request…
^ 'I've changed my mind,' he told them suddenly. 'We will reply…'
^ He watched the two officers closely as he made the remark. Mackay looked out of the bridge window, bored. Bennett took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. 'I'll word the reply myself,' Winter went on, 'telling him a search is being made of the ship and that you'll report the result when we dock at Oleum…' Mackay, who had hoped to word the reply himself, managed to hide his bitter disappointment. He started walking off the bridge.
^ 'Just a minute,' Winter called out. 'Sullivan is a pretty common name – and I want this message to reach him at the St Francis. What's his Christian name?'
^ The signal signed Mackay reached Sullivan at the St Francis at eleven in the morning of Tuesday – eleven hours before the ^ Challenger ^ was due to dock at Oleum. ^ Message received and understood. Am instituting general search of ship. Will report result on arrival at Oleum. ^ Sullivan stared at the signal he had taken down over the phone on a scribble pad, stared at the address. ^ Ephraim Sullivan, St Francis Hotel ^… He stood up, feeling almost light-headed, as though the jet lag had come back. I was bloody right, he said to himself, bloody right all the way from Bordeaux, and now I'm going to get some action.
^ After a lot of persuasive talking on the phone he was put through to the Mayor's secretary. Sullivan soon realised that she was well-chosen for her job of protecting the Mayor from crank callers. He went on talking and she was like a Berlin Wall. Taking a deep breath, he went overboard.
^ 'I'm trying to warn him about a threat to the whole city of San Francisco, an imminent threat – as from about ten o'clock tonight…'
^ Mayor Aldo Peretti was a handsome-looking man of forty who smiled easily and frequently. Dark-haired, smooth-skinned, he had propelled himself upwards in the world from lower than zero as he was fond of putting it. Which was quite true; his father had been a fruit-picker from Salinas in the Salinas valley. Because of this background, Peretti was a man deeply interested in all forms
^ of modern technology, in anything which could take the muscle-power out of work. He was especially interested in computers.
^ 'Let's go over it again, Mr Sullivan,' he said with a pleasant smile from behind his desk. 'You checked with the Marine Centre people in The Hague and they were sure the signals had to be accurate – that if Ephraim had crossed his circuits the result would be a mess, not a clear message?'
^ 'Which is my understanding of the way computers work-we're installing them this year in several more departments in the city. Frankly, what convinces me we ought to check is Ephraim – and the use of his name in this signal you got back from the ship. It almost suggests that someone, maybe the captain, was trying to tell us something is wrong.' He smiled again. 'You won't mind if I check myself with the Marine Centre at The Hague? Before I start raising hell I'd better make sure I have some kind of launch pad under me…'
^ It was one o'clock in the afternoon in San Francisco, nine hours before the ^ Challenger ^ was due to dock at Oleum.
^ As the ^ Challenger ^ steamed steadily towards San Francisco at seventeen knots, a battered, bruised, misshapen ship, but still with her engine power unaffected, an edgy tension grew on board. Which was strange because it might have been expected that morale would rise as they neared their ultimate destination which should see the end of their ordeal. Quite the reverse was happening.
^ The British crew and officers were badly affected by the unexplained disappearance of Monk, the missing engine-room artificer. Brady, the engine-room chief, tried to keep up the morale of his men by suggesting that Monk was hiding somewhere. 'It would take more than one of these froggie terrorists to put paid to a man like Monk,' he assured Lanky Miller. 'He just didn't get his chance to sort out LeCat, so he's gone to ground somewhere…'
^ Mackay and Bennett had taken a more realistic view in the chart-room when they discussed it early in the morning before dawn. 'I think the cat got him,' Bennett said. They had taken to referring to the French terrorist they most feared as 'the cat'.
^ 'I think you're probably right,' Mackay had replied. 'What I don't understand is why Winter has made no reference to it.'
^ 'And we can hardly ask him. How would we go about it? 'Mr Winter, we sent one of our men to kill your second-in-command and he's gone missing. Any news?' It's getting on the men's nerves, too. You know what seamen are – a man dying at sea rouses superstition, but a man disappearing, that's enough to send them round the bend…'
^ So LeCat's method was working, which was ironical. Winter had kept the crew under control earlier by being forceful but not brutal. He had, in fact, more than justified Sheikh Gamal Tafak's judgement that it would take an Englishman to control a British crew. Now, without anyone being aware of it – least of all Winter – LeCat's use of the terror weapon was also working, grinding away at the morale of the crew only a few hours' sailing time from San Francisco. LeCat observed what was happening through habitually half-closed eyes without apparently noticing anything. Soon Winter would leave the ship and he would assume control; meantime the crew was slowly losing its guts.
^ The tension on board was not confined to the prisoners; the ex-OAS guards themselves showed signs of mounting tension as they came closer and closer to the American mainland, and this showed itself in a stricter, more irritable, trigger-fingered attitude. Nor was Winter, cold and detached as he was, free from tension. It was not the approach to California which plucked at his nerves; the closer he came to the climax the more icy he became. It was the unexplained incidents which warned his sixth sense that something was going wrong. First, there was the second signal from the mainland which arrived at 2pm.
^ Please confirm urgently that all is well aboard your ship. I require a fully worded signal in reply. Certain of your signals have not conformed to normal practice. O'Hara. San Francisco Port Authority.
^ Winter immediately showed this signal to Mackay who had just come back on to the bridge after sleeping for four hours. 'I want to know what this means,' Winter demanded. 'You'll agree you wouldn't normally receive this kind of signal? What has aroused O'Hara's suspicions?'
^ 'Since you seized control of my ship you have sent all the radio messages. Somewhere, it seems, you blundered…'
^ 'I'm not dictating a reply,' Mackay said firmly. He turned his back on Winter and stared through the smashed bridge window. Betty Cordell stood beside him, noting all that was going on. Because there were always two British officers present, she was now spending most of her time on the bridge; there was an atmosphere of rising tension on the ship which worried her. Beyond the window the ocean was incredibly calm, a grey, placid plain under a grey, placid sky. Typhoon Tara was now ripping her way south, causing havoc on the sea lanes to Australia, while ^ Challenger ^ approached San Francisco from the south-west. This route – normally the tanker would have come in from the north-west -was being followed under pressure from Winter who planned to arrive unexpectedly at the entrance to Golden Gate channel.
^ 'You must work out your own reply,' Mackay repeated when he was asked a second time.
^ Winter let it go, decided not to make an issue of it with Mackay. Within a few hours' sailing time of his objective he was going to be very careful not to stir up more trouble. He wrote out the reply himself and then took it to Kinnaird.
^ He left the radio cabin, locking the door behind him and handing the key to the armed guard outside. Kinnaird began transmitting. ^ All is not well aboard my ship. Between 0100 and 0500 hours we passed through the eye of Typhoon Tara. Bridge structure extensively damaged but vessel seaworthy. Engine room unaffected. Proceeding on course for Oleum through calm waters at seventeen knots. Cannot understand your reference to my signals which have been transmitted as usual at regular intervals. Estimated time of arrival at Oleum still 2200 hours. Mackay.
^ Winter, who had catnapped for short periods later in the night when the typhoon subsided, became more active than ever, turning up unexpectedly all over the ship. He noted the edginess of the guards, but that was to be expected – as they came very close to the Californian coast they were bound to be apprehensive, and most of them were recovering from sea-sickness.
^ What puzzled him was the sullenness of the British crew. Hostility he could have understood – expected – but there was something furtive in the way they looked at him when he went down into the engine-room, some mood he didn't understand. He checked to make sure that no man had been injured by LeCat. He questioned LeCat himself.
^ 'Have you been threatening them?' he demanded when he was alone with the French terrorist inside the
