The death toll from the Polyphemus disaster had topped a hundred, with at least as many seriously injured. Some twenty persons still missing or variously unaccounted for. Among the dead were over forty women and children. Now John Watson’s wife was likely dying and he well understood that the only reason ‘the Colonel’ was sitting in his office was because the CSS was looking for a convenient scapegoat.
“I’m busy, what do you want, Harrison?” He demanded, slumping behind his desk and rifling through the notes which had accumulated on his blotter while he had been at Queen Mary’s Hospital. Belatedly, he remembered his manners. A guest was a guest, notwithstanding he was Matthew Harrison. “Forgive me. These are trying hours.”
Sixty-two-year old Matthew Jefferson Harrison shrugged.
“No offence taken, friend.”
The CSS man had used the time waiting for John Watson’s return to study the man’s office. His surroundings were less opulent, less to do with a visible expression of his status at the yard, suggesting a confident, pragmatic man who knew he was very good at his job and had no need of the psychological props with which many of his fellows surrounded themselves. The furniture was old, solid and sparse. A big desk, chairs for visitors, a drinks cabinet by the window overlooking the four slipways.
“It has been a long day,” Watson breathed wearily. “Will you join me in a drink?”
Presently, Harrison was contemplating the generous measure of Scotch Whiskey in the tumbler in his large, pale hands as the two men took fresh stock of each other, circling like heavyweights nervous about the other man’s left hook.
Through the windows arc lights threw their harsh, unrelenting dazzling illumination across a surreal scene as rescuers still sifted through the wreckage at the bottom of the slipway. The hulk of the Polyphemus lay half submerged like a giant steel whale as oxy-acetylene torches cut through the ship’s plates in a desperate race to free men still trapped within the hull.
From a distance it might have seemed like an outer ring of Dante’s inferno.
“A lot of questions are going to get asked about what happened here today,” Harrison observed. “I reckoned I’d start with the man most likely to have figured it out first.”
John Watson did not take this as any kind of complement.
“What happened isn’t any kind of mystery,” he retorted.
Whisky scorched his throat.
Several hundred pounds of most likely blasting powder or gun cotton, cordite – judging by the stench of the remains of the crater half-way down Slipway Number 3 – had detonated during the launch. Thereafter, the forward hull of the Polyphemus had dragged over the wreckage opening a hundred feet long gash in her bottom plating before she toppled over onto her starboard beam and sank into the relatively shallow waters of Wallabout Bay at the bottom of the slip. The explosion had been so violent it had sent debris as large as slipway rails scything through the packed crowd up to fifty yards away and left a crater over thirty feet wide by ten in depth.
“At some time in the last month saboteurs must have emplaced a large blasting charge in the storm drains beneath the slips…”
“Why the last month?”
Watson emptied his tumbler.
He was an engineer by training so he knew all about the properties of blasting powder and other demolition explosives. Cordite was a low explosive which burned rather than exploded, like TNT, a high explosive. ‘Burned’ was the operative word. Low explosives only ‘exploded’ when confined, either in a gun barrel or otherwise. The saboteurs would have had to wall up the storm drain beneath the slipway and that would have blocked it, leading to back flooding if there was a big storm. Without blocking off the tunnel the charge would have burned itself out underground, perhaps venting through weak spots in the drain-lining; and it would not have caused a single violent explosion.
The properties of cordite were so well understood that capital ships like the Lions anchored out in the Upper Bay were designed with ‘venting paths’ so that flash fires caused by enemy action or by an accident in the shell handling rooms of the main and secondary magazines could never, hopefully, result in a catastrophic ship-wrecking detonation.
“Blocking the storm drains so close to their seaward outfalls would have caused back flooding in Brooklyn and the yards. The last heavy rains were in the first week of June. So, it had to have been done in the last two to three weeks.”
“Oh. Right. How big are these drains we’re talking about?”
“Four to six feet in diameter. They were installed when the yards were modernised back in the 1950s. The authorities decided it was easier to route them through the yards rather than digging up the neighbourhoods around Brooklyn Heights.” He had a stray thought. “Once we dig out the crater and follow the tunnels back we might find traces of the blasting powder or cordite the bastards used. That could be analysed…”
“How do you mean?”
“In peacetime cordite is only made in half-a-dozen factories in the United Kingdom and here in New England. The production process is standardised but there will be minor trace pollutants and imperfections particular to each plant. That would tell us where it came from.”
John Watson thought better of it.
“No, that wouldn’t help, I suppose.”
Under the right conditions gun cotton could be stored for many years, during that time it might be sold on, transferred, or passed through endless hands.
“But,” he sighed, “you don’t really care about any of that, do you Colonel?”
“Don’t I?”
Watson shook his head.
“The CSS didn’t see this coming therefore you’re doing what everybody else is doing, you’re covering your arse!”
“You’ve got to admit it’s mighty suspicious nobody noticed anything was wrong until that bomb went off, friend?”
Watson had walked every inch of Slipway Number 3 in the weeks before the launch, every day checking every little detail, inspecting every block, every chain, every rail. Of course, he had not personally walked and crawled through every drain and utility conduit beneath the slips…
Why would he?
He was damned sure nobody from the Colonial Security Service had either!
John Watson said nothing.
“It doesn’t look good,” Harrison intoned, clunking down his tumbler half-drunk on the desk.
Chapter 18
East Islip, Suffolk County, Long Island
I honestly did not think this could get more surreal. But then what did I know? The cuffs had come off. I was ordered to take off my wet clothes. A medic had come in and cleaned up my face; and stuffed wads of cotton wool up my nostrils to staunch the flow of blood. Needless to say, nobody brought me dry clothes. Or offered me food or water as I shivered uncontrollably. The thirst was the worst thing, then the cold…
I was beginning to get a feel for ‘the method’ I was being subjected to. Normally, these things would play out over days; this thing, whatever it was, was operating on a much shorter, possibly abbreviated timescale.
“Drink this.”
The water in the beaker tasted brackish but I was so thirsty I’d have drunk the man’s piss – anybody’s in fact – without a second’s hesitation.
Then I got handed a big blanket and led out of my abandoned, coldly tiled abandoned changing room into a cell with a mattress on the floor. This room still retained a little of the sultry heat of the day.
Next, a bowl of some kind of gruel which was vaguely like porridge was put in front of me.
Presently, I began to feel half-human again.