‘Come about. One hundred and eighty degrees,’ he said. ‘Reverse course completely. We’ll run before the storm until things get sorted out one way or another.’
First Officer Bulgakov nodded once, decisively, in agreement. ‘Come to two forty and run before the storm until I receive further orders. Yes, Captain,’ she said, and was gone.
Borodin remained swaying where he was for a moment or two after she had gone, trying to remember what he had been doing before she came in. Then he remembered, and returned to the latrine. When he got there, he stood for several moments looking down into the bowl, his long face folded into a frown of deep concern. Rough squares of toilet paper were floating in what seemed to be a puddle of watery blood.
What in the name of God was going on here? he wondered. He staggered across to the washbasin and stood for a moment, the only clear thought in his head that if this was some kind of infection he had better wash his hands very carefully.
Above the metal basin was a mirror and, for the first time since they had left Murmansk, Borodin found himself looking at his own reflection. It came as a stunning surprise. His skin was white and lined. There were black rings below his bloodshot, streaming eyes. At the corners of his mouth and nose there were lines of pale, crusted sores. The vomit had left an iron taste in his mouth which seemed to be clinging to his teeth and he sucked at them speculatively, then spread his lips in a slow grimace, careful lest he split the sores open. His teeth were edged in blood from his gums.
He looked at himself. He knew what this meant. He knew what this meant and it was important.
The ship heeled and rolled as she began to come round. He lost his grip on the basin and staggered. He made it to his bunk and collapsed. His mind would be clearer after some sleep, he thought. He would work out what to do about everything after he had had some sleep.
Tatiana Bulgakov was an excellent first officer, dedicated, able and decisive. But the next few days proved far beyond her capacity. With the captain increasingly feverish, and the chief and a growing number of engineers, deck officers and crew going the same way, she found herself run to the edge of utter exhaustion. In common with the majority of Western ships, Leonid Brezhnev relied upon the first officer to act as medic for routine problems and a Pan Medic call for emergencies. But the radio wasn’t working and the radio officer could find nothing wrong with it. Unable to summon aid, she had to intersperse increasingly long watches with ever more frenetic sick calls. There was no real question of controlling the ship — she certainly stood no chance of getting back into Murmansk — and she was content to keep running with the storm, trying to maintain some kind of idea where they were. Her measurements and calculations became increasingly approximate as her exhaustion grew deeper and, in the constant scurrying overcast, any sight of sun or stars remained impossible. The navigating equipment was no more reliable than the radio and all too soon they were effectively lost in the vast eastern approaches to the terrible Denmark Strait.
The current beneath the weary hull was moving sluggishly south, and the heading on the compass read 240 magnetic unvaryingly, but the storm and the circumstances were playing tricks. Degree by degree the wind moved round to the south, though it moderated not a jot. By dawn on the third day, Leonid Brezhnev’s course was coming up to the better part of 330 degrees and nobody aboard knew a thing about it. And even if they had, they would hardly have had the power to do anything much about it.
Captain Borodin awoke on the morning of the fourth day since his sickness — the fifth since they left Murmansk — with his head a little clearer. Tatiana Bulgakov’s careful ministrations had filled him with warming, heartening borscht; increasingly his system had accepted the bracing liquid which was at once nourishing food and drink. She was, in fact, sitting next to his bed gently taking his pulse when his clouded blue eyes flickered open.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Eight.’ Her thick blonde eyebrows arched in surprise that he should be awake and apparently so alert. ‘I’m just going to watch.’
‘You look dreadful.’ He was still too groggy for tact.
‘You should see yourself.’ So was she.
Her information sank in and he struggled to sit up. ‘Your watch doesn’t start at eight,’ he accused.
‘Does now. Has done for two days. Eight to four, morning and night.’
A whole series of questions clamoured. He didn’t know which one to ask first, but the logical one came out first. ‘Where are we?’
‘Somewhere in the Denmark Strait.’
‘How are we heading?’
‘As per your last order. Two hundred and forty degrees magnetic.’
‘How long have I been out?’
‘Four days.’
His eyes flickered with the shock. ‘Weather?’
‘No change. North-easterly storm running down behind us.’
He licked his lips. They felt swollen, simian, edged with crusted craters. He took a shuddering breath.
She put his hand down and he lifted it off the blanket and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else entirely. There were blisters on it and he knew exactly what that meant. He raised it and ran the fingers across his scalp, closing them into a loose fist. When he lowered his hand he found he was shaking. His fist was full of black hairs and he had felt no pain as he pulled them out by the roots.
‘Get out the dosimeters,’ he said.
‘I have,’ she answered. ‘I did it yesterday when I saw the pattern in the sickness. But they don’t work properly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re all stuck on maximum. That’s all they read.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them.’
‘No variation?’
‘None.’
‘No matter where on the ship you are?’
‘I haven’t been everywhere, but pretty much. I think they’re broken.’
‘All four of them.’ He remembered that somewhere recently he had heard of something like this happening. Now where… Ah, yes. At Chernobyl. The firemen at Chernobyl had thought their dosimeters were broken because they were all stuck on maximum. Chernobyl was still fresh in his memory, though in common with the rest of Russia he had very little idea of how serious the incident had actually proved. It had been only six weeks since the explosion.
‘All four. I hope they’re broken.’
They looked at each other, two blue eyes and two brown ones. All weeping. He noticed that she, too, had sores at the corners of her lips. He knew then with a kind of numb certainty that the dosimeters were not broken at all. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked softly.
‘Tired. Sick.’
He nodded.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked softly.
‘I could be wrong,’ he answered, ‘but I think we’re going to die.’
He had to be carried up to the bridge, but once he was there he found he was quite comfortable in the watchkeeper’s chair. The spasms of diarrhoea had calmed during his long sleep and he had time to review their situation and talk to the few crew who were still fit and functioning, before the first spasm overtook him. When he returned, weaker but doggedly determined, there was time to begin to make some kind of plan.
The continuing savagery of the storm made it impossible for them to dump the cargo overboard, even had they the individual or collective strength to do so. They hadn’t even got the strength to control the ship, really. Certainly it was far beyond the bounds of practical possibility to reverse course again and run back towards home. But he could not bring himself to view the prospect of continuing to run along their present course with any degree of satisfaction. At this rate, according to his calculations based on Tatiana’s scribbled notes in the log, they would simply be spewed out into the North Atlantic somewhere to the west and south of Iceland. From the look of things, they would be past Cape Farewell before the weather moderated. For a nightmare moment he envisaged them ending up marooned with their lethal cargo somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States. But then, he thought grimly, if they did have radiation poisoning from leakage in their cargo, the United States was the best place they could possibly be. The only place where they stood a chance of immediate survival. But that was a hopeless fantasy. They would do far better to look for some shelter.