Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (20 page)

BOOK: Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure
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Macavity crossed to the pilot's chair and threw himself in it, looking morosely out through the clearview windows down the length of the foredeck. Dom stood behind him, holding on to the chair's back. Richard went forward and came to stand beside Rikki Sato where the main computer access was immediately beside the helm and movement controls – the engine room telegraph on old-fashioned vessels. He steadied himself with his left hand on the rally-sized steering wheel of the helm. His gaze flicked down to the screens that automatically monitored all the systems on board – whether computers or people controlled them. He noted the engine revolutions coming up to the top of the green and the servos controlling the massive rudders already well into the red. His eyes flicked up to the monitor on the deck head above him that showed the rudders' disposition. It was shaking as though it were made of jelly as the great fins battered this way and that under the turbulent waters of the wake. He glanced down again but before he could check on the pitch of the propellers something made him glance up through the clearview windows angling in from the top towards the control console immediately in front of him.

All the ship's lights were fully on outside, giving Richard a rather clearer view than he would have liked. The great white whaleback stretched forward into a maw of blackness; a huge, gaping, cavernous mouth fanged with lighting. Huge white bolts struck almost in series from port to starboard, giving the jaws of the storm ahead some kind of depth. Sheet lightning illuminated a roiling insanity of storm clouds seeming to stretch away forever ahead, starting just above the top of the bridge itself. There was a second eyewall out there, a ring of thunderstorms standing immediately across their course an hour or so ahead. That was where the really big winds would be. And, of course, the really tall seas.

Not that those they were sailing through at the moment were much less dangerous. Especially, thought Richard, given the dynamics released by that great whaleback standing along the foredeck. As the winds whipped across it, they seemed to be clawing at it as though it were a sail, pushing
Sayonara
's head relentlessly round to starboard. And, in the face of the counter-pressure caused by her rudders, programmed to turn her back on course, the wind and weather was threatening to roll her over. The foam, spray, rain and spindrift lashed across it from left to right with a speed that made it hard to focus. And beyond, as
Sayonara
slid off the top of another great incoming comber, there was an immense, white-fanged wilderness revealed by the lights as they struck out ahead.

The sound was incredible – howling, whining and keening through the upper registers to levels that only bats could bear, while at the same time booming and thundering through bass registers that Paul Robeson and Fyodor Chaliapin could only dream of. And the volume was more than overpowering. It was like being in the middle of a battlefield. Disorientating. Terrifying. Unless you were used to it, thought Richard. He was battle-hardened in ways these soldiers could never conceive of. Like the sea-sickness, the disorientation and naked terror might serve to give him an edge. If he survived for long enough to need one, that is.

‘… do anything?' came Macavity's voice like a distant whisper. Richard turned and was surprised to observe that what he could see of the soldier's face was red with strain. Macavity had been bellowing at the top of his lungs.

‘Not unless Doctor Sato can find some way to give us back control,' he answered, pitching his voice to ride over the cacophony with practised ease. ‘Come to think of it, you guys seem to have done the damage – can't you undo it? Or tell Doctor Sato how to undo it?

‘No need. I will have control in ten minutes,' promised Sato suddenly. ‘Perhaps less.' Richard swung round, shocked, then suspicious. Paranoid, perhaps. After all this time trying with no success … The moment the going really got tough, suddenly Rikki got going. That made him wonder about the Japanese computer expert. Especially, now he thought of it, after what Sato had said about the master codes …

‘Ten minutes?' He probed. ‘You can override the programmes in ten minutes?'

‘As I said, perhaps less …' Rikki Sato nodded, his black hair falling over the dome of his forehead, glasses slipping towards the end of his nose.

‘Absolute override? Complete control?' Richard could hardly believe it.

Another huge wave came in from the ten o'clock position, jerking his attention away from the suddenly shifty-looking computer programmer. It smashed into the whaleback, threatening to tear the whole thing off. Spray exploded up and thrashed away down the wind so fast that Richard was able to see the way the incoming water seemed to split, a wall running back along the pathway he and Aleks had followed on top of the whaleback to get into the bridge before moonrise. It rushed along the flat top between the pipe walls to rear up against the clearview and blot out everything for a lingering moment with a wash of foam that seemed glued to the glass.

The whole hull shuddered. Heeled to starboard. The port-side bridge wing made some very strange sounds indeed and Richard reckoned the foam from the incoming wave crest must be beating against the overhanging underside almost hard enough to tear it off. The bulkhead door out on to the bridge wing rattled in its frame as though an invisible giant were beating at it. And suddenly Macavity was out of the chair beside it and standing at Richard's shoulder, Dom DiVito just beside him. Looking, with Richard, through the slowly-clearing glass as though they understood the full importance of what they could see. ‘Ten minutes, then, Rikki,' said Richard, keeping his tone conversational even though he had to bellow to be heard. ‘Less would be good.' Then a thought struck him. ‘All the controls?' he repeated. ‘Did you say
all
?'

‘Yes. I will close down all computer controls …'

Richard glanced over his shoulder. ‘When those controls come off,' he bellowed at Macavity, ‘there will need to be men who know what they're doing in the cargo control room. God knows what this is doing to the cargo. It'll certainly be slopping about in these Moss tanks as wildly as the waves outside. The NIPEX men. Steve Penn from Anchorage, maybe. If there isn't an experienced hand at the cargo control, the inertia of the liquid in the tanks will just become another force trying to roll us over or tear us apart.'

Macavity nodded, then began to turn.

‘
But
even more important than that, I need guys who know what they're doing down in engine control. Someone from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries who knows how the engine control system works, who can back up on my signal. I'm not convinced that the engine room telegraph will communicate directly to the engines if the computer systems are all down. But I can rely on the old-fashioned way, I think. What I set those levers to will come up in the engine control room and they can control the engines from down there.' He gestured to the telegraph as he spoke, and Macavity looked wide-eyed at the levers with the timeless commands written beneath them. FULL AHEAD, HALF AHEAD, SLOW AHEAD, DEAD SLOW, STOP ALL, FINISHED WITH ENGINES …

‘It's now set up for skeleton crew,' insisted Rikki defensively. ‘Good control from here when all online.' He too gestured at the helm, the engine room telegraph levers and the movement control systems.

‘A skeleton crew was supposed to dock her,' emphasized Richard. ‘A skeleton crew with half the programmes still keeping watch on the cargo and governing the engine movements, the rudder settings, headings and so forth. A skeleton crew who were supposed to just put her into a facility pre-programmed to receive her,' insisted Richard. ‘A skeleton crew was never supposed to bring her home through a typhoon with every support system on board shut down!'

He rounded fully on the hesitating Macavity and met him face-to-face, staring down those cold, pale eyes. ‘And even if they were,' he snarled, ‘I'm a
slim captain
. I'm not a bloody
skeleton crew
! I need Engineer Esaki, maybe Murukami – they know their stuff.' Macavity got the message. He turned, gestured to Dom and one of the men by the door. The three of them vanished through the doorway in the middle of the aft bridge wall running down into the well of the companionway. Richard swung back to confront Rikki Sato. ‘How long?' he grated.

‘Five minutes, Captain,' muttered Sato, suddenly seeming to be nervous now that Macavity was away.

But Richard had no time for speculation or confrontation – though he really wanted to tear apart the tissue of lies Rikki Sato seemed to be spinning. They were coming closer to the outer eye wall now and, ahead of the line of thunderstorms, the typhoon suddenly started throwing waterspouts at them. As Rikki wrestled with the last of the cut-outs preventing him from closing down his own programme, Richard began to wrestle with an increasingly responsive helm, trying to remember from what he had studied of the ship's management systems how independent of the computer circuitry the command and control systems actually were. Out of the darkness at the ten o'clock position where the winds were coming from, he saw a tall, pale spout of spray-filled whirlwind suddenly join the heaving water to the roiling clouds.

As sinuous as a snake dancing to a charmer's flute, the waterspout writhed out of the wilderness towards
Sayonara
– a snake more than a hundred feet high. A snake whose tail in the water kicked up a circular wall maybe thirty metres across. Richard had never seen anything quite like it and found himself just for the briefest moment trying to work out what peculiar set of physical circumstances could have led to such a thing appearing under these conditions in this place. But then Rikki Sato said, ‘
Hokay
,' and the helm sprang fully to life beneath his grasp and immediately set about trying to rip his arms off. Richard had planned for this moment. He knew what he was going to do – what he had to do if he was going to save the vessel. He was going to maintain the engines on full ahead and use all the power at his command to ease the helm over to starboard. Perhaps play with the fact that
Sayonara
had twin propellers that could turn independently of each other. Vary the thrust from each to help with the manoeuvre. Look for help also from the conditions he was sailing through. He was planning to allow those big seas to help turn
Sayonara
's head round until the weather was coming in from her stern, and then he would adjust the engine settings until he was running just a little faster than the wave-sets. He had enough sea room to run due west for the better part of a day if he wanted to. Though, judging by the speed with which the typhoon seemed to be moving,
Sayonara
would be past the eye within a day and able to reverse her heading to ride the counter-winds eastwards back on to her original course. It looked as though he would be at the helm himself for the next thirty-five hours or so, if they could even get back on schedule. But what he had called
an exercise in simple ship-handling
, let alone anything else, would have to wait until he had dealt with the waterspout.

Richard pushed the right-hand lever of the engine room telegraph hard into the full ahead position, therefore, and pulled the left-hand lever to full astern, treating the sedate LNG transporter as though she were a frigate able to turn on a penny. He hauled the helm hard over to port and pushed
Sayonara
's bows straight into the spray-wall at the foot of the waterspout. ‘Attack is the best form of defence,' he said to himself. And so it seemed. At first. The spraywall swept across the deck, seeming to ooze up on to the whaleback before the veil of wildly whirling spray swept back towards the clearview. Through it, Richard was able to see the central column of the spout writhing on to the helideck at the forecastle head. It seemed to linger there for an instant, then it stepped sedately down on to the water to the starboard of the bow.

But just as it did so, the largest wave so far came thundering in from the port side.
Sayonara
gave that strange, unsteady swoop again. Her forecastle slid down and to the left into the trough in front of the oncoming giant. The whole hull yawed and rolled to the left, then heaved off the back of the last wave and surged down after the forecastle head. Rikki Sato, completely thrown off balance, came crashing across the deck and cannoned into Richard. The collision was so unexpected, coming at a time when Richard was so focused on handling the ship, that he was knocked sideways. He lost his grip on the helm and was bizarrely replaced there by the sagging, winded body of the Japanese computer expert. He fell heavily and went skidding and rolling painfully across the non-slip surface of the bridge's deck. But he pulled himself to his feet the instant he stopped rolling and turned, staggering, just inside the bulkhead door that opened on to the port bridge wing. So he was able to see what happened, even though he was unable to do anything about it.

Still turning hard to port, driven by the push of one engine full ahead against the suck of the other full astern, helm held hard over, wedged by Rikki's considerable paunch,
Sayonara
turned into the oncoming wall of water. Her forecastle tried sluggishly to ride up the near-vertical green cliff, but almost immediately there was white water boiling on to the forecastle head so recently occupied by the waterspout. Then, as the bows dug deeper into the oncoming wave, green water thundered on to the forecastle and the whaleback above it. White water was largely foam. Green water was much more substantial. Moving at this speed, it was effectively as solid as ice, and nearly as deadly. As though channelled by the pipewalls secured along the top of the tall white metal construction, the topmost five metres of the wave surged back towards the bridge like a battering ram.

Richard took a step towards the helm, thinking that there might be something he could do. But an explosion of sound behind him made him look back. Behind and below, oddly. The bridge wing seemed to leap upward as though a giant was trying to kick it into touch. The door to the bridge wing twisted in its frame. Jets of water sprayed in as though the most powerful of fire hoses was playing on the outside. Richard slipped in a puddle that seemed to have formed out of nowhere and in no time at all. He went down on one knee.

BOOK: Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure
3.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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