cabin he had taken over for his own use. 'There's a feeling growing on this ship I don't understand…'
^ 'A feeling of murderous resentment. If we're not careful there'll be an explosion just when I don't want it…'
^ Edgy as he was inwardly, Winter still remembered to send a guard to escort Betty Cordell off the bridge and back to her cabin; with LeCat now stationed on the bridge it was better to keep the American girl out of the way. At three o'clock in the afternoon there was a third incident, when the tanker was only forty miles off the Californian coast, something far more disturbing than the arrival of a fresh signal.
^ The US Coast Guard helicopter arrived at exactly 1500 hours, cruising in towards the tanker so close to the ocean that only a man with LeCat's sharp eyes would have seen it so quickly. He used the phone to call Winter to the bridge. Winter reacted instantly, ordering three seamen to be brought up from the day cabin.
^ 'You will go out on to the main deck,' he told them. 'Take those cleaning materials the guard has brought and pretend to be working. If you make any attempt to signal for help to this chopper three men in the day cabin will be shot. Their lives are in your hands…'
^ At the front of the bridge Mackay was looking sour; Winter was the devil incarnate. He thought of everything. At the moment the deserted deck had an abnormal, naked look. By the time the helicopter arrived it would look as though nothing were wrong.
^ 'Now let's all be quite clear about what's going to happen,' Winter said grimly as the three seamen were escorted off the bridge. 'Mr Mackay will stay where he is. You, Bennett, will go forward beside him. If the chopper flies alongside us you will wave to it. I shall be out of sight at the rear of the bridge, watching you…'
^ Mackay, still tired, tried desperately to think of some way he could indicate to the chopper pilot what was happening, but the problem defeated him. He watched this representative of the outside, sane world, the first representative he had seen since the terrorists came aboard, flying towards him. It was an anxious moment. For Winter also, as he stood well out of sight with LeCat beside him. The armed guards couldn't possibly be seen no matter how close the machine came.
^ It was heading straight for the bow of the ship, and through the open window they could now hear, above the throb of the ^ Challenger's ^ engines, the lighter, faster beat of the helicopter's engine. There was no doubt about it: the machine was coming to take a look at them, maybe even attempt a landing where, two days earlier, Winter himself had landed a Sikorsky which in appearance was the twin of the one approaching them.
^ Inside her cabin Betty Cordell had her porthole wide open. With her acute sense of hearing, sharpened by a childhood spent in the desert, she had heard it coming a long way off. At first she thought it might be the terrorists' helicopter returning, but when she poked her head out of the open porthole she saw the tiny blip just above the sea, flying in from the east, from the direction of the mainland. She decided to take a chance.
^ Grabbing one of the white towels from out of the bathroom, she used her felt-tip pen to inscribe the three letters large-size on the towel. SOS. She went back to the porthole and waited. It was much closer now, she could tell from the engine sound, although the bow of the ship concealed how close it was. If only it would fly along the port side, along her side of the ship. The engine beat became a sharp drumming staccato. She leaned out of the porthole again and still she couldn't see it. She licked her dry lips and waited with the towel in her hands.
^ The air coming in through the porthole was almost warm; the tanker was now moving through far more southerly latitudes than when it had sailed from Alaska. The engine beat of the incoming Sikorsky was rising to a roar when the cabin door behind Betty Cordell opened and the armed guard came inside. He ran across to the porthole, slammed it shut, pulled the curtain over it and dragged the towel out of her hand. 'You sit over the bed,' he said in halting English. She sat down on the edge of the bunk and clasped her trembling hands in front of her.
^ 'You are bad,' he said, looking at the marked towel. 'LeCat will not like…'
^ 'Tell Winter,' she said in a weary voice. 'He won't like it either…'
^ Inside the day cabin the seamen not on duty were lying face down on their stomachs while three guards stood close to the walls pointing pistols at them. The curtains were drawn over the portholes. The same scene was taking place inside the galley where Wrigley had joined Bates, the cook, on the floor. It was a further order Winter had issued on the bridge when he saw the Sikorsky coming – that the prisoners above engine-room level must be put in a position where it would be impossible for them to signal to the US Coast Guard plane.
^ The Sikorsky reached the bow, flew at fifty feet above the ocean along the port side of the tanker. 'Wave!' Winter shouted from the rear of the bridge. 'Do you want your helmsman to get a bullet in the back?' Bennett waved without enthusiasm, and then Mackay noticed something – the helmeted pilot inside his dome was not waving back. Which was damned odd.
^ The machine flew past the stern and Winter watched it going through the rear window. 'Doesn't the pilot normally acknowledge your wave?' he asked. 'I didn't see him wave back…'
^ 'They don't always,' Mackay lied. 'If they're near the end of a patrol they're only interested in getting back home…'
^ Half a mile beyond the tanker's stern the Sikorsky was circling; then, squat-nosed and small, it headed straight back towards the tanker steaming away from it. As it came closer Winter gave a fresh order. 'Don't wave at it this time. Just watch it go. Do they ever communicate with you by radio when they're as close as this?'
^ 'Not often,' Mackay said neutrally. He wasn't at all sure what was happening. The machine flew past them again, this time along the starboard side, still only fifty feet above the waves, which meant it passed below bridge deck level. On the main deck one seaman was hosing down the open areas while the other two seamen swabbed with brushes. They had decided to use the hose on their own initiative, to make it look good. As one of them said, 'Even if it lands and has Marines aboard those buggers will shoot our lads before they can get to them
…' Mackay, as he watched, had never seen them work harder. He thought he understood why. Kinnaird, pale- faced, came running on to the bridge a moment later. He handed a message to Winter.
^ 'I decided to bring it up…' Because you were scared, Winter thought, because you had to see what was happening. 'They've requested permission to land…'
^ Mackay swung round, his face grim and alert. And how are you going to cope with that, you bastard? Winter stood quite still for only a few seconds, watching the distant Sikorsky as it circled a mile ahead of the tanker which was now steaming towards it. He caught Mackay's expression and smiled bleakly, then gave the order to Kinnaird. 'Refuse permission to land. Tell them the deck-plates under the landing point were weakened by the typhoon, that we have two injured seamen aboard – not seriously – but they will need to go to hospital for a check-up when we reach Oleum…'
^ The Sikorsky flew over them once more, making this last run directly over the tanker at a height of one hundred feet, then it turned away and headed on a due east course until it was out of sight. 'Where would it have come from?' Winter asked.
^ 'Off some weather cutter, I suppose,' Mackay lied. 'How the devil would I know?'
^ But he did know. There was no chance of a weather cutter being stationed so close to the Californian coast. And the machine had
^ At 4.30pm on Tuesday, half an hour before dusk, Winter leaned out of the smashed window on the bridge and watched the blip coming in from the south on the starboard side, the Sikorsky returning from the trawler ^ Pecheur.
^ During the height of the typhoon Kinnaird had exchanged frequent position messages with the ^ Pecheur, ^ so they each knew where the other vessel was. And because the ^ Pecheur ^ had steamed through the night over a hundred miles south of the tanker she had escaped the typhoon. Which was just as well, Winter reflected: had the trawler endured only a quarter of the tanker's ordeal the Sikorsky would undoubtedly have been ripped from her deck and hurled into the ocean.
^ Winter had deliberately left it as late as possible before summoning the Sikorsky to return. A helicopter sitting on the ^ Challenger's ^ port quarter would hardly have heightened an impression of normality if they had been seen and reported on by a passing ship – let alone by the genuine US Coast Guard machine which had circled them three times. Winter was still worried about that incident, as he was about the unprecedented signal from the San Francisco Port Authority. He turned round as Betty Cordell came on the bridge.
^ 'We'll be standing off the Californian coast in less than an hour,' he told her soberly. 'We are scheduled to
