His mind was racing. He was going over the things he needed to do at once before he left to return to Antelope tonight, and London tomorrow. And he was already drawing his plans — or, more accurately, firming up plans already drawn — to liberate six supertankers and get them here before winter set in.
He wasn’t sure precisely when, but sometime this afternoon he had become convinced that Colin Ross’s plan would work. That they really were going to take this thing to Africa.
Kate looked up as they carried Dave into the big hut. Paul was lying on the stretcher clad only in his Calvin Kleins and she was putting the finishing touches to a proper bandage on his thigh. ‘It’s not as bad as I’d feared,’ she said, ‘but I think he’d better go back to Antelope with you, Richard. If Dave has to go too it’ll be a bit crowded, though.’
‘We’ll manage,’ said Richard. ‘First order of business is to see how he is.’
As a first officer, Richard had done his stint as acting medical officer on several ships, but his knowledge had only been basic then and was rusty now to say the least. Kate went to work and there was nothing further for him to do on the medical front.
He made some coffee and went into a close huddle with Colin. By the time she had finished, they had ironed out all the details that needed to be addressed at the moment. The three of them, with a fascinated Sam in tow, went to consult the satnav. Still in a straight line. Still due south.
‘She’s sailing like a ship now,’ observed Richard. ‘Perhaps we should give her a name.’
‘She may already have one,’ said Kate. ‘I found a plank of wood in that ice cliff. God alone knows where it came from but it was heaven sent to use as a splint. It has a name written on it.’
‘What? Where is it? Let’s have a look,’ said Colin, speaking for them all.
They went back into the big hut and she found the painted plank where she had kicked it under Paul’s bunk.
‘There you are,’ she said, holding it out for them to see. ‘It’s part of a name. It’s Russian. I’m a bit rusty, but I think it says Leonid.’
‘Leonid?’ asked Richard, frowning down at the strange piece of wood.
The Russian characters were painted in black on wood which had once been painted white. Both coats of paint were scorched and blistered now. Just looking at it made Richard feel uncomfortable, as though there was something supernatural at work here.
‘Yes,’ answered Kate. ‘My Russian’s rusty, as I said, but the word is familiar because it’s part of such a well known name: Leonid Brezhnev. The late Chairman of the Soviet Party. Yes. I’m sure it says Leonid.’
Richard frowned. ‘Well, I suppose in these post-glasnost days we could give her a Russian name, but—’
‘Leonid Shmeonid,’ rasped a weary Bronx voice behind them. ‘This mother nearly killed two New York boys this afternoon and I guess that gives us some say in the matter.’
They all turned round to see Dave Brodski leaning up on one elbow. He was dressed only in pyjama pants and his battered face and barrel torso were covered in so many scrapes, scratches, welts, blotches and bruises that it looked as though he had just lost a long, hard boxing match with the likes of Muhammad Ali.
Kate was still holding the mysterious plank of wood. She used it to point at the battered man. ‘Well, what do you think we ought to call it, then?’ she demanded.
‘Hell, it’s obvious, lady. What you got here is a boat made out of ice that’s the size of an island. So you should call it after the most famous island in the world. ‘You got to call it “Manhattan”.’
Chapter Seven
The boardroom at Heritage House doubled as the dining room and was available to anyone who worked in the building and their guests between twelve and two. At two thirty in the afternoon, exactly a week after Richard had stepped down from the Huey onto the iceberg, the air in the boardroom was still redolent of gourmet luncheon, in spite of the discreet efforts of the extractor fans to push all such odours out into Leadenhall Street.
The atmosphere was not as relaxing as the sweet-smelling air.
The room was panelled in oak said to have been rescued from one of Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet, and on the lovingly tended wood hung a series of naval prints. At one end of the room stood a glass case containing a detailed model of Prometheus II, the flagship of the Heritage Mariner fleet. She was a supertanker, a quarter of a million tonner, currently making her way back from the Gulf with a cargo of oil; a situation which everyone in the room knew to be increasingly rare. At the other end, in pride of place under the windows looking out across the busy London street, a pair of smaller glass cases contained models of Katapult, the elegant multi-hull which represented Heritage Mariner’s unexpectedly successful move into the world of leisure boating, and of Atropos, the nuclear waste transporter, currently working between Canada and Europe, moving the byproducts of nuclear power and weaponry as safely as it was possible to do. Her sister, Clotho, was even now in dry dock at Harland and Wolff’s, having her bow section replaced and strengthened after an accident-filled and deadly dangerous summer.
Four members of Heritage Mariner’s executive board sat silently round the table while the fifth, Richard himself, stood. Richard was unexpectedly feeling isolated, almost threatened; on trial. It was a feeling he knew well enough — he had spent part of the summer in litigation, with the future of the company at stake — but it was a novel feeling in his own boardroom.
His ice-blue eyes swept round the table again as he re-ordered his thoughts and prepared to begin his argument again. Robin was on his side. She had met Colin and Kate. She shared the dream. Her steady grey gaze met his and she gave him a tiny smile of support and a minuscule nod which made her gold curls glint like guineas in the strong September sunshine.
Her father, Sir William, sitting at her side, was not so convinced. Still tired looking and gaunt after heart surgery and the insertion of a pacemaker, he was ready to vote for a period of conservative retrenchment. That was understandable. His heart attack had been the climax of the worst couple of weeks any of them had ever experienced. He was still convalescent and only the importance of this meeting had called him down from Cold Fell, his great house in Cumbria where he spent almost all his time now.
Beside Bill sat Helen DuFour. The calm, pragmatic Provencal chief executive was not convinced either. She shared most things with Sir William and she shared his opinion now. They had been lucky to survive the summer, personally and financially. The court case had come too close to ruining them, and still might do so if things went badly at the American bar. The cost of keeping lawyers in New York was crippling. So was the cost of insuring the ten hulls they owned, but the fact that it was the insurers who were fixing and refitting Clotho proved how worthwhile the crippling expenses really were. They had just survived some extremely bad publicity and they were all too well aware that they had made some dangerous enemies in the media. They had been on the wrong end of terrorist action, one of the reasons their insurance premiums were so high, and looked likely to remain a target as long as they continued to handle nuclear byproducts. All in all, it looked as though there was a hard winter coming, especially as the promised upturn in several important economies was failing to materialise. This was not the time for harebrained experimental schemes.