The O.D. (12 page)

The first plane, an old turbo prop, appeared at dawn and circled overhead for around twenty minutes before disappearing northwards. The shipping warning was still being broadcast. The tremors had increased in severity and the first mini tsunamis were washing up against the coasts of France and Spain. They had caused no damage, but the experts were alarmed by their increasing frequency and magnitude. Pilot could feel his body bristle with excitement at this further emphatic evidence of the waking of their island.

A hundred miles west of Brest, cracks began appearing in the ice floe sky. Shafts of light rained down on the sea to form an S-shaped curtain of sunbeams which
Ptolemy
now parted.

Pilot pulled up his collar and left the bridge. There was nothing in the instructions that forbade use of the jumbo before the landing window opened, so he invited the entire complement to climb aboard the jet and enjoy the view and the improving weather from higher up.

From their seats it looked as if they were flying very low over the sea, but unlike a transatlantic flight where half the passengers are asleep and the other half are watching the film, every eye was pressed to a window.

Up in the cockpit, the two camera operators were familiarizing themselves with the video equipment while Pilot stared ahead at the horizon. It wasn’t visible from his viewpoint in the pilot’s seat, nor could he feel it, but from a thousand feet, the pattern was obvious. When
Ptolemy
had cleared Ushant and changed course southwest towards the epicenter of the current disturbances, she had sailed straight onto a washboar
d−
thousands of wave lines, escalating across the surface of the sea from horizon to horizon. At first they’d been small and far between, but had increased in height and frequency to five feet from trough to peak and twenty metres apart.

When the call came for dinner there was little enthusiasm for going below for first servings. Half the passengers had already begun to feel seasick.

Shortly after dinner, Turner altered course due south to take him to the designated coordinates. This had the effect of changing their angle into the waves from a straight ninety degrees, to forty-five degrees, with the result that, not only were they rocking front to back, but side to side as well. Only half the crew returned to the jumbo, the others deciding instead to take to their bunks within easy proximity of a toilet.

“JESUS. LOOK AT THOSE,” someone shouted. Everyone felt the new, higher band of waves at the same time as their arrival was announced. Row upon row, they passed under the barge. Just before she threw up in her sick bag, Jane Lavery likened it to traveling over a liquid cattle grid.

Fifteen other people lost their dinner. Pilot hoped they wouldn’t lose their nerve.

At three-twenty in the morning, sensing in his sleep that Ptolemy’s engines had stopped, Pilot got out of bed, hurried topside and found Serman, Mara and Bradingbrooke already in the wheelhouse.

Turner was trying to keep
Ptolemy’s
nose into the waves, which Pilot couldn’t see in the darkness, but which felt enormous. They were striking every seven seconds now.

“Don’t want to get ourselves broadside to
those
,” Turner said. “Not enough ballast under the water line. I saw a light to the northeast earlier. Could be one of the other barges.”

“We’re to signal every fifteen minutes,” Serman said, leading the others out of the wheelhouse and placing a flare in its firing tube. With a thump and a whoosh it cut through the night, its magenta light hanging in the sky for nearly a minute before dropping. Pilot followed it down to extinction and for half a second, before the light died, he could see a barge three or four miles away. Almost immediately, the blackness was split by the rising trail of an answering flare.

“We have company,” Mara said.

By dawn, three barges were standing just off
Ptolemy
, with a further seven in sight. What Pilot also noticed when he came on deck after breakfast was the placidity of the sea. He wondered how the waves could have died so fast.

Not more than fifty yards away, the barge
Julius
was resting on the upturned image of herself. Pilot could feel his body tingle with the input of extra adrenalin the scene triggered. Not far behind
Julius
were
Fort
Lowell
and
Douro
, the latter painted green from stem to stern.

The entire scene was softly lit by a low, orange sun on the horizon and covered by a fine muslin mist. The sun hadn’t been up for long and Pilot guessed it would burn through the mist as the morning went on. A few degrees off the line of the sun, seven dark specks marked what was otherwise a clean horizon.

An inflatable dinghy, with Highbell and Budd aboard, had been put in the water earlier and they were now directing the positioning of the barges in preparation for the trussing up operation scheduled for later.

Pilot went below, gathered his instruction sheets, inserted them into his plastic pocket necklace, and returned topside. He’d been wrong to think that the sun would burn away the mist. Instead of dissolving, it was thickening and rising, and by 0730 the sun was obscured. Already, the day was taking on that same oppressive yellow-grey emptiness that had beset England for most of July. In light of the close maneuvering they would soon be undertaking, Pilot was glad of the flat seas, but not so the stale, bell jar atmosphere, which he found sinister and portentous.

Josiah Billy, taking his turn as lookout, shouted down that he could make out three more barges on the horizon. That made fourteen in all, including themselves. One short.

There was plenty of preparation work to get on with and Pilot went through each procedure with as much calm as he could muster to mask his growing nervousness. It was Serman’s job to attend to the details and Pilot’s to direct the overall operation.

Bulldozer tyre fenders were manhandled over the sides of each barge – five crew to a tyre, such was their weigh
t−
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.