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The arrival of the two ships, therefore, could not have been better timed to lighten Richard’s darkening spirits. It gave him something to do other than worry. It gave him a project, moreover, whose speedy and successful outcome would go a long way to alleviating the difficulty with which he found himself faced. He had been waiting for this moment since they turned the corner off Flemish Cap, but even talking to the captains of the vessels as they raced westward on the northern counter-current did not put his mind at rest in the way that the sight of them, hull up and side by side over the northern horizon and steaming south, gave him.

As soon as the two ships hove into view, he was back to his old self, feeling more in control of events again. He went through into the bridge, leaving the port bridgewing door slightly ajar behind him. ‘I’ll be going onto the ice to help with the securing of Kraken and Psyche,’ he told Sally Bell. ‘You can take the con and dog the watch if you want. I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

He left and the first officer looked after him with narrowed eyes, deciding whether or not to take his advice and rearrange the watches to break at two and six instead of four and eight, hand over the watchkeeping responsibilities to her juniors and take overall command herself. It might be a good idea, especially as the captain would be off the ship all afternoon. He would probably be back by six, though, she reckoned. No matter what jaunt he was up to, he always came back by Pour Out — not for a drink (she had never seen him drink anything alcoholic) but for a chat, a bit of socialising and psychological pulse-taking before working dinner and late meetings and reports.

In fact, Sally Bell was staggered by how hard her captain worked. She was a Belfast girl born and bred and no stranger to the Protestant work ethic, but she had never seen anyone pour so much time and energy into anything in all her life. Richard was up at six, woken, according to the chief steward, with a cup of tea the colour of teak. He was about the ship by six thirty, and put in a swift tour of inspection before breakfast at seven thirty. The tour formed the basis of his working breakfast with her, for during it he noted everything that needed doing or checking around the ship. When she reported to his table in the saloon at eight, usually a little drowsy after four hours’ sleep, she would find, beside his coffee cup, a neat list of things he wished to refer to her notice, and as she ate — always a full cooked breakfast for Sally — he went through them with her. By eight thirty he was in the radio shack and he first contacted his other captains, checking what was happening aboard their ships and centralising their reports about die tow. Then he talked to Colin Ross and Major Snell up on the ice. Then he made a radio report to the United Nations building in New York and to Heritage House in London. Routinely, also, he called his wife who was usually getting their twin children Mary and William ready for lunch by the time he got through to her.

By eleven, he had assembled all the facts he needed in order to write his reports and he would routinely spend two hours typing ferociously in his day room. He shared a working lunch at one with the chief engineer who was expected to give the most detailed report on the state of the big RB211 turbine engines which powered the complex variable-pitch, twin-screw configuration deep beneath the counter.

From fourteen hundred hours he would be about the ship again, checking that the work listed this morning was under way, and then he would check with the other captains again, and tell off Doug Buchanan the helicopter pilot for duty — on almost every day so far, there had been a meeting of all the captains, Major Snell and the Rosses either on board or on the ice. But wherever he was during the afternoon, as she had observed, he was down in the officers’ lounge by eighteen hundred, sipping sparkling Malvern water and taking the pulse of his command. For he was in command here, more so than any captain she had served under. Not fussily or dominatingly but supportively and absolutely; and if he habitually straightened every pencil on the chart table to regimented neatness whenever he passed, that was simply because he wanted to know where even the least thing aboard might be in case he needed it in an emergency.

During dinner he would complete any business left over from the afternoon’s meeting and then share his coffee with her, checking up on ship’s business. Then he would spend another hour at least in the radio shack making radio reports which, from twenty-one thirty or twenty-two hundred, he would put onto paper in his day room. At twenty-three hundred hours exactly, on the dot, he would put through his final call, to the lucky woman in Ashenden, that house of his high on the cliffs above the English Channel. Then he would retire. As often as not, however, Sally would find him prowling the bridge, sipping cocoa, checking the log and straightening the pencils when she came on duty at midnight, so he got little more sleep than she did — and she would usually catch up in the afternoon during a siesta which he allowed her but never himself. She was beginning to wonder how long he could keep it up, but in her bones she knew. He would keep it up until the job was done, no matter how tough it got, no matter how much it took.

She crossed to the telephone by the helm and buzzed the second officer’s number. As she did so, the first fingers of mist crept in around the edge of the bridgewing door and the huge airy bridge itself was suddenly filled with the smell of slightly rancid cucumbers.

* * *

Captain Gendo Odate had come a long and varied way from his birth in the town of Tsu overlooking die bay of Ise-wan, on the south coast of Honshu, to the command of the supertanker Kraken currently nosing her way east-south-eastwards through thickening fog into a tiny bay on the north side of an iceberg proceeding towards Europe at slightly less than seven knots. He stood solidly in the middle of his bridge, looking steadfastly forwards into the dazzling impenetrability ahead, listening to the disciplined flow of information, all of it in English, which was coming via his officers from the electronic equipment all around him, and thanking various deities for the tall form of Richard Mariner who stood beside him.

Richard had come to Kraken first because she would take up her position first. Psyche had run ahead of the convoy when the two ships drew near and was now falling back into place as they worked Kraken into her allotted position here. About the only thing visible through the clearview in front of him was the bright yellow glow of the Sea King on the foredeck, sitting waiting to take him off again in due course. He was not simply halfway between a pilot and an idle observer. He held in his right hand a walkie-talkie tuned to a closed frequency on which he could liaise with Major Snell on the ice and direct his efforts as necessary. But at the moment, he was in pilot mode, talking to the Japanese captain.

‘We have to position Kraken fifty metres offshore and hold her course parallel at just less than seven knots,’ Richard was saying gently. ‘Major Snell and his men will fire the lines across fore and aft. We can pull them aboard by winch and capstan and take it from there. John Higgins, Bob Stark and I have drawn up the disposition diagrams for optimum patterns of attachment, but I’m sure you will want to study them and discuss any points of concern.’

‘One hundred metres and closing on the starboard side,’ sang out the first officer who was crouching over the collision alarm radar. ‘Ice across the stern at one hundred and twenty-five metres and closing.’