“Pilot Maas, Pilot Mass, this is the Freya.”
The supertanker was on Channel 20, the usual channel for a tanker out at sea to call up Mass Control by radiotelephone. Dijkstra leaned forward and flicked a switch.
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead.”
“Pilot Maas, this is the Freya. Captain Thor Larsen speaking. Where is the launch with my berthing crew?”
Dijkstra consulted a clipboard to the left of his console.
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. They left the Hook over an hour ago. They should be with you in twenty minutes.”
What followed caused Dijkstra to shoot bolt-upright in his chair.
“Freya to Pilot Maas. Contact the launch immediately and tell them to return to port. We cannot accept them on board. Inform the Maas pilots not to take off—repeat, not to take off. We cannot accept them on board. We have an emergency—I repeat, we have an emergency.”
Dijkstra covered the speaker with his hand and yelled to his fellow duty officer to throw the switch on the tape recorder. When it was spinning to record the conversation, Dijkstra removed his hand and said carefully:
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Understand you do not wish the berthing crew to come alongside. Understand you do not wish the pilots to take off. Please confirm.”
“Pilot Maas, this is Freya. Confirm. Confirm.”
“Freya, please give details of your emergency.”
There was silence for ten seconds, as if a consultation were taking place on the Freya’s bridge far out at sea. Then Larsen’s voice boomed out again in the control room.
“Pilot Maas, Freya. I cannot give the nature of the emergency. But if any attempt is made by anyone to approach the Freya, people will get killed. Please stay away. Do not make any further attempt to contact the Freya by radio or telephone. Finally, the Freya will contact you again at oh-nine-hundred hours exactly. Have the chairman of the Rotterdam Port Authority present in the control room. That is all.”
The voice ended, and there was a loud click. Dijkstra tried to call back two or three times. Then he looked across at his colleague.
“What the hell did that mean?”
Officer Wilhelm Schipper shrugged in perplexity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Captain Larsen sounded as if he might be in danger.”
“He spoke of men getting killed,” said Dijkstra. “How killed? What’s he got, a mutiny? Someone run amok?”
“We’d better do what he says until this is sorted out,” said Schipper.
“Right,” said Dijkstra. “You get on to the chairman. I’ll contact the launch and the two pilots up at Schiphol.”
The launch bearing the berthing crew was chugging at a steady ten knots across the flat calm toward the Freya, with three miles still to go. It was developing into a beautiful spring morning, warm for the time of year. At three miles the bulk of the giant tanker was already looming large, and the ten Dutchmen who would help her berth, but who had never seen her before, were craning their necks as they came closer.
No one thought anything when the ship-to-shore radio by the helmsman’s side crackled and squawked. He took the handset off its cradle and held it to his ear. With a frown he cut the engine to idling, and asked for a repeat. When he got it, he put the helm hard a-starboard and brought the launch around in a semicircle.
“We’re going back,” he told the men, who looked at him with puzzlement. “There’s something wrong. Captain Larsen’s not ready for you yet.”
Behind them the Freya receded again toward the horizon as they headed back to the Hook.
Up at Schiphol Airport, south of Amsterdam, the two estuary pilots were walking toward the Port Authority helicopter that would airlift them out to the deck of the tanker. It was routine procedure; they always went out to waiting ships by whirlybird.
The senior pilot, a grizzled veteran with twenty years at sea, a master’s ticket, and fifteen years as a Maas Pilot, carried his “brown box,” the instrument that would help him steer her to within a yard of seawater if he wished to be so precise. With the Freya clearing twenty feet only from the shoals and the Inner Channel barely fifty feet wider than the Freya herself, he would need it this morning.
As they ducked underneath the whirling blades, the helicopter pilot leaned out and wagged a warning finger at them.
“Something seems to be wrong,” he yelled above the roar of the engine. “We have to wait. I’m closing her down.”
The engine cut, the blades swished to a stop.
“What the hell’s all that about?” asked the second pilot.