The Bomb Ship Read online

  *

  Dan Williams met them in the hotel lobby. He was a huge Canadian with a wise, wizened Celtic Welsh face perched atop a Viking giant’s body. His clothes were conservative and businesslike — a dark suit, a pale shirt and a silk tie — but they were unmistakably American and seemed ill-suited to his massive frame. At first glance it was hard to sum him up; he could have been anything from a lawyer to a lumberjack. He was in fact a shipping man. A Canadian version of Richard Mariner, running an independent shipping fleet in a depressed market in a shrinking world. He, unlike Richard, ran a one-man show, but he had used the extra years he had over his English associate to broaden his base: he was a partner in the Sept Isles Waste Disposal Company and he was the man who had part-funded the ships they were here to launch. He owned one of them outright, although Robin would have the honour of naming both. He would run his ship out of Sept Isles where his headquarters was. Richard and Dan had great plans — and a great deal of money bound up in them. But he might just as well have been here to amuse the twins. As soon as they saw him, they ran across the lobby, screaming with glee, to be swept up against the barrel of his chest, one in each arm, for a bear hug.

  As far as the twins were concerned, the limousine was their greatest adventure so far, even better than yesterday’s jet. The sheer size of the car was a source of excitement — even for toddlers used to riding in their parents’ Range Rover and their grandfather’s Bentley. The rear-facing seats in the back proved a source of amusement which Dan Williams compounded and even the disapproval of Nurse Janet could not dim. They crawled all over the seats and tottered dangerously from door to door as the motorcade swept down the North Circular Road round the foot of the mountain and into the outskirts of Belfast itself.

  Robin watched them with a jaundiced eye. Her outfit, carefully chosen from among her favourites pre-pregnancy, felt restrictively tight. She was sure she would present a laughable figure in the news photographs, all horizontal wrinkles and straining seams, like a mother dressed in her daughter’s clothes. Perhaps she should have chosen something more flowing and matronly. But she didn’t feel like a matron, so why should she dress like one? Nurse Janet leaned forward to collect young William just as he began to explore an ashtray beside his father’s elbow. Richard was oblivious, locked in deep discussion with Dan.

  ‘So, this is it, everything ready to go.’

  ‘I guess so. It’s exciting, Richard, but sometimes I think maybe I’m getting too old for this stuff, you know?’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘I need to go through the crewing lists again. I brought them with me to check through on the plane, but I’ll have to take another look when I get back home next week. The captain ...’ The Canadian’s voice drifted off uncertainly.

  ‘That’s the price of running a one-man show, Dan,’ said Richard sympathetically. ‘I did it for long enough before I joined the Heritage Mariner team. Thank God it’s not like that now. I’ve Bill Heritage, looking after things in London at the moment — he knows the shipping better than any of us. Helen Dufour’s sorting out the Russian end ...’ He too broke off. Voicing sympathy with his friend and associate was one thing, making a list of his own relative strengths was too much like boasting. Silence fell for a second; an unnatural state which the twins were happy to dispel.

  Nurse Janet was slim and calm and blonde and especially slim, thought Robin. She would look much better in all the photographs and television news bulletins. Robin stopped Mary from following her brother’s example and handed the squirming toddler to Richard, interrupting his tête-à-tête. At least it didn’t matter how creased Richard’s clothes were, she thought maliciously; it was Dan and she who were on the firing line today.

  As the limousine swung into the Crumlin Road, it became part of a motorcade and suddenly the twins were straining to watch what was going on around them, as though they had suddenly joined a circus parade. William stood on Janet’s lap, his button nose pressed up against the car window, and Mary jiggled up and down on her father’s knees, equally entranced. Even Robin was momentarily distracted by their innocent excitement, though she was all too vividly aware of the importance of the other vehicles in front and behind them. She glanced across at Richard and found that he had been looking at her. The shock of his ice-blue gaze shivered down her spine as it always did and she smiled, relieved to know that he shared some of her concerns.

  The Secretary of State’s motorcade joined in behind theirs as they swept past the end of Corporation Street and into Albert Square.

  It had been a gloomy day so far. The mountain behind the hotel had loomed darkly all the way down to the North Circular Road and the clouds above it had hardly been any lighter. Now, as they came out of Albert Square, past the Custom House and onto Queen Elizabeth Bridge, another squall swept across the city and seemed to follow the river down towards the sea, doing its level best to take the two motorcades along with it. Robin felt the limousine lift off the bridge and she clutched Richard automatically with her left hand, and felt him clutching at Mary as she reached for William with her right. Only Dan Williams sat still, apparently unconcerned, as though his massiveness would hold the car safe in spite of all the wind could do. The car settled back onto the road. The twins screamed with delight. Robin let go of her husband and her son. She met the mocking smile in Dan’s dark eyes and blushed, feeling faintly foolish.

  They turned left out of Queen’s Quay and into Queen’s Road, the backbone of the dockyards. Down the centre of Queen’s Island they sped, with the river on their left, invisible behind the buildings, until they reached the great gates surmounted with the legend ‘Harland and Wolff’. As though by magic, the gates opened and the two motorcades swung in. There was a kind of bedlam as the security vehicles pulled up in one spot and the limousines parked in another. Then Robin was out in the blustery morning, with a solicitous official holding an umbrella over her, and Richard was there beside her, steadying the umbrella with his iron grip as the wind threatened to tear it away. Neither he nor Dan actually seemed to fit beneath the straining umbrellas, but both of them treated the squall with disdain in any case. They had no need to worry about hair-dos and outfits and looking as though they had just stepped out of Vogue magazine. Another set of gates stood in front of them, opening onto a bunting-dressed grandstand, but between the guests and their seats stood eager ranks of photographers and news reporters.

  Both Robin and Richard had enjoyed a fairly positive relationship with the press over the years. Not for many a day had they featured regularly in the gossip columns, though their appearances on the society pages in Tatler and Hello had been frequent enough. They were not really of any interest to the paparazzi; and the financial correspondents who were the other news people interested in their doings rarely went too far in their search for information. Only Richard’s involvement in the Gulf War had pulled them out of the comfortable relationship they enjoyed with the press, and that affected nothing here.

  Indeed, as Richard and Robin approached the press, they smiled at familiar faces and accepted smiles in return with very much more confidence and aplomb than did their old friend the Secretary of State beside them. It was to Sir Jeffrey that the press spoke first, of course, shaking hands with the plump little politician in the over-cheerful pantomime of a photo opportunity. At once the welcoming committee from the great shipbuilding firm joined them and the ritual was repeated against the bright background of the straining golf umbrellas. At the earliest opportunity the news reporters surged forward for comment and question. Here the Secretary of State came into his own, smoothly answering the questions of cub reporters from the local papers and the older hands from the nationals with courteous vagueness. To all of the TV cameras he gave equally bland sound bites. But then the weather took a hand, turning the biggest of the umbrellas inside out, and they were hurried on through, only five minutes behind schedule.

  The press people were all British, with one exception. Richard was surprise
d to see the familiar face of an old American friend among them. Ann Cable was now established as an investigative journalist with a considerable international reputation, but when Richard had first met her she had been a stringer for Reuters working out of Naples and an active member of Greenpeace. They had sailed together on a battered old freighter called Napoli and her fate had at one stroke established Ann’s reputation and Richard’s desire to ensure that the transport of toxic waste was as well controlled as possible. It was his power and influence that had resulted in the ships Robin was about to name. Richard met Ann Cable’s eager, intelligent gaze. The tall American brunette’s bright blue eyes crinkled in the ghost of a smile. Her full lips lifted ever so slightly at the corners. All her Italian blood shone through the minuscule facial expressions. Only the Neapolitan Nico Niccolo, destined to be first officer of one of these ships and long-time lover of Ann, could say more with less expression. Richard found himself giving the ghost of a shrug and she gave the hint of a nod: they would get together later. For the moment, the ceremony must proceed.

  Richard glanced round. The momentary communication with Ann had put him out of step with the rest of his group: Robin was gone with Dan Williams, the Secretary of State and the shipyard and company representatives. Janet seemed to have the twins well in hand. Richard moved forward to join the minor VIPs and climbed onto the brightly dressed grandstand from where he could look down with justifiable pride upon the sister ships he had caused to be built and on his wife who was about to name them.

  Robin’s speech was brief and to the point. Any temptation she might have felt to talk at length was curtailed by the persistent rain and the stormy west wind. Even with the aid of the microphone, much of what she said was all but lost beneath the roaring of the squalls and the explosive flapping of the canvas, the creaking of the grandstand’s tubular steel structure and the hiss of the stormy surf pushed high up the slipway by the tide.

  She told the story of Napoli, the battered old freighter laden with atomic and chemical waste. She explained how she had been trapped at home, heavily pregnant, while Richard had been trapped aboard, hopelessly trying to get the cargo to Canada while the chemicals ate away at the ship and at the protective covering around the atomic waste. Richard had been lucky to survive the loss of the Napoli and was still involved in a court case arising from the incident. That being said, his shock at discovering the state in which such dangerous cargoes could be shipped had strengthened his resolve to see that it was done safely. Heritage Mariner had, in conjunction with the Sept Isles Waste Disposal Company of Sept Isles in Canada and the Williams Shipping Company with which they were associated, set up a route between northern Europe and North America along which toxic waste could be transported safely, at each end of which were facilities which guaranteed equal safety in the disposal of the waste. And these ships were the backbone of that plan. They would be named for two of the Greek Fates, in the hope that a third would be ordered in due course; a hope which in turn rested upon Heritage Mariner’s bid to become involved with the transport for disposal of the massive stockpiles of Soviet nuclear hardware. Hence the ships had been designed with strengthened bows, to function as icebreakers, and the routes to be explored would run as far north as the North Atlantic would allow. Ultimately, should the Fates for whom the sister ships were to be named prove kind, the routes would stretch from the St Lawrence Seaway to Murmansk and even Archangel. In the meantime, the sisters would have to be content with sailing between Sept Isles in Canada and Sellafield in Cumbria.

  ‘I name these ships Atropos and Clotho.’ Robin raised her voice so that the names of the Fates rang around the shipyard and, as she did so, she pressed a button upon the console in front of her which released a bottle of champagne to explode in white foam across the bows of the great ships. In turn, their launch separated by the pause Robin placed between her ringing declamation of the two names, the ships began to move. ‘May God bless them and all who sail in them.’

  Robin paused for an instant to watch the majestic sight of the ships sliding towards the grey, stormy waters of Belfast Lough. The thunder of applause joined the jarring nimble of the sisters inching down the slipway. Then Robin turned and began to make her way towards her husband at the back of the VIP box. The Secretary of State turned at her side and two of his bodyguards automatically closed in behind, but Dan Williams shouldered his way in front of them, wanting to compliment Robin on her speech. The marine architect who had designed the great ships and the shipyard foreman who had built them lingered a little, watching as they gathered way, then they too turned to follow Robin, Sir Jeffrey and the huge Canadian. The completion of the ceremony was exactly ten minutes behind schedule.

  The front of the grandstand blew out in a great cloud of canvas ripped into blazing shreds which whirled around the bows of the sister ships and away down the wind. The two massive vessels seemed to flinch and all the glass at the front of their bridges exploded inwards in seeming sympathy. Several shipyard workers standing on the slipway itself simply ceased to exist: the first of many, many casualties.

  The pipe in which the twenty pounds of Semtex had been packed was not a load-bearing member. When it turned into a cloud of shrapnel, its destruction did not immediately undermine the strength of the tubular steel construction. But the force it unleashed certainly did. The nearest poles were shattered as the original one had been. Further away, they broke. Beyond that, they bent outwards like grass stalks in a storm, flattening and twisting. The wooden sections on top of them came tumbling to the ground. The section Robin had been standing on while she made her speech became a geyser of splinters, black specks hurled skywards like a flock of deadly starlings. The two men who had paused upon it to take one last look at their handiwork became indistinguishable from it: just so many more black splinters rising skywards.

  Most of the power of the explosion went outwards, towards the ships, but much of it also went upwards. Beyond the seat of its power, where everything became atoms, shards and splinters, it still had sufficient power to tear and scorch. The wooden sections became flying boards and the security men upon them became human rockets blazing in the lower air. Hungrily, the lethal power flashed wider and collected the massive form of Dan Williams. By chance, he had stepped onto the third series of boards, and as the section beneath his feet rose in a solid piece, his tree-trunk legs and huge back presented a brief wall against the deadly force of the explosion. A wall of fragile cloth and soft flesh. A wall destroyed by the force unleashed by the motion of the blast and the inertia of the Canadian himself. A wall which, in a millionth of a second, was stripped and scoured and seared to the bone. A wall in the shadow of which stood Robin Mariner. But then the blast took the Canadian. His front remained miraculously unscathed but his back from scalp to heels became an oozing red-and-black anatomy lesson. As the power of it hurled him over Robin’s head, the shock of it stopped his heart.

  *

  Robin never really distinguished the sound of the explosion from the sound of the ships thundering down the slipway. She simply became aware of a force which took her and the Secretary of State and hurled them up the slope of the grandstand atop the tumbling pile of bodies there. But the Secretary of State flew higher than she did and she wondered why that should be so.

  Only Richard seemed to stand firm on the heaving, tearing storm waves of wood. He saw what was happening and — which was more than most did — he understood it. Robin was hurled towards him as the wooden section she was standing on slammed bodily into the air and the one beyond it broke apart and simply flew away. It was impossible that he could catch her or protect her from the unimaginable forces released around her, but he had to try. Such was the nature of his love for her that it never occurred to him to worry about the twins until he knew that she was safe. He knew this was almost stupid: the twins were so helpless and she was quite the opposite, but he had adored her so much for so long that even proud fatherhood could not rival what he felt for her. So absolute was
his concentration upon her that he never even saw what happened to Dan Williams or to the Secretary of State.

  He did not consciously follow the flight of her body but some atavistic ability, far deeper and more powerful than generations of civilisation, took him to where she lay almost as soon as she fell on the jumble of stunned and stricken people there. Like a wild man he leaped across the heaving structure until he could fall to his knees by her side and roll her tenderly onto her back. Her skin was white and cold. She was covered in blood. He could smell the odour of burning about her but neither her hair nor her clothing seemed to be alight. He knew the risk he was running in moving her, but he had little choice in the matter.

  His ears were not what they once had been: explosive decompression had done them no good at all as he fought free of the sunken Napoli, nor had the Gulf War, and this blast now had set them to ringing again as though he had a carillon of bells in his dizzy head. Even so, the sounds he could hear from below the sliding wooden sections warned him that the whole grandstand might well be coming down. He had to get her clear of it as quickly as he could. Desperately, he began to look for help.

  He did not look in vain. He was by no means alone in his quick reaction to the unexpected blast. The security men were already in action and the soldiers who had been in the security vehicles were forming quickly into rescue squads to get the wounded away. But it was Ann Cable who got to him first. He saw her forcing her way towards him through the flood of people going the other way. No, she was not hurrying towards him, he realised, but towards the Secretary of State sitting dazedly a few feet away, watching smoke curling up from the rags of clothing on his arms.

  Some sort of order was beginning to form now. The people on the upper sections of the grandstand were streaming towards safety. They were quiet, shocked no doubt; there was no sign of panic except where one or two knots of horrified people had gathered around the corpses blasted up there in bits and pieces. Richard, Robin and Sir Jeffrey were among the hurt and unconscious in the middle section of the great construction. Behind them was the great gaping hole above the heart of the blast. Below this hole, in a twisted jungle of ruined metal, the first rescue workers were looking for any life amid the obviously dead who had been blown straight up and who had rained back down.