He thought again when he arrived on the bridge. Steve Bollom, his square, reliable first officer, was there. He should have been in bed hours ago but John knew better than to mention it. Mentioning anything was going to be quite a trick, in fact, for the noise of the wind was a constant overpowering, reverberating roar, as though the bridgehouse was trapped beneath a waterfall. There was, too, just the faintest, most sinister, hint of a sandblast whisper, which only seemed so quiet because the wind was so loud.
‘I was just going to call down to you,’ shouted Steve, pulling a hand the size of a spade back over his steel-grey hair. ‘It looks as though this mess is getting worse.’
John’s eyes narrowed as he strode over to the clearview. ‘It’s difficult to tell,’ he observed in a throat-tearing bellow.
‘Right!’ agreed Steve. ‘But it’s past dawn now and we should be able to see more than this.’
‘You mean we should be able to see something.’
‘Yes. Something like a deck, Sampson posts, forecastle head. Sea, sky…’
‘I agree. What’s the mean wind speed?’
‘Last recorded two hours ago at about sixty knots due south. Steady. Not a gust or a fluke. It hasn’t veered a point in two full watches, just got steadily stronger. It’s as though it’s coming out of a fire hose. Then when we tried for a five o’clock reading we found the anemometer had seized. It’s solid. Full of sand. Nothing we can do.’
John looked into the whirling murk immediately in front of his nose as though the glass itself was full of wildly dancing dots and the darkness beyond was solid. He checked with his watch and then doublechecked with the ship’s chronometer immediately above his head. It was well past dawn. Where was the bloody daylight?
‘I’ll tell you what we can do,’ he said grimly. ‘We can make that idle Frenchman earn his keep.’ He strode across to the pilot’s chair and picked up the walkie-talkie beside it. ‘Hello, Titan?’ he barked.
‘Titan here, Sally Bell speaking. Is that you, Captain Higgins?’
‘Yes. Buzz down to Yves Maille, would you, and tell him I need a detailed weather prophecy as soon as humanly possible.’
‘I called him up at six, John. He’ll give us a detailed report within the hour.’
‘Good. I want to come over to you at the earliest opportunity and I want to send Asha back to Psyche.’
‘OK. I’ll pass that on to Yves. Any problem there?’
‘We’ll talk about it when I see you. In the meantime, how’s your captain?’
‘No obvious change. Asha checked in ten minutes ago. She hasn’t done more than a visual check yet so he may be sleeping rather than out cold. We’ll know more soon and I’ll update you at once.’
Sally Bell broke off contact and John called through to Psyche again.
‘Captain Walcott here.’
‘This is John Higgins again. Any more news on that man of yours?’
‘No. We’re still checking through the rest of the crew but no one else has shown any symptoms yet.’
‘Good. I understand what you meant when you said “weather permitting” just now. I’ll get the doctor over to you as soon as possible, but obviously we’ll have to wait for things to moderate.’
‘OK, but you’d better pray for things to moderate soon. When I said my officers and I had things screwed down tight here I may have been being a little over-optimistic.’
Peter broke contact and it was all John could do to keep his shoulders square. Never had the weight of responsibility seemed so heavy. Never had the forces of nature seemed so set on keeping that weight so unremittingly and crushingly in place.
Suddenly he found that from the bottom of his soul he was praying that Richard Mariner would wake up now, right this instant and resume the burden of command.
Asha leant back against the wall nearest to Richard’s bed head and looked down at her friend. He was heavily bandaged, more heavily bandaged than was absolutely necessary, perhaps, but she had been deeply worried yesterday and had reacted with more than usual concern.
He was wearing a hospital gown — not a very dignified garment but the only practical one under the circumstances. He lay on his back atop the pale green counterpane — she had kept the temperature in the little medical room high enough to make any covering of bedclothes redundant. He lay absolutely still and, but for the slow rise and fall of his massive chest and the placing of his arms at his sides, he might have been laid out for burial. The first bandage was wrapped round his left ankle, though the sharp-boned joint was little more than grazed. The same was probably true of his knees and elbows, all of which were bound up in thick white gauze as though they were actually broken. In the absence of an X-ray machine, only Richard could tell her whether there was any real damage there. And he could only do that when he woke up and could tell her in detail what he could feel. The last bandage was the most important in that regard; it was wrapped round his head as neatly as a Sikh’s turban.
Where to start? she wondered. The damage — slight enough, perhaps — to his knee joints was complicated by the fact that they were actually held together by steel pins courtesy of a terrorist bomb. She smiled fondly, remembering the stories he had told of how the pins had more than once tripped off the security sensors at law courts and airports. That was Richard, she thought; a story for every occasion. Only he could have contrived to turn a terrorist outrage which had so nearly destroyed him into an amusing after-dinner story.
But there had been no such stories about the state of his chest. The massive, star-shaped entry and exit wounds which marred the pale barrel curve of his right lower thorax, just beneath the swell of his pectoral muscle, had come as a stunning surprise to her. Even the medical notes in his personal file had been sketchy. He joked about his involvement in the Gulf War, occasionally held up the middle finger of his right hand to display the missing top joint, giving the impression that this was all the damage he had sustained; but there was never a mention of the wounds in his chest which, it seemed, had been severe enough to interfere with his circulation and make his pulses so difficult to find.
Well, that was the logical place to start. Find the pulse and check that. Then the blood pressure. Then the joints themselves. Check for freedom of movement and look for any reaction to the pain. If there was any discomfort, with luck it would wake him up.
She was aware of John’s concerns, and the weight of the responsibility he now carried. She did not share her husband’s worries about his adequacy to meet those responsibilities, however. She had seen him in a bemusing range of situations during the years of their courtship and marriage, and she had never seen him in a situation he could not cope with. Even wounded — with a bullet wound similar to though thankfully much smaller than the wound on Richard’s chest — John had still been able to command and sail a supertanker almost single-handed. He was simply the steadiest, most reliable man she had ever known and she could see him now in her mind’s eye, meeting each new problem with an increasingly squared jaw, holding his face as though he was still chewing on the stem of his beloved pipe. But the pipe had remained unlit for years and she had talked him into putting it away now. He had amiably acquiesced to her wish, though he missed it, she knew. Under pressure he would still reach for it and his expression would remind her irresistibly of pictures she had seen depicting the typically English faces of pilots in the Battle of Britain. He was a Manxman and the son of Manx-Irish parents; he was a seafarer and the son of a seafarer, so why he should remind her of young fighter pilots, she had no idea. But there was something about those narrowed eyes and that squared jaw that always reminded her of those intrepid young heroes ready and heartbreakingly eager to do battle against the Hun on high. Her eyes flooded with tears and she burned to throw her arms round him; to try and stiffen his resolve — or to lighten his load.