‘My name is Ann Cable. I am an American citizen.’
‘What? Say that again! Joe, come here! Get over here at once.’
‘My name is Ann Cable …’ It was all she had the strength to say.
It was enough. ‘It’s OK, honey, just you lie there. You’re in safe hands now and we’ve got just what you need. My name is Emily Karanga and I’m going to take care of you.’
BIGHT
GUINEA AND BENIN
Beware, beware the Bight of Benin
Chapter Twenty-Five
Richard Mariner pressed the walkie-talkie to his lips, thumbed SEND and talked to four helmsmen at once. Four helmsmen and three other captains, come to that. ‘One degree more,’ he said. ‘One degree further west.’
‘That’ll be one ninety-one magnetic, Captain,’ said his own helmsman helpfully.
‘I know. But not for all of us.’ He thumbed SEND. ‘John?’
‘Here, Richard.’
‘How is Niobe heading?’
‘One ninety-eight magnetic on your order.’
‘Peter?’ he asked Captain Walcott next.
‘Psyche is at one eighty-six, magnetic.’ Peter Walcott’s voice was weary and cold. Both he and Gendo Odate were being a little short with Richard at the moment. Asha had yet to diagnose exactly what it was that was causing the skin damage to their crews, though she was treating it with apparent success. It was still spreading, though the incidence of new cases reported was falling off. The first panic seemed to be fading now that everyone knew that the condition was not life-threatening and that it responded to treatment. But where it came from and why it struck remained a mystery which niggled the giant body of Richard’s organisation like an itch it could not scratch, and with each new case reported to Gendo or Peter, things took a small step further down a dangerous road. The atmosphere aboard the two ships shackled nearest to the high flanks of Manhattan simmered darkly — and Richard had made things worse by appropriating their helicopter.
He had taken it first to remove the frozen corpse of the murderous eco-terrorist Henri LeFever into Titan’s cold storage, but then he had found that he needed to keep it. A new chopper was on its way out to them, he knew, but there was no definite ETA for it yet and in the meantime he simply had to have the facility of going high above or far ahead as he laid his plans.
‘Bob?’
‘Achilles is at one eighty-two, magnetic,’ came Bob Stark’s cheerful New England tones. There had been no cases of the mystery disease reported on his ship. Yet.
Richard looked down at the diagram on the chart table in front of him, the different headings for all his ships carefully calculated and meticulously plotted, as they needed to be. While Manhattan pursued its own majestic way, the six ships tethered to her each sailed along a slightly different bearing, their corporate objective to influence in the minimum amount of time the course it was actually following.
They had reached the next really critical stage now, for they were preparing to turn the corner as they came past Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Canaries current had carried them safely southwards during the last few days, and its coastal offshoot would combine with the gathering eastward pressure of the equatorial counter current to swing them into the grip of the Guinea current within the next few hours when they would head east along the final leg of their journey. But the Guinea current swept along the shallow, coral-fanged seas off Guinea and Benin before it reached the deep-water anchorages of Mau’s tectonic coast. Titan and her team were swinging their massive burden out across the water’s drift, therefore, in an attempt to place the massive burden on the outer, deep-water edge of the current, far from lee shores and sharp reefs.
Captain Gendo Odate was the only one of them whose course matched the iceberg’s, for Kraken was too close to the ice to follow anything but a carefully parallel heading. Even Anna Borodin in Ajax was angling her course slightly, trying to support the efforts of Bob Stark in Achilles.
‘Gendo?’ Silence. ‘Captain Odate?’
‘Hai?’
‘Course and speed, please.’
‘We continue to proceed due south, Captain Mariner, at eleven knots precisely. You are a miracle-worker, sir.’
With the passage of time and the increasing stress, Captain Odate had become so much more formal that Richard sometimes wondered whether he was getting at the sake more than was good for him.
‘Thank you, Captain Odate. Inform me at once if we deviate from that course at all, please.’
‘Hai!’
Their course was right, then, and it looked as though they could maintain it — until the full force of the counter current came down on their starboard quarter, at any rate. Their position he could read for himself. He strolled across to the satnav equipment and looked down at the figures which placed his ship accurately to within mere metres on the earth’s surface. Yes, there they were, at eight degrees north latitude and ten degrees west longitude, with the berg behind them still scraping over the Sierra Leone rise while the ships out in front were heading hard for the Guinea basin.
Even now, he found he had to doublecheck when he was looking at courses, bearings, and especially location readings and reckonings. He was well enough used to placing vessels more than a quarter of a mile long, but Manhattan was something else. He had to keep reminding himself that his command was at the leading edge of an oblong on the earth’s surface one hundred kilometres long and fifteen or more wide. The measurements were increasingly rough, but they included the positions of the ships and the increasing puddle of cold, clear, pure water through which they were sailing. A puddle of water which had registered on the eastern coasts of the Azores, on the western ones of the Canaries and on the eastern side of the Cape Verdes as they had come past the three sets of islands during the last ten days. Now they were preparing to turn east onto the final leg and there was only a week to go — if nothing else went wrong.
But what else could possibly go wrong?
Certainly, during the week since his memory had returned, the situation on the six ships and the berg itself seemed to have been held almost immobile. The wind had abated and the weather had become clear and summery all around them, and it seemed that the worst was over. With the last of the bodies off the ice, even the sand-shrouded Manhattan seemed to be exercising a relatively beneficent air — except, perhaps, in the perceptions of those still closest to it.
By the time he had come to this point in his thoughts, Richard was once again standing by his chart. The pale colours showed all too vividly the shallow waters, the coral reefs, the narrowness of the entrance to the gigantic harbour of Mawanga, the nearness of the city to the final resting place of Manhattan, the all too obvious dangers of moving it into place and stopping that movement in time. There was someone in the United Nations building, he knew, whose sole job was to calculate the effects both locally and globally if one billion tonnes of ice was still moving at any kind of speed when it collided with the African coast. Bracingly, they had already informed him that it was unlikely that the whole continent would shift on its foundations …
He dragged his thoughts back to the matter in hand, never one to cross his bridges before he came to them, no matter how carefully or acutely he scouted them first.
‘Yves? Any update on the currents?’ He had asked about the ‘current situation’ last time, but the Frenchman on the forecastle head had failed to recognise the pun. Or, more likely, refused to recognise it as he had not made the joke himself.