The Bomb Ship Read online

  The Bomb Ship

  Peter Tonkin

  Copyright © Peter Tonkin 1993

  The right of Peter Tonkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1993 by Headline Book Publishing PLC.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Cham and Guy

  BOMB SHIP: ‘A ship loaded with mortars or bombs.’

  First used 1704.

  Oxford English Dictionary

  For there is no friend like a sister,

  In calm or stormy weather;

  To cheer one on the tedious way,

  To fetch one if one goes astray,

  To lift one if one totters down,

  To strengthen whilst one stands.

  Christina Rossetti, Goblin Fair

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE - The Bombs

  CHAPTER ONE - Naming Day

  CHAPTER TWO - Naming Day

  CHAPTER THREE - Day One

  CHAPTER FOUR - Day Three

  CHAPTER FIVE - Day Four

  CHAPTER SIX - Day Four

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Day Six

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Day Six

  CHAPTER NINE - Day Six

  CHAPTER TEN - Day Seven

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Day Seven

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Day Eight

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Day Eight

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Day Nine

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Day Nine

  PART TWO - The Sisters

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Day Nine

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Day Nine

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Day Nine

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Day Nine

  CHAPTER TWENTY - Day Ten

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Day Ten

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Day Ten

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Day Ten

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Day Ten

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Day Eleven

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Day Eleven

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Day Eleven

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Day Eleven

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Day Eleven

  CHAPTER THIRTY - Day Twelve

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Day Twelve

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Day Twelve

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Day Thirteen

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Day Thirteen

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - The Last Day

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - The Last Day

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Independence Day

  Acknowledgements

  Extract from The Coffin Ship by Peter Tonkin

  PART ONE - The Bombs

  CHAPTER ONE - Naming Day

  Tuesday, 16 February 04:00

  The black waters parted and a black-wrapped bundle rose all but invisibly to the surface. It was rounded but not round, as though a square object had been wrapped in some protective material and then swathed in black plastic. It was about the same size as a backpack and roughly the same shape, though the way it sat on the water made it seem that something larger and more buoyant was supporting it from just beneath the inky waves.

  A westerly squall gusted across the lough, spraying chill rain like handfuls of gravel, setting the surface to dancing and foaming, and sending all the flotsam bobbing eastward with the choppy wavelets it created. The black bundle moved determinedly westwards into the teeth of the wind, shorewards towards the sickly yellow of the security lighting and the twinkling city beyond.

  A second squall roared over the mountain and across the sleeping streets and on down to set the water rearing into more ugly wavelets, giving the first bundle a brief bow wave just as a second one broke water beside it. The foul weather continued to beat against them as they pushed forwards, like two slightly misshapen naval mines, towards the shore. As they neared the tide line, so the heads and air tanks of the divers pushing them broke the surface in turn and the steady beating of their diving fins disturbed the wave pattern behind. The nearer the tide line they came, the slower the divers swam, so that at last, just as the two black bundles began to grind up a solid slope, all forward motion stopped and the glass of two face plates reflected the security lighting as the divers looked up and around themselves.

  Beyond the bulk of the bundle, each saw first the slope of a concrete slipway, slick and glossy with rain, ribboned with steel rails like giant railway tracks. At the crest of the slope, on the runways waiting to be launched, sat two ships side by side. The ships were facing inland, and the perspective combined with massive size and impenetrable shadows to make it impossible for the divers to comprehend everything at once. All they could clearly make out as they hung immobile in the freezing water, waiting until their first visual check of this end of the shipyard was complete, was the massive brass propeller sitting beneath the overhanging stern of each of the ships.

  Each propeller had three blades and each blade shone, bright new metal reflecting the security lighting almost as clearly as the glass in the face plates. Each blade was as tall as the first storey of a house front and almost as wide. With the huge conical boss round which the blades were hinged, each of the propellers would have obscured the front of any of the modest two-storey terraced houses in the city beyond the shipyard. There was about them an air of massive weight and solidity, an impression which was deepened by the hulls of the ships beyond.

  The divers floated for an instant side by side, a tall, muscular figure beside a shorter, slighter one. For all their physical difference it was clear that the shorter of the two was the dominant one the instant they were in action. There was no signal apparent between them but they were in motion at exactly the same moment, pushing their burdens forward up the slipway to reveal black rafts on which the bundles sat. The wind thundered around them as they rose out of the water like black seals. The rain spattered and hissed on the concrete as they slipped off their air tanks and face masks, then crouched to remove their flippers and to release the bundles from the rafts. The foul weather cocooned them as they sprinted forward into the outwash of the security lighting, each now burdened with his black-wrapped parcel, heading with one accord for darkness and quiet.

  But not warmth: there was no heat available to the two divers within or without. All they could hope for was some shelter from the stormy wind and the driving rain, some opportunity to catch their breath, chafe their shaking hands, and endeavour to massage some feeling back into their numbed fingers. So cold were they that the rain felt warm against their lips and chins before the wind-chill factor cooled the wet skin to freezing. Bare feet as senseless as fingers stumbled and stubbed as the two black-clad figures ran up the slipway and into the darkness between the two ships. The closer they came to the pair of vessels, the greater their size seemed to grow. The thrust of massive steering gear became obvious behind the great propellers. Smaller, manoeuvring propellers behind the main ones were dwarfed by the sheer scale of the shafts thrusting out to the main propellers. The hulls of the ship towered over the two scurrying figures and the bundles they were carrying.

  Between the parallel keels was a tunnel of darkness five hundred feet long and into this the two divers plunged side by side. Moments later they emerged, every bit as hesitantly as they had come out of the water, into the light between the steel-clad cliffs of the bows. Immediately beyond the dizzy reach of the shear cutwaters stood a grandstand constructed of steel girders dressed in bright canvas. The gaudy colours seemed to be bleached and running under the twin effects of yellow light and driving rain. The bunting seemed to be light and sere under the influence of the stormy wind. Beneath the canvas covers, however, there was relative calm and apparent warmth, if not much reduction in noise, and the two
figures crouched side by side again, like children sheltering in a massive tent. The canvas was heavy enough to cut off most of the light and so the first thing taken from each of the bundles was a torch. Two beams swept around the forest of tubular steel supports and the wooden sky of seats rising into impenetrable shadow, step by step as the grandstand fell back. But the divers were not interested in the further reaches. They unpacked their bundles and retraced their steps to that part of the grandstand which stood nearest to the twin hulls of the ships. Here they shone their torch beams along one steel strut after another, bright pools of light lingering especially on the joints, until one thick reinforcement tube answered the yellow brightness with a small red mark.

  The taller diver held the beam on the marked member while the other carefully unscrewed it. The wind gusted with a sound like an avalanche outside and all the girders flexed and creaked. Both divers looked around apprehensively, but the joint they were uncoupling remained firm. The sleeve which they were unscrewing slid down to reveal the gape of open tubes. While everything else around then flexed and groaned, these tubes remained firm. It was the work of a very few minutes to pack the contents of the black bundles into the hollow tubes. Twenty pounds of doughy Semtex explosive oozed stiffly into the metal members, turning the grandstand’s false supports into a lethally powerful bomb. A timer, itself tubular, fitted exactly between the ends of the tubes within the joint. A white finger pushed a button and a pre-set display flashed into life. The finger was chalk-white because it was chilled to the bone and what should have been a simple, accurate, single stab of action, became a clumsy, shaking one. The display flashed into life, died, lit up again. The pre-set figures jumped forward, adding ten minutes to the countdown.

  The two divers looked at each other, frozen with shock. Then the slighter one, who had mis-set the timer, gave a peculiar, almost French shrug. ‘C’est la vie’, it seemed to say. Clearly it would be impossible to reset the digital display through twenty-three hours and fifty minutes if the simple act of switching it on could go so disastrously wrong. Hurriedly now, as though unnerved by the bad luck that had rendered their actions less than perfect, the first diver lifted the joint sleeve and screwed it back into place so that its extra thickness perfectly concealed the explosive and the timer. Then the two of them stumbled back to the little pile of rubbish which was all that remained of their two bundles. Carefully they cleared up any trace of themselves and then they ran back out into the stormy night. Under the restless canvas, all that remained of their presence was a twin set of wet footprints which were almost instantly concealed by the drizzle forcing its way through the wooden seats above.

  At the water’s edge, they fought their way back into their compressed air tanks and their flippers. They carried the rubbish with them back out into the water until they could leave it floating safely, anonymously, lost for ever among the flotsam. Then they turned to look back one last time and the taller one hit the other on the shoulder in exuberant relief. ‘Well done!’ the friendly blow seemed to say. The smaller figure reacted unexpectedly. Turning towards the tall diver, it reached up for him, face plate dangling from one slim wrist. He lowered his head and, waist deep in the black water, the two divers kissed long and deeply.

  Then the slighter figure put her mouthpiece where his lips had been and turned away. He stood for a moment longer looking back at the pale wash of the security lighting, the dark loom of the sister ships and the two bright brass stars of the propellers. The glass of his face plate reflected the dockyard and the lights of the city beyond, creeping up the black shoulder of the mountain behind. Then he gave a fatalistic, almost hopeless shrug and followed his companion eastwards into the first steely promise of the stormy dawn.

  CHAPTER TWO - Naming Day

  Tuesday, 16 February 08:00

  Robin Mariner turned away from the shaving mirror above the washbasin and padded across the bathroom. She had used a flannel to wipe away the condensation from her bath, but it kept returning to make the little glass useless as a make-up mirror. As she passed the bathroom chair, she caught up her towelling dressing gown and used it to clear the condensation off the full-length bathroom mirror instead. When she had done so, she stood back and moodily surveyed her naked body in it. She did not much like what she saw.

  Since her teens she had taken a sort of thoughtless pride in her girlish figure and her ability to keep it. Her busy, physically demanding work had seen to that. Slim muscularity and complete fitness had been something she had taken for granted. But during the last eighteen months, motherhood had changed all that. It had added an unwelcome softness to her breasts, inches and stretch marks to her waist and hips, an all too apparent weightiness to her thighs and bottom. She felt fat.

  An explosion of hilarity came from beyond the bathroom door as the twins pulled their father into one of their games. Robin’s mouth twitched into an automatic smile which only served to show the wrinkles around her eyes. Really, this mirror was merciless! She padded closer and concentrated on her face. Too many windswept, blistering days at sea had undermined the natural creaminess of her complexion and all the oils and unguents money could buy did nothing to smooth the lines at the corners of her eyes and lips. At least the gold of her short-cropped curls concealed the increasing number of silver hairs among them. Even so, she felt old.

  The noise from the bedroom reached a kind of hysterical climax and then stopped abruptly. Robin knew what that meant: Nurse Janet had entered and the three of them were in trouble. She shook her head, still lost in thought. Where did Richard get his energy from? Janet had been hired to help him convalesce after the Gulf War and had stayed on to act as a nanny to William and Mary and yet of all of the family, it seemed that Robin had the least energy, the lowest resilience.

  The twins had been up all night, unsettled by yesterday’s journey and the strangeness of their surroundings; no one in the hotel suite, probably no one in the hotel itself, had got any sleep at all. She leaned forward until her breath clouded on the water-streaked glass. She rarely bothered with much make-up but she would have to do something about those dark rings round her eyes. There were bound to be photographs when she launched the sister ships and she didn’t want to see herself looking like a panda in all the papers. Or on television either, for that matter.

  And cameras added pounds to even the slimmest of figures. Oh, why had she agreed to do it? she asked herself pettishly, though she knew the answer well enough. The sister ships were important to the company which Richard and she ran.

  Heritage Mariner was just about the last independent shipping company in Britain. The oil-shipping trade, the backbone of their business, was on its uppers these days. What little demand there had been was all but killed by the Gulf War. At the moment, all attempts to broaden their base into commodity shipping had been crippled by the IRA’s recent attack on the Baltic Exchange, which had also destroyed the original offices of Crewfinders, Richard’s first company, and had blown out all the windows in Heritage House, their current headquarters. Heritage Mariner’s more recent venture into leisure boats had been hampered by the recession in Europe and America.

  The sister ships waiting to be launched later this morning represented Heritage Mariner’s move into the only growth area in modern shipping: the safe transport of military and industrial waste — if the term ‘safe’ could ever be applied to the chemical and nuclear filth the two ships were designed to carry across the wild North Atlantic.

  Her watch alarm began to sound, jerking her back to reality. She glanced at the multi-function diving chronometer on her left wrist, though she knew what the time was well enough. Eight fifteen. She had better get a move on. The long fingers of her right hand ran through the damp curls of her hair. She never normally bothered with a hair dryer, but today was different. She returned across the room, reached for the portable, battery-powered one Richard had bought her especially for this trip and turned it on the mirror above the washbasin, clearing away the condensation which h
ad crept back while she was lost in thought. Perhaps this one would be kinder than the full-length one, she thought.

  Twenty minutes later she was just putting the finishing touches to an unaccustomedly thorough make-up when the bathroom door opened.

  ‘Nurse Janet and I have given the monsters their breakfast,’ said Richard. ‘I have the porridge on my dressing gown to prove it. God, you look wonderful.’ He wrapped his arms round her waist and lifted her off the floor until the bristles on his chin were scraping softly against the junction of her neck and shoulder. The sensation made her shiver with lust.

  Even reflected in the little mirror they made a striking couple. Her blonde ringlets curled against the solid plane of his cheek, setting off its steel-blue lines. The grey concealed within them was more obvious against the black of his temples, a salt and pepper effect she loved. The peaches and cream complexion she felt she was beginning to lose remained enough in evidence to show off the weathered tan of his high forehead and sharp cheekbones. The deep grey of her eyes set off the light blue in his. Where her nose almost turned up, his plunged in that patrician way, broken slightly out of line by some adventure in his youth. God, how she loved him, she thought.

  ‘Put me down, darling,’ she ordered, but her voice lacked conviction. Then she felt the chilly patches which told her he had not been exaggerating about the porridge on his dressing gown. She thought about going through the next few hours with cold porridge drying in her back. ‘Put me down at once!’ she said again and this time he did not hesitate.

  ‘May I shave now?’

  ‘Yes. I haven’t much more to do.’ She ran her fingers through her hair again in case his clumsy playfulness had disturbed it. Her mood began to darken once more. She crossed back to the full-length glass and leaned closer to it as Richard’s hot shaving water splashed into the basin. At once, her mirror began to fog up again.