Sulu Queen pulled in her fore and aft moorings, broke the shorelines that supplied direct power and communications through the dock facilities and engaged her thrusters under a clear sky with rising moon at eight p.m. The dock was open and easy to exit, so she did not require much in the way of tugging, and Richard stood beside the pilot as he guided the ship out through the main channel, past the increasing bustle of pleasure and commerce reawakening after the fear of the ARkStorm. Richard then accompanied him to the head of the companionway and watched him walk down to the platform at water level where he stepped aboard the cutter, passing out of Richard’s purview — and out of his mind. Then, even as the cutter pulled away towards the San Piedro pier, he was hurrying back to the bridge. Cheng was there, though technically it was the third officer’s watch. ‘You know the course, Mr Cheng,’ said Richard. ‘Compass heading one hundred and eighty degrees. Due south. And ask the engine room for full ahead.’
The voyage proper had no sooner started than Guerrero was on the bridge. ‘Captain,’ he said, ‘my people are all fed, watered and quartered. Our next duty is to check the contents of the containers. I have a manifest, but it would be wise to double-check. It’s twenty-one hundred hours now. If you could switch on your deck lights, we can at least get started before we bunk down.’
‘Fine,’ said Richard. ‘I can supply light and the crewmen you’ll need to get into the most accessible containers, but we’ll have to take more time to get you into the ones that are harder to reach. It looks like the weather is going to be calm until mid-morning tomorrow, so if you start now with the easy ones you can finish going through the hard-to-reach ones after breakfast. And of course, you’re right. If we’re going to do any good down there, we need to be absolutely certain of what we’re taking and what we can do most effectively with it.’
It was only when Guerrero bustled off and Richard had a moment to himself that he realized how hungry he was. He toyed with the idea of having something sent up, but decided that it would be better to let the watch officer take the responsibility, even though the third officer looked little more than a child. But the weather was calm. There was little traffic. The course was clear and unvarying. The only complication was that the deck lights were all on full while Guerrero and his command sorted through the contents of those containers that they could most easily access. He was all too well aware that he had been fussing around the bridge like an anxious parent, checking the course and heading, making sure no radio contacts had come in without his knowledge. He satisfied himself that the engine settings were running at the top of the green and Sulu Queen was heading south along the south-flowing California current at speeds well in excess of her optimum — the better part of twenty-five knots, in fact; and sod the expense. ‘If you need me, I’ll be on the foredeck with Major Guerrero, then down in the canteen,’ he said.
The third officer nodded silently.
The foredeck consisted of the tops of the Chinese containers Sulu Queen had brought from Hong Kong. But it was possible to walk on it with care. And even to open and part empty the National Guard containers stacked around the outer edges — those that could be accessed easily, at any rate. Richard came down and joined the busy soldiers with a lively interest that quite overwhelmed his hunger pangs for the time being. The containers all seemed to be of the same basic design. They were specialized twenty-foot equivalent units with sides, tops and bottoms that had been corrugated for added strength. They could be opened from both ends, with pairs of doors that were twenty feet high and ten feet wide, meeting in the middle where they were locked and bolted. The stevedores working the huge cranes at Long Beach had stacked them end to end, two deep, round the outer edges of the foredeck in a kind of palisade. This arrangement reminded Richard of the battlements of a castle as he came into the middle and looked up. But it meant that only some of the lower ones could be accessed — where they hadn’t been placed so close to one another that it was impossible to open the doors. The contents of these were laid out carefully on the makeshift deck, well clear of the narrow canyons that plunged down towards the keel between the Chinese containers’ sides and ends.
As Richard walked among the soldiers, heartened and impressed by their focus and care, he began to make a mental list of his own. There were tents with inflatable skeletons, shelters of all kinds, large and small, judging from the descriptions on the packaging. Chemical latrines. Washing facilities lacking nothing but water. Containers of various sizes full of fresh water. Distillation kits to make fresh water from soiled or salty. Bundles of food in self-heating packages. Mealspec flameless food heater systems. Collapsible clinics, liberally supplied by the looks of things. Generators. Solar panels. Lamp-lights and torches. Wind-up radios. Everything that might be required to offer help at a kind of paramedic or first-aid level in a situation where the basic systems such as gas, electricity, communications, road and rail had all broken down. But the soldiers had opened less than a quarter of the containers, as Guerrero pointed out, his voice tense, when Richard finally caught up with him.
‘I’ll have a word with the lading officer and see what we can do to help,’ promised Richard. ‘We’ll leave it till morning and hope the weather stays fair.’
‘Lading officer?’ snarled Guerrero. ‘What good will he be? I mean, have you seen the size of these things? Have you calculated the weight? We don’t have the muscle power to move even one of them.’
‘Oh, yes, we do,’ said Richard gently. ‘Look.’ And he gestured to the big square gantry sitting hard up against the front of the bridge house. ‘All we have to do is decide where we want them and how we want them — especially as we’ll have to secure them as tightly as we secured the Bell on the poop deck — and that gantry will place them absolutely precisely.’
Part of Guerrero’s problem was that he, like Richard, had had nothing to eat in a long while. As soon as Richard discovered this, he persuaded the major to leave the foredeck under the control of his new second in command, a regular army first lieutenant called James Harding who seemed to be competence personified. The pair of them walked back to the ladder leading up to the level of the train-track runners that the gantry moved along, then went side by side into the A-deck corridor and down to the canteen. They were lucky. Cook was just getting ready to clear away, but there was deep-fried Kung Po chicken, stir-fried rice, spring rolls and wontons. And toffee bananas to follow. As the two commanders ate, so their energy levels began rising. After a while, Biddy joined them, and that geed them up even more. ‘I know what the immediate priorities are,’ said Guerrero. ‘But what’s the long-term plan here?’