West of Saint David's Head and the coast of Wales, the leviathan plowed forward into rolling seas and a stiff breeze. The blue-and-white-painted PNTL transport had a top speed of eighteen knots, but since leaving Barrow some two hundred nautical miles astern she'd been plodding along at a mere eight, a concession to safety regulations. Sea traffic was heavy within the confined waters between England and Ireland and the chances of a collision markedly higher. The Pacific Sandpiper's stringent insurance contracts required that she move slowly enough within congested waters that even rowboats could avoid her, or so it seemed. She would be required to crawl during her approach to the Panama Canal, and when she entered Japanese waters as well.
High on the ship's spacious bridge, her captain, Neil Jorgenson, stood next to the helm and studied the waters ahead. Their escort, the Ishikari, led the way nearly half a mile off the bow, a narrow gray silhouette rolling alarmingly from side to side in the heavy swell. To starboard rode their second escort, the Royal Navy frigate Campbeltown. The Campbeltown's Sea King helicopter was a speck in the distance to the southwest, scouting ahead for trouble.
'Looks like the Japs'll be feeding the fishes this morning, Captain,' the first officer, Roger Dunsmore, said, grinning as he lowered a pair of binoculars.
Jorgenson had been a sailor for nearly all of his fifty-two years, starting out as a boy on the family fishing boat in Norway. His parents had immigrated to Great Britain in the early 1970s, and his very first adult job had been as deckhand on board a British Petroleum supply ship in the North Sea. Compared to that, a bit of roll like this was nothing.
'That's what you get when you go to sea in a cockleshell,' Jorgenson replied with a shrug. He fished inside the pocket of his jacket, extracting a battered pipe and a tobacco pouch. There were regulations against smoking on board — there were regulations for everything on PNTL vessels — but at sea he was the master. He began filling the pipe. 'I imagine they envy us our rock-solid little island now!'
The Sandpiper was superbly stable, ignoring the swell, which broke to either side of the ship's high, rounded bow with scarcely any lift or roll at all. Even in a full gale, being on board the Piper was more like standing on an oil platform anchored to the bottom than being on board a ship. She was an aircraft carrier to IshikarVs canoe, a most comfortable and pleasantly civilized way of going to sea.
'Speaking of Japs, sir,' Dunsmore said, 'have you seen ours?'
'Wanibuchi and Kitagawa? Not since we left Barrow,' Jorgenson replied. 'Why?'
'Not sure. They were giving me the creeps when we were taking on our cargo, always underfoot, always watching everything we do.'
'It's their plutonium,' Jorgenson replied mildly. 'They have every right to keep a close eye on it.'
'I suppose so, sir. But I swear they crawled through every cubic meter of this ship. Looking at everything. Taking notes. Checking security, measures. Asking questions. Jabbering away at one another like nobody's business.'
'It is nobody's business, Number One. They were cleared by the head office. That should be enough for us.'
Dunsmore's attitude annoyed the captain. The man was a bigot. He didn't like blacks, he didn't like Asians, and he didn't like the third-world hands who made up the majority of the deck force on board working ships. As the ship's executive officer, Dunsmore was responsible for the thirty men of the Sandpiper's crew — and a good three- quarters of them were Pakistani, Malay, or Filipino. Dunsmore was an elitist of the worst type, a snob and a racist who liked to boast that an ancestor of his had been in the court of the first Queen Elizabeth.
It must, Jorgenson thought wryly, be something of a comedown for Dunsmore, having to work with the riffraff like that.
Jorgenson didn't care what the man thought, so long as he did his job. He was a competent first officer, and that was all that mattered.
PNTL was a British company, the Pacific Sandpiper a British-flagged ship. Their chief client and business partner, however, was Japan. Since 1995, Japan had been shipping radioactive wastes to France and England for reprocessing. The high-level radioactive waste, or HLW, belonged to ten Japanese utility companies using nuclear plants to produce electricity. The waste was processed and vitrified at the Sellafield reactor complex in England, north of Barrow, then returned to Japan for disposal. The last shipment from France had been completed in 2007; shipments from England would be continuing through 2016.
Since 1999, a new twist had been added, when PNTL had begun transporting used fuel rods from Japanese reactors to Sellafield, where useable plutonium was extracted from the waste and mixed with depleted uranium into fresh fuel elements, called MOX. Japan had some fifty-three reactors online that could use these fuel elements, and more were being built. They were building a new processing plant at Rokkasho-mura, in northern Honshu, but there'd been delays. Until that plant was up and running, Japan would rely on Europe for its supply of nuclear fuel.
Pacific Sandpiper and her sisters had been custom-built for transporting radioactive waste halfway around the world, and they'd been very well designed for that task, and that task alone. They'd been called the safest vessels on the seas, and with good reason. With double-hull construction, double collision bulkheads, and redundant power and propulsion systems, she was designed to be as close to unsinkable as a ship could be. She was safe from attack, too. Hidden away inside her superstructure were three 30mm cannons, the first time since World War II that merchant ships had actually been armed. The guns were backed by thirty ex-military British AEF police on permanent assignment to PNTL and by the Sandpiper's two escorts, the Campbeltown, which would escort them out of European waters, and the Ishikari, which would accompany them all the way to Japan.
Jorgenson puffed his pipe alight, discarded the match, and raised his binoculars for a closer look at the Ishikari ahead, then looked to starboard and studied the Campbeltown for a moment. As they left the Irish Sea for the Atlantic Ocean proper, the water grew swiftly rougher, and both escorts were making rather heavy work of it.
Yes, the crews on board the Piper's escorts were certainly in for a rough ride.
Jerry Esterhausen glowered at the monitor screen, where a beautiful woman's face stared back with a blank- faced lack of emotion. 'You electronic bitchl' he said.
'You do know how to sweet-talk a girl,' Sandy Markham said.
'She's determined not to be cooperative this morning,' Esterhausen said. He pushed his glasses higher up at the bridge of his nose, then began typing furiously at the keyboard in front of him. 'I swear sometimes she has a mind of her own.'
'Danger, Will Robinson!' Markham said, putting an edge to her voice as she imitated a famous robot from American TV. 'Danger! Danger!'
'Yeah, right,' Esterhausen said, still typing. He'd only heard that lame old joke a few dozen times in the past year, and it was no funnier now than it had been when he'd started. 'Believe me, there'll be plenty of danger for Rosie if she doesn't behave herself.'
'Rosie' was the CyberAge Corporation's latest commercial product, a robot that could play blackjack and several other card games. Named for another American TV robot, Rosie looked nothing like her cartoon namesake. She was bolted to the deck, for one thing, a slender, upright pylon capped by a moveable TV monitor that displayed her face and a small video camera. She had broad shoulders supporting a pair of spidery arms ending in finely articulated mechanical hands. Those hands, sold by the Shadow Robot Company in London, possessed a touch delicate enough to handle a wineglass, pick up a feather — or deal playing cards from a deck.
At least, she could deal cards when she was properly working.
CyberAge was an American company, located in Paterson, New Jersey, and Esterhausen was one of their service representatives. Royal Sky Line had purchased one of CyberAge's half-million-dollar machines for the Atlantis Queen's Poseidon Casino, a novelty item to complement the cruise ship's ultra-modern decor. It was a dream assignment, really… a free two-week cruise to the Eastern Mediterranean on board a luxury liner, and all he had to do was make sure Rosie was functioning properly.
