Fair Game (32 page)

Hainrich shook his head. ‘You accountants are killing the job, you know that?’ He thrust a chunk of steak into his mouth and chewed noisily.

‘I’m not an accountant,’ said Shepherd.

The messman returned with a stainless-steel tureen that he put down in front of Shepherd. Shepherd thanked him and asked him what his name was, even though he knew from the file that he was Jimmy Aguallo. ‘Jimmy,’ said the messman, flashing a wide grin. Shepherd lifted the tureen lid and used a stainless-steel spoon to pour watery minestrone soup into his bowl.

‘Ten years ago the food allowance was fifteen dollars a day,’ said Hainrich. ‘It’s half that now.’ He pointed at his plate with his knife. ‘This is probably horsemeat.’

‘It’s beefsteak,’ said the messman, clearly offended.

‘It tastes like horse,’ said Hainrich.

The messman snorted and headed back to the galley.

‘I don’t see how you accountants can cut costs any more than you have,’ said Hainrich, putting another forkful of steak into his mouth. ‘There’s only twenty-two officers and crew on the ship. How do you expect us to work with any less?’

‘Like I said, I’m not an accountant,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’m human resources.’

‘You know, we’re not even allowed to send personal emails any more,’ said Hainrich. ‘And no wifi for personal use. If you’re human resources, don’t you think humans need to be in contact with their families when they’re away for months at a time? Don’t you think Skype is a basic human right?’

Shepherd used his soup as an excuse to avoid any further conversation with the chief officer. He was just finishing it when the door opened and a man with unkempt jet-black hair wearing a New York Yankees T-shirt and baggy grey shorts with button-down pockets came in. At first Shepherd thought it was a deckhand but when he sat at the head of the table he realised it was the captain. Dominik Kaminski. Shepherd knew from the file that the captain was forty-seven years old but he looked a good ten years younger.

The captain poured himself a glass of water, then looked up and noticed Shepherd for the first time. He peered over the top of his round-lensed spectacles with a slight frown, and then he grinned. ‘The man from the company, yes?’

‘Oliver Blackburn,’ said Shepherd. He stood up and offered his hand and the captain shook it. He had a firm grip and nicotine stains on his first and second fingers.

‘Dominik,’ he said. ‘You are with us until Suez?’ His accent was more pronounced than the chief officer’s.

‘Yes,’ said Shepherd, even though he was fairly sure that the ship wouldn’t be reaching the Suez Canal, not as planned, anyway. He sat back down and picked up a bread roll.

‘And you’re here to decide who to sack?’ The messman reappeared with another tureen of soup that he put down at the captain’s elbow.

‘It’s not like that,’ said Shepherd.

‘The company is always trying to cut costs,’ said the captain, ladling soup into his bowl.

‘I told him that already,’ growled the chief officer. He looked over at Shepherd. ‘Do you know how many television sets there are on this ship?’

Shepherd shook his head.

‘Three,’ said the chief officer. ‘I was talking to a head office guy last year and I asked him why we didn’t all have televisions and DVD players in our cabins. Why are they only in the recreation rooms? You know what he said?’

‘Tell me.’

‘He said that the company wanted us to socialise, and not to just stay in our cabins. It’s bullshit, of course. The company doesn’t care about socialising, all it cares about is the bottom line.’ He shrugged and hacked away at his steak.

‘Well, anyway, I hope you enjoy your time with us, Mr Blackburn,’ said the captain.

‘Oliver,’ said Shepherd. ‘Please call me Oliver. And do I call you master? Or captain?’

The captain chuckled. ‘You can call me what you want,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here.’ He reached for the bottle of water and poured himself a glass. He raised it to Shepherd. ‘To management,’ he said. ‘Fuck them!’

Hainrich raised his glass. ‘Fuck them all!’ he said. The two men clinked their glasses and then drank until they were empty and slammed them down on the table.

There were two bottles of wine on the table, red and white, both untouched.

‘Not drinking?’ said Shepherd.

Dominik laughed. ‘We’re leaving port in two hours,’ he said. ‘If the pilot smells alcohol on my breath I’ll lose my job. But you go ahead.’

‘Pilot?’ said Shepherd.

‘Yes, pilot. He comes on board to help us leave the port.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘You’ve been on a ship before?’

‘Not this big,’ said Shepherd.

‘You’re in the office all the time?’ said Hainrich.

‘Pretty much, yes.’

‘That’s the problem with this company,’ said Hainrich. ‘The people who make decisions have never been to sea.’

‘I’m not a decision-maker,’ said Shepherd. ‘Like I said, I just compile a report, that’s all.’

‘Just following orders,’ snorted Hainrich. ‘Like the Nazis.’

Shepherd kept his head down as he finished his meal, while Hainrich and the captain chatted away in Polish.

After lunch, the captain went up to the bridge and the chief officer disappeared down to the Ship Office on the Upper Deck. Shepherd finished the coffee that Jimmy had brought him and then spent the time before departure getting a feel for the layout of the structure. All the decks, from the Upper Deck where he’d first arrived to G-Deck, which was directly below the bridge, were all laid out the same way. There was a central corridor that stretched the full width of the ship, lined with wood-effect plastic and with a chrome handrail at waist height. The floor was grey, the ceiling made of cream-coloured metal sections, dotted with smoke detectors and emergency lights. Cabins and rooms led off both sides of the corridor, fore and aft. In the middle of each floor was a central stairway that also functioned as an emergency exit, and next to it was a lift big enough to hold six people. The lift ran from G-Deck and down through the Upper Deck to the engine room.

At either end of each corridor was a hatchway that led out to the green-painted outside deck. The metal stairways and decks ran from the wings of the bridge all the way down to the Upper Deck. White metal stairs linked the outdoor decks and provided an escape route in the event of an emergency but also allowed the sailors to move between decks outside the superstructure.

There were two large chrome levers on either side of the hatch doors so that they could be closed securely and made watertight, and a third regular handle for opening and closing. Most of the hatches were locked. Shepherd went down floor by floor, walking back and forth along the corridors and taking the stairs. He didn’t pass anyone else as he wandered around the superstructure but through the windows he occasionally saw seamen in overalls climbing up and down the exterior stairways as they went about their work.

When he reached the Upper Deck he went along to the Ship Office. Hainrich was sitting at one of three computers, comparing a spreadsheet on the screen with a computer printout. ‘Busy?’ asked Shepherd.

‘I’m always busy,’ said Hainrich, looking at Shepherd over the top of his spectacles.

Shepherd sat down on a chair. ‘I was wondering about the locked hatches,’ he said. ‘The ones that give you access to the outer decks.’

‘What about them?’

‘Are they always locked? If so, I’d like a key.’

‘They’re always locked while we’re in port,’ said Hainrich. ‘The stevedores will steal anything. You should keep your cabin locked, too. It’s different at sea, nobody steals, but we have a lot of strangers on board.’

‘But you can give me a key, right?’

Hainrich shrugged. ‘Sure, but why?’

‘I’d just like to have access to all areas, that’s all. It’s my understanding that’s how it should work.’

‘But not the cabins?’ said Hainrich. ‘There’ll be an uproar if a company man starts going through personal belongings.’

Shepherd shook his head. ‘Just the hatches, and any doors,’ he said. ‘I saw the doors on this floor that lead outside have combination locks. I’ll need the combination.’

‘That’s easy,’ said Hainrich. ‘One six two seven. The key I’ll have to get from the master’s safe.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Is there anywhere in particular you want to go?’ asked Hainrich.

‘I just want to be able to move around the ship.’

‘To spy?’

‘To see how things work. To see what people do. You’ll hardly be aware that I’m here.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ said Hainrich, turning back to his computer.

At four o’clock Shepherd went up to the bridge. There was a numerical keyboard to the side of the door handle but the door wasn’t locked. He pulled it open and walked in. The bridge ran the full width of the ship with huge windows giving full all-round visibility. To the right of the door were two desks each twelve feet long, and behind them a bookcase filled with folders and manuals. On the desk closest to the door were two computer screens, two printers, a line of transceivers in their charging docks and a sat-phone; on the other was a large Admiralty chart on which the ship’s course was marked every hour, in pencil, so that it could be rubbed off for the next voyage. Below the second desk were lines of drawers filled with charts for every part of the world. Separating the desks from the front of the bridge were thick green curtains that could be closed at night so that officers could look at the charts without disrupting the night vision of the men on watch.

A four-foot-wide green non-slip rubber mat ran the full width of the bridge leading to a hatch at either end that gave on to the port and starboard outside wings.

The main instruments of the ship were housed in a chest-high green metal structure that curved in a semicircle in the centre of the bridge, a twenty-foot-long console with six large computer screens and a variety of dials and controls. Facing the screens and dials were two large black leather chairs with armrests and footrests that wouldn’t have been out of place in a dentist’s surgery, and between them were the controls that directed the ship, including the ship’s wheel, which was barely eight inches across. Loose items such as transceivers and binoculars were placed on white mesh non-slip mats to stop them sliding around in rough weather.

Dominik was sitting in the right-hand chair, his foot up on the console, and he nodded at Shepherd. ‘We’re just loading the last few containers. The pilots are on their way,’ he said. He looked up at the ship’s clock. ‘Half an hour and we should be moving.’

‘You don’t mind me being on the bridge?’ asked Shepherd.

‘I’m not sure that I can stop you,’ said Dominik, lighting a cigarette. ‘The company said you were to have the run of the vessel.’ He leaned forward and brushed ash off the console.

‘I’ll try not to get in your way,’ said Shepherd. At either side of the bridge were wooden chairs with high legs and Shepherd went to sit in the starboard one as he watched the last of the containers being loaded. The
Athena
had looked big when he’d arrived at the port, but from his vantage point on the bridge he could see the entire deck of containers stretched out in front of him, and he realised for the first time what a true leviathan it was. At the bow was the forward mast, a white metal tower topped by one of the radar scanners. From where he was sitting the mast seemed quite small, but he knew from the plans he’d studied that it was more than thirty feet tall.

Containers filled every part of the deck, and while they were all one of two sizes, either forty feet or twenty feet long, they were in a multitude of colours – dark blue, light blue, dark green, pale green, white, orange and red. Some were obviously brand new, others were dented and spotted with rust, suggesting that they had been around the world several times. Overhead were the giant cranes sending containers whizzing from the dockside to the ship, and lowering them into place with a confidence and speed that belied their bulk.

There were three cranes loading the ship, moving independently of each other, each with its own operator shuttling backwards and forwards in a small plexiglass cabin. Thick wires snaked down from the overhead gantries to a metal slab some forty feet long and ten feet wide which had locking catches that gripped the corners of the containers and held them fast. The slab could hold either one forty-foot or two twenty-foot containers with equal dexterity.

Shepherd ran his eyes from port to starboard, counting the containers in a single row. He counted sixteen, but on the plans that Charlie Button had given him there had been eighteen. He counted the number of rows forward between the bridge and the bow. There were twelve, and that wasn’t right either. On the plans there had been sixteen. Sixteen containers long and eighteen across.

‘Captain, can I ask you a question?’ he said, looking over his shoulder.

Dominik looked up from his instruments. ‘I thought that’s why you were on board,’ he said.

Shepherd grinned. ‘It’s a technical question. About the ship.’ Shepherd pointed at the containers stretching ahead of them. ‘I thought there were eighteen bays across but I can only see sixteen. And I thought there were sixteen rows between here and the bow. But I can’t see sixteen. More like twelve.’

Dominik took a drag on his cigarette before blowing smoke across the console. ‘You’re quite right. But the stacks are tapered to give us better visibility. The outer sides are one container less and they decrease in height as you go towards the bow. The stacks below you are seven above deck, with another eleven below in the holds. At the bow the upper stack is five deep. But when you look forward the eye is fooled, it makes the ship look shorter than it really is.’

‘An optical illusion?’

‘Exactly,’ said Dominik. ‘I’d have thought that someone from head office would have known how we stack our containers.’

‘I’m not based at head office. I’m an outside consultant hired to do this particular report, so shipping isn’t really my field.’

‘That’s becoming painfully clear,’ said Dominik. He pointed at the door that led to the outdoor starboard wing of the bridge. ‘If you go out there you’ll see the containers on the outside.’