“It was a night just like this.”

Eddie turned in surprise to look at the man standing beside him. A stranger, a man he’d never seen before. “Excuse me?” he said.

“It was a night just like this,” the man repeated. “A cold night, November the seventeenth nineteen eighty two, when the Queen of Esbjerg, pride of the Jutland Shipping Company, set sail for the last time.”

Eddie wasn’t sure how to react. Being spoken to, out of the blue, by a complete stranger wasn't something he was used to. The other man was older than him, in his fifties by the look of him, with a short, neatly trimmed beard and a bald head. He was wearing a smart suit under his warm coat. He was looking at him, as if expecting him to reply, and Eddie searched his mind for something to say. Something non committal that would, hopefully, enable him to avoid being drawn into a conversation. Not that he was anti social or anything. He liked a good chat as much as anyone, but he'd come up here to be alone with his thoughts and he just wanted to think for a while. “You don't say,” he said therefore.

The man nodded soberly. “The air was biting cold,” he said, his breath making a cloud that hung between the two men. “So cold it stung your face and hands, but as still as a tomb. The sea was as smooth as a mirror. You could see the stars and the moon reflected in it, just like today.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, to give each syllable weight and meaning. He turned his gaze across the water stretched out below them, its surface disturbed only by the wake of the ferry as it pulled away from the coast of Denmark. “As if the very elements knew that the ship would never return and were holding their breaths as a sign of respect. It was the same time of day as well. Eight in the evening when the ship slipped out to sea for the last time with four hundred living souls on board. The ship would be sailing through the night, just as we are now. The similarities between then and now... Well, I'm not saying it means anything, of course. That would just be silly superstition.”

“What happened?” asked Eddie, finding himself hooked despite himself.

“It should have been an eighteen hour crossing, but the Captain was in a hurry. Why, we may never know. He was determined to make the crossing in sixteen hours.” He turned to look at Eddie again, and there was a strange intensity in his eyes that disturbed him a little. “Maybe it was important to him to reach Harwich before midday. Whatever the reason, it was just ten minutes before noon when the ship drew close to port. It slipped past Landguard Point with its cranes and warehouses. Past Ha'penny pier, devoid of the usual crowd of gawping tourists that cold November day. It entered the brown, sludgy waters of the River Stour and it pulled up at the quayside at the very stroke of noon itself.”

Eddie found his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “So it made the crossing then,” he said.

The other man nodded. “The passengers disembarked. Shortly afterwards most of the crew did as well. Just another successful sea crossing, no different from a thousand others it had made.” He drew a heavy breath. “No different at all.”

“I thought you were going to say that the ship sank or something.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Well, why tell the story otherwise?”

“I was just saying that it was a day just like today. Not everything has to be a drama, does it?”

“You said it was the last time the ship made the crossing!”

“That's right. It was an old ship. It was moved to Edinburgh, where it was broken up for scrap later that year.” He was struggling to keep a straight face now, though, and a moment later both men broke out in laughter. “You're a lunatic.” said Eddie, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“That accusation has been made by others. Ben Wrexham.” He held out his gloved hand.

“Eddie Nash.” He took the other man's hand and shook it.

“I'm sorry, I'm just not very good at starting conversations, that’s all. I find that telling a stupid story is a good way to break the ice with someone.”

Oh God! thought Eddie, taking his hand back rather faster than he'd meant to. Is he making a pass at me? If he was, he was going to be disappointed. Eddie was very much a lady's man. He tried to think of ways to turn him down politely, without causing offense. Not that it mattered if he did cause offence, of course. They'd never met each other before and would very likely never meet again, although there was something vaguely familiar about him...

“Is that how you broke the ice with your wife when you first met her?” he asked, then cursed himself. He'd assumed the man was married and was trying to politely remind him of the fact, but if he wasn't... He'd think Eddie wanted to know if he was single. He'd think he was responding to his approach. “I always have a hard time finding the first words to say to a pretty girl,” he said hurriedly. There, now he knows I'm straight.

Ben smiled with amusement, as if he could read the younger man's thoughts. “I want to offer you a job,” he said.

“A job? You don't know me.”

“I'm afraid I know you quite well. I've done quite a bit of research on you. You were born in Basildon, Essex, and educated at Preston Grammar School. In twenty thirty eight you were awarded a scholarship to attend St John’s College, Cambridge where you graduated with first class honours in natural science and physics. You currently work as assistant demonstrator in experimental physics at the Cavendish Laboratory where you have co-authored several papers on nuclear dynamics and casimir radiation with your head of department, Andrew Sterling. You are strongly tipped to replace him when he retires in a year or two, which would make you the youngest person ever to hold the position. You are regarded as a rising star. A prodigy. The most brilliant physicist since Rutherford.”

Eddie stared in astonishment. “Now I recognise you. You were at the conference. Ben Wrexham. Professor Ben Wrexham? You're that Ben Wrexham?” The older man hung his head modestly. “I can't believe I didn't recognise you. You gave a lecture on neutron decay just yesterday. It was brilliant!”

“Thank you. We've been keeping an eye on you for some time, I'm afraid. I'm sorry if that’s a bit creepy...”

“Who’s we?”

“I'm the head of a team working for the British government whose job it is to undertake a rather special research project. A project that’s been going on for well over fifty years and that will very probably still be going on well after you and I are in our graves. It's top secret. We can't publish any papers on the work we do. You will still be well known in the field of high energy physics, though. We all have side projects that we can publish papers on. This is important, because we have to interact with the wider scientific community. Get the input of other scientists without them realising what they're really advising us on. That means they have to respect us, and that means published papers. You can spend some of your time continuing to work on your current projects. You can continue to talk to your current colleagues, so long as you don’t tell them what you’re really working on.”

“And what will I really be working on?”

“I'm afraid I can't tell you that yet. Not until we get your answer. I know this is a lot to ask of you. You already have a brilliant future ahead of you. A virtually guaranteed position as one of the foremost authorities in the world...”

His voice broke off as his attention was distracted by something coming into view to his left. A wind turbine, towering above them, its gleaming metal trunk rising out of the water no more than a couple of dozen meters from the side of the ferry.

The two men spun around, and saw more wind turbines beyond it. A whole forest of them, their blades, each the size of an airliner’s wing, motionless in the still night air. “I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to be that close to them,” said Eddie in alarm.

“We're certainly not,” agreed Ben. “There’s supposed to be an exclusion zone. We must be off course.”

“How can we be off course? That's just not possible nowadays. Modern navigation techniques...”

The two men stared as the huge shaft of steel, as wide across as a house and painted a bright yellow to make it easily visible to anyone careless or stupid enough to get this close, drifted slowly past to the sound of the ship's wake slapping against its mussel and barnacle covered base. One of its blades was pointing straight down, and as the ferry passed below, the top of the aerial mast passed just a couple of meters from its stationary tip.

“Wow that was close,” muttered Eddie, his whole body shivering with nervous energy. He felt as though he was tip toeing past a terrible monster that somehow, miraculously, had failed to wake up. “This ship's navigator is so fired.”

“Fired?” said Ben in a half laugh. “He'll be lucky to avoid jail time. Endangering a ship on the high seas...”

The two men walked forward along the deck, wanting to see what lay ahead of the ship. Were they just passing the wind farm, skirting it to one side, in which case the danger was now past, or were they passing through It? “How deep is the water here?” asked Eddie. “Could we run aground?”

“No idea,” replied the older man. “I would imagine it’s easier to build those things where the water's not too deep, but...” He allowed the sentence to trail off, and both men kept well away from the railing in case a sudden lurch of the ship threw them overboard.

There were very few people up on the ferry’s deck. Most of the passengers were inside, in the warm, but those who were standing by the railing had also seen the towering colossus and were talking among themselves in loud, alarmed voices. A woman standing by the nearest lifeboat had a phone in her hand and was talking to someone, here eyes wide and her breathing rapid with fear. She was holding it to take a selfie of herself and the towering bulk of the turbine behind her, to prove to the friend on the other end of the phone that she wasn't hallucinating. As they passed, Eddie heard a screech of disbelief coming from the phone's speaker. Yeah, you and me both, he thought.

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Seeing it gave Ben an idea and he stopped to pull his own phone from his pocket. “Let's see where we are,” he said, bringing up a map on the screen. Eddie leaned closer to see. The screen glowed brightly in the evening gloom and Ben scrolled the map to bring the North Sea into view. He reverse pinched it to magnify it. “That's odd,” he said. “The phone thinks we're fifty miles south of the nearest wind farm.”

“Sometimes it takes a moment or two to work out where we are,” said Eddie, but as seconds passed the little marker on the screen refused to move, continuing to insist that they were thirty miles west of Rotterdam, in a well established shipping lane. Right where they were supposed to be.

“Perhaps the map’s out of date,” he suggested. “They're building new wind farms all the time. There's this really huge one they’re thinking of building...” He knew it was a ridiculous thing to say even as he was saying it. Shipping would be told to avoid new wind farm sites well before there was anything there for them to run into.

The ferry was beginning to turn, they saw. The crew, normally too busy watching computer screens to do anything as mundane as looking out the windows, had also noticed the turbines and were trying to steer the ship to safety. “They must think there’s clear water to the south,” said Ben. “Or perhaps they just hope there is. Let's get to the bows.” Eddie nodded and the two men continued their way forward.

A crowd of passengers, who had apparently become aware of what was happening some time before the two scientists, had had the same idea and were emerging onto the deck, pulling warm coats around themselves as they did so. A crewman was also looking anxiously out to sea and several passengers were demanding answers from him in loud, angry voices. “He doesn't know anything, idiots.” muttered Ben to himself. “Leave the poor man alone.” He didn't say this to the passengers, though, to Eddie's relief. That wasn't a scene they wanted to get caught up in.

There was a small knot of passengers at the bow, crowded up against the railing, but they didn't block their view of the wind turbines towering above them up ahead, one of them directly in their path. “Shit!” said Eddie with feeling. “This could be bad.”

The ferry was still turning and the huge steel structure was slipping slowly to the side, but not fast enough. The ship gave a lurch as the engines were put into reverse, but their forward movement was scarcely affected. “They say a supertanker takes twenty miles to stop,” said Ben, staring at the wind turbine as it grew menacingly ahead of them. “I wonder how long a cross channel ferry takes to stop?”

The passengers at the bow began to back away, some of them running for the imagined safety of the nearest hatch inside. Ben and Eddie merely took a firm hold of the handrail of the staircase leading up to the next deck. “I know we're in little real danger,” said Eddie, “but I still find myself wishing for a life jacket.”

“This ship and the turbine both have vertical sides,” agreed Ben. “The impact, if there is one, will be above the waterline, and it’ll be a sliding contact. The turbine might suffer some serious damage, but the worst that'll happen to the ship is that there’ll be a long stretch of hull in need of a new coat of paint. You’re right, though. The brain seeks reassurance.”

A woman standing nearby stared at him and nodded vigorously, then turned to share Ben's words with her friends. They looked relieved for a moment, but the moment they looked back at the turbine Eddie saw the fear return to their faces. The thing was just too huge, just too tall, like a giant out of a fairy tale. Until you got this close to one, it was impossible to understand just how gigantic they were! A vast, overwhelming presence that could only mean bad things for anything that dared to approach.

The impact, when it came, though, was just as Ben had said it would be. A steel staircase running up the side of the turbine’s base was torn to ruin as the ferry brushed past it, and then the shaft of the turbine itself came into contact with the ferry’s hull. The ship rocked with the impact and the two men held on tight to prevent themselves from being thrown from their feet. Then the ship steadied itself, although it sat at a slight angle in the water as it continued to move on.

The scream of friction as the two steel surfaces rubbed against each other was deafening, but neither structure seemed to suffer any serious damage. It might have been different if they'd been passing the turbine on the side in which the blades were facing, since the ship's highest structures were almost at the same level as the downward pointing blade, but luck was with them and they were on the turbine’s other side. A young man was trying to say something to his wife, they saw, but the din was so great that she couldn't hear him, even though she leaned closer so that her ear was right next to his mouth. They could only wait, hands over their ears, until the ferry and the turbine parted at last, the ship righting itself to float upright in the water once more.

A dozen different conversations broke out at once as silence fell, and almost everyone was pointing their phone cameras at the receding turbine, one side of which, they saw, was now buckled inwards and gleaming where the paint had been stripped from the freshly exposed steel.

“I'm no structural engineer,” admitted Ben, “But I reckon they'll be wanting to take a look at that. The structure’s been seriously weakened. Looks like it might buckle and fall in a high wind.”

“Looks expensive,” agreed Eddie. “What about the ship?” He looked over the side, trying to see the damage. “I can't see anything. I would imagine they make ships stronger than wind turbines. They move, after all, and carry passengers.”

Ben nodded. “The only danger, I think, will be if the hull plates have separated, letting water in. I'm afraid my knowledge of ship design is sorely inadequate. So long as we're not taking on water, though, we should be okay.” He looked ahead. There was nothing but open water ahead of them now, and the engines were put back into forward gear as the bridge crew tried to get the ship out of danger. “Quite an adventure, all in all. Something to tell the grandkids about. I don't imagine we'll ever find out what happened. Someone on the bridge fell asleep, probably, or the ship’s navigation developed a nasty glitch. These things happen, after all, and more often than people like to think.”

“What about the phone?” asked Eddie. He'd pulled his own phone from his pocket and pulled up a map app. The map was failing to load, though, and after waiting a few minutes he gave up and put it back in his pocket. Probably everyone was using that app at the moment, he thought, and the internet was overloaded.

“I wouldn’t put too much faith in the accuracy of a smartphone app,” said the other man, though. “I would imagine that this ship's navigation systems are a good deal more sophisticated.”

Someone shouted. A woman. She was pointing at something off to starboard and everyone else was staring, some of them gasping with horror. The two scientists looked and saw another ship. A large container ship, considerably larger than the ferry and piled high with shipping containers. It was almost fully dark now and most of the ship was hidden in the darkness, but the bridge and crew quarters half way back along the ship were brightly lit with light spilling from the windows. Portholes, Eddie corrected himself. Windows on a ship are called portholes. The light was enough to illuminate the lower parts of two nearby wind turbines, one on the ferry’s side of the ship, the other partly hidden from view behind the huge container ship. The ship was sailing neatly between them, but the silver moonlight was illuminating another that appeared to be directly on its path. “Shit!” said Eddie, his stomach clenching up in awful anticipation.

“This could be bad.” agreed Ben. “That ship won't just glance off the turbine, like we did. Its momentum will take it right through it. Maybe it'll miss. It's hard to tell from this angle...”

He didn't sound as though he believed it, though, and neither did Eddie. Neither did the other passengers, to judge from the muttered, fearful conversations and the number of phones being held up to record the event. Everyone knew what was going to happen, so that when it happened there was nothing but a great sigh of awe and horror from the captivated spectators.

The wind turbine bent backwards slowly and majestically while the container ship continued onwards without any visible change to its motion. When it fell, it did so all in one piece, toppling back into the water with a splash whose size was made evident by the slowness with which foaming water rose up around it. The spray hung around the ship for a long age, hiding its entire front end from view while gasps rose from the ferry passengers, and when it cleared they saw that the water was too shallow for the turbine to be completely submerged. The blades remained above the surface; wide, dark shapes, their edges gleaming in the moonlight like knives that some careless giant had dropped directly in the path of the container ship.

They saw the front end of the ship rise as it slid onto the blades, then drop again as the structure of the turbine was crushed beneath it. So great was its momentum that the ship continued moving forward against engines that, they assumed, must have been slammed into reverse.

“That turbine will be a mass of jagged steel shards now,” said Ben, his voice hushed with shock. “Tearing the ship's hull open like the claws of a tiger. That ship's finished, it must be.”

“At least the water's shallow,” said Eddie. “Even when it settles onto the sea bed, its top will still be above sea level.”

“Shallow is a relative term,” said the older man, though. “Twenty, thirty metres maybe. Don’t let the turbine fool you. Remember how huge those thing are.”

Eddie nodded, remembering the one the ferry had passed by.

“A shipping container is about two and a half metres high," continued Ben, "so that ship is about...” He stared, using the containers as a ruler. “The top of the bridge is about thirty metres above sea level, give or take. It could well sink completely. Vanish entirely beneath the waves.”

“Shit!” said Eddie. “You hear about disasters at sea, but to actually witness one...”

He glanced around at the passengers. Virtually every passenger was now up on deck, it seemed, and the majority were filming the disaster with their smart phones. The event, now that their own danger was passed, was nothing more than an evening's entertainment for them. Eddie felt a wave of disgust, then forced it down when he remembered that there was nothing they could do at present. It wasn't as if they could go to the aid of the emperilled sailors instead of filming them.

“How can two ships go astray at the same time?” muttered Ben to himself. “I think we owe the navigator an apology. There's clearly something bigger going on here. The global GPS system.”

“That would explain your phone as well,” agreed Eddie. “A glitch, you think? Something like the millennium bug but a few decades late?”

“Or sabotage,” said Ben. “Someone hacked it, perhaps. Terrorists or something.”

Both men fell silent as the implications sank in. If the GPS system had been sabotaged it would be causing mayhem all over the world. Not just ships but aircraft, hundreds of miles from their intended destinations and desperately looking for somewhere to land before they ran out of fuel. There might already have been tragedies. Ben pulled the phone from his pocket and brought up a news app.

Eddie looked over his shoulder as the progress bar crept across the screen, then stopped half way. “A GPS failure would affect the internet too,” said Ben as he put the phone back in his pocket. “Most data traffic goes by way of undersea cables, but some goes by satellite, and they use GPS timing signals to synchronise themselves. The internet's going to be sluggish until they sort this out.”

“Who would do a thing like this?” asked Eddie, aghast with horror. “I mean, it’s not just travellers going off course. Banks use GPS to synchronise transactions, so do international traders. Police, fire fighters, power grids, god knows what else. Who hates us that much?”

“To quote a friend of mine, some people just want to watch the world burn.”

They both turned their attention back to the container ship, which was now visibly lower at the front end. The ferry was slowing to a stop, and a moment later the ship's intercom crackled to life. “Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen,” said a man's voice. “This is your captain speaking. As you are no doubt already aware, the container ship Sabrina Bay has run over a wind turbine and is sinking. The crew will shortly be taking to the lifeboats and we will be taking them aboard. We will, therefore, be remaining in the area for a few hours, which means that our arrival in Harwich will be delayed. We apologise for the inconvenience, but I know you will all understand and will be glad to give assistance to our fellow sea travellers.”

A babble of consternated conversation broke out in the crowd, and the two scientists made their way quietly back to the stern of the ship. “It could be us sinking,” said Ben, shaking his head with disbelief, “and instead of being thankful they’re just angry that they'll be late for their, for whatever it is they're in such a hurry to get back for.”

“But we will get there,” said Eddie, smiling. “We'll get back to port and we'll disembark safely. And it was a night just like this.”

Ben chuckled, and they stopped by the railing to watch the crew of the container ship lowering their lifeboats.