A Death on the Ocean Wave

by Tim Heald

  C for crazy. Even if he were a cross between James Bond and Spiderman this was a really bad idea. If the terrorists were even half serious they’d shoot him on sight. Of course they would. That’s what terrorists did. It had happened time and again during his lifetime and before. Moreover, having spent a lifetime studying crime in all its aspects he knew this better than most. The ordinary bloke who ‘has a go’ is a certain suicide. He might make an adulatory obituary in the next day’s paper but that was all.

  Option D was to sit down and read a book. Another mousy idea but safe and sensible. He could phone a friend. That meant Elizabeth in the cabin next door but what good could that do? For different reasons he couldn’t involve her in either his cowardice or his riskiness. The one would be too embarassing and the other, well, ungentlemanly. In a curious old-fashioned way, he rather cared about that.

  He was still wrestling feebly with these choices when his phone rang.

  He picked it up and realized that the necessity of making a choice had been removed. The decision was being made for him.

  The voice was familiar.

  And Irish.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Doctor Cornwall?’

  ‘This is he,’ he said, wishing he wasn’t.

  ‘You’re wanted on the bridge.’

  ‘By whom?’ Tudor was surprised by the bolshiness in his voice. If the person to whom he was speaking was the person he thought it was, asking questions, particularly in that tone of voice, was risky.

  ‘Us,’ said the voice with Celtic ambiguity. ‘We’ll send an escort. They’ll be with you presently.’

  Tudor shrugged. No question now of his sitting in the cabin and reading a book. He wondered what they wanted from him and whether heroics would be required. If he had been seriously contemplating such a course of action he felt somewhat thwarted. A potential initative had been removed. Had he come bursting on to the bridge unannounced he would have held the upper hand. Surprise was a key element in conflict of any kind. All the manuals said so.

  Presently there was a sharp knock on the door. The knock had an unpleasantly peremptory quality. It was not a question expecting the answer ‘no’ nor even entertaining the idea. More of an affirmation of authority.

  ‘Come,’ said Tudor, using the expression and the tone of voice he assumed at home in the university when one of his students came calling.

  The door was unlocked despite the advice to bolt it while asleep. Tudor had an aversion to locked doors even though it made him vulnerable. It was now flung open with abrupt violence and a stocky figure in a balaclava helmet and combat fatigues stood in the doorway, beckoning. The knocker’s left hand held what looked like some sort of pistol. Although firearms came within Tudor’s area of knowledge, they were not a speciality. Whatever the man held it gave off an air of metallic menace. The person had not spoken but it exuded male body-language and, more potently and convincingly, male body odour. Strong pong of beer, tobacco and unwashed armpit.

  It said nothing but jerked its right hand in an uncouth beckoning fashion while the left pointed the gun barrel at Cornwall’s midriff. Compliance seemed desirable even if mousy. In any case Tudor was curious. He had never been involved in a nautical hi-jack before. It would prove an invaluable teaching tool as well as a terrific subject for future cruise lectures. Reasoning thus he did as he was gestured. He was good at rationalizing weakness.

  The hijacker shoved him roughly to one side, shut the door and prodded him in the small of the back with what Tudor took to be his gun barrel. Activated in this crude manner he walked.

  They went as far as the elevators, ascended three decks to bridge level, exited, walked to a door marked with a red skull and crossbones and words ‘Danger. Crew only!’ translated into French, Spanish and some script which could, to Tudor, have been Japanese, Chinese or any language from east of Suez. Passing through was the nautical equivalent of going through the green baize door in a stately home which separated upstairs from downstairs, ladies and gentlemen from maids and players. The contrast between passenger accommodation and crew quarters was almost total. Carpet became lino; chandelier, neon strip; polished mahogany, raw steel. In a single second one went from pampered indolence to forced labour. Tudor tried, vainly, to remember the lunar astronaut’s oracular words about the instantaneous step for man and mankind but only found himself wondering whether the crew slept in hammocks. It would be difficult to find such anachronistic class distinctions on dry land.

  Tudor was thinking of all this in a dreamy academic sort of way when he suddenly realized that he and his demon prodder had emerged on to the bridge. ‘Bridge’, like so many words on board ship, was misleading for in no way did the area in which Tudor now found himself resemble a structure traversing a road, railway or river. Much less a game of cards. This dimly lit room with its flickering screens and panoramic, wrap-round view of the moon-lit ocean deep was a nerve-centre or control-room but in no recognizable way a ‘bridge’. It took him a blinking second or so to accustom himself to the dim half-light and even then he saw only through a glass darkly.

  There were five officers on watch. At least that was what he assumed the ghostly white figures to be. He could not make out their features, or their badges of office but their white uniforms glowed in the gloom. Each one of them was being shadowed – literally – by a darker person whom Tudor took to be one of the terrorist team from the Emerald Isle. This was all the hijackers had had to do – break on to or in to the Bridge, commandeer the Duchess’s public address system – the maritime equivalent of a banana republic’s national broadcasting centre and post office – and Bob’s your uncle, the revolution’s triumphed and the regime is toppled.

  The gorilla-guerilla escort prodded him towards a diminutive shadow which looked female and in charge. These were difficult things to assess in the crepuscular light but Tudor guessed that it was Fiannula or Ffion or whoever the girl from the fictitious Tipperary Tatler was and that she was the ring-leader and also the voice who had spoken to everyone over the ship’s public address system.

  ‘Doctor Cornwall,’ she said in a voice that confirmed that she was a girl and also the voice on the Tannoy. Her air of authority was sufficiently obvious for him to think that his intuition about being the boss was also correct.

  ‘Tipperary Tatler,’ he said, hoping to fit the last piece into this little jigsaw. It sounded the sort of name Ian Fleming might have given a Bond girl.

  ‘Very astute, Dr Cornwall,’ she said, in a brogue so husky and Gaelic that he felt sure it must have been fake. No real Irishwoman would speak like that. It was like something from Father Ted. ‘I know you’re a professional,’ she said, ‘it’s why we asked you to step up here. We’re keen to have a plausible mouthpiece.’

  ‘What exactly are you playing at?’ he asked, feeling like the mouse that roared, a frisson of daring translating into courage. Yet the remark didn’t, he felt, require real courage because, he sensed intuitively, that this was just a game. These people weren’t real.

  ‘We’re not playing at anything,’ said Tipperary, lilting. ‘This is no game. You’d better believe it.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Cornwall, ‘it’s easy to do what you’ve done so far because that’s the way civilized societies are. We don’t live in a police state. Not in Ireland. Not in the UK. Not in the United States. And most certainly not on board an ocean liner such as this. Everything is based on tolerance and trust which means no obtrusive security devices, no armed goons patrolling everywhere, no CCTVs, nothing to make people scared or tense. If you go on holiday you don’t expect to end up in Guantanamo. And the only way one can prevent people like you doing what you’ve just done is by creating a world that is simply not acceptable. Being civilized opens the way for the uncivilized.’

  ‘I agree. Western society is soft, vulnerable. We’ve just demonstrated that.’ She sounded, thought Tudor, more than slightly mad. But you’d have to be more than slightly mad to do what they’d just done.
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br />   ‘You do realize,’ said Tudor, ‘that what you’ve done is easy because those in charge have no choice but to make it easy. The reason it doesn’t happen more often is that real professionals understand that the only part of an operation such as this which is viable is phase one. The deterrent lies in the certainty of effective response.’

  ‘You’re the expert,’ said the girl. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘You could have commandeered Sir Goronwy Watkyn,’ said Tudor, playing for time.

  ‘He’s fiction,’ she said, ‘we deal in fact. We also think he’s yesterday’s story. And a windbag. We know your stuff, Dr Cornwall. You’ll do. You suit our purposes perfectly well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tudor, ‘I’m flattered.’

  He was too, up to a point and in a manner of speaking. It was always good to score points over his old crime writer rival even in dodgy circumstances such as this and the circumstances couldn’t get much dodgier. Here he was, ivory-tower man, effectively the hostage of a gang of fanatical Irish terrorists on the bridge of a hijacked cruise liner in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  In theory he should have known exactly how to behave but, he had to concede, theory was what he knew about and this, disturbingly and threateningly, was the real thing. It was ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’ syndrome. Any fool could answer Chris Tarrant’s patsy questions when they were sitting in an armchair in the comfort of their own home, preferably with a hot milky drink and a packet of chocolate digestives or Jaffa cakes to hand. Plonk them down on one of those uncomfortable stools in the studio under the full glare of the studio lights and the deceptively amiable quiz-master himself and all was utterly different. The mind went blank. One no longer knew what two and two equalled, let alone what the capital of French Equatorial Africa was or who invented the kitchen scales.

  ‘You’re not meant to be flattered,’ she said. ‘Like I said, we deal in facts. You’re our man, Dr Cornwall. You’re part of the deal. We didn’t pick our ship or our cruise at random. We wanted the Duchess and we wanted you. An expert on crime. Academic. Cutting edge. The sort of guy Jeremy Paxman would invoke in a crisis. Larry King even. Someone who will play well on the airwaves. Also help us in other ways. You play ball with us; we’ll play ball with you.’

  Tudor found himself levitating. It had happened to him once or twice before on the rare occasions when he had found himself in an unaccustomed or threatening session. There had been one such moment when he was summoned to 10 Downing Street for what sounded like a routine consultation with a Whitehall committee of jobsworth bureaucrats only to find himself alone on a sofa with Tony Blair. And another when he agreed to address a meeting of Animal Rights Activists and found himself not, as he had expected, a neutral imparter of inside information, but a target, an enemy alien, a subject of verbal abuse which threatened to teeter over a brink into something more physical. It didn’t quite, but he was glad to escape unscathed. On another occasion he had fallen out of a boat off the Cornish coast and had five minutes of thinking he was about to drown.

  All three times he had enjoyed what he could only describe as an ‘out-of-body-experience’. It was if his soul or brain, (call it what you like depending on the state of your beliefs and he being cheerfully agnostic simply wasn’t sure) had left his body and settled at a point a few feet above his head. From this vantage point the thinking part of his being was able to make a far more rational assessment of the situation than if it had remained at head level. The one common factor was that the disembodied regarded base camp with a mixture of disdain and hilarity. From six feet above his head Dr Tudor Cornwall looked, regrettably, a trifle absurd.

  It was the same now except that in this case the other principal figure cut little more of a dash than Cornwall. It seemed from on high that the girl was all mouth and no knickers as they say on Tyneside. She was bluffing.

  It was all very well knowing this in theory, quite another to act on it. Spaceship Cornwall beamed the message down to base but it was quite another matter for base to act on it.

  Cornwall found himself running through his internal ‘man or mouse’ routine once more. ‘Man’ would have called the bluff; ‘mouse’ would have played safe and gone along with the implausible manner and the gun-barrel pointing at the small of his back from an unnervingly close distance. He had a choice and very little time to make it.

  ‘The weapon,’ he said, in a voice which was far firmer than he felt, ‘which your friend is pointing at me in such a threatening and, if I may say so, melodramatic and superfluous a fashion, intrigues me. I don’t think I recognize it. Not, I think, a Mauser or a Walther and certainly not a Smith & Wesson. I doubt it’s Czech or Russian. Beretta I somehow doubt. Chinese perhaps. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before.’

  He was bluffing himself. He knew next to nothing about firearms. In theory maybe, but certainly not in practice. Motivation was his forte not the crude business of execution. He was not a Ludlumite as in Robert of that ilk who devoted whole pages to the minutiae of small-arms.

  ‘How should I know?’ asked the girl. ‘I leave that sort of thing to others. I do brain not brawn.’

  ‘The truth,’ said Cornwall, ‘is that you haven’t a clue, because’ – and here he surprised himself as much as everyone else in the room, by spinning round deftly and grabbing hold of the menacing barrel – ‘it isn’t a real gun at all.’

  Chapter Eight

  He was right. It wasn’t a Smith & Wesson. Or a Beretta. Or a Walther or Mauser. In fact it wasn’t any sort of gun, just a crude piece of make-believe, a piece of black metal piping taped to a roughly hewn wooden butt. It was enough to deceive a startled innocent on a dark night, especially if the owner was wearing a balaclava helmet and combat fatigues. As a blunt instrument wielded with force and precision it might have maimed or even killed but as deployed here on board the Duchess it was just a piece of play-acting.

  For a moment there was silence.

  It was the girl who broke it.

  ‘We didn’t want anyone to get hurt,’ she said. The words sounded lame.

  Tudor turned back to her.

  ‘Oh really,’ he said. ‘Can’t you do better than that?’

  A further silence followed. A mid-Atlantic stand-off. Tudor couldn’t help feeling rather pleased with himself, but at the same time horrified at what might have been. His alter-ego, that disembodied part of him which had been hovering above his head but which now seemed, mysteriously to have returned to base, had given the correct advice but it was reckless and dangerous counsel. How could it have known? Did it know? Had he acted on a certainty or a desperate hunch. Should he be dead? Was he really a man? Or was he just a mouse in man’s clothing? These worries pounded away at him as he tried to concentrate on the immediate issue and maintain his imitation of Action Man, Bond, the cutting edge rather than his preferred mode of cerebral onlooker.

  Eventually he said, ‘I think you and I had better sit down and have a little chat.’

  To his gratification and, once more, surprise, she agreed at once.

  There was a room off the bridge, a curious sort of R and R place with a couple of beds, a coffee-maker, some armchairs and a general slightly desperate air of getting-away-from-it all-but-only-just. It was somewhere for those on watch to take forty winks when the situation allowed. A halfway house.

  They sat down in two chairs facing each other and said nothing. It was thought-gathering time before the match or the duel or whatever sort of competition this was going to be. Chess? Poker? Tennis? Fencing? Pistols at dawn? Tudor ran through the metaphors and remained unsure. All he knew was that this was adversarial and tricky. They didn’t know who was going to lead the first card, make the first serve, take strike. He almost felt like tossing a coin.

  ‘You going to keep that balaclava on? I know what you look like. There’s no need to hide.’

  She seemed to think about it, then removed the woolly disguise and flicked her head like a dog after
a swim. Thick auburn hair bounced down to her shoulders. She was freckled, high cheek-boned, would have been attractive but for an off-putting set of the jaw, an air of fanaticism bordering on madness. Or was Tudor fantasizing? Maybe she just looked a bit silly.

  She still said nothing, waiting for him to play a second card.

  ‘So what on earth is this all about?’ he said, trying to sound grown-up without being pompous, and not sure he was succeeding, ‘What are your demands?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ she said, scornfully. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Tudor, ‘but if we’re going to negotiate, we need to have some sort of agenda. We can’t negotiate nothing.’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked, sounding almost as if she meant it.

  ‘Oh come on.’ Tudor’s exasperation was genuine. ‘You’re the one who’s hijacked the ship. Terrorists have causes. That means reasons, demands. You’ve effectively taken us all hostage so you have to come up with terms. You release us in return for... well, in return for whatever it is that you want.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘It’s the convention.’

  ‘We don’t believe in convention. That’s why we’re here.’ She flicked her head back, thrust out her jaw and challenged him to argue. ‘Suicide bombers don’t make demands,’ she continued. ‘The 9/11 guys didn’t ask for anything. They just killed people, destroyed an American icon, panicked Dubya and his cronies into an idiot reaction. But they didn’t fly into the twin towers waving a piece of paper with an agenda on it.’

  ‘You haven’t killed anyone,’ said Tudor evenly, ‘or destroyed anything. You’re not suicide bombers. Even your guns are fake.’