The Accident Man

62

The Scandwave Adventurer was longer than three football fields laid end to end. It weighed around one hundred thousand tons and it could carry over six thousand standard shipping containers at a speed of more than twenty-five knots. That made it around fourteen thousand times heavier than Faulkner’s yacht and a little over three times as fast. The combination of size, weight, and speed also made it about as maneuverable as a runaway steam roller.

Knowing all this, its designers had given their vessel every possible assistance. It had state-of-the-art radar, satellite tracking, and telecom equipment. The skipper knew the precise position of his ship on the surface of the globe. He could track every other ship for miles around. In shallow waters he could map the precise contours of the ocean floor beneath him, making it virtually impossible to run aground. As the men who managed the Scandwave Shipping Corporation regularly told themselves, no one needed experienced crew these days. The technology sailed the damn boat all by itself.

So when the wind changed that night and the cold, biting rain came in from the north, the watchman posted on the exposed, narrow deck, high up in the icy air beside the bridge, did not stand up proud and tall, exposing himself to the bitter blast, because that was his duty and he was proud to do it. No, he sat right down, with his back against the deck’s low steel wall, cupped his hands to make a tiny shelter from the wind, and lit a cigarette. He was damned if he was going to get cold and wet on the pittance they were paying him, when the rain was so heavy he could barely see the bow of his own ship, let alone anything farther out to sea. And besides, there was a guy who sat by the radar screen. Let him watch out for passing traffic.

And so it was that the Scandwave Adventurer, bound from Rotterdam to Baltimore, sailed west down the English Channel, with its load of six thousand containers, while the Tamarisk, bound from Cherbourg to Poole, sailed due north, across the English Channel, with its load of three tired men. And neither had the faintest idea of the other’s existence.