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When Borodin turned back, Sholokov had vanished and the only evidence of his existence was the fact that the black glass in the broken crate, displaced by the bulk of his body, had geysered up to spew out over the boards around it like rough-hewn ice cubes carelessly dropped.

Chapter Four

The storm came out of the east hard on the heels of the final squall and, much against his will and wishes, Borodin was forced to batten down the hatches and leave Sholokov’s body where it was. Any regrets he felt — and they were many and bitter — were soon outweighed by the situation Leonid Brezhnev found herself in. The freighter was less than a day out of Murmansk when the full force of the storm hit. She had made ten knots due north for a couple of hours after leaving the coastal ice and then come to a north-westerly heading, designed to take her across the thousand kilometres to Novaya Zemlya in about one hundred hours’ further sailing. Even with the force of the storm pushing so powerfully against her, she should have made die passage within a week.

At Borodin’s order, the crew first tried running directly into the teeth of the storm and for the rest of the day after Sholokov’s death they plunged doggedly north-east along a rough heading of 60 degrees. It was hard work for all aboard as the wind slowly intensified through gale to severe gale and storm force. The watch officers had to be ready for any flaw in the wind, prepared to meet any of the cunning side draughts the evil pressure system enjoyed throwing at them. A couple of degrees to port or starboard seemed to give the storm the purchase it needed to push them wildly off course when it returned to the north-east — as it always did in the end. They also had to keep a weather eye out for ice as the storm centre was perfectly placed to break up the edge of the winter pack and send all sorts of danger down upon them. The chief and his engineers had done a lot of work on the radar while the ship was laid up in Murmansk and it had been functioning perfectly. This was no longer the case, however, and the radio was producing nothing but static. The watch officers were literally living up to their title, watching for dangers which the safety equipment could no longer see.

The deck officers were equally busy. They had to make sure that the lethal cargo was safe against the increasingly wild motion of the ship. This required constant and diligent attention. No system of ropes and stays could hope to keep the restless cargo safely in place as the ship was hurled up and down and from side to side. Every line and support had to be checked and re-checked at least once during each watch; everyone aboard was all too well aware that if the cargo of decommissioned ammunition in Number Two hold behaved like the cargo immediately forward of it, then the whole ship would be blown to pieces.

The engineers had to ensure that the labouring engine continued to deliver sufficient power to keep them moving along the captain’s dictated course, in spite of the wilful imperatives of the wind. They also had to guarantee that the auxiliaries were all ready to fulfil their functions immediately and faultlessly, from the temperamental central beating system to the centrifugal falls of the lifeboats, which it looked as if they might need to use at any moment.

Nobody aboard got any sleep and precious few got any rest.

Borodin was so tired that he could not stop his eyes from streaming. It seemed that he had been crying almost continuously since Fydor Sholokov’s death, though in all truth he had been too busy to do much mourning. He had remained on the bridge throughout all the watches, not as a gesture of mistrust in his officers but because he knew that the next mistake, the next piece of bad luck, was going to be their last. He sat in the watchkeeper’s chair, comatose with increasing exhaustion and almost uncontrollable nausea. It was not until after midnight, twenty-four hours out of Murmansk and little more than a hundred kilometres along their course, that he suddenly began to wonder whether he had picked up some kind of infection.

He hoped not. He had seen how incredibly rapidly a virulent bug could go round the closed society of a ship at sea, and with what devastating effect. But he was certainly not well. He had eaten almost nothing and normally would have been ravenous, yet the importunities of the unusually excellent cook had been turned away. Even the promise of his favourite mixed vegetable borscht and bitoks had failed to rouse him.

‘Are you well?’ Tatiana Bulgakov had asked — he had refused the food during her second watch. ‘Borscht is exactly what you need. It is hot and bracing. It will give you strength and energy.’

He had shaken his head like a pettish infant and she had shrugged and returned to her duty. She was first lieutenant after all, not babushka here.

Through the night watches, he had found it more and more difficult to contain the sickness demanding so insistently to be released from his heaving stomach, and at four, just when the watch was changing, he had found himself hurrying down to the latrine as the little food inside him, forbidden egress one way, demanded it the other way. After the first convulsion, he found that he suffered uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea every couple of hours and, although he said nothing — and his crew naturally respected his icy solitude — he found the strain of each attack increasingly enervating.

At eight o’clock next morning he called a meeting of his senior officers while he still had the strength to conduct it.

‘The storm is growing stronger,’ he began, ‘but I seem to be growing weaker. There is no doubt I have contracted an illness of some kind. I do not think it could be food poisoning, but if it is, it cannot be from anything aboard I have eaten, as I have eaten nothing since we sailed. It could be from my samovar, I suppose. That would be difficult to check, however. The only other person who drank from it was Sholokov. It may be an infection. How do the rest of you feel?’

None of them admitted to being in the best of health, but to his jaundiced eye they all seemed fit enough. With one major exception.

‘Like you, Captain, I fear I may have contracted some kind of infection,’ admitted the chief engineer. He certainly looked pallid and ill. He had dark rings under his streaming eyes and lines of strain running down from the corners of his mouth to the scraggy skin of his neck. ‘And at least one of my junior engineers seems to have contracted the same thing. I’m afraid we will find it difficult to run the engine room as efficiently as—’

He broke off abruptly and half rose, obviously fighting to control the contents of his rebellious stomach. His lined face was dead white in the grey light of the stormy dawn. A big sea hurled the freighter’s head to starboard and a vicious gust made her roll to the first red band on the gauge of the clinometer.

The captain’s intercom buzzed and he lifted the handset. It was impossible to make out what the watch officer on the bridge wanted, so he sent Tatiana Bulgakov up to see what the problem was and dismissed the rest of them.

He was in the latrine when she returned and he was so concerned to hear what she had to report that he hurried out into his cabin without even flushing.

‘The radio officer has managed to get some intermittent traffic past the static,’ she reported. ‘Apparently things are pretty bad up ahead. There’s a lot of ice and a lot of very bad weather between us and Novaya Zemlya, both heading our way about as quickly as we’re heading up towards them. The ship isn’t riding all that well. The cargo will have to be watched even more closely if we’re to continue on the current heading. And the watch officer says he feels too sick to continue his duty and asks to be relieved so that he can go to bed at once. What are your orders, Captain?’

Borodin stood, swaying, like a boxer about to hit the canvas. There was just too much for him to come to terms with. Through the nauseated haze, only one course of action seemed to make any sense at all.