Richard caught Tom Snell’s gaze and the officer gave a slight world-weary shake of his head.
‘Just so long as they can do their job,’ said John.
‘Just so long as they take good care of my boat!’ said Richard.
‘Too right. Look, just before I sign off, I’ve been told to expect two deliveries tomorrow. Professor Yves Maille, the marine biologist. I’m bringing him up to join the Club, I understand. He’s the man who knows almost as much about warm water as Dr Ross knows about cold. And I’m to expect the rope. Is it really from NASA?’
‘Yes it is, John. It’s not really rope, it’s non-breakable, monocellular carbon-graphite fibre woven into a cable.’
‘Ah. Right.’ The dazed wonderment in John’s voice was clearly audible. ‘I’ll be bringing that up too, then. OK?’
‘OK, John. Over and out.’ Richard put the portable phone down on the starched linen of the table cloth. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Achilles will be here in three days, together with Professor Yves Maille and the rope. Which will, of course, give us yet another interesting conundrum.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Tom Snell.
‘How do you cut a length off something that’s supposed to be unbreakable?’
The unbreakability of the rope was something which exercised the minds of Richard and Bob Stark the next afternoon.
Richard was there by the helipad to welcome his old friend aboard. The last time they had seen each other was at John Higgins’ wedding and that had been nearly three years ago when Robin had been pregnant with the twins. Even then Richard had been struck by how little the American chief engineer had aged over the long years of their acquaintance. And now he was struck anew by the physical power and dynamism of the newly-promoted captain of Achilles. With his film star good looks, his Ivy League background, and his New England Four Hundred family you would have expected to find him following his father’s footsteps into politics. Or at least his uncle’s into the US Navy. But no. A love of marine engines and some vagaries of maritime chance had brought Bob to Heritage Mariner and he had always seemed content to remain, working his way up slowly but surely from third engineer to captain.
He looked at Richard almost quizzically as they shook hands. Then he looked at the iceberg. His blond eyebrows met his rich, straw-coloured head of hair and his dark blue eyes held an expression of incredulity. His wide mouth, over an impossibly wide jaw, turned up at one sculpted corner and he shook his head in mild disbelief. ‘You really think we’re going to be able to move that thing?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Richard decisively. ‘We have the power. We have the rope. All we need to do is think it through.’
Half an hour later they were in conclave in Richard’s day room while Bob’s ship Achilles sailed off under command of its first officer to take Tom Snell and his men to the far end of the berg. Bob looked down at the diagrams on the desk. Then, sweeping the cow’s lick of blond hair out of his eyes, he said, ‘Even if it’s unbreakable, there has to be a little give in it because it’s woven into cable. Each individual fibre may have no elasticity whatsoever but when you wind them round each other they will stretch a little, even if it’s only while the whole thing tightens up. And I guess that’s all to the good because a little give will work to our advantage, give us some leeway.’ He grinned. ‘Cut us some slack.’
‘OK,’ temporised Richard, ‘but we’ve still got trouble at both ends.’
‘Damn right. The way I see it is this. Once you’re anchored to the ice, that’s it unless the anchorage points fail — which is a possibility we can look at in a minute. But the point is, if things go wrong, the cable isn’t the weak link in the chain any more. It won’t snap before damage to the ship occurs. So what would come next?’
‘Capstans.’
‘Right. Now each pair of capstans is motorised. So. The capstan post could be cut off or it could be pulled out of its mountings. With or without its motor.’
Bob paused there while Richard revisited one of his more recent nightmares. Beheading the capstan would be bad enough, but pulling it bodily out of the poop deck like a rotten tooth was something he didn’t want to think about. And yet even that was preferable to the alternative.
‘Or, of course,’ he said to Bob, his voice rusty as though he had been shouting a lot recently, ‘we could simply pull the whole back end off the boat.’
‘Yup,’ said Bob, ‘we could certainly do that.’
The pair of them sat in silence for a moment, considering imponderables like if the poop did break away, how much of the stern would go with it. Whether the hull would remain watertight under those circumstances. Whether the engine would continue to function.
The impact of such a catastrophe was incalculable. It was one of those things you had to live through in order to get a proper hold on it. Like the separation of a supertanker. Richard had come through that by the skin of his teeth, standing on the deck of the first Prometheus in the English Channel in a storm while she broke in two beneath him. All the foresight in the world could not have prepared him for the actuality of that. The same was true of pulling the back end off your boat.
‘We also have the facility,’ said Richard, ‘of running a line back from the forecastle head.’
‘So as well as being able to pull off the back end, you could pull off the front end too. You’ve started living dangerously in your old age, Richard!’
‘Is it feasible? Would it help?’
‘In theory it wouldn’t help the actual tow. I mean, if you’ve got one unbreakable rope, why would you need two of them? Would it ease the strain on the hull? Probably not at this end. As I understand it, we plan to guide the thing and maybe get its mean speed up to five knots faster than its normal rate of drift, which should take it across the surface of the earth at about ten knots. Right?’
‘Right. We would have to move at five knots faster than the current in any case, just to give the ships steerageway. Any slower than that and we’re just drifting, really.’
‘OK. I see, that. So, what we need to do is apply propulsion to make it move faster until you have steerageway for your vessels, then force at some points to vary its course — you can’t expect actually to turn it at all. Obviously the lead vessels and the rear vessels will have to do steering as well as propulsion while the middle vessels will just do propulsion. Therefore …’
The talk suddenly took an extremely technical turn.
Niobe hove into view thirty-six hours later and John Higgins came aboard at once. He and Richard shook hands a little formally. Although they were close friends — Richard had been John’s best man — they had seen little of each other during the last couple of years, except for a taxing few days they had spent together in court fighting a case which threatened to cripple Heritage Mariner and destroy Richard and his family financially for generations to come. ‘Asha will be over later,’ said John. ‘I thought you’d want to get the business bits over first. I told Yves Maille to wait too. He’s full of ideas and wants to discuss them, but we won’t really be coming into his area of expertise until we swing her round into the Gulf Stream. I say, though, that’s a bloody big bit of ice you’ve got there!’
Richard smiled down at the dapper, decisive man he had first met nearly fifteen years ago. Physically, John had changed little since that time. Five feet ten of restless energy, he only seemed slight when close beside Richard’s six feet four inch frame. He had filled out perhaps, but there was no fat on his body; and if he carried himself a little stiffly these days, that was less to do with the passage of years than with a terrorist bullet in the ribs five years ago in the Gulf. The character was different, however. The happy-go-lucky third officer of Prometheus that Richard had first met had matured into a solid, reliable, senior captain who wore the weight of command easily and well. And the gifted navigator who had religiously taken noon and night-time sights with a series of beautiful old sextants had matured into a navigator of real genius, someone who they could rely upon to do even more for them than the dazzling array of navigation aids they had at their disposal.