They rode up in the lift towards Richard’s day room locked in conversation. John was all for starting the final preparations for departure at once: Ajax was expected soon, though Richard knew nothing about her captain and crew other than the simple complement lists sent to him by the Mau Club in the UN building. Yes, agreed John, they would meet her captain and his men before putting them in place beside Achilles and getting under way, but even so, that was no reason for delay…
John had not come empty-handed, so the ride up in the lift was cramped as well as animated. As soon as they entered the day room, John unburdened himself of the largest of his gifts. ‘Yves Maille will explain the details of these himself later, but I thought you’d want a look at them.’
‘They’ were a series of charts covering the whole of the proposed voyage, starting with the chart of the Davis Strait where they were currently, then following across the North Atlantic to the west coast of Ireland and down to Biscay, then on down the west coast of Africa to the Canaries. There was one chart for the sea area surrounding the Canary Islands themselves. Then another series took them into the Gulf of Guinea past the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra into Mawanga itself.
Every chart was covered with drawings and notes which Richard, dazedly, began to recognise as the most incredibly detailed information about the currents they were hoping to follow. Mean flow speeds — at what depth if there was variation. Water temperatures — a careful gradation of colour to show which figure referred to what depth. Notes about possible variations. Offshoots, counter-currents, associated climatic conditions — whether and how they would be affected by them. Prevailing surface winds — force and temperature at surface level.
‘This stuff is really only the beginning,’ said John. ‘The professor is going to go through it all and expand it at the first overall briefing we convene. Then he’s going to update it daily and give us really detailed forecasts of all die conditions we will be sailing into from a thousand metres up in the air to a thousand metres down in the ocean. He’s drifted across the Atlantic in a submersible just following the Gulf Stream so he literally knows it like the back of his hand, and of course the series of programmes he did for the World Wildlife Fund which were on TV last year were all filmed on the coral reefs off the Guinea coast so he knows our destination perfectly too. I really cannot believe how much he knows about the ocean. It’s mind-numbing.’
‘He’ll get on with Kate Ross like a house on fire,’ prophesied Richard.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Now, here’s your next present.’
He laid it almost reverently on the desktop beside Yves Maille’s charts. It was half a metre of black cable about the thickness of a strong man’s forearm.
Richard picked it up. It was icy cold. Like glass. ‘Is this it?’
‘Some of it. The main cable’s a couple of metres thick. This is the lighter line. And it goes right down to the thickness of string. Apparently they make it as thin as thread but that’s too dangerous for general use. As you can see, though, it’s just a bundle of threads all wrapped into a cable shape then held in place by this woven skin. It’s incredible. But you’ve got to be careful of it. As I say, it’s dangerous. Especially the thinner stuff.’
‘How?’
‘Well, for a start, it’s damn near unbreakable. They’ve given us these things like pipe benders to cut it with. You clamp one round it and move a handle. It’s as though you’re trying to put a screw-thread on the outside of the cable but in fact the handle activates a laser beam which is all that can get through it. Apparently the beam gets between the molecules and breaks the magnetic link or some such. But the point is that scissors, knives, axes, oxyacetylene equipment are all useless. Even on the string. And what you’ve got to remember is that the thinner it gets, the sharper it gets. I read somewhere about someone training soldiers to use single fibres as a weapon. Use a thread of it like a garotte and you can take somebody’s head off, no trouble at all. And that’s what I’m building up to. Two of my men tried a tug of war with the thinnest string. Big blokes. Wrapped it round their hands and pulled against each other. They thought it would break. It was no thicker than a shoelace. But it didn’t break. It cut their fingers off instead. I’ve got it all under lock and key now.’
Richard looked at the cable and felt a slight shiver. It gleamed slightly, as though slugs had been crawling all over it.
‘Have you worked out how you’re going to anchor it in the ice yet?’ asked John.
‘Yes, I think so. I’m going to loop the end of the cable nearest the ice and then run two other lengths of cable through. That will give us four cable ends on the ice. And a spread of four anchorage points. What Tom Snell has done so far is to level the anchorage areas and then bore down into the ice four holes in carefully calculated positions at carefully calculated angles. Each hole is about five metres across and ten metres deep and they slope so that their bottoms are towards the ship while their tops are away from the ship. We’ll fill each hole with quick drying concrete and embed the actual anchorage points in that so there is no direct pressure on the ice from the anchorage. That way we hope to keep the pressure-melting to a minimum. We’ll have teams watching at each anchorage point in any case, certainly to begin with. In theory if even three of the anchorages fail, the fourth should be enough to maintain the tow while we get the others back into commission.’
‘But having four should give you a fail-safe spread.’
‘Like having four engines on an aeroplane.’
Dinner that night was close to being a social affair. Colin and Kate again came down off the ice — a five-minute hop in the Westland made it very easy to exchange visits. John had brought not only the rope from New York but also a Bell helicopter destined for Achilles’ deck — it had been agreed as part of the overall equipping of the project that there should be one helicopter for each pair of ships. Bob Stark was still aboard Titan; he would go back to his own command with the new helicopter tomorrow, for Ajax was due within the next twenty-four hours and Richard intended to get under way within the next thirty-six. They would meet Kraken and Psyche in the Atlantic and get up to full speed then. Manhattan was drifting south with the Labrador Current so quickly now that she would be in the grip of the Gulf Stream within four days at the outside and Richard wanted to have her under some kind of control before then if he possibly could. So for the first and probably the last time they were all together at this table. John and his doctor wife Asha, Professor Yves Maille, Bob Stark, Richard, Sally Bell. Tom Snell and his men were still down on Achilles, putting the final touches to the anchorage areas at the stern of the tow. The Bell would bring them back tomorrow.
In the meantime, Kate, Asha and Sally were surrounded by witty, charming, highly attractive men, who for once were not talking exclusively about the tow. Asha had eyes for no one but her John, really, and Kate and Colin drifted in and out of an impenetrable conversation about phytoplankton and microclimates. Sally, on the other hand, found herself torn. Captain Mariner was so tall and distinguished with just those wings of silver sweeping back above his ears to emphasise the jet-black hair which in turn seemed to bring out to perfection his ice-blue eyes. But Professor Maille was also worthy of attention, all Gallic charm, the most irresistible accent, and old-world courtesy. But it was Bob Stark she finally plumped for — the wide grin, the boyish cow’s lick of thick blond hair, the square jut of his jaw and the dreamy depths of his eyes.