Year of the Golden Ape (25 page)

^{'That's right...'}

^{'Which is my understanding of the way computers work-we're installing them this year in several more departments in the city. Frankly, what convinces me we ought to check is Ephraim - and the use of his name in this signal you got back from the ship. It almost suggests that someone, maybe the captain, was trying to tell us something is wrong.' He smiled again. 'You won't mind if I check myself with the Marine Centre at The Hague? Before I start raising hell I'd better make sure I have some kind of launch pad under me...'}

^{It was one o'clock in the afternoon in San Francisco, nine hours before the
Challenger
was due to dock at Oleum.}

^{As the
Challenger
steamed steadily towards San Francisco at seventeen knots, a battered, bruised, misshapen ship, but still with her engine power unaffected, an edgy tension grew on board. Which was strange because it might have been expected that morale would rise as they neared their ultimate destination which should see the end of their ordeal. Quite the reverse was happening.}

^{The British crew and officers were badly affected by the unexplained disappearance of Monk, the missing engine-room artificer. Brady, the engine-room chief, tried to keep up the morale of his men by suggesting that Monk was hiding somewhere. 'It would take more than one of these froggie terrorists to put paid to a man like Monk,' he assured Lanky Miller. 'He just didn't get his chance to sort out LeCat, so he's gone to ground somewhere ...'}

^{Mackay and Bennett had taken a more realistic view in the chart-room when they discussed it early in the morning before dawn. 'I think the cat got him,' Bennett said. They had taken to referring to the French terrorist they most feared as 'the cat'.}

^{'I think you're probably right,' Mackay had replied. 'What I don't understand is why Winter has made no reference to it.'}

^{'And we can hardly ask him. How would we go about it ? 'Mr Winter, we sent one of our men to kill your second-in-command and he's gone missing. Any news?' It's getting on the men's nerves, too. You know what seamen are - a man dying at sea rouses superstition, but a man disappearing, that's enough to send them round the bend ...'}

^{So LeCat's method was working, which was ironical. Winter had kept the crew under control earlier by being forceful but not brutal. He had, in fact, more than justified Sheikh Gamal Tafak's judgement that it would take an Englishman to control a British crew. Now, without anyone being aware of it - least of all Winter - LeCat's use of the terror weapon was also working, grinding away at the morale of the crew only a few hours' sailing time from San Francisco. LeCat observed what was happening through habitually half-closed eyes without apparently noticing anything. Soon Winter would leave the ship and he would assume control; meantime the crew was slowly losing its guts.}

^{The tension on board was not confined to the prisoners; the ex-OAS guards themselves showed signs of mounting tension as they came closer and closer to the American mainland, and this showed itself in a stricter, more irritable, trigger-fingered attitude. Nor was Winter, cold and detached as he was, free from tension. It was not the approach to California which plucked at his nerves; the closer he came to the climax the more icy he became. It was the unexplained incidents which warned his sixth sense that something was going wrong. First, there was the second signal from the mainland which arrived at 2pm.}

^{Please confirm urgently that all is well aboard your ship. I require a fully worded signal in reply. Certain of your signals have not conformed to normal practice. O'Hara. San Francisco Port Authority.}

^{Winter immediately showed this signal to Mackay who had just come back on to the bridge after sleeping for four hours. 'I want to know what this means,' Winter demanded. 'You'll agree you wouldn't normally receive this kind of signal? What has aroused O'Hara's suspicions?'}

^{'You have, I expect,' Mackay replied bluntly.}

^{'What does that mean ?'}

^{'Since you seized control of my ship you have sent all the radio messages. Somewhere, it seems, you blundered...'}

^{'So what answer would you send ?'}

^{'I'm not dictating a reply,' Mackay said firmly. He turned his back on Winter and stared through the smashed bridge window. Betty Cordell stood beside him, noting all that was going on. Because there were always two British officers present, she was now spending most of her time on the bridge; there was an atmosphere of rising tension on the ship which worried her. Beyond the window the ocean was incredibly calm, a grey, placid plain under a grey, placid sky. Typhoon Tara was now ripping her way south, causing havoc on the sea lanes to Australia, while
Challenger
approached San Francisco from the south-west. This route - normally the tanker would have come in from the north-west -was being followed under pressure from Winter who planned to arrive unexpectedly at the entrance to Golden Gate channel.}

^{'You must work out your own reply,' Mackay repeated when he was asked a second time.}

^{Winter let it go, decided not to make an issue of it with Mackay. Within a few hours' sailing time of his objective he was going to be very careful not to stir up more trouble. He wrote out the reply himself and then took it to Kinnaird.}

^{'Does this mean that they know something?' Kinnaird asked nervously as he read the message. 'Are we in trouble?'}

^{'Send the message,' Winter ordered him. 'Did you think getting into San Francisco was going to be a cake walk ?'}

^{He left the radio cabin, locking the door behind him and handing the key to the armed guard outside. Kinnaird began transmitting.
All is not well aboard my ship. Between 0100 and 0500 hours we passed through the eye of Typhoon Tara. Bridge structure extensively damaged but vessel seaworthy. Engine room unaffected. Proceeding on course for Oleum through calm waters at seventeen knots. Cannot understand your reference to my signals which have been transmitted as usual at regular intervals. Estimated time of arrival at Oleum still 2200 hours. Mackay.}

^{Winter, who had catnapped for short periods later in the night when the typhoon subsided, became more active than ever, turning up unexpectedly all over the ship. He noted the edginess of the guards, but that was to be expected - as they came very close to the Californian coast they were bound to be apprehensive, and most of them were recovering from sea-sickness.}

^{What puzzled him was the sullenness of the British crew. Hostility he could have understood - expected - but there was something furtive in the way they looked at him when he went down into the engine-room, some mood he didn't understand. He checked to make sure that no man had been injured by LeCat. He questioned LeCat himself.}

^{'Have you been threatening them ?' he demanded when he was alone with the French terrorist inside the cabin he had taken over for his own use. 'There's a feeling growing on this ship I don't understand...'}

^{'What kind of feeling?' LeCat enquired.}

^{'A feeling of murderous resentment. If we're not careful there'll be an explosion just when I don't want it...'}

^{'I'll warn the guards ...'}

^{'I'll warn them. You'd better get back on the bridge.'}

^{Edgy as he was inwardly, Winter still remembered to send a guard to escort Betty Cordell off the bridge and back to her cabin; with LeCat now stationed on the bridge it was better to keep the American girl out of the way. At three o'clock in the afternoon there was a third incident, when the tanker was only forty miles off the Californian coast, something far more disturbing than the arrival of a fresh signal.}

^{The US Coast Guard helicopter arrived at exactly 1500 hours, cruising in towards the tanker so close to the ocean that only a man with LeCat's sharp eyes would have seen it so quickly. He used the phone to call Winter to the bridge. Winter reacted instantly, ordering three seamen to be brought up from the day cabin.}

^{'You will go out on to the main deck,' he told them. 'Take those cleaning materials the guard has brought and pretend to be working. If you make any attempt to signal for help to this chopper three men in the day cabin will be shot. Their lives are in your hands...'}

^{At the front of the bridge Mackay was looking sour; Winter was the devil incarnate. He thought of everything. At the moment the deserted deck had an abnormal, naked look. By the time the helicopter arrived it would look as though nothing were wrong.}

^{'Now let's all be quite clear about what's going to happen,' Winter said grimly as the three seamen were escorted off the bridge. 'Mr Mackay will stay where he is. You, Bennett, will go forward beside him. If the chopper flies alongside us you will wave to it. I shall be out of sight at the rear of the bridge, watching you...'}

^{Mackay, still tired, tried desperately to think of some way he could indicate to the chopper pilot what was happening, but the problem defeated him. He watched this representative of the outside, sane world, the first representative he had seen since the terrorists came aboard, flying towards him. It was an anxious moment. For Winter also, as he stood well out of sight with LeCat beside him. The armed guards couldn't possibly be seen no matter how close the machine came.}

^{It was heading straight for the bow of the ship, and through the open window they could now hear, above the throb of the
Challenger's
engines, the lighter, faster beat of the helicopter's engine. There was no doubt about it: the machine was coming to take a look at them, maybe even attempt a landing where, two days earlier, Winter himself had landed a Sikorsky which in appearance was the twin of the one approaching them.}

^{Inside her cabin Betty Cordell had her porthole wide open. With her acute sense of hearing, sharpened by a childhood spent in the desert, she had heard it coming a long way off. At first she thought it might be the terrorists' helicopter returning, but when she poked her head out of the open porthole she saw the tiny blip just above the sea, flying in from the east, from the direction of the mainland. She decided to take a chance.}

^{Grabbing one of the white towels from out of the bathroom, she used her felt-tip pen to inscribe the three letters large-size on the towel. SOS. She went back to the porthole and waited. It was much closer now, she could tell from the engine sound, although the bow of the ship concealed how close it was. If only it would fly along the port side, along her side of the ship. The engine beat became a sharp drumming staccato. She leaned out of the porthole again and still she couldn't see it. She licked her dry lips and waited with the towel in her hands.}

^{The air coming in through the porthole was almost warm; the tanker was now moving through far more southerly latitudes than when it had sailed from Alaska. The engine beat of the incoming Sikorsky was rising to a roar when the cabin door behind Betty Cordell opened and the armed guard came inside. He ran across to the porthole, slammed it shut, pulled the curtain over it and dragged the towel out of her hand. 'You sit over the bed,' he said in halting English. She sat down on the edge of the bunk and clasped her trembling hands in front of her.}

^{'You are bad,' he said, looking at the marked towel. 'LeCat will not like...'}

^{'Tell Winter,' she said in a weary voice. 'He won't like it either...'}

^{Inside the day cabin the seamen not on duty were lying face down on their stomachs while three guards stood close to the walls pointing pistols at them. The curtains were drawn over the portholes. The same scene was taking place inside the galley where Wrigley had joined Bates, the cook, on the floor. It was a further order Winter had issued on the bridge when he saw the Sikorsky coming - that the prisoners above engine-room level must be put in a position where it would be impossible for them to signal to the US Coast Guard plane.}

^{The Sikorsky reached the bow, flew at fifty feet above the ocean along the port side of the tanker. 'Wave!' Winter shouted from the rear of the bridge. 'Do you want your helmsman to get a bullet in the back ?' Bennett waved without enthusiasm, and then Mackay noticed something - the helmeted pilot inside his dome was not waving back. Which was damned odd.}

^{The machine flew past the stern and Winter watched it going through the rear window. 'Doesn't the pilot normally acknowledge your wave?' he asked. 'I didn't see him wave back ...'}

^{'They don't always,' Mackay lied. 'If they're near the end of a patrol they're only interested in getting back home.. .'}

^{'He's coining back!' LeCat shouted.}

^{Half a mile beyond the tanker's stern the Sikorsky was circling; then, squat-nosed and small, it headed straight back towards the tanker steaming away from it. As it came closer Winter gave a fresh order. 'Don't wave at it this time. Just watch it go. Do they ever communicate with you by radio when they're as close as this?'}

^{'Not often,' Mackay said neutrally. He wasn't at all sure what was happening. The machine flew past them again, this time along the starboard side, still only fifty feet above the waves, which meant it passed below bridge deck level. On the main deck one seaman was hosing down the open areas while the other two seamen swabbed with brushes. They had decided to use the hose on their own initiative, to make it look good. As one of them said, 'Even if it lands and has Marines aboard those buggers will shoot our lads before they can get to them ...' Mackay, as he watched, had never seen them work harder. He thought he understood why. Kinnaird, pale-faced, came running on to the bridge a moment later. He handed a message to Winter.}