average woman journalist. 'Any special precautions, sir?'
^ 'Precautions?' Mackay's voice went up an octave. 'What the devil do you mean?'
^ 'Certain areas out of bounds?' Walsh's memory was going back to what his father had told him about life aboard a troopship which also carried WREN officers. 'Where will she eat, sir?'
^ 'In the saloon with the rest of us. She might, of course, miss the sailing,' Mackay went on with a hint of hope. He had already issued orders that the ^ Challenger ^ would sail at 2200 hours – two hours before her normal departure. 'London office has asked us to extend all courtesies,' Mackay added grimly. 'She's probably writing some damnfool article on life at sea.'
^ 'No! I'm not having my crew turned into a bunch of nancy boys just because a woman has come aboard. She'll have to take the ship as it is, warts and all.' Mackay checked the bridge clock. 'That is, if she gets here at all…'
^ 'I think she's just arriving,' Walsh observed, staring out of the port-side window. 'And, respectfully, sir, I don't think she has bandy legs…'
^ To keep under the low cloud ceiling Winter flew the Cessna light aircraft at only a few hundred feet above the Cook Inlet. It was dark, the time on the control panel clock registered 10.30pm, and navigation was not easy under these conditions. In the seat beside Winter, LeCat was leaning side-ways, staring downwards. 'That will be the fire,' he said into his headset microphone.
^ It was a heavily overcast night, but there was more illumination below the machine than might be imagined, flying as they were over the area where Alaska ended and the Pacific began its long surge towards Japan and Siberia. Gas burn-offs from the oil rigs glowed like fireballs in the night, like great torches held aloft by giants, and ahead an even fiercer glow lit the darkness. The refinery fire which Bazin's thermite bomb had started earlier in the day was spreading in the terminal where firemen from Anchorage were fighting to get it under control.
^ 'There's the ^ Challenger.. ^.'
^ Even below them in the night it looked enormous; 51,332 deadweight tons of ship, seven hundred and forty- three feet long, one hundred and two feet wide, a floating platform of steel with the island bridge close to the stern, the bridge which had been represented by Cosgrove Manor, over four thousand five hundred miles away.
^ Winter lost a little altitude and pointed the plane's nose so it would pass directly over the navigation lights moving down the main channel. Besides her navigation lights the tanker had her deck lights on and a cluster of lamps attached to the foremast spotlit the forepart of the ship – and it was the forepart Winter was interested in.
^ 'On the port side, yes,' Winter replied as he angled the plane downwards. 'You can just see the landing point – that white-painted circle with the dot in the middle…'
^ 'Big enough, and next time it will be daylight.' Winter leaned forward, putting the Cessna into a shallow dive. The lozenge-shaped platform of steel hardly seemed to move as he went down towards the tanker like a pilot on a bombing run-in. 'That's the catwalk down her middle,' Winter observed. That's important -so don't forget it. That takes us straight from the landing point to the bridge…'
^ LeCat said nothing, leaning well forward, his eyes taking in every detail, photographing it on his mind. Someone on deck near the foremast was looking up as the plane came in, shielding his eyes against the glare of the lights. 'There's the foremast with the crow's nest platform,' Winter pointed out.
^ LeCat was totally concentrated on his observation of the 50,000-ton tanker, like a soldier on reconnaissance assessing a fortress he would later have to storm. Winter lifted the nose of the machine so he was well clear of the radar mast, then he waggled his wings as the vessel vanished under them. Above the roar of the engine a faint sound came, the sound of the ship's siren. Mackay, a curious character, so remote in some ways, always acknowledged a salute, however bizarre.
^ Turning the plane in a wide arc over Cook Inlet, he headed back at speed for Anchorage. After they landed, he phoned the reopened United Arab Republic consulate in San Francisco from an airport booth, asking for Mr Talaal Ismail who was waiting for the call. Winter's message was simple: Case Orange has been delivered.
^ They left Alaska aboard a North West Airlines flight at 11.30 pm which would land them at Seattle in the United States. Walgren, sitting apart from them, travelled in the same plane; from Seattle he would proceed direct to San Francisco. At 11.45pm the much-delayed Scandinavian Airlines Flight SK 989 from Copenhagen arrived at Anchorage. Sullivan was the first passenger to alight from the aircraft.
9
^ The 50,000-ton ^ Challenger ^ was rolling gently as she proceeded through the night at seventeen knots. She was now clear of Cook Inlet, heading out into the Pacific Ocean on her way to distant San Francisco. It was six in the morning and most of the crew were asleep, except for those on duty in the engine-room, the officer of the watch and the helmsman.
^ Seen from the sixty-foot high island bridge at her stern, this huge vessel was all deck, a vast platform of steel extending seven hundred and forty-three feet from stem to stern with a breadth of over one hundred feet. From the island bridge, five decks high, her endless main deck below was a maze of piping and valves with a breakwater in front of the main distribution area close to the base of the bridge – the area where pipes would be attached to suck out her desperately-needed cargo of oil when she reached the terminal near San Francisco.
^ A raised catwalk ran down the centre of her main deck to the distant forepeak, a catwalk men could move along when the main deck was submerged under heavy seas, a not infrequent hazard at this time of the year. Two large loading derricks reared up to port and starboard on either side of the catwalk near the bridge; five hundred feet beyond them the foremast loomed up with its crow's nest circular platform close to its summit. And these three vertical structures were the only mast-forms raised above the main deck beyond the bridge.
^ The ^ Challenger, ^ like so many other ships of her kind, was designed as a floating storage tank of oil, a tank divided into eighteen smaller tanks – one row of centre tanks and two more rows of wing tanks to port and starboard. This sub-division of the cargo-carrying space was vital because it provided stability and safety in turbulent seas: carried in one single, vast compartment fifty thousand tons of oil could endanger the life of the ship had it been able to sway and slosh about as one huge liquid unit. The weight alone would have become an unmanageable menace. On the morning of Friday January 17 the meteorological report forecast a quiet and uneventful voyage for the ^ Challenger.
^ Betty Cordell stirred in her bunk, switched on the light and saw that it was almost six in the morning. She hadn't been able to sleep for the past hour. First night on board, she assumed. Sitting up in her bunk, she yawned and stretched and then got up sleepily. It might be interesting to see what the ship was like at this hour. Might even make an interesting story angle: ^ While The Ship Slept.
^ Twenty-seven years old, slim and fair-haired, her hair cut short and close to the neck, there was a severity and detachment about her expression as she gazed critically at the reflection in the mirror over the basin. She knew people found her disconcerting when they first met her, that they described her as attractive but cold, and the description pleased her: it made people less inclined to draw her into a crowd. Like Winter, like Sullivan, even like LeCat, Betty Cordell was a lone wolf who preferred to go her own way.
^ She dressed quickly and without fuss: slacks, sweater and fur-lined parka. As an afterthought she decided to clean her teeth, then she collected her camera and opened the cabin door quietly. The ship creaked, rolled a little, tilting the deserted alleyway. She closed the door and went silently along the alleyway.
^ There was a light under the door marked 'Radio Cabin', which struck her as odd at this early hour. She paused, listening to the irregular tapping of a Morse key beyond the closed door, a familiar sound when her father had been a ham radio operator at their home in the Californian desert. She walked on, past the next cabin door, which also had a light underneath it, climbing a com-panionway, holding on to the rail. Bennett met her at the top.
^ 'Betty, please…' She liked Bennett: he had a quiet sureness of manner she found appealing. 'I thought it might be interesting to get the atmosphere of the ship when everyone was asleep,' she explained. 'This series of magazine articles I'm doing on the energy crisis – I want to get an unusual angle on it.' She smiled. 'In any case, I'm not the only one up – the radio operator is working.'
^ 'I'm not!' Her natural combativeness surfaced. 'There's a light under his door.'
