‘He’s on Prometheus.’
‘I know. But we have other captains who can take even Prometheus between Kharg and Europoort with no trouble at all. He’s the best qualified captain for the job I have in mind. And there’s a bonus. Our medic Paul Chan is in hospital with a shattered thigh. If John comes then so will Asha his wife and she’s the best doctor in the Heritage Mariner fleet.’
‘Very well. Then it looks as though I shall be replacing Captain Higgins with Captain Welland from Ajax. I hope Captain Welland will not mind exchanging the icy weather in the north for the opposite extremes on die Gulf run.’
‘You know he’ll jump at it!’
‘I do. He will. And that means that your friends — your Club do you call them? — just have to get their third captain and crew out to Stavanger. I think we can give Ajax’s complement a choice of alternative berths or paid leave until this contract expires. And that will be everything tied up tight from this end.’
‘Charles, I never thought I’d hear you say that!’
‘Well, Richard, I must admit to being quite surprised myself.’
After his talk with Charles Lee, Richard found that he was too wound up to sit still. He left the radio shack and crossed the bridge, then he was out through the bridge-wing door and thundering down the external companionway. His energy felt boundless and his confidence infinite. The morning spread out around him, bright and beautiful; he could hardly contain himself. He had spent so much of the summer locked in deep despair that he had forgotten it was possible to feel like this. Every cloud which had darkened his horizon in May, June and July was gone. Heritage Mariner was back on track; Bill, Robin and he were out of the woods in all sorts of ways. He was engaged on a project where he carried the power of responsibility but little of its weight. A project which allowed him to surround himself with many of the men and women he most admired among his wide circle of friends and colleagues. A project of great benefit to the world in general and to a country for which he felt a particular affection. A project which required him to try and complete work begun by a man who had been a hero of his youth, and in doing so would benefit his own company. A project which would require every ounce of seamanship and leadership within him, but which at the same time filled him with joyful anticipation and simple excitement. This is what it must be like, he supposed, to be in an Olympic final. To captain the England cricket team for the Ashes series.
He looked at his watch: just coming up for nine. Would breakfast be cleared away yet? he wondered.
An hour later, he was back in the radio shack, full of bacon and eggs and a little calmer. This time Emily Karanga was with him. He was talking to the Mau Club — or, at least, to Indira Dyal. She had informed him that the first official contacts with the Maui government had been made and a team of as yet unnamed Maui government representatives and experts would be on its way soon. That was the news which Emily particularly wanted to hear and Indira agreed to give her more details the moment they came to hand. And of course Emily would also be informed of the names of the other members of the UN team going with her to Mau as soon as they had been finalised.
Indira provisionally approved the recommissioning of Kraken and Psyche and noted that the third crew would be going aboard Ajax at Stavanger. She listened with patient lack of understanding to Richard’s theories about using the ocean currents. At last she broke in, ‘Captain Mariner, I must admit to being left breathless by the speed at which you have caused things to happen. I have never seen a project shape up so quickly or so promisingly. But I have a meeting in five minutes. Is there anything at all that we in the Mau Club can do at this stage? Any little problems you cannot see a way round yourself?’
And, almost without realising it had ever been on his mind, he answered, ‘Rope.’
‘Rope?’
‘Yes. It’s been niggling away in the back of my mind. I know that whatever we use, the pressure of the actual tow will cause the ice to melt at the anchorage points. I suppose we’ll just have to work something out to overcome that when we see what we are actually dealing with, but what I can’t quite see is what kind of rope, cable or line is actually going to be strong enough to tow something weighing a billion and a half tons.’
‘I’ll hand you over to General Cord, I think. I know that rope isn’t a strategic consideration, but he’s die man most likely to be able to help, I think.’
Emily had gone by the time General Cord came through. There was nothing much for her to do until they began drawing detailed plans for their arrival in Mawanga, though the plans would have to be drawn as early as possible because they would have to be negotiated with the Maui government and might well need time-consuming preparations on the ground. She would be here to draw up the preliminaries with Richard for the run up the coast. She had been educated and trained as a civil engineer and she was the person most perfectly placed to go through the detailed structural plans of Mawanga harbour as soon as they arrived via the UN and the fax. She was the person selected by the Mau team as being the one best qualified to check the irrigation system, too; it had been with this sort of task in mind that her father had overseen her education in the first place. So, as soon as the drawings came, the plans would be laid then she would be off via New York to Mawanga and to the irrigation ditches in the veldt — if they were still there as Robert Gardiner had reported forty-eight hours ago.
‘NASA,’ echoed Richard, the tone of his voice betraying his astonishment.
‘Sure,’ said General Cord, surprised that Richard was surprised. ‘They’ve done a lot of work in that field. It was NASA who first put out the contract for this unbreakable rope, as far as I know, and I guess they’ll still be die best place to start. I don’t know whether they’ve gone much beyond the parallel molecule carbon mono-fibre they’ve been using for their suits, but if they have, then I’ll find out. But it seems to me that if you get large bundles of carbon monofibre and then wind them round each other, you should end up with the kind of rope you’re looking for. Maximum strength, minimum weight, minimum stretch. I mean, your standard braided nylon probably won’t be long enough and will stretch to hell and gone if you’re going to use any sort of length of the stuff…’
‘Yes. That seems likely to me too. It’s been a bit of a worry. Of course we won’t be trying to pull over a billion tons dead weight. It’ll be moving under its own power anyway, influenced by the currents, the winds, the spin of the earth, but we’ll have to overcome some almost incalculable inertias, especially if we want to turn it.’
‘Kinda like a fisherman trying to land a ten-pound steelhead on a line with five-pound breaking strain.’
‘Yes, that’s right. I’m afraid we’ll go well beyond the capacity of normal ships’ ropes, so I really do want the strongest available.’
‘OK. I’ll see what I can do. On the other hand, though, having a known breaking strain might be all to the good. This pulling business can go both ways remember. You don’t ever want to find that that thing is pulling you and there ain’t no way to break free…’
‘Manhattan is drifting down the Labrador Current at the moment. Making about four knots in a straight line roughly south.’ Richard was on the phone in die radio shack. It was mid-afternoon now and Sally Bell was holding her own watch as Titan pounded through the dark brown outwash of the still swollen Mississippi River. Even out here it was hard to hold course because of the power of the river’s current. The big tanker kept drifting away to starboard, behaving in exactly the way Richard hoped the iceberg would. ‘My ships will try to get that speed up to ten knots by the time we hit the Gulf Stream, then we’ll swing east with the Stream — and with the westerly winds behind us — and run it as fast as we can southwards across the main flow until we can pick up the Canaries current on the western edge of Biscay. The Canaries current will take us down to the Canary Islands themselves. It’ll be a long haul but at least the water will be relatively cold.’