordinary boats, prey to material weaknesses which had never before concerned her. Hardin, used to babying the twenty-year-old Siren and several wooden boats before her, was not especially disturbed.
And she was still as devilishly fast.
Five days after leaving Durban, she was kiting east of Bassas da India, an island midway between Mozambique and the island of Madagascar. The wind held and he tore up the Mozambique Channel, covering the four hundred miles from Bassas da India to Ile Juan de Nova in a breathtaking two days.
He skirted east of the blue sheer-sided volcanic mass of Anjouan—one of the Comoro Islands—and, leaving the green waters of the Channel, steered northeast into the Indian Ocean and up the East African coast.
Tanker traffic was heavy on this route, and he often saw several VLCC’s at a time. The blundering ships dominated the sea lanes, their presence a constant threat to lesser traffic. For safety and concealment, Hardin altered course a few degrees to the east. Angling farther and farther from the coast, he sailed out of the mild southern African winter back into equatorial heat on the beginning of a two-thousand-five-hundred-mile voyage to the Arabian summer.
The weather stations reported that the southwest monsoon was holding longer than usual this year, but it was late August already. Hardin was still a thousand miles below the equator, and September was the transition month when the powerful winds abated, then wheeled about and stormed back down from the Arabian sea. He hoped to catch the tail end of the monsoon going north, or at least the brief calm between them, and he pushed the Swan hard, fearing what would happen if the winds turned too soon.
What happened was worse. After a week and a half of steady wind, he was suddenly becalmed in the Indian Ocean, a hundred miles north of the equator and far to the east of the shipping lanes. The wind stopped abruptly. The sea flattened, and the burning sun spread an eye-searing haze over all he could see.
It was utterly silent. Even the creaking of the self-steering and the tap-tap of the halyards on the mast had ceased to sound. There were no waves, no swells, not a ripple. The Swan stood as still as a cup on a glass table.
When it looked as if the calm might last for a few hours, he went about the business of the boat, pumping the bilges, cleaning the galley and the head, straightening up the cabin, airing his bedding, his eye occasionally drifting toward the water, waiting for a change.
It grew hotter, the air heavier. He rigged an awning over the cockpit and shed his shirt, and then his shorts for the comfort of a loincloth made from a light, absorbent towel.
The next morning, having slept on deck where it was cooler, he saw the soap and dinner scraps that had washed down the galley drain still floating beside the boat.
The greasy slick stayed there for days.
He crawled around the stifling bilges on another fruitless search for leaks. The calm would have been a good time to check the hull from underwater, but despite the heat he resisted going over the side because he feared sharks.
The same frightening image always came to mind. He would be working underwater, concentrating on the hull. A dark torpedo shadow, longer and thicker than his own body, would hurtle out of the depths. Before he could move, it would seize him.
As if called up by his imagination, a shark surfaced one evening. Easily a third the length of the Swan, it thrust its head out of the water and watched him watching it. It made a few passes, which caused the boat to move for the first time since the wind had stopped. Then it dove to deeper water and never returned. Hardin gazed longingly after the fish, hungering for motion.
To fill the heavy hours, he did dozens of useful, nonessential jobs. He was tightening the fittings on the engine box when the thought came to him that his screwdriver handle was actually a circle of levers—an infinite arrangement of levers bearing on the fulcrum of the screwdriver shaft, separated by an infinite number of triangular spaces.
He wondered, could every tool be reduced to the simple components of lever and fulcrum? A wrench? Obviously a lever, the nut it turned the fulcrum. Pliers? Two levers. The pistons in the engine? The idea seemed to break down. Maybe they distributed power through levers. He couldn’t concentrate.
He dozed in the thick heat until he was drugged by sleep and sun, and decided to use the engine. It was a matter of time versus fuel. He motored on and off for several days, searching for the fringes of the monsoon, until his fuel was gone. He cursed his stupidity. Now he had no way to maneuver but the wind, no way to power his radio but the batteries, and no way to recharge the batteries.
He didn’t know when he first noticed the triangles, but one day he realized that his boat was composed entirely of triangles. His eye traced the triangles of the stays and the mast. The forestay angled from the tip of the bow to the top of the mast, forming a triangle of stay, deck, and mast. The back stay formed another. The shrouds made triangles above the spreaders.
The biggest triangle was the limp mainsail, majestic in its boldness, daring to fill its triangular space with white Dacron while the stay triangles encompassed nothing more than air. Th
e jib was another bold triangle.
There were many others, on deck and below: the smaller triangles of the bow and the pulpit; the forepeak, the companionway, the propeller shaft, the coach roof; many others.
The stitches in the sail’s seams contained thousands. Had sailmakers discovered triangles accidentally or had they known the secret all along? The answer could be in the weave of the cloth.
He inspected it minutely, but no matter how he turned the cloth he couldn’t find them. The sailmakers had kept the secret for their own advantage. Somewhere, deep in the weave, he knew the triangles existed.
He ran to the sail bins. Of course!
The triangles were hidden in the heavier sails. He pulled a storm jib from its bag, but quickly threw it aside in disgust. They were too clever to hide their triangles in that sail.
The heavy spinnaker. This was a sail of secrets—so big and ballooning round in the wind—appearing round instead of its true shape, the shape of a triangle.
He dragged the sail on deck, spread it over the boat from mast to helm, and crawled over it on his hands and knees, his face bent to the rumpled nylon. As night fell he collapsed on the cloth and sobbed with frustration. The sailmakers had hidden their triangles with ferocious care. He would never find them.
He slept on the sail. The next day—he had lost count of what day—was stifling hot at dawn. He awakened groggily and splashed warm seawater on his face. He wanted coffee, but the business at hand was too important to wait.
He removed the eyepiece lens from his binoculars and used it as a magnifying glass to scrutinize the weave of the sailcloth. At noon, despite the infernal sun, he arrived at an important realization. The spinnaker was a ruse.
And he had been stupid enough to fall for it, even when the true answer was right in front of his eyes, hanging on the mast. The main. Of course, the main. There he would find the triangles. He shoved the fake spinnaker into the water, thinking he was lucky to have found it was false now, instead of when he needed it. Then he held his improvised magnifying glass to the main, his heart beating faster in anticipation.
He was right. The cloth was full of triangles, a veritable storehouse of them. He laughed loudly. He had cracked the sailmakers’ secret. He felt giddy with triumph. He hadn’t realized that he possessed such power. Then it struck him that a man with the power to beat the sailmakers, the cleverness to plumb the secrets they hatched in their hidden lofts, such a man could make mincemeat of the calm.
And then, blindingly, the solution came. The great revelation. The ultimate knowledge. Ironically, it had nothing to do with the triangles or the sailmakers’ petty secrets. No. This was knowledge of the gods. LEVIATHAN knowledge.
This was the way it worked.
He had known it all along, of course, he just hadn’t needed it before. This level of knowledge was part of you, not something you could learn. You knew it, or you didn’t.
He gathered the boat’s kerosene lamps in the salon, and heaped the settee cushions on the dining table. Unhurried, secure in his certainty, he lifted the chimneys out of the kerosene lamps, wrapped the glass in towels, and stowed them carefully in the cupboard beneath the galley sink. Then he unscrewed the wick holders and wiped each wick dry as he removed it from the bowl. Careful not to spill any oil, he laid them in the sink because he realized that he hadn’t the time to stow them individually now. The power was coming.
He upended the lamps and emptied the bowls onto the cushions. The cabin reeked of kerosene, but it didn’t matter. His plan would take care of that. The wind would air it in seconds, even as it filled the triangular sails and drove the Swan north to the monsoon.
He took a match from the watertight bottle by the stove, laid it beside the striking strip, and went on deck to inspect the sky. It was frightening how clever they were. The sky was the same dull blue it had been forever. There was absolutely no sign of the enormous power stored so close by, waiting for the right mind to release it.
He climbed down the companionway, chuckling to himself. Like everything else in life, it was so simple. All you had to know was how to signal the power and the power was yours. He struck the match and carried the flame to the table. He was laughing. He knew the signal.
Cedric Ogilvy dangled the medal by its ribbon and tossed. It landed among the papers on his makeshift desk with a tiny thud. Lloyd’s of London had cited him for Meritorious Services. A company director had actually flown out to present the award.
Meritorious Services? He was a proud man who enjoyed the symbols by which Britain rewarded exceptional deeds—he had his share of decorations from the war—and yet he felt cynical about this one. To be sure, he had saved the insurance brokers a pretty penny. Millions of pounds. That made him Lloyd’s hero, even though the South African newspapers were still savaging him weeks after he had defied the Capetown harbor authorities who tried to block him from Table Bay.
The medal had landed on a letter of congratulations from the Company. He didn’t believe them. He’d had the most peculiar suspicion that they were disappointed that he had saved LEVIATHAN. With the present glut of both oil and crude carriers in the world market, LEVIATHAN was less of a profit maker than they had hoped. To wit, practically giving away that last shipment to the Fawley refinery rather than bringing it back to Arabia marked Sorry, no takers.
“In conditions where another Master might have abandoned his vessel,” the Lloyd’s citation read, “Captain Ogilvy stood fast and brought his charge to safe harbour.”
It was like running a bloody blockade, Ogilvy thought grimly. They had all but fired across his bows . . . there had been several moments when he hadn’t expected to see this bridge again. The afternoon they had neared the storm, when the sky was darkening with the southern winter, his second had asked him to come to the bridge.
LEVIATHAN was heaving the seas skyward as she plunged through the Cape rollers. The second wanted him to see the bow-stress indicators. The steel plates were suffering heavy pressures. He ordered two-thirds speed.
Ogilvy had monitored them for a while, matching the instrument readings with the ways his mind and body responded to the ship. Despite the thunderous boom each time the ship battered a roller, he was not yet concerned. After many bow failures tanker designers had learned a thing or two, and LEVIATHAN’s bluff bow was a much stronger affair than those of lesser ships.
Nonetheless, with the seas worsening, he had decided—reminiscent of wartime—to eat dinner on the bridge. His steward treated it like a ruddy picnic, spreading a feast of finger food on a silver tray beneath a bridge window that had a screen cleaner so that Ogilvy could watch the seas while he ate.
The full storm hit at 2100 hours. He ordered speed cut from two thirds to one half and, using the short-range radar to spot the freak waves which were rearing above the gigantic rollers, he began a maneuver never before done on LEVIATHAN: He conned LEVIATHAN around the waves, weaving among them like a ten-thousand-ton freighter.
Had she been an ordinary ship she would not have survived. In all his years at sea, Ogilvy had never seen a storm its equal. It had had four thousand miles of ocean to build in, and it had used every mile to advantage.
At midnight, when he thought it couldn’t get worse, the shriek of the wind tearing around the bridge house suddenly doubled in volume. The ship heeled under the new impact, and for the second time that night LEVIATHAN did something it had never done before. Ogilvy ordered the helm put down, and the ship ran before the storm.
At dawn, when they drew dangerously close to land and he was forced to order a southerly turn, a big sea did the first damage. LEVIATHAN staggered—he hadn’t believed it possible that such a mass could be staggered—and the needles on the bow-stress indicators shot into the red and stayed there, knocked out by the impact.
Ogilvy had no way of assessing the damage. The entire forward two thirds of the ship was inaccessible until the storm ended. There was no interior passage to the bows, and anyone who stepped on deck or even climbed
the fire-station catwalk would be swept away.
Again the ship staggered; the impact shivered the deck and Ogilvy didn’t need a damage report this time to know that the bows were collapsing. He ordered the engines reversed to spare the thin bulkheads that formed the forward tanks, but before LEVIATHAN’s forward momentum could be stopped, a third sea smashed the bows, inflicting, he discovered later, the worst damage of all.
Like the baron of a besieged castle, cut off from his counterattacking armies, he waited, blind and ignorant, guessing the worst as the ship began to sink. Engines reversed and all pumps running, he backed away from the storm, stern to the seas like an ant dragging a crippled victim to its nest.
Old-fashioned discipline and seamanship had saved the day. His crew had worked like bloody blacks to dike the fire room. Had it flooded and they lost power, LEVIATHAN would have foundered. When the storm eased, he wheeled her about and backed toward Table Bay.
It was then that the radio had exploded with South African protests. LEVIATHAN was too big. LEVIATHAN threatened Capetown. Ships over three hundred thousand tons deadweight were expressly forbidden to enter the harbor. The drydocks were too small. They couldn’t effect repairs. If LEVIATHAN sank in the approaches she would block the harbor.
Ogilvy was outraged. To refuse aid, to abandon his ship and men to the elements, was the ultimate example of the venality of the landsman. Ironic, it was, that those with the securest position on God’s planet were the least charitable. He ignored the protests and continued backing the tanker at a painful crawl toward Table Bay while the bows sank lower and lower. The storm rollers were still crashing into the bay, and they had a tricky passage across the harbor until they dropped anchor off Duncan Dock.
Ogilvy anchored the ship there for two reasons. It was as close as he could get the deep-draft ship to the repair facilities; but more important, he had placed the ship in the busiest part of the port so that it would be to the South Africans’ advantage to repair it as quickly as possible to clear the way.