Rather, Richard was back in his schooldays, when terms at the forbidding Gothic pile of his Edinburgh alma mater had been leavened with the occasional visit to the west coast, where his love of the sea had been born. For the old-fashioned brass controls all around him on Queen Mary’s command bridge took him to gleaming memories of the bridge, control and engine spaces of the venerable paddle-steamer Waverley, which plied up and down the River Clyde in the days of his youth and had sailed all around the coast of Britain to this date, the last ocean-going paddle steamer in the world. With his parents on weekend exeats and during summer vacations, he had clambered from stem to stern, from truck to keel as Waverley pounded downriver from Greenock’s Custom House Quay to call at Gourock, and Largs, then on to Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae and back, past Clydebank where the John Brown shipyards used to stand in the long-gone days when Queen Mary herself, hull 534 until she was named, sat on the slipways.
Richard’s eyes grew wide as he luxuriated in the brass-bound equipment, all of which would have been familiar to Joseph Conrad and, it seemed, at least one generation of Victorian seafarers before him. Brass so lovingly burnished that his lean face was reflected in it as though in a golden mirror. The gleaming surface gave a strange tinge to the reflection, though. His skin looked deeply tanned — even the white line of the scar along his cheekbone seemed sunburned. His jet-black hair had a tinge of red-bronze and the icy blue of his eyes seemed, unsettlingly, almost sea green, as though his angular, Celtic face had become that of a Mediterranean man. As though, somehow, Queen Mary had magically transformed him from the piratical Captain Kidd into the mythical adventurer Odysseus.
There was a matched pair of helms, to Richard’s eyes the size of cartwheels, in gleaming brass like all the rest, with a third, dull-grey emergency control beside them. Above the huge helms, brass trumpets gaped like the bells of French horns, communicating with the identical system of controls down in the engine room and — when necessary — with the emergency control room far below. And the engine room telegraphs stood beside them, marked with every command from full ahead to full astern, stand by, stop and finished with engines.
That last command brought a wry smile to Richard’s lips, for he entertained a more recent memory — of the liquefied natural gas transporter Sayonara that was controlled by computers and had been taken over by pirates who had reprogrammed her command systems so that finished with engines had in fact started her final, near-fatal run to a terrifyingly deadly impact with a floating nuclear power station off the coast of Japan.
Without thinking, he pocketed his cell phone with its automatic text alerting him to the safe berthing of Sulu Queen, which had arrived unnoticed during the shenanigans at midnight last night. He’d only noticed the text when he’d called Robin. He strode forward towards the twin helms until he was brought up short by the equally effulgent brass rail designed to keep casual visitors away from the priceless equipment. He hesitated, overcome by a sudden boyish desire to climb over the barrier and explore the forbidden area further. After a moment, good sense prevailed and he stepped back, contenting himself with walking to the starboard extremity of the bridge, where he could look out over Queensway Bay past Grissom Island and over Long Beach into the dawn. But then something deep below his consciousness led him back across to the port side. And that was where Robin found him when she arrived at last, gazing narrow-eyed away westward, as though he could see over the grey bulks of Terminal Island, past Sulu Queen in her berth and distant San Pedro to the depths beyond the San Pedro submarine escarpment and away across the Pacific.
‘Wow!’ said Robin as she arrived. ‘No wonder you wanted to show me this! I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Shall we climb over the barrier and play with it a bit? Bags I try one of those wonderful wheels.’
Then Robin stopped speaking for an instant. And not because she had noticed Richard’s preoccupied westward stare. Instead, she crossed to the opposite extremity of the bridge to the one he was occupying and looked eastward while he looked west. ‘Hey,’ she said a moment later. ‘What do you make of that?’
Richard tore his frowning gaze away from the dark sky over the far Pacific and turned. ‘What?’
Robin just gestured eastwards. And there, apparently static, a wall of fog stood where it had suddenly appeared, reaching right across Queensway Bay and Long Beach harbour as far as Seal Beach and Marina Vista Park less than five miles distant, a towering white cliff, sitting, waiting, like a rattlesnake about to strike.
‘That’s pretty impressive,’ she said. ‘Strange, too.’
‘And then some,’ he agreed, glancing over his shoulder at the distant, western sky. ‘There’s something up with the weather …’ Then he shook his head as though clearing it of its forebodings. ‘Let’s go down to breakfast,’ he suggested. ‘Nic’s chopper’s due to pick us up at ten.’
THREE
In fact, Nic’s chopper touched down at 10.15 a.m. It landed at the Island Express helipad, 1175 Queen’s Highway, just behind the huge white dome of the Carnival Cruise Lines building, above which the three black-topped red funnels atop Queen Mary stood tall. Nic was aboard himself, but Liberty was not. The six-seater passenger cabin of the little Bell executive 429 was empty apart from the man himself. ‘Look,’ he said as Richard and Robin climbed aboard, strapped in and put on the headphones that allowed them to communicate. ‘I’m sorry to be late but I’ve been forced to change plans with no notice. I’ve dropped Liberty down at Maxima where she’s getting ready to go aboard Katapult8, and I’ll take you to her as well if you insist, but I’m on my way to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce and I’m only just going to make it in time as it is. Something’s come up …’
‘Something bad,’ hazarded Robin, who had never seen her friend looking so concerned. She had to raise her voice over the gathering roar as the Pratt and Whitney motors throttled up and the helicopter swooped upwards.
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’ve called a meeting of the local great and good. And one or two hangers-on, like me.’ He gave a self-deprecating grin that banished the worry from his lean, boyish face. But not, Robin noticed, from his eyes. ‘You heard of something called an ARkStorm?’
‘Not since that Russell Crowe movie Noah came out,’ said Richard lightly. ‘And there were one or two people in England back at the beginning of 2014 who were thinking of arks as well. Especially on the Somerset Levels and down along the Thames towards Windsor …’
‘Yeah. The floods. I remember.’ Nic nodded. ‘Well, as ever, anything you Limeys can do us Yanks can do bigger and better. Come along to the meeting and listen to this guy. He’s from the USGS.’
‘The United States Geological Survey?’ said Richard, more seriously. ‘Are they expecting an earthquake? Then yes, we’d better get going. The Chamber of Commerce, right?’
‘The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.’
The main briefing room at the LA Chamber of Commerce building, 350, Bixel Street, was packed. Nic was right, thought Richard. They had made it just in time, and it looked like there was standing room only. Robin took what appeared to be the last seat on the end of the back row. Richard and Nic, both tall men, were happy to stand behind her, leaning against the rear wall, looking over the top of the assembled audience. The young USGS representative looked chipper and confident. But in spite of what Nic has said, the scientist was not a man. The ID tag on her lapel said Dr Dan Jones, though, which explained Nic’s confusion.