A Ravel of Waters

He backed out of the sick-bay; the guard took up his previous position behind the glass partition.

I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. For fully a couple of minutes we all stood rooted. Finally, I broke the silence.

'I'll put your case in a cubicle, Kay — any particular choice?' 'The closer to you both, the better.'

I started to pick up the case and she said, 'They let me bring my transistor radio. It might help pass the time — until Molot.' She was close to tears. 'What is Molot? Peter? John?'

'I wish we knew,' replied Tideman. 'We've been racking our brains all day.'

She went into her cubicle. I followed. Inside, there was no need to say anything. She came into my arms. I could feel the dry sobs from her throat through her breasts against me. Her lips were a warm pulse of agony and denied ecstasy, wet with tears.

'Just when I've found the man I want, I'm to lose him!' she whispered brokenly. 'Why didn't you just let me go this morning? It would have been better all round. Oh, my love, my darling!'

I held her close and said those things which can only be said in the presence of new love. Finally her sobs quietened.

I said, more to comfort her than with any plan in mind, 'Three days is a long time, Kay. Anything could happen before we reach Molot.'

'Molot!' she echoed. 'How I hate that name already! What is it? What does it mean? It has an evil ring, like Trolltunga.'

'It's Russian, that's for sure. What it means is as much a mystery as where it is.' -

Then we joined Tideman in the main 'ward'. He was listening to Kay's radio, turning it every way to try and improve reception.

'I had the Cape Town news’ he said. 'It reported concern because no signals had been received from Jetwind for a day. There was an interview with Thomsen. I couldn't hear clearly — something about no contact with the ship.'

Kay voiced the concern uppermost in all our minds. 'John — Peter — why should the Russians be interested in me? I haven't any secrets!'

Tideman switched.off the radio with a significant gesture. He said gravely, 'You have, Kay.' 'I? Secrets?'

He waved us into a couple of hard chairs round a low table. He opened a drawer by his bed and produced a pack of cards, obviously provided for patients. He nodded towards the watching sentry.

'If we hold a discussion in the ordinary way I'm sure we'll rouse his suspicions,' he said quietly. 'We'll pretend we're playing cards. I'll explain.'

Kay's hand was shaking when Tideman dealt the first round. 'Secrets?' she repeated incredulously.

'Aye, secrets, Kay. Remember when the Schiffbau Institut was making the final wind-tunnel tests of Jetwind's sails and masts?'

'Sure — I was there!' she exclaimed. 'You were there, too. That's where we met.'

'I was — at the invitation of Axel Thomsen himself. He'd heard of my runs round the Horn as a member of the British Services Adventure Scheme and thought I might be able to contribute something practical to the theoretical tests.' 'I stressed the same thing to Thomsen,' I interjected.

'That's what probably made him interested in you as a skipper — your practical experience in Albatros.' He looked anxiously round the sick-bay. 'I take it this place isn't bugged, is it? If so, we might as well say goodbye in the light of what I'm going to say now.' 'Grohman hasn't had any opportunity,' I replied.

'Here goes, then. Both of you know, of course, that Jetwind's sails are made of dacron, not canvas.'

He stressed his statement so carefully that Kay said, 'Of course, John — but that's no secret.'

'Bacron is tougher and smoother and therefore more aerodynamically efficient than canvas.'

Kay was staring at him, and he warned, 'Try and keep your eyes on your cards, Kay.'

She gave a little shake of her head, half reproach, half incredulity.

'Dacron is also far more expensive than canvas,5 Tideman went on. 'Therefore it is worth protecting in a way canvas need not be. Jetwind’s sails alone cost a fortune.'

' Albatros’s dacron sails at the end of my run were as thin from sun damage as the Ancient Mariner's ghost ships,' I said.

'That's it — sun damage!' he went on. cJetwind’s designers realized that to prevent sun damage from infrared and ultra-violet rays the sails would have to have a plastic coating. You realize the problem this poses — what plastic could stand up to the continual flexing, reefing, furling and endless changes in wind pressure? There was also the problem of cracking and flaking. The protective coating would have to withstand that also.'

Kay said, 'I remember the headaches that caused. But the Schiffbau team came up trumps in the end.'

'It was brilliant inventiveness,' Tideman went on. 'The specialists evolved a completely new plastic in the polymer group — the same chemical group as dacron itself. It was named polyionosoprene. The day we tested the new plastic and found that it absorbed infra-red and micro-waves was sensational.'

I threw down a card at random on the table. It was the top ace in the pack.

Tideman gave value to the pause, gathering up the pack and riffling the deck like a professional card-sharp. The guard beyond the glass partition was lolling, disinterested.

'That absorption was due — we believed though we couldn't prove it — to an unknown chemical reaction occurring between the dacron and polyionosoprene.' ‘That doesn't sound too dramatic, John.'

'I was there,' Kay added. 'Everyone seemed quite pleased but not over-excited at the discovery.'

A slight smile broke the seriousness of Tideman's explanation. 'It was in fact one of the biggest strategic breakthroughs of the satellite age.

'Infra-red and micro-waves are the basic elements of American and Russian spy satellites. However, infra-red rays are strongly absorbed by water vapour, with the result that a spy satellite cannot "see" through cloud, which means restricting their use to cloud-free days.' He slapped down a card. 'Now — here is polyionosoprene, an artificial substance which similarly absorbs these rays.'

Kay looked dumbfounded. ‘I never guessed it was that important.'

'Micro-waves can actually penetrate water vapour — cloud, for example — but the deeper they penetrate the poorer becomes the resolution of the sensor image,' continued Tideman. 'I still don't quite get it,' I said.

'In the latest Nimbus series of satellite using microwave instruments, resolution is of the order of two hundred to three hundred metres. In other words, any object with a distinct water mass, say, an iceberg, with dimensions smaller than this will not show up on the spy satellite scan.' 'I still don't get the connection with Jetwind,' I said.

'The combination of heavy cloud cover and polyionosoprene-coated sails renders this ship undetectable by spy satellite,' said Tideman.

He gathered up the cards as a token gesture and reshuffled them.

'Polyionosoprene-coated sails also deflect most of what we call PECM — passive electronic counter-measures — which are used in the multi-sensor module installations of the latest American and Russian high-altitude spy-planes.' He dealt the cards.

'Jetwind's secret makes her of top strategic significance in today's world.'

Kay still seemed dumbfounded. 'Remembers John, when they told us in Hamburg that polyionosoprene was a big commercial secret and we were not to talk about it? I never dreamed it was anything as momentous as this.5

'Now then,’ Tideman went on. 'You, Paul and I discussed the importance of the Drake Passage as an antisubmarine choke point. We shall never know how much Brockton was in on what I am about to tell you now. When I learned the facts about polyionosoprene, I immediately thought of the Drake Passage, where cloud cover is total for twenty-five days in the month. A ship protected by polyionosoprene in those waters is almost undetectable by spy satellites. Even under light cloud cover conditions, Jetwind would show up on spy satellite instruments only as an amorphous white blob, indistinguishable from innumerable icebergs. In fact we have the biggest anti-surveillance breakthrough since the first spy-in-the-sky went into orbit.’