The starboard screen door on the bridge opened and a figure, torch in hand, entered. Batesman said: ‘Captain?’
‘Indeed. One of these days I’ll get to finish my breakfast in peace. Some lamps, will you, Third?’
Captain Bowen was of medium height, running to fat – ‘well-built’ was his preferred term – with a cheerful white-bearded face and periwinkle-blue eyes. He was also well past retirement age but had never asked to retire and never been asked to: in both ships and men the Merchant Navy had suffered crippling losses and a new ship could be made in a tiny fraction of the time it took to make a new captain: there weren’t too many Captain Bowens left around.
The three emergency lamps didn’t give much more light than a similar number of candles would have done but it was enough to see just how quickly the Captain’s coat had been covered in snow in the brief seconds it had taken him to cover the distance from the saloon. He removed the coat, shook it out through the doorway and hurriedly closed the door.
‘Bloody generator having one of its fits again,’ Bowen said. He didn’t seem particularly upset about it, but then, no one had ever seen the Captain upset about anything. ‘Kent screen on the blink, of course. No odds. Useless anyway. Heavy snow, thirty knot wind and visibility zero.’ There was a certain satisfaction in Bowen’s voice and neither Batesman nor Hudson, the helmsman, had to ask why. All three belonged to the group of thought that had minimal belief in the Geneva Convention: no plane, ship or submarine could hope to locate them in those conditions. ‘Been through to the engine-room?’
‘I have not.’ Batesman spoke with some feeling and Bowen smiled. Chief Engineer Patterson, a north-easterner from the Newcastle area, had a high pride in his undoubted skill, a temper with a notoriously short fuse and a rooted aversion to being questioned about his activities by anyone as lowly as a third officer. ‘I’ll get the Chief, sir.’
He got the Chief. Bowen took the phone and said: ‘Ah, John. Not having much luck this trip, are we? Overload coil? Brushes? Fuse? Ah! The standby, then – I do hope we’re not out of fuel again.’ Captain Bowen spoke in tones of grave concern and Batesman smiled: every member of the crew, down even to the pantry-boy, knew that Chief Patterson was totally devoid of any sense of humour. Bowen’s reference to fuel referred to the occasion when, with Chief Patterson off duty, the main generator had failed and the young engineer in charge had forgotten to turn the cock on the fuel line to the auxiliary. Patterson’s comments were predictable. With a pained expression on his face, Bowen held the phone a foot from his ear until the crackling in the earpiece had ceased, spoke briefly again, then hung up and said diplomatically: ‘I think Chief Patterson is having rather more trouble than usual in locating electrical faults. Ten minutes, he says.’
Only two minutes later the phone rang.
‘Bad news, for a fiver.’ Bowen lifted the phone, listened briefly, then said: ‘You want a word with me, John? But you are having a word with me … Ah. I see. Very well.’ He hung up. ‘The Chief wants to show me something.’
Bowen did not, as Batesman might have assumed, go to the engine-room. He went, instead, to his cabin where he was joined within a minute by the Chief Engineer. A tall, lean man, with an unremarkable face and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was, like a number of men who are humourless and unaware of it, given to smiling at frequent intervals and usually at inappropriate moments. He was not, however, smiling at that particular moment. He produced three pieces of what appeared to be black carbon and arranged them on the Captain’s table until they formed an oblong shape.
‘What do you make of that, then?’
‘You know me, John, just a simple seaman. An armature brush for a dynamo or generator or whatever?’
‘Exactly.’ Patterson was much better at being grim than he was at smiling.
‘Hence the power failure?’
‘Nothing to do with the power failure. Overload coil thrown. Short somewhere. Jamieson’s taken a bridge-megger and gone off to locate it. Shouldn’t take him long to locate it.’
This Bowen was prepared to believe. Jamieson, the Second Engineer, was a very bright young man with the unusual distinction of being an A.M.I.E.E. – an Associate Member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. He said: ‘So this brush comes from the auxiliary generator; it’s broken, you seem unhappy about it, so I take it this is unusual.’
‘Unusual? It’s unknown. At least, I’ve never known of it. The brush is under constant spring-loaded pressure against the face of the armature. There is no way it could have broken in this particular fashion.’
‘Well, it did happen. First time for everything.’ Bowen touched the broken pieces with his finger. ‘A one-off job? Flaw in manufacture?”
Patterson didn’t answer. He dug into an overall pocket, brought out a small metal box, removed the lid and placed the box on the table beside the broken brush. The two brushes inside were identical in shape and size to the one that Patterson had reassembled. Bowen looked at them, pursed his lips, then looked at Patterson.
‘Spares?’ Patterson nodded. Bowen picked one up but only one half came away in his hand: the other half remained in the bottom of the box.
‘Our only two spares,’ Patterson said.
‘No point in examining the other?’
‘None. Both generators were examined and in good shape when we were in Halifax – and we’ve used the auxiliary twice since leaving there.’
‘One broken brush could be an extraordinary fluke. Three broken ones don’t even make for a ludicrous coincidence. Doesn’t even call for thoughtful chin-rubbing, John. We have an ill-intentioned crank in our midst.’
‘Crank! Saboteur, you mean.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose. At least, someone who is ill-disposed to us. Or towards the San Andreas. But saboteur? I wonder. Saboteurs go in for varied forms of wholesale destruction. Breaking three generator brushes can hardly be classified as wholesale destruction. And unless the character responsible is deranged he’s not going to send the San Andreas to the bottom – not with him inside it. Why, John, why?’
They were still sitting there, darkly pondering why, when a knock came at the door and Jamieson entered. Young, red-headed and with an ebullient and carefree attitude to life, he was being anything but ebullient and carefree at that moment: he had about him an air of gravity and anxiety, both quite alien to his nature.
‘Engine-room told me I’d find you here. I thought I should come at once.’
‘As the bearer of bad news,’ Captain Bowen said. ‘You have discovered two things: the location of the short and evidence of, shall we say, sabotage?’
‘How the hell – I’m sorry, sir, but how could you possibly -‘
‘Tell him, John,’ Bowen said.
‘I don’t have to. Those broken brushes are enough. What did you find, Peter?’
‘For’ard. Carpenter’s shop. Lead cable passing through a bulkhead. Clips on either side seemed to have worked loose where it passed through the hole in the bulkhead.’
Bowen said: ‘Normal ship’s vibration, weather movement – doesn’t take much to chafe through soft lead.’
‘Lead’s tougher than you think, sir. In this case a pair of hands helped the normal chafing along. Not that that matters. Inside the lead sheathing the rubber round the power cable has been scorched away.”
‘Which one would expect in a short?’
‘Yes, sir. Only, I know the smell of electrically burnt rubber and it doesn’t smell like sulphur. Some bright lad had used an igniting match-head or heads to do the trick. I’ve left Ellis on the repair job. It’s simple and he should be about through now.’
‘Well, well. So it’s as easy as that to knock out a ship’s electrical power.’
‘Almost, sir. He’d one other little job to do. There’s a fuse-box just outside the carpenter’s shop and he removed the appropriate fuse before starting work. Then he returned to the fuse-box and shorted out the line – insulated pliers, ditto screwdriver, almost anything would do – then replaced the fuse. If he’d replaced the fuse before shorting out the line it would have blown, leaving the rest of the electrical system intact. Theoretically, that is – on very rare occasions the fuse is not so obliging and doesn’t go.’ Jamieson smiled faintly. ‘Fact of the matter is, if I’d had a cold in the nose he might have got away with it.’
The phone rang. Captain Bowen lifted it and handed it over to Patterson who listened, said: ‘Sure. Now,’ and handed the phone back. ‘Engine-room. Power coming on.’
Perhaps half a minute passed, then Captain Bowen said mildly: ‘You know, I don’t think the power is coming on.’