Immediately following that conference I had arranged to get Gertrude ashore. I had never had a woman on board a trawler before and the fact that the crew were so accustomed to her presence that, almost unconsciously, they looked to her for decisions, made my own position considerably more difficult than it would otherwise have been. Johan, in particular, had a great fondness for her, as though she were a close relative as well as the owner. In any case, we needed I her back at base to organize supplies. There was no room for her on the helicopter, but when the new cables came out I got her away on Rattler. After that I was able to re-establish my authority and get a grip on the ship and her crew.
There was a great deal of activity during the days it took to get the rig fully operational again. But once they had resumed drilling, everything settled down to normal, and the dullness of our patrol, the steady routine of watch-and-watch about, made things considerably easier for me. Throughout this period the Shetlanders gave us no trouble. Indeed, for the better part of a week we never saw a single fishing boat. Johan thought they would be fishing either west of Sumburgh or out by Fair Isle, for the weather was fine and clear. It was mid-summer now, the days so long there was almost no night, only a weird pinkish twilight before the sun edged up over the horizon again.
Twenty-third June and another clear, silky morning. I was just coming off watch when the rig called us. I was to report on board immediately — Ed Wiseberg's orders. I found him alone in the toolpusher's office, his hard, leathery face even more craggy than usual. 'You've seen this, have you?' It was a copy of the Shetland paper with a headline — Dragging Rig a Danger to Lives.
'No, we haven't had any papers sent out yet.'
He grunted. 'Then you won't have seen the stories in your national press. The Morning Star is the worst, of course, accusing Villiers of gambling with men's lives. But they're all on to it — The Times, Express, Telegraph, the whole goddam lot, all screaming for our blood.' He flung the pile down in front of me, staring at me angrily as though I personally had leaked the story. The intercom phone rang, and while he answered it, I picked up one of the papers, my eye caught by several lines of print underlined in red: It is not the first time things have gone wrong for this 51-year-old American driller. In the past six years he has had a fire, a blowout and an accident in which two men were killed. Regarded as something of a Jonah by his fellow toolpushers, it is hardly surprising that he now finds himself in charge of the oldest rig in the North Sea operating west of Shetland in the most dangerous sea area of all.
No wonder he was angry. I turned to the Telegraph. Here, too, the story was front page news, but at that point I suddenly became interested in what he was saying over the phone — something about fishing boats and he had mentioned Gertrude Petersen's name. He reached for a pad, made a note and then looked across at me. 'Okay, George. I think that's a pretty smart deal… Yeah, I guess that should cool the whole thing down, locally at any rate. When d'you reckon it'll be on station?… That's fine. Rattler can stand by till it arrives. Yeah, I'll tell him. He's here with me right now.' And he put the phone down. 'That was George Fuller,' he said. For a moment he didn't say anything more, just stood there facing me, his brows drawn down and his face grim. He was looking older than when I had last seen him, the lines of his face deeper, the shoulders sagging. The effect was to make him seem less than life size, as though the weight of responsibility had diminished his stature.
The silence hung heavy. 'What was it about?' I asked him.
'You.' He paused, still frowning. Then he straightened up, squaring his shoulders. 'First, I'd better tell you the results of the laboratory tests on Nos. 1 and 2 cables. We sent the whole lot ashore, including the broken ends from both anchor chains. It wasn't what we thought. No indication of cable fatigue. Know what it was?' He was suddenly leaning on the desk, his head thrust aggressively forward. 'Sabotage.'
I was so shocked by the boldness of his statement that all I could think of was that moment on the bridge when something, some force, had slammed against the soles of my feet. So I'd been right. It had been an underwater explosion.
That surprise you?' He glowered at me. 'No, I bet " it doesn't. I can see it in your face. You know damn well they were ripped apart by a bomb.'
'Are you accusing me?'
'I'm not accusing you of anything. All I know is that your political record stinks, and yours was the only boat with the opportunity-'
'What about that purse-seiner I reported steaming without lights?' But I knew Island Girl hadn't had time to undertake what would have been a very tricky operation. He knew it, too.
'That fishing vessel's got nothing to do with it. Mebbe you haven't either. God knows how it was done. But there it is. There's the laboratory report.'
He picked up a telex and tossed it across to me. 'Read it if you want to. The frayed ends of those cables all showed indications of heat metamorphosis. Traces of carbon, other more technical details. It all adds up, the findings conclusive. And something else you should read.' He reached for the local paper and handed it to me, his finger pointing to the second column of the front page story. That boat you saw. It wasn't fishing. It was tailing you. Read it.'
'But it couldn't possibly-'
'Read it. Then I'll tell you what we've decided.'
It was a statement by Ian Sandford:
The rig's only stand-by boat is the Duchess of Norfolk, manned partly by foreigners. This is not the sort of boat that should be permitted to harry our fishing boats, which have an age-old right to fish those waters. Nor should a man with a police record be in command of the one boat with the right to come and go around the rig. This should be a Shetland responsibility. My own boat was, in fact, present in the neighbourhood of the rig at the time it began to drag. The man on watch saw the Duchess out by the windward buoys, but then she forced Island Girl to leave the area.
The implication was obvious, and it went on: Mr Sandford, who was recently elected to the Zetland County Council, drew a hair-raising picture of what could happen if this rig were to break adrift at the moment when the drill bit had penetrated an underwater oil reservoir. 'It could mean,' he told our reporter, 'vast quantities of crude oil gushing out into the waters west of Shetland. Every fisherman knows the effect this would have on his livelihood. But it's not just the fishing that would be hit. With the prevailing winds, all the west of Shetland could be totally polluted, the whole coastline black with crude oil. The beauty of our islands, the bird life, everything that attracts the tourist, would be ruined.'
His solution: A modern, self-positioning drilling ship in place of the obsolete North Star. And in the interim, proper surveillance with two Shetland boats sharing the guard duties, and manned by Shetlanders.
So that was it. The man had turned politician and was using his new position to get us out and his own boats in. I looked across at the big toolpusher and knew by the look on his face I hadn't a hope of changing his mind. 'You're ditching us, is that it?'
'Call it that if you like. I told you, when I first met you, I didn't want you on my rig. Now I don't want you anywhere near it — or your ship. Nor does George. You're a political liability, and to my way of thinking a potential danger to the rig.' He was looking down at the paper again, his voice thick with anger as he said, 'A dynamic stationed drill ship! That shows their goddam ignorance. A dynamic stationed ship in these waters! There's no heave compensator invented could cope with the pitch and movement of a drill ship in the waves we'll be getting out here later in the year.'