watched a work party, led by his First Officer, toiling heroically in
the bows. Four men in glistening yellow plastic suits and hoods,
drenched by the icy seas, working with the slow cold-numbed movements of
automatons as they struggled to stream a sea-anchor and bring the ship's
head up into the sea, so that she might ride more easily, and perhaps
slow her precipitous rush down onto the rocky coast. Twice in the
preceding days, the anchors they had rigged had been torn away by sea
and wind and the ship's dead weight.
Three hours before, he had called his engineering officers up from
below, where the risk to their lives had become too great to chance
against the remote possibility of restoring power to his main engines.
He had conceded the battle to the sea and now he was planning the final
moves when he must abandon his command and attempt to remove six hundred
human beings from this helpless hulk to the even greater dangers and
hardships of Cape Alarm's barren and storm-rent shores.
Cape Alarm was one of those few pinnacles of barren black rock which
thrust out from beneath the thick white mantle of the Antarctic cap,
pounded free of ice like an anvil beneath the eternal hammering assault
of storm and sea and wind.
The long straight ridge protruded almost fifty miles into the eastern
extremity of the Weddell Sea, was fifty miles across at its widest
point, and terminated in a pair of bull's horns which formed a small
protected bay named after the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Shackleton Bay, with its steep purple-black beaches of round polished
pebbles, was the nesting ground of a huge colony of chin-strap penguin,
and for this reason was one of Golden Adventurer's regular ports of
call.
On each tour, the ship would anchor in the deep and calm waters of the
bay, while her passengers went ashore to study and photograph the
breeding birds and the extraordinary geological formations, sculptured
by ice and wind into weird and grotesque shapes.
Only ten days earlier, Golden Adventurer had weighed anchor in
Shackleton Bay and stood out into the Weddell Sea. The weather had been
mild and still, with a slow oily swell and a bright clear sun. Now,
before a force seven gale, in temperatures forty-five degrees colder,
and borne on the wild dark sweep of the current, she was being carried
back to that same black and rocky shore.
There was no doubt in Captain Reilly's mind - they were going to go
aground on Cape Alarm, there was no avoiding that fate with this set of
sea and wind, unless the French salvage tug reached them first.
La Mouette should have been in radar contact already, if the tug's
reported position was correct, and Basil Reilly let a little frown of
worry crease the brown parchment skin of his forehead and shadows were
in his eyes.
Another message from head office, sir. His Second Officer was beside
him now, a young man with the shape of a teddy bear swathed in thick
woollen jerseys and marine blue top coat. Basil Reilly's strict dress
regulations had long ago been abandoned and their breaths steamed in the
frigid air of the navigation bridge.
Very well. Reilly glanced at the flimsy. Send that to the tug master.
