The O.D. (15 page)

‘It can’t be far away now,’ Pilot thought, glancing at his watch as a way of summoning their salvation. But so violently was he being shaken, he had great difficulty reading the time. He held the tarnished old timepiece once worn by his grandfather up to his ear, but what with the noise from protesting bulkheads, spray pelting against the windows and the general uproar in the cabin, he couldn’t tell if his watch were ticking or not.

Whatever the actual time, he knew it was only a matter of minutes before the transponder in the nose cone would be activated and Geirsson and the others would stake their common claim. From then on the eyes of the entire world would fall forever on this unlikely band of colonisers – aground in the Bay of Biscay on fourteen trussed up barges and half a jumbo in a rubber ring.

‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law ...’

With a jolt Pilot realised he was getting ahead of himself and that the only thing they were in possession of at that moment was a floating barge cemetery that was fast sinking. So intense were the vibrations that Pilot had lost track of his observations of the wave pattern. When the next one washed over the front row of the flotilla, he knew that the worst of their ordeal was over. This assessment was confirmed over the next few minutes as consecutive waves shed power at a rate that could only, by Pilot’s reasoning, be explained by there being a sudden and massive loss of water volume beneath them.

The shockwaves had also taken on a different expression – not so frenetic and brain-rattling now. It was more like feeling and hearing an underground train through five feet of earth. All around them the sea was a jumping mass of whipped up foam. A snow-white circular wake was spreading out from the convoy as if churned up by a thousand propellers set all round them. Beyond this wake and all the way to the horizon it was as if a billion tuna were thrashing their lives to extinction in two feet of water.

“HERE IT COMES.” Pilot shouted. “CRASH POSITIONS.”

He tore his eyes from the drama outside and clamped his head in the vice of his knees and hands.

Amidst the noise, the vibration and his own almost boundless excitement, he noticed that the entire flotilla was rotating, and he couldn’t resist the temptation to look out the window for a sign.

When he lifted his face, there were the ‘thrashing tuna’ as before, but as the jumbo rotated, the random display of white water began to take on a definite ripple pattern. Thousands of tiny whitecaps were marching in close formation as if breaking across a very shallow sea.

As the plane continued its pirouette, the next vision to assault Pilot’s eyes nearly stopped his heart. In the fading light, his immediate reaction was that it was another giant wave. But, as the setting sun broke through the cloud canopy at last, it wasn’t water that Pilot saw before him, but land.

A trick of the eye made it seem as if they were flying low over the sea towards an island runway – an illusion of speed and direction caused by a shoreline moving towards
them
at fifty miles an hour as the continental shelf rose majestically from the sea at an angle of two degrees and the emerging island reached across to take the flotilla ashore.

VIII

Earthmover
II
,
Ocean
Queen
and
Baltimore
were unrecognizable as sea-going vessels. They had taken the brunt of the collision, being lower in the water on impact, and had come apart at the seams. Their cargoes had been shed in a strangely appropriate christening of the new land, with six hundred tons of hard core, gravel, sand and topsoil-turned-mud from
Earthmover
II
lying in random piles across the solid rock as if in preparation for laying down. Next to them,
Ocean
Queen’s tinned goods, rehydratable ‘space meals’ and freeze-dried foodstuffs had formally taken possession of the island in the name of 21st Century convenience. Three panels of the all-green
Douro
in the back row had also split, allowing forty-seven saplings the distinction of being the first living things ashore.

The shelf had hit the underbelly of the convoy at twelve miles an hour, or twenty feet per second – a hundred times faster than Pilot had estimated.

Two things had saved them from catastrophe. First, due to the angle at which the land was rising, the leading barges had made contact first and soaked up at least some of the impact. Second, the eight crumple areas between the jumbo’s collars and Ptolemy’s deck had performed to specification, absorbing 90% of the collision energy.

On board the old Boeing, minds, bodies and spirits were slowly being reassembled after the impact shock and the twenty minutes of violent tremors that followed. The only serious casualty had been Dubravka Horvat. Having dislocated her shoulder earlier during their roller coaster ride over the waves, for the landing, she thought she’d be safer sitting on the floor between seats. As a result, she now had a hairline fracture of the coccyx to augment the pain in her shoulder.

Pilot got word of Horvat’s condition after the tremors had subsided to a comfortable level and went down to see her. She was in a lot of pain, but one of the doctors was attending to her. Pilot squeezed her forearm gently and offered some words of commiseration, apology and encouragement. By way of reply, she ran her free hand up the back of his leg and forced a smile. “Hvala,” she said. “Thank you. Was my fault, not yours.”

The sun had set quickly behind a distant weather front that evening of August 4th and what light remained was insufficient to clarify the scene outside. A strong wind was whipping the water on the windows into fine tendrils whose progress across the glass distorted the scene outside. Very little of the features of their landing place was discernible. The sea was nowhere to be seen, that much they could tell, but they had no idea how far away the nearest coast now was. Nor was their current altitude known. At least it wasn’t snowing and the air didn’t seem any thinner than before. More important questions awaited their attention.

Four hundred and fifty miles away, in the Wapping offices of
The
Morning
Journal
, Thursday night’s read-in man, Len Wenlight, sat po-faced in front of his computer screen alerting his back bench to the evening’s running stories.

Most of the news coming in that afternoon had concerned the tremors in the Bay of Biscay and the tsunamis that had begun hitting Europe’s western seaboard, but there’d been a lull from that quarter for nearly an hour.

“SRI LANKA TRAIN CRASH,” Wenlight called out.

“Got it,” came the back bench reply.

“CHANCELLOR CHEATS ON WIFE.”

Reg Fuller, the night editor, stopped what he was doing for a second. “Cheats on wife? Who’s our magpie?”

“Veronica.”

“I might have known,” Fuller answered. “I think the Chancellor’s got enough problems—”

“SCILLY ISLES EVACUATION UPDATE,” Wenlight interrupted.

“Time?”

“It’s running now. Started 1930 hours.”

“O.K. I’ll read it.”

Wenlight didn’t bother calling out the next catch line.
The
Morning
Journal
had never carried Hollywood gossip of a sexual nature and never would. For a further five minutes the bantam-weight journalist, who hated this job but willingly took his turn with the rest of the writers, fished his directory for usable copy. Eventually, he hooked a big one, or so it seemed at first glance.

“BISCAY ISLAND LANDING, Reg.”

From Fuller: “Biscay what?”

“ISLAND LANDING.” He spoke the words with inflections of urgency and puzzlement.

“Who’s the corr?”

Wenlight didn’t hear the question. He was reading the copy.

“WHO SENT IT, LEN?”

“It’s unattributed. I think you should have a look, though.”

Anything from the Bay of Biscay was news that night, so Fuller swiveled round to inspect the fish for himself on his own computer screen.

Wenlight read the first few lines of the release, then looked across at Fuller in disbelief. “There was nothing about an island before I came on, was there?”

But Fuller was too engrossed in the text marching up his screen to answer.

On impact with Eydos, the transmitter in the jumbo’s nose cone had automatically sent Geirsson’s declaration, largely rewritten by Pilot, to the iPatch News21 system, a satellite facility used by journalists to file stories anywhere in the world to any number of locations simultaneously. Vaalon’s ‘redilist’, comprised the codes for every broadcast, print and internet news source in the world. Through the magic of technology, BISCAY ISLAND LANDING was worldwide in minutes.

Bay of Biscay. 46° 42’N., 6° 04’ W. 4/8. Filed 2003 GMT.

150 words. 20 screen lines.

BISCAY
ISLAND
LANDING
.

PRESS
RELEASE
AND
DECLARATION
.

At
the
exact
time
coded
above
,
the
outer
edge
of
the
continental
shelf
of
Europe
surfaced
in
international
waters
in
the
Bay
of
Biscay
.
As
numerous
sources
will
verify
in
the
coming
days
,
simultaneous
with
our
landing
on
the
aforementioned
land
mass
,
representations
were
made
by
our
agents
in
London
,
Paris
,
Madrid
,
Dublin
and
the
United
Nations
presenting
our
legal
and
indisputable
claim
on
this
island
,
which
,
as
of
this
moment
,
will
be
known
as
Eydos.

We
have
displaced
no
indigenous
population
to
get
here
.
Nor
have
we
relocated
from
an
existing
political
,
sociological
,
ideological
or
religious
base
.
We
have
left
everything
behind
,
and
our
baggage
contains
only
clothes
.
We
appeal
to
the
international
community
to
respect
our
claim
on
this
island
.
And
we
invite
the
support
of
friendly
nations
in
upholding
it
.

Our
geographical
position
is
as
logged
above
.

--
L
.
Pilot

“Who the hell’s L. Pilot?” Fuller asked no one in particular. “Run a check on the name, Tony. Alan, call the BBC, SKY and the Foreign Office. See if they have anything on an island. And New York… Paris. COME ON. Get the calls out.” Fuller seemed to be talking to everyone at once. “AND CHARTER A PLANE.”

Behind his small, wire-rimmed spectacles, Wenlight’s pupils were like sharpened pencil points. “I reckon it’s a hoax, Reg,” he cautioned. “Look. The corr is unidentified. Plus, the story was filed at 8.03, and yet it claims this island came up at 8.03. How would they have had time to both write and file in one second? The whole country knows about the tremors and this is just some jokester journalist or hacker having a punt, but screwing up his timings.”

Fuller weighed the evidence.

“You’re probably right, Len, but let’s get the calls out all the same.”

Satisfied with his detective work, Wenlight removed the hook from this strange fish and threw it back into a sea frothing with the fact, fiction, innuendo, gossip, half-truths and scoops being poured into it by sources on every shore.

Ten minutes later, two ‘snaps’ came on screen in quick succession that made Len Wenlight forget all about jokes and hackers: EARTHQUAKE ISLAND U.N. CLAIM, and immediately below it, LANDMASS SURFACING BISCAY m.f.

“This thing gets curiouser and curiouser, Len,” Fuller said over his colleague’s shoulder.

Back on
Ptolemy
, Lonnie Pilot sat listening to Serman’s damage report. It seemed as if every joint in the barge had been dislocated by the impact. There wasn’t a right angle to be found anywhere. Yet, for all that, everything still functioned: the galley was operational; water came out of the taps and the lights worked.

The mess room of the barge was turned into a makeshift infirmary and the dozen most severe cases of shock had been taken down to be treated. Quite a few of the crew were making their way to their cabins to recover privately from the impact, while those who remained in the jumbo were experiencing a different form of shock.

The tremors had ceased at last and after four days at sea, culminating in the earthquake, the sudden calm – signifying as it did a return to solid ground – was disturbing in itself. Less than an hour before, the coordinates 46° 42’N, 6° 04’W had been 190 metres under water. It wasn’t surprising that the distinguished American billionaire had taken on new stature with his passengers, none moreso than Lonnie Pilot, Henry Bradingbrooke, Aaron Serman, Jane Lavery, Josiah Billy and Macushla Mara. Someone appeared at the door with a tray of mugs partly obscured by the steam from the hot tea, an instant reminder that no one had taken any food or liquid for eight hours.

The features of the barges around them were clearly visible in the fading evening light but all horizons were hidden from view. Those who remained in the jumbo shared the unspoken desire to disembark to look at, stand on and take in the world’s only current virgin territory. When Henry Bradingbrooke began toying with his torch, Pilot uncoiled himself from his seat. “We’re not going to sleep until we’ve seen it, are we?” he said.

They decided to disembark aft, not yet aware of the easier descent forward from the damaged barges. Using a trestle table brought up from the mess room as a bridge, they crossed over to
Fort
Lowell
and then to
Earthmover
IV
where they secured one end of a nylon rope. Pilot tested the knot, then, taking the free end, walked over the trestle table to the top of the rubber barrage which bounced him up and down like a trampoline. With great ceremony he gathered up the slack, threw the rope to the ground and began abseiling down. On the way, he tried to think of something Neil-Armstrong-like to say to the others when he set foot on the surface for the first time.

Lonnie Pilot’s desert boot met with solid rock, smooth as polished granite and still wet and slippery from its long, underwater sleep. “One bald baby’s ass for a man. One clean slate for mankind,” he said.