The O.D. Read online

  Bulldozer tyre fenders were manhandled over the sides of each barge – five crew to a tyre, such was their weight− and soon Ptolemy was ready to begin drawing the other barges in around her.

  The vessel which hadn’t yet made the rendezvous was Shenandoah, one of the water carriers. As all the vessels in the central row were present, Pilot called them into position in readiness for the mooring operation.

  First, Bimbo’s Kraal, which would temporarily stable the sheep when they arrived, and Chiswick Eyot, a floating supermarket warehouse of canned goods, were pulled in on his port and starboard sides. When they were both in line, all three barges exchanged steel cables and winched themselves together as tightly as the fenders would allow. The incoming crew and the two barge masters used the fenders as stepping stones to board Ptolemy from either side.

  Westcliff and King Solomon, carrying building materials and pre-fab sections respectively, followed and within an hour all five barges of the centre row were snugly laced.

  A French Air Force reconnaissance plane from a base near Nantes – the first of many aircraft to pass over them that day – appeared and made three low passes before taking its leave, having been unable to raise so much as a wave from anyone on the fourteen barges. Item 18 of Pilot’s instructions read, ‘Under no circumstances communicate with any outside presence after arriving at the rendezvous.’

  The shipping warning was still in force, but had been modified to say that although no serious seismic activity had occurred for over fifteen hours, shipping was to remain outside the danger zone until the experts agreed it was safe. These ‘experts’ had not yet done so, thanks to some erroneous readings being supplied by the IGP research vessel Pima Verde, which was observing events five hundred miles west of Brest. Pilot hoped that the only interference they would get now would be from the air.

  The mooring operation was slow, which was understandable considering it had never been practiced. After a few hours, all fourteen vessels were snugly laced, effectively relieving the barge masters of their commands. Their job done, they were gathering aboard one of the outer barges in readiness for their collection and return to the mainland. They watched the scene with a mixture of bafflement and wonder until the launch from St. Helier arrived and began taking them aboard. Within minutes, they were on their way to the Channel Islands.

  The rubber barrage, in 25 parts, was hauled up from Douro’s hold and each section fed out into the water, with only their inflation tubes still on deck. The man whose job it was to work the air compressor was explaining how the machine worked to three assistants.

  An hour later, twelve long red snakes floated on the sea, joined together by adjustable cable which would be cranked in when the time came to form a tight rubber collar round the convoy. Further cables would then lock the ring to the outer walls of the flotilla, which was still one barge short.

  “How long before we have to lock the ring, Aaron?” Pilot asked.

  Serman consulted one of his lists. “We still have two hours before the window opens and the door shuts,” he said. “It’s your call, Lonnie.”

  Pilot had already decided to wait until the last possible moment to lock the rubber barrage in case Shenandoah appeared. Her captain and the remaining five crew members were potentially in great peril, and for the first time Pilot admitted the possibility of there being fatalities. He saw no point in dwelling on the subject, but at the same time wanted to know how to place it within the framework of the whole idea should the unthinkable happen and six people perish in defiance of a well broadcast shipping warning. It didn’t seem right to think of it in these terms, but Pilot believed that the ultimate success of the venture was far more important than the human lives within it. His own coldness shocked him, but he knew that sentimentality could be as destructive and deadly in its own way as cold-blooded murder. Is callousness a prerequisite to being an effective leader? he asked himself. Does a leader need to dress in delusions of grandeur before he can block out matters of conscience and decent humanity? More importantly, am I now deluded? It reminded him of the admonition Vaalon had given him in London about the dangers of self-aggrandisement. “You’re only 25, Lonnie,” he had said. “The temptation towards self-elevation is stronger the younger we are, and the line between delusion and reality is thinner. Having said that, to be an effective leader, you often have to act out of character. Your responsibility is to make sure the character you’re acting is true to the play and not a ‘prima divus’ reading from a different script.”

  The sound of another plane brought Pilot racing up on deck. This one was an antique Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft. He went to the wheelhouse and watched as Jim McConie, his radio operator, tried to make sense of the scrambled communications taking place between the plane and the mainland. It made one final pass, then flew north. “Did you catch any of that, Jim?” Pilot asked.

  “Not a word.”

  At 1230 hours, two more French Air Force planes flew over the floating seed that would soon germinate the new island. The French had been demanding explanations from the United Kingdom as to the purpose of the strange convoy of British barges congregating off the Brittany coast. Whitehall had denied all knowledge and France had accepted, but not believed a word of it.

  Do they know something we don’t know? they were asking in Paris. Already, the ocean research vessel Largesse had left Cherbourg for the Bay of Biscay to investigate.

  In London, the mystery of the barge-cum-jumbo jet was deepening. The Royal Navy had been requested by both MI5 and MI6 to dispatch a seaplane to investigate, and this arrived just as Pilot was giving the order to lock the barrage, Shenandoah or no Shenandoah.

  With some annoyance, Pilot watched the RM20 Seahopper land in the water some thousand metres away and it soon became a race to see which dinghy crew could finish their task first – those drawing together the head and tail of the red rubber snake, or the naval ratings from the seaplane. The former finished first and were hoisted aboard Earthmover IV with the aid of rope ladders just as the navy Lieutenant touched the collar at the far side. Without the cooperation of those on the barges, there was no method by which the sailors could scale the fourteen-foot rubber wall. They looked for a way through, but the joins were too tight. In two places the lengths overlapped, owing to the extra space afforded by being one barge short.

  “AHOY THERE,” the Lieutenant hailed in true naval fashion. “I REPRESENT THE ROYAL NAVY. WILL YOU SPEAK?” He was greeted with nothing but the slapping of his own dinghy on the flat water. “PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE.”

  On board Ptolemy, Pilot asked McConie to find Radio Three and feed it through the P.A. system at full volume. The British Lieutenant didn’t listen to Mahler’s Sixth for long. Access to the barges was impossible, and cooperation unforthcoming from those within their rubber-walled fortress, so he took his bad humour back with him to the Seahopper.

  It was 1345, just a quarter of an hour before the opening of the IGP’s ‘landing window’ and the order to retire to the jumbo, so Pilot and Serman ran through the final checklist. Apart from the missing barge, everything was in place. Pilot took a deep breath and was happy to notice that the air once again contained an adequate amount of oxygen. He’d been too busy to notice the change in the sky that had been taking place since noon. The low, featureless, monotone roof had risen. The yellow tinge of malady had disappeared to be replaced by the most magnificent vaulted ceiling of grey, white and black sculpted cloud. What was unusual about this cloud layer was its extreme altitude. It was the kind of cloud that normally lived at between one and three thousand feet, but was in fact hanging at around three miles, engendering a feeling of infinite space.

  There was still no wind, but the air had cooled by twenty degrees. “I don’t understand how cold air can replace hot air so quickly without so much as creating a breeze,” Bradingbrooke said to no-one in particular.

  “Looks mighty windy over there, Henry,” Jane Lavery said, directing Bradingbrooke to a point just sho
rt of the horizon where a magnificent water spout a thousand feet high marked the white wedding of warm front to cold front.

  From his position in the front seat of the cockpit area, Pilot scanned as much of the horizon as he could, hoping Shenandoah would not appear. Perhaps she had never left Southampton, he thought. But if that were the case they would have received a message. Pilot looked at his watch. It was time. He picked up the PA mic and, through loudspeakers mounted on the barge stanchions, called everyone into the plane.

  Aaron Serman positioned himself at the door and began checking people aboard. “Wait in the main cabin,” he told each of them. “Lonnie wants to say a few words.” When the last name was ticked, Serman closed the door and sat down on the first step of the spiral staircase. To his right, towards the nose of the fuselage, the full complement of crew sat, or stood in the aisles, waiting to hear what the man in charge had to say. Pilot bounded down the stairs past Serman and found a central location where everyone could see him and he could see them. He was holding a long white tube in his right hand and something small and black in his left – yin and yang, positive and negative. In a slow, measured tone, he began to speak.

  “When Mr. Vaalon first recruited you for this ground-breaking social experiment, he told you that we’d be travelling to a remote part of the world… that we might be in for a rough landing… that there was an outside chance some or all of us could die.” He looked around at the assembled faces and caught Jane Lavery’s eye. She already knew what was coming, so he found an ignorant crew member at whom to aim his words. “Before I continue… if, after what I’m going say, any of you want to bail out, I just have to activate this.” He held up the device in his left hand. “It will signal Saint Helier aerodrome. When the helicopter gets here, you’ll be winched aboard and returned to terra firma. There, you will be guests in a mansion on Jersey until it’s safe for us to release you.”

  “Prisoners?” someone asked.

  “No. Prisoners are allowed to make phone calls and have visitors. You won’t. During your stay you’ll be incommunicado, but very comfortable. If the science is correct, you’ll be free to go home after no more than six days. Don’t make your decision until I’ve told you our final destination.” Pilot unrolled the chart he had taken from Captain Turner and held it up. It showed the northern half of the Bay of Biscay with the Brittany peninsula filling the top right quarter. To the far left, in the empty waters of the Bay, a large red X had been drawn. “This is where we are now,” he said, pointing to the X. He lowered his arm, then immediately raised it and pointed to the X again. “And this where we’re going.” He looked over at his ‘sounding board’. She was looking bewildered. “Sometime in the next five days, the western edge of the European continental shelf will be surfacing underneath us. It will impact with some force and carry us with it. How hard it hits us falls within a range we’ve already computed. The hydraulic columns we’re sitting on have been designed to absorb a maximum collision speed far in excess of what the physics tells us it could be.”

  “And we’re the crash test dummies,” someone said. “How high will we be lifted?”

  “We don’t know what our final altitude will be,” Pilot said. “The computer model suggests a few hundred metres, give or take.” By the look on their faces, his audience was far from converted. It was Dublin all over again, but this time he actually believed in what he was saying. “Let me tell you about Solar Tides…”

  For ten minutes, in the same manner he used to give his geography lessons in Newlyn, Pilot delivered an exposition on the geophysical phenomenon that was primed to deliver them to their new home within the next 144 hours. To his relief, there were no more snide comments or doubting asides from the listeners, who were riveted to his every word. When he’d finished the lesson, he held up the transmitter and placed his right finger on the button. The moment of truth had come. His heart was pounding. “Does anyone want to leave?”

  Macushla Mara looked around the room with ‘don’t you dare’ eyes while the crew merely looked at each other. For half a minute the question spun on its edge and Pilot’s arms were beginning ache.

  “Put it away, Lonnie,” Mara said.

  Pilot made a final scan of the faces, then placed the pager in his pocket. “Below us, a virgin land is waiting to be deflowered,” he said, deciding to use an analogy he had at first rejected, but now retrieved. “We can impregnate her with more of the same out there…” he waved his hand at a window, “or with a seed of change.” When he’d written down ‘seed of change’ two months earlier in his net shed, it had seemed clichéd, but, when articulated in the confines of an aged 747 riding an ocean-going barge, it worked.

  “You renounced your citizenships for a reason. We can no longer be party to a world hell-bent on self-destruction. But we can’t just run away from it, either. By coming here, we’re not escaping or retreating. We’re regrouping.” Pilot made a quick calculation in his head – 86 minus five. “Eighty-one people on a strip of barren rock in the Bay of Biscay… what can we possibly do to change things in the world we left behind? First, we have to understand the history of the problem, which begins at the Industrial Revolution. Two hundred and fifty years ago, mankind left the realworld behind and embarked on a journey which−”

  “BARGE.” The shout came from a port side window seat. Pilot immediately squeezed his way through the packed aisle to the stairs, which he took two at a time to the higher vantage point of the top deck. He sprinted down the aisle to the cockpit area with Serman hard on his heels and peered out the portside window. Serman followed his gaze to a small dark speck just discernible under the horizon.

  Then, as suddenly as the waves had stopped earlier, they reappeared from nowhere, accompanied by a distinct sensation of vibration underfoot. But this time, the waves were angrier, and topped with churning white caps. Pilot looked at Shenandoah again as she began to rise and fall on the boiling sea. Worse deaths have been exacted during the march of the human race, he thought. His eyes remained firmly on the script, and the rubber barrage remained closed.

  Fifteen minutes later, the crew were all seated and belted up. Pilot looked behind him to the lounge, where the camera operators were tending the bank of digital video equipment and trying to get Shenandoah in picture. Every seat had a video screen, so, whatever the cameras saw, everyone else saw, too. Pilot drew a deep breath and waited. 1415 passed, then 1430 and 1440 with still the only sign of life on the water that of the approaching barge. He watched with growing anxiety as it closed on them, remembering that, apart from her human cargo, Shenandoah carried two hundred thousand gallons of fresh water, plus half the pumps, pipes and other equipment they would need in the construction of their cisterns and the distribution of their water.

  Shenandoah was only 400 metres from the outer barrage now and he could make out figures scurrying about on deck. The smoke billowing from the barge’s funnel looked unhealthy, the result of a do or die effort to reach the flotilla in time.

  “They’re in trouble,” Billy said, looking over Pilot’s shoulder.

  A breathless silence had replaced the raucous excitement of earlier and Pilot could read fear on some of the faces around him. Then, at five minutes to three on that strange Monday afternoon, the world turned over.

  The full 360 degrees of the horizon fell away as the tethered flotilla began to rise up on what would be described more accurately as a vast plateau of water rather than a wave. Internal organs followed muscle, bone and skin by a millisecond, but long enough to cause severe discomfort, as the eighty-one passengers were thrust upwards at five feet per second. Protesting squeals of rubber against rubber tore through the air as the fenders were crushed and pressed between the barges. A second later the din was augmented by a series of ear-shattering cracks as the barge hulls below the waterline slammed together and tried to grind each other to shards. There were a few expletives and some vomit, but everyone remained, on the surface at least, calm.

  The upward accele
ration lasted for twenty seconds. Pilot’s stomach told him when they’d reached the top of the ride and told him again, a few seconds later, that the plateau was collapsing beneath them and that they were now dropping at a frightening speed, seemingly without support, straight down. The fear which filled the jumbo wasn’t vocal. It dwelt far deeper. With strange detachment, Pilot noticed that the white-knuckled hands gripping the armrests along the aisle looked like tiny snowcapped mountains. For a brief moment, he glimpsed Shenandoah following them down and feared she’d be flipped over on top of them.

  It took half a minute to reach the bottom of the valley, at which point Pilot found himself looking up at the horizon. Straight ahead, there was no sky visible at all, just grey-blue jumping water.

  They’d barely had time to collect their thoughts, or indeed to think at all, when the valley floor began rising again with a surge that left everyone fighting for breath. Thirty-five seconds later, they found themselves once again atop the vast watery plateau. Vaalon had had enough foresight to provision each seat with extra sick bags and these were being used by the bucket load.

  “They’re listing badly,” someone shouted. Pilot could just make out the foundering vessel, now less than 300 metres away. Above it, a human figure was dangling in the air. Through the rattles and crashes of the barges, a helicopter’s rotors could just be heard, but owing to the rotation of the flotilla, the rescue attempt was soon lost to view.

  “Are you picking anything up on the stern camera?” Pilot asked.

  “Nothing,” a voice behind him replied. “Yes. Yes. There she is.”

  Pilot switched on his own video screen. The picture was split into four quarters, one for each camera. In the stern image, he could see that Shenandoah was still with them, but noticeably lower in the water. Then he saw a dinghy emerge from behind the foundering barge. Pilot counted six figures. Seven, if you included the figure dangling on a wire above them. He asked the camera operator to follow the line upwards, and seconds later a Sea King helicopter filled the screen. There were no military markings on the machine, so Pilot deduced it was a ‘private hire’ Vaalon had organized.