By dawn later that morning, the 6th, John was on the port bridge wing looking narrow-eyed into the heart of the pressure system that was all that lay between them and Australasia. The glass was falling fast. The sky was still blue, but its cerulean face was marked with high streaks of cloud and the distant horizon was dark.
When Richard came onto the bridge at 07.15, John was still out there. Richard went out and stood at his side, following his gaze.
After a while, John said: “‘Mackerel skies and mares tails/Make tall ships wear short sails….’ There’s a nasty one coming.”
“The glass is at 990,” observed the captain coolly. “Of course there’s a nasty one coming.”
During the next twelve hours, they altered course a point or two south, letting the coast of Africa fall away west on their starboard, giving themselves more sea room. When the monster hit, they were at 30 south, 40 east, five hundred miles off Durban.
They had more warning than the falling glass and the darkening sky. They had more substantial danger signs than the increasingly agitated surface of the ocean and the hot, vicious gusting of the wind. Tsirtos started picking up distress signals as soon as the thing reached its full force to the east of them. Small ships and then large ones began reporting wind strengths off the Beaufort scale, mountainous seas, and unbelievably destructive electrics. They started asking for help, but nobody, it seemed, was too keen on going in to get them out. And as the day wore on, some of them started falling silent. Tsirtos’s mood went dark, then foul, like the weather. After the briefest communication with the desperate men, he felt as though he were losing personal friends to the storm.
But soon enough he had worries of his own.
The first he knew about their own position was an unexpected lurch that he felt even in the shack, as though Prometheus had hit an impediment solid enough to stop her for an instant. Everything loose in the little room seemed to spring forward. Some of it hit the wall in front. Most of it went onto the floor. Tsirtos looked blearily around. He had been concentrating so hard on his messages he had lost all track of time. It was 19.14: an apt enough hour for war with the elements to be declared.
The great lurch was repeated, as though this were the smallest of trawlers and not a sizable tanker. Tsirtos switched off and went up to the bridge.
As soon as he stepped out of the shack, he heard the wind, although it took him a moment to realize that it was the wind. It sounded like a rolling explosion in the near distance accompanied by the music of a mad orchestra. Over the artillery-barrage bass, a thousand different notes and tones rose and fell as the air tore at every individual strut, line, nut, and bolt with that microscopic fury that only the greatest disturbances are capable of showing. Quite simply, the wind was trying to tear the superstructure off. Even in the long corridors behind battened bulkhead doors, the air was mobile, whispering into drafts and breezes. Moving curtains, setting pictures aswing, making carpets and even linoleum seem to ripple and lift. Setting everything attapping restlessly. Slamming doors suddenly, as though moved by sympathy for its wild cousin outside.
Tsirtos had thought it was impossible for a supertanker to pitch. The hulls of such ships, he knew, were too long for even the broadest wave formation to place the stem on a crest and the stern in a trough. Supertankers, he had been told, were supposed to ride smoothly on the backs of several waves at once. But no one seemed to have explained this to the storm. Prometheus seemed to be pitching like a cockleshell. Tossing. Rolling. Performing complexes of motion totally at the mercy of wind and water, as though there were no one at the helm or in the Engine Room at all. For a wild moment in that wind-haunted corridor, Tsirtos was convinced they had abandoned without telling him.
He reached the bridge at an unsteady run. It was bedlam. While the storm had seemed distant enough in the passages below, here it was pressed up against the windows fighting madly to get in at them.
The twilight’s last gleaming smeared the bellies of the low, scudding clouds with blood. From the near horizon, dark gray curtains of torrential rain hung in devastating series, torn from top to bottom continuously by great jagged forks of lightning. The sea in sympathy was a crystal gray — like a leaden gemstone — but the spume torn from the backs of the maelstrom waves was red. Even as Tsirtos, frozen in the doorway, watched, bow waves like the runoff in a giant’s slaughter house exploded hundreds of feet into the air. The long hull faltered in her motion once again. A cascade of detritus flew onto the floor and slid forward. A tidal wave seethed back along the deck and exploded at the foot of the superstructure with such force that a wall of it rose to block the clear view in front of the helmsman’s narrow eyes. The sound was incredible.
Tsirtos had seen all he wanted to see within seconds. “I’ll be in the shack,” he bellowed at Ben Strong’s back. Ben raised a hand to show that he had heard, but he was occupied with his own preoccupations. “Still at 983,” he yelled to the captain, who was sitting comfortably in his big black chair on the port side of the bridge. “I think it’s slowing.”
The captain raised a hand: he had heard.
There was something indefinably calm about him. No danger could approach too near while he took his confident ease in that chair. Tsirtos took comfort from this and went back below.
Half an hour after that, Ho brought the soup.
“Hey,” said Tsirtos happily to the chief steward. “Thick vegetable soup. Now I know we’re in winter waters.” He toasted the rock-steady Chinese. “First of the voyage,” he said.
Half an hour after he drained the last drop of it, he started to vomit helplessly.
It was one of the worst storms Richard had seen, but there was really nothing in it to cause him more than a moment’s worry. He was in a well-found, well-prepared ship. Only if the cargo had been incorrectly loaded; only if the tanks had been so inexpertly balanced as to put an unacceptable strain on Prometheus’s long hull, was there anything to fear. And if that had been the case, she would have broken up long ago. And he knew his godson well enough to have no doubts at all on that score. The wind could howl until it blew the world awry, therefore; the seas could become more mountainous than the Himalayas: they would not overwhelm his command. Nothing outside could seriously threaten the supertanker.
Ho appeared at his shoulder bearing a large tray well-stocked with brimming mugs of soup. He took one of them, amused to note that not a drop had been spilled on the long trip up from the galley.
Ho crossed next to Robin, then to Ben and John. “Some of this going below?” asked Richard, knowing the answer would be in the affirmative: the engineers were just as much under the chief steward’s wing as were the deck officers. “‘Pity poor sailors on a night like to night.’” He raised his mug, saying the old toast to John, who grinned and toasted back. John was close, by the Collision Alarm Radar, the only one close enough to hear him above the cacophony of wind and sea.
This was still John’s watch, though he would technically be relieved by Robin soon. But they were all on the bridge, of course, each doing a vital job, working as a well-trained team under the eagle eye of their captain, the only one of them apparently idle. And in the Engine Room it would be the same. Each engineering officer with his set task and particular responsibility, and Martyr overseeing, making sure each vital task was done well. Ready and able to do any task himself if necessary, and yet at the moment probably doing nothing.
He finished his soup and stood up. Angling himself carefully so as not to be thrown by the motion of the ship, he crossed to the chart table where Ben was carefully plotting their course, matching it to the course and reported size of the storm. “We’ll be in the eye in ninety minutes, maybe two hours,” Ben yelled, though they were close together. “We should be about here by then.” He pointed to a spot farther south and west than Richard would have expected. Ben saw his frown. “Yes,” he yelled. “It’s pushing us over pretty fast. Lucky you gave us the extra sea room earlier. Be a bit embarrassing if we bumped into Africa!”