The First Mate nodded. ‘Small cargo vessel. The Jerusalem Bay. She’s due to dock just after us. My guess is that she’s making heavier going than we are and probably doesn’t want to be out in this weather longer than necessary. I’ve been keeping an eye on her.’
Svenson grinned. A 3-metre swell could make life very uncomfortable aboard a small container vessel. He glanced at the radar again. Well to the north, off the tanker’s starboard quarter, one and occasionally two fainter blips were showing on the screen.
‘And those?’ the Captain asked.
‘A couple of ocean-going tugs, the Montgomery and the Wavell, also due in Sydney at the same time as us.’
‘Who’d be a tug driver,’ Svenson observed sympathetically. He’d started out in tugs and he knew the sheer hell of a watch spent strapped in and hanging on through a long night, the deck pitching and rolling relentlessly beneath you.
‘A warship, the HMAS Melbourne, is due out of the harbour this morning as well and she’ll be followed by a car ship, the Shanghai, but otherwise, there’s nothing else to bother us,’ the First Mate said.
CHAPTER 66
T he semi passed through security and Murray Black inched forward in the rain. The hydraulically controlled posts in front of the gate disappeared into the road, the light turned green and Murray drove off Hickson Road and pulled up at the guardhouse.
‘Morning, Frank.’ Murray flashed his Sydney Ports Authority identification card and gave the security guard a smile. Frank waved and a second set of security posts disappeared, opening the entrance to the vast concrete dock. Murray drove onto the secure area of the docks and turned right towards the Sydney Ports Authority Control Tower at the far northern end. Slowly, he swung his car into the small parking compound at the base of the control tower.
‘Bugger!’ he muttered as the wind blew his umbrella inside out. The Best and Less $2 special was no match for the westerly that was driving rain across the open docks. Murray bolted up the narrow staircase on the outside of the tower, unlocked the door, wiped his face and stood dripping rainwater onto the carpet in the lift well. The tower might be an engineering marvel but it had one of the slowest lifts in the world, he thought, as he waited for the tiny capsule to come down from the operations centre, 76 metres above him. After what seemed an eternity, Murray stepped into the lift and pressed the button for it to return to the top. He could feel the lift rocking as it ground its way up the middle of the concrete tower. He stepped out and made his way up a few stairs into the operations centre – a large round capsule on top of the tower that provided 360 degree vision around the city and the harbour. The tower had been deliberately sited above the most dangerous part of the harbour where ships were blind to each other’s movements around Miller’s Point.
‘Morning, Bob.’
Bob Muscat, the duty operations officer, waved a greeting from his desk. He was leaning into one of several microphones arrayed in front of him, talking to the Captain of a Royal Australian Navy guided missile destroyer that was just rounding the sea buoy at the Heads.
‘Harbour Control, HMAS Melbourne is rounding junction buoy, over.’
‘Romeo, Melbourne, this is Sydney Harbour Control, report departing Line Zulu and have a safe voyage.’
‘A pleasant overnight leave?’ Bob asked, leaning back from the microphone. The two had served together in the 5/7th Battalion, a mechanised cavalry regiment and there was an easy camaraderie between Murray and the short, dark-haired ex-Major.
‘Late-night shopping,’ Murray said, rolling his eyes. ‘Why is it that most women at shopping centres are fourteen pick handles across the arse?’
‘With husbands and barge-arsed kids to match,’ Bob replied. ‘You can’t have your ice-cream until you finish your bloody hamburger!’ he said with a grin.
Murray steadied himself against the roll of the tower, which was designed to flex in high winds, and then made a move towards the coffee that was quietly percolating near a whiteboard that held the current information on arrivals and departures. The whiteboard was there as a backup in case any of the four big computer screens on each duty officer’s desk ever crashed. Each officer had a split screen with a detailed display map of both Sydney Harbour and Port Botany. Another screen held arrivals and departures, and at the flick of a cursor either Murray or Bob could haul up the information on any ship. A third screen was controlled by a joystick linked to dozens of cameras that covered every part of both ports from the tops of buildings and other critical points. The image on the screen on Murray’s desk was beamed in from a camera near Sydney Airport; it was shaking even though the camera was anchored in an armoured box to protect it on days like today. Despite the weather, Murray had no difficulty in seeing the details of a tanker that was preparing to depart from Port Botany.
He scanned the digital meters above the whiteboard. No wonder the camera was shaking. The wind was touching 53 knots from the west. The tide had turned and at 0.8 metres, it was on the flood. Two more digital displays showed local time and Greenwich Mean Time. It looked like it was going to be a pretty light day. Only one large car ship was departing in the morning. He looked towards the west where the car ship was berthed a kilometre or so from the control tower. The Shanghai, a huge grey box towering over the loading dock at White Bay, was straining at her moorings and the wind was whipping grey smoke from the stubby smokestack at her stern. She had been emptied of the last of nearly 3000 cars from her eighteen decks and the engineers were firing up the huge diesels in preparation for departure. A break in the driving rain allowed Murray to scan the horizon. As the night sky gave way to the grey of the dawn he could just pick out the long jagged peaks of the Blue Mountains, and he noticed that another bank of thick black clouds was rolling in from across the Western Plains. To the east he could see Shark Island and beyond that South and North Head; between them, a Manly ferry was smashing its way past Bradley’s Head, one of the tree covered promontories that marked the turn towards the inner harbour.
He looked back to the whiteboard. The arrivals board was a little busier with the 80,000-ton tanker, the Ocean Venturer scheduled to berth just across from the tower at the big oil terminal at Gore Cove. She would be closely followed by the Jerusalem Bay, a regular visitor to the port.
‘Who are the Montgomery and the Wavell?’ Murray asked.
‘A couple of ocean-going tugs on their way to Vanuatu. They’re coming in to refuel,’ Bob replied.
‘They must be having quite a time of it out there,’ Murray observed. The waves were rolling powerfully and relentlessly across hundreds of miles of the Pacific, venting their fury against the jagged but unbowed face of North Head in thunderous explosions of boiling green water and foam.
‘Who’d be a tug boat driver,’ Bob said, echoing the words of Captain Svenson. It seemed to be a universal view.
‘Or a pilot,’ Murray replied, as he focused his binoculars on the small but powerful boat that was heading out to sea from its base at Watson’s Bay. The bright yellow pilot boat rose momentarily on the crest of a big wave before ploughing defiantly into the base of the next one. The passage to the rendezvous point with the Ocean Venturer, 4 nautical miles off the Heads, would be rough and arduous. ‘It’s bad enough up here,’ Murray added, lowering his binoculars and glancing at the photograph of Anthea, with Louise and the twins, that he kept on his desk.
In a few short hours it was going to get unimaginably worse.
CHAPTER 67
J amal had been at the warehouse since before dawn calculating the extra time he would need to allow for
