‘I’m going to do my final round,’ said Psyche’s captain without answering Richard’s question.
‘I’ll come with you, if I may,’ said Richard. ‘I’d like a look over her again.’
‘I thought you’d never sailed her.’
‘I haven’t. John Higgins has. I’ve visited him aboard.’
‘You two go back a long way, hunh?’
The two men crossed to the door and exited side by side. Richard chatted as they crossed to the lift and waited for the car.
‘Yes. I first met him more than fifteen years ago on a ship called Prometheus. I was running a firm called Crewfinders at the time. We were employed to replace a crew decimated by an industrial accident. John was on my firm’s books as a second mate. I hadn’t met him but his references were good so I sent him out then I went out myself as master. We had an eventful voyage during which I met my wife Robin, quite apart from anything else. We stayed friends.’
The lift came. They got in.
‘And he joined you when you took over the Heritage Mariner fleet?’
‘That’s right. I’d known Bill Heritage, my father-in-law, for many years. When I transferred into the Heritage organisation, John came with me. Now that it’s Heritage Mariner, he’s our senior captain. He’s sailed everything from supertankers to tramp steamers. He met Asha when she nursed him after he’d been wounded by terrorists in the Gulf. They honeymooned on a cargo vessel refused permission to dock anywhere because the atomic waste aboard was so dangerous.’
‘The leper ship Napoli. Yes, I read Ann Cable’s account of that. You were on board too, I understand.’
‘Briefly.’
The lift doors hissed open and the two of them stepped out onto the bridge. From here it was possible to see just how snugly berthed against Manhattan Psyche really was. Although there was no moisture in the wind at all, it blew a steady stream of runoff across the clearview and down the shadowed deck. It was almost as though the great supertanker was moored beneath a waterfall. The noise was intrusive, if not overpowering. ‘It’s been improving all day,’ said Peter, gesturing at the falling water. ‘But I don’t think it’ll ever stop. At least it’s fresh.’
He introduced Richard to his third officer, who was holding the watch, and checked the instruments, the charts and the logs. Then the two captains went out onto the starboard bridge wing where it was blustery and cold, but dry. ‘I’ve started to do a full inspection at weather deck level,’ confided Peter. ‘Bridge and line watches before I retire. It seems to be the most sensible way of going about things.’
‘It’s what I do,’ Richard told him. ‘But I don’t have to go all the way up to the forecastle head.’
‘The forecastle head watch changes every hour at night. We found on the first night that it was a bit too much for the men out there during a full four-hour watch, and things have got worse since then, of course.’
‘Do you go there first, or do you go to the poop-deck line watch first?’
‘Capstans first, then windlass. I find I have to build up to the forecastle head, somehow.’
‘Right then.’ Richard gathered his cold-weather gear more snugly about his massive frame. ‘After you.’
They went down die external companionways sternwards to the first deck which stood at the base of the great funnel, side by side across it, deep in conversation, then down and aft again, five decks in all, finally coming down a central stair onto the poop behind the massive bridgehouse. All through their shadowy journey, they had seen no one; all the curtains were drawn except on the bridge, and they did not even see a light. But it was not dark. The clear skies promised by Yves had arrived, though the wind showed little sign of abating. The stars were out and the moon was glimmering promisingly on the distant, southern horizon.
The capstan line watch had rigged a shelter, half tent and half hut, open to one side to let the line ride out and up onto the white shoulder of the ice. The shelter was designed to keep the worst of the runoff away, but because the open side was, perforce, nearest to the iceberg, this was only partially successful and the three men of the watch sat huddled in unhappy silence while a fine spray drifted unceasingly in upon them. They said nothing to each other and only answered their captain’s questions in sulky monosyllables when he addressed them directly. Whether they were naturally taciturn or moodily mutinous, Richard had no way of knowing; the duty offered little in the way of opportunities for conversation in any case. The meltwater fell, the ice grumbled distantly; the wind blustered, sometimes with enough force to make the rope hum and the capstan groan; the ship’s massive motor rumbled like the onset of an earthquake, setting the deck to throbbing and the deck furniture to jingling and tinkling; the surf arrived at the reef astern with a piercing sibilance and an arhythmic lack of pattern, and thundered beneath Psyche’s counter like a tidal wave, where the monotonous thudding of the propeller blades battered it to death.
‘Where did you get your crew from?’ asked Richard as they began to walk down the length of the weather deck, side by side.
‘From Piraeus. But of course they arrived in Greece from all over the world. Most of the stewards are Hong Kong Chinese who are particularly concerned that we are giving ship room to a white-haired ghost. The GP seamen mostly come from Pakistan and they would prefer, I think, that water claim the bodies of the deceased as is common practice in India. But amongst them there is a contingent from Haiti, of all places, so we have some voudon aboard as well. The officers are the usual mixed bunch. I haven’t sailed with any of them before.’
‘You must find it a bit lonely.’ The wind battered around them, whirling past the port side of the bridgehouse. In the distance there was a howling sound which wavered and died away.
‘Sometimes. A little. I have no family of my own. You haven’t brought your wife along? I hear she’s got her captain’s papers too. Didn’t she fancy a cruise?’ The ice groaned as though weary of life. They glanced up involuntarily, looking across the tall, blind front of die bridgehouse.
‘No. She’s at home with the twins. She had enough of this berg when she pulled her ship up on the ice to fix its propeller earlier in the year. Especially as she lost a good few people doing it. At least one of them is still up there somewhere.’
Peter Walcott glanced up at the sheer cliffs. ‘She must have had powerful winches.’
Richard gave a bark of laughter. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There was a shallow bay. It came out in a kind of hook. Near perfect dry dock. She did brilliantly to make use of it as she did, though. I don’t think I would have coped half as well. Anyway, we had to blow it all off to make Manhattan ship-shaped. We’d never have been able to control it as it was shaped originally. That was when we knew we were in business, really, when we got it drifting in a straight line.’ The wind thundered up against the ice cliffs and the waterfall was snatched upwards suddenly and hurled like a great handful of stars up into the blue velvet sky.
‘Then it was just a case of controlling the course and speed of the drift. I see that, yes.’
‘A kind of intellectual game given form and urgency by circumstances. A problem of practical seamanship put into practice because Colin sold it to the United Nations as a viable way of combating a drought and averting a civil war. There was no other way a project like this was ever going to get off the ground really. The cost is so enormous that it could only seem worthwhile to an organisation confronted with the prospect of sorting out another Somalia, another Bosnia, another Congo. The political implications must be enormous even outside Africa, too. Consider the amount of ice-cold water we’re putting into the North Atlantic Drift even now. What effect will that have when it hits the coast of Ireland? Only the UN could have got the Irish government to take the risk of agreeing or we’d have farmers from all over the place suing.’