Click!
“Now, the tender has now steamed ahead of the four tugs, unreeling the tow line from its capstan aboard the Sun King. Here you see the Sun King’s crew attaching a big yellow buoy to the line as it is dragged in the tender’s wake. Tied on at kilometer intervals, eight buoys will keep the line being unreeled from the Sun King to the tender from sinking. Clear so far?”
Milbrand nodded. He was listening intently but wasn’t, Gary English observed, taking notes.
Click!
“Now the tender reaches the anchor buoy. The steel tow-line eye is removed from the fantail bitt and shackled to the anchor rode. The tender moves to one side. In the port chain locker of the Sun King, the capstan crew awaits the signal to reel in the line.”
English now switched to satellite imaging. The monitor showed the Alamo curving, so slowly as to be almost imperceptible, toward the smooth wake of the Sun King.
“It’s going to take about three hours or more for the linkup,” he said, “but meanwhile I can tell you what’s going to happen next. The Sun King will begin to slow so that the Alamo can close. When they are one thousand meters apart, the skipper will signal the Sun King to start reeling in the tow line attached to AN-3 until reel speed is exactly equal to berg speed. The berg and the Sun King will thus be stationary with respect to each other.
“Two tugs will then deploy directly in front of the Alamo. The winches tending the four lines of the iceberg harness will be standing by. The innermost lines, numbers two and three, will be lowered over the forward end of the berg and secured to bitts on the stern of the respective
tugs. The tugs will then move forward and transfer those lines to the respective bitts on the Sun King’s fantail. The tugs transfer lines one and four to make the linkup complete. The Alamo is now firmly secured by four strong lines to its escort and will remain so all the way to Matagorda Bay.”
Click!
“And finally, here’s an artist’s impression of the whole mule train under way. Reading from bow to stern or, if you prefer from front to back, you have: a, the anchor; b, the anchor rode from anchor to buoy; c, the Sun King reeling in the tow line attached to the anchor rode; and, d, in the smooth wake of the Sun King, the Alamo, attached to its escort by an umbilical of four lines. Two lines, by the way, would be sufficient from an engineering standpoint. But splitting up the load among four weight-bearing cables is a safer bet.”
He looked at his watch.
“Will that help you make your deadline, Mr. Milburn?”
“Milbrand–of the Sydney Morning Herald. I guess it will have to do, but there’s just one thing: What happens when the Sun King reels in its five miles of tow line? It’ll lie dead in the water until–”
“Mr. Milbrand, I said the tow line was attached to the reel in the Sun King’s port chain locker. There are port and starboard chain lockers. While the port tow line is being hauled in, the tender will be deploying the starboard line to the anchor beyond, in this case AN-4.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. That should about wrap it up.”
He levered himself out of the chair and made his way aft to the console assigned to him. Within thirty seconds he had hooked up his pocket tape recorder to the SPEECH RECOGNITION jack on the keyboard and hit DISPLAY. Gary English’s words began to scroll onto the screen. When the readout was complete, Milbrand ad-libbed bits of color, such as the snapping of one of the Alamo tow lines (two men injured, one severely), the fire in the tender’s boiler room (quickly extinguished), and the man overboard (rescued from the jaws of a great white shark), as he went. Fifteen minutes later, he touched the TRANSMIT button. Within seconds, his copy was on his editor’s operating table in Australia, ready for radical surgery.
Milbrand, the heavy work done for the day, heaved a sigh of relief and headed for the bar.
The six young men, on the other hand, sat through press officer English’s detailed explanations of the day’s events, taking notes and frequently consulting the even more clinical text provided by the press kit. They spent time at the observation windows taking notes and pictures, especially when the Orange Free State hovered at low altitude over AN-3 as the tender bought up the tow line for linkup.
By early evening, most of the rest of the press corps had lost interest in the proceedings. They had dutifully observed the various linkups, interviewed by radio those of Forte’s staff aboard the Sun King and the Alamo who could impart information he thought might do Triple Eye some good, filed their stories, “and gotten down to the serious business of drinking as much as they could hold before the Orange Free State headed back to Cape Town.
On 6 February 2008, the tramp steamer Elmira put in at Lobito, Angola, for bunker fuel, water, and fresh provisions. The next day, at dawn, it set sail on a southerly course. On the morning of 8 February, off Palgrave Point in the Kaoko Veld, in that part of South-West Africa that once aspired to be Namibia but didn’t quite make it, the Elmira turned due west. By nightfall it was some 225 kilometers from land, above the continental slope where the water was 462 meters deep.
The Elmira anchored, and six young ultra-deep-sea divers struggled into wet suits in the ship’s decompression chamber, where they had been slowly subjected to rising pressures for the past thirty hours. They squirmed through the hatch into the submersible decompression chamber and dogged down the hatch behind them. Darkness was falling as the SDC, under 43 atmospheres within, was winched up from the hold.
Inside, the six men went through their predive checklist. The check complete, the leader gave a thumbs-up sign through the quartz-glass port and confirmed it with an “All clear!” over the intercom.
The SDC was hoisted over the side and lowered into the pitch-black sea.
According to the calculations of the skipper of the Elmira, they were precisely above AN-145. Three hundred kilometers to the south, just off Walvis Bay, South-West Africa’s major port, the Alamo was forging steadily north-ward through the turbulent seas that had made that stretch of the Atlantic a graveyard of ships. According to radar plot and satellite scan, no other ship was within ninety kilometers. If all went well, therefore, they would be able to incapacitate Anchors 145, 144, and 143 by daybreak and be well on their way out of the area, their presence never having been observed.
Somewhere to the north another ship, the Blakely, would be disabling Anchors 146, 147, and 148.
The descent was swift. The divers switched on the high-intensity SDC lights, but they revealed little but swirling gray waters. At four hundred meters, the winch operator on the deck of the Elmira slowed the rotation of the cable drum, and the SDC drifted to a stop.
The senior diver activated the side-scan sonar. Immediately the anchor came into view as a blip on the sonar screen.
“Right on the money,” he reported to topside control.
The SDC hovered almost directly above the anchor, buried at a 30-degree angle in the seabed. The lead diver gave the order to the winchman to lower the SDC another twenty meters to bring the submersible right alongside the anchor. The fifteen meter umbilicals supplying heliox to the two divers would now reach wherever their work would require. He checked the pressure gauge and made sure the assistant leader logged it to determine decompression time.
He adjusted his mask and climbed down the ladder, through the open hatch, into the stygian sea. A moment later his partner followed.
The high-intensity beams lit up the water for a good ten meters. Above the SDC was the big wire basket attached to the support cable. It contained three long, sausagelike plastic bladders filled with cyclotol, 60-40 RDX-TNT.
Detaching hand-held lamps from their brackets on the side of the SDC, the two men swam down toward the base of the concrete monolith. As they swam closer, however, they observed a strange sight. Attached to the plain square column of gray concrete and undulating in the current were dozens of bright yellow streamers. Every square meter of the column seemed to sprout them, as though a mammoth exotic seaweed had taken root in the anchor and proliferated overnight.
The men paused and looked at each other through the murky waters, apprehensive with a fear neither could define.
The leader shook off his hesitation and slowly swam closer, until one of the fluorescent yellow ribbons was only inches from his face mask. He extended his hand and took hold of it gingerly. He put the beam of his lamp on it. The foot-wide yellow plastic ribbon contained rows of printed script and something else–what appeared to be twin wires embedded throughout its length.