Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

“Speaking of the bridge,” a third officer said, “what if we were to drill through the security hatch and pump in gas? Anything that will displace the air within. Hell, the kitchen has several canisters of CO2. You know, knock her out.”

“And then what? We’re still on autopilot.”

There was a brief silence. Then the IT head, Hufnagel, a bespectacled man in a lab coat, cleared his throat. “The autopilot is a piece of software like any other,” he said in a quiet voice. “It can be hacked—in theory, anyway. Hack it and reprogram it.”

LeSeur rounded on him. “How? It’s firewalled.”

“No firewall’s impregnable.”

“Get your best man on it, right away.”

“That would be Penner, sir.” The head of IT stood up.

“Report back to me as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

LeSeur watched him leave the conference room. “Any other ideas?”

“What about the military?” asked Crowley, another third officer. “They could scramble fighters, take out the bridge with a missile. Or get a sub to disable the screws with a torpedo.”

“We’ve looked into those possibilities,” LeSeur replied. “There’s no way to aim a missile precisely enough. There aren’t any submarines in the vicinity, and, given our speed, there’s no way for one to intercept or catch us.”

“Is there a way to launch the lifeboats?” a voice in the back asked.

LeSeur turned to the bosun, Liu. “Possible?”

“At a speed of thirty knots, in heavy seas . . . Jesus, I can’t even

imagine

how you’d do it.”

“I don’t want to hear what you can’t imagine. If it’s even remotely possible, I want you to look into it.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll find out if it’s possible. But to do that I’ll need a full emergency launch crew—and they’re all tied up.”

LeSeur cursed. The one thing they lacked were experienced deckhands. Sure, they had every bloody plonker in the world on board, from croupiers to masseurs to lounge crooners—all so much ballast. “That man who came up here a while ago, what’s his name? Bruce. He was ex–Royal Navy and so were his friends. Go find him. Enlist his help.”

“But he was an old man, in his seventies—” Kemper protested.

“Mr. Kemper, I’ve known seventy-year-old ex-navy men who could drop you in two rounds.” He turned back to Crowley. “Get moving.”

A voice boomed from the door, in a broad Scots accent. “No need to find me, Mr. LeSeur.” Bruce pushed his way through the crowd. “Gavin Bruce, at your service.”

LeSeur turned. “Mr. Bruce. Have you been apprised of our current situation?”

“I have.”

“We need to know whether we can launch the lifeboats under these conditions and speed. Have you experience in that line? These are a new kind of lifeboat—freefall.”

Bruce rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We’ll have to take a close look at those boats.” He hesitated. “We might launch them after the collision.”

“We can’t wait until after the collision. Striking a shoal at thirty knots . . . half the people on board would be killed or injured by the impact alone.”

This was greeted by silence. After a moment, Bruce nodded slowly.

“Mr. Bruce, I give you and your group full authority to address this issue. The bosun, Mr. Liu, assisted by Third Officer Crowley, will direct you—they are thoroughly familiar with the abandon-ship routines.”

“Yes, Captain.”

LeSeur looked around the room. “There’s something else. We need Commodore Cutter. He knows the ship better than any of us and . . . well, he’s the only one who knows the number sequence for standing down from a Code Three. I’m going to call him back to the bridge.”

“As master?” Kemper asked.

LeSeur hesitated. “Let’s just see what he says, first.” He glanced at his watch.

Eighty-nine minutes.

57

CAPTAIN CAROL MASON STOOD AT THE BRIDGE WORKSTATION, staring calmly at the thirty-two-inch plasma-screen Northstar 941X DGPS chartplotter running infonav 2.2. It was, she thought, a marvel of electronic engineering, a technology that had virtually rendered obsolete the skills, mathematics, experience, and deep intuition once required for piloting and navigation. With this device, a bright twelve-year-old could practically navigate the Britannia : using this big colorful chart with the little ship on it, a line drawn ahead showing the ship’s course, conveniently marked with estimated positions at ten-minute intervals into the future, along with waypoints for each course alteration.

She glanced over at the autopilot. Another marvel; it constantly monitored the ship’s speed through the water, its ground speed, engine rpms, power output, rudder and pod angles, and made countless adjustments so subtle they were not even perceptible to even the most vessel-savvy officer. It kept the ship on course and at speed better than the most skilled human captain, while saving fuel—which is why the standing orders dictated that the autopilot should be used for all but inland or coastal waters.

Ten years ago, the bridge on a ship like this would have required the minimum presence of three highly trained officers; now, it required only one . . . and, for the most part, she hardly had anything to do.

She turned her attention to LeSeur’s navigation table, with its paper charts, parallel rulers, compasses, pencils and markers, and the case that held the man’s sextant. Dead instruments, dead skills.

She walked around the bridge workstation and back to the helm, resting one hand on the elegant mahogany wheel. It was there strictly for show. To its right stood the helmsman’s console where the real business of steering was done: six little joysticks, manipulated with the touch of a finger, that controlled the two fixed and two rotating propulsion pods and the engine throttles. With its 360-degree aft rotating pods, the ship was so maneuverable it could dock without help from a single tug.

She slid her hand along the smooth varnish of the wheel, raising her glance to the wall of gray windows that stood ahead. As the wind intensified the rain had slackened, and now she could see the outline of the bows shuddering through spectacular forty-foot seas, great eruptions of spray and flying spume sweeping across the foredecks in slow-motion explosions of white.

She felt a kind of peace, an utter emptiness, that went beyond anything she had experienced before. Most of her life she had been knotted up by self-reproach, feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, anger, overweening ambition. Now, all that was gone—blessedly gone. Decision-making had never been so simple, and afterward there had been none of that agonizing second-guessing that had tormented her career decisions. She had made a decision to destroy the ship; it had been done calmly and without emotion; and now all that remained was to carry it out.

Why? LeSeur had asked. If he couldn’t guess why, then she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of spelling it out. To her, it was obvious. There had never been—not once—a female captain on one of the great transatlantic liners. How foolish she had been to think she would be the one to break the teak ceiling. She knew—and this was not vanity—that she was twice the captain of most of her peers. She had graduated at the very top of her class at the Newcastle Maritime Academy, with one of the highest scores in the history of the school. Her record was perfect—unblemished. She had even remained single, despite several excellent opportunities, in order to eliminate any question of maternity leave. With exquisite care she had cultivated the right relationships at the company, sought out the right mentors, all the while taking care never to display careerist tendencies; she had assiduously cultivated the crisp, professional, but not unpleasant demeanor of the best captains, always genuinely pleased at the success of her peers.