Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (2 page)

“You are the lucky man,
monsieur
.”

The precise voice of the French warrant officer jerked him out of his bitter thoughts.

“Huh?” Rogo grunted.

The helicopter was swinging in a great angled sweep of the sky and the officer pointed through the window to the wreckage of the S.S.
Poseidon
below. “I said you are the lucky man,” he repeated. “Sixteen hundred dead and only six saved. We must thank God, I think.”

Rogo finished the rest of the coffee in the plastic cup. “You thank Him, pal,” he said. “He ain’t done me no favors.”

The Frenchman raised incredulous eyebrows and backed onto his seat on the port side of the machine, where Manny and Martin offered more agreeable company. “We certainly do thank God, sir,” Martin chirruped. “Mr. Rogo’s rather tired.” He raised his face to Rogo and called out, “But we did it okay, Mr. Rogo, didn’t we? We got out after all.”

Rogo decided to ignore the little shopkeeper. There were other, more serious things that occupied him. He pressed his pugnacious face against the cold of the window and looked down.

The ship lay on the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean like a surfacing whale. The tidal wave that had tossed it over so easily had left it upside down and two-thirds submerged. He could see the huge propellers jutting upwards like ears, and the square cut the French rescue team made in the propeller-shaft housing to release them.

It was impossible to imagine that about eight hours earlier it had been packed with carefree merrymakers celebrating New Year’s Eve. Now they were all dead. His wife Linda. Manny Rosen’s wife, Belle, and Scott, the fiery minister who had led them to safety. All dead. In some ways, he thought, it would be better if he were down there with them.

For eight hours they had struggled to fight their way through a nightmare of wreckage and bodies and roaring water, and in that topsy-turvy hell it had been hard to count on a normal world outside. Now he was safe in the warmth of the helicopter with a glittering sun overhead, and he wished himself still inside the
Poseidon.

The warrant officer was checking the names of the survivors on a clipboard. “Let us see if I have the details correct,” he said. “Susan and Robin Shelby. They will be the two children who are asleep in the back, yes?” His pencil indicated the rear of the machine where they had been bedded down.

The self-appointed spokesman, James Martin, agreed. “And the girl with them, she’s called Nonnie Parry. From Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

He went on brightly as the officer continued to check the names against a list. “I’m James Martin, from Anaheim, California, and this is Mr. Emmanuel Rosen from New York.”

The officer murmured his thanks and ticked off more names. “And that,” whispered Martin, “is Detective Lieutenant Mike Rogo—he’s from New York too. He’s quite famous really. He once broke up a prison riot.”

The Frenchman shot Rogo a look that suggested he would not be impressed if he had been the first man on the moon. Martin insisted as loudly as he dare. “He did. It was in all the papers.”

It was not quiet enough. “Can it,” Rogo’s growl shrank the little red-haired man back into his seat.

“I was only . . .”

Rogo mimicked his squeaky voice with cruel accuracy. “I was only trying to help, Mr. Rogo.” Then he reverted to his own rasping register. “Well, don’t.”

He turned from his shocked audience and squinted through the window again. All around the steel hull of the
Poseidon
lay the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck, the smashed relics of life aboard a cruise liner that were no longer entirely recognizable. He could pick out some things: items of clothing, an empty lifejacket, crates, and, incongruously, a grand piano.

Suddenly Manny Rosen burst into sobs and dropped his weeping face into his hands. “Belle, my Belle, I shouldn’t have left you down there.”

The Frenchman was astonished by the tenderness of Rogo’s response. “Don’t take it so bad, Manny. She was a great lady. She saved us all. That’s what she wanted to do.”

The helicopter was circling again back over the scene. Rogo nodded towards the short staircase that led to the bubble which housed the pilot, copilot, and radio operator. He asked the warrant officer, “Why don’t we get the hell outta here?”

The Frenchman ignored his tone. “We must survey the scene to make a full report, sir,” he replied. “They will want to know which other ships are in the area and if and when the
Poseidon
is likely to sink. Then we shall take you back to base, and you will be flown to Athens.”

Then, thought Rogo, back to New York. And the questions. Why had he left? Why had he not stayed with the job? What had happened to the shipment? For Chrissakes, he groaned inwardly, all those goddamn questions. Then he remembered O’Hagan and that made it worse. Every mill, every office, every classroom has its funny man. O’Hagan was going to love this one. Rogo could imagine it all too easily. “Fell down on the job, huh, Rogo? Quit. Walked out. Must have a yellow streak buried under that fat gut, Rogo.” He gripped his massive fists as he thought about it.

The helicopter continued to circle and climb, and Rogo half-heard Martin’s babbling as he told the officer of their terrifying ascent through the bowels of the ship. “Well, it was the Reverend Scott who took charge. He was the minister, you know, a preacher. What a wonderful man! It was his idea to make for the stern. He said it was the best chance of rescue. He tried to tell the others but they wouldn’t listen . . .”

Rogo muttered a few weary obscenities to himself. Martin made it sound like an adventure trip. He didn’t know, none of them knew, of the weight of shame and responsibility that the policeman would have to bear.

“. . . but I guess Scott went kind of funny at the end and he threw himself into a blazing pool. He said something about sacrificing his life for ours. He was very religious.” He glanced nervously at Rogo and lowered his voice. “That was when Mr. Rogo’s wife died. She fell. And Mrs. Rosen was a real hero. She dived under the water to find a way out for us.”

If Manny heard him, he said nothing. His head was still buried in his hands as he sobbed softly.

The blanket fell from Rogo’s shoulders as he pressed once more against the window. The sea was no longer empty. To the south there was a white pleasure yacht with a single yellow funnel about ten miles from the
Poseidon.
On the horizon to the north, a blob of black smoke signifying another advancing vessel. And much nearer, almost directly below them, what looked like a scruffy working boat. All were heading for the
Poseidon.

“Hey you!” Rogo ordered. The Frenchman looked up with strained courtesy. Rogo went on, “What the hell’s going on down there?”

The officer lifted his marine glasses and inspected the scene. He swung them from one vessel to another. “Salvage,” he said. “It is customary.”

“Customary!” Rogo made the word sound like the eighth deadly sin. “Whaddya mean, for Chrissakes? That tub’s got nothing to do with those guys.”

The officer lowered the glasses and explained with elaborate patience. “The nearest one looks like a coaster. He will be trying to be the first to get a line on board so he can claim salvage rights. The one furthest away is, I think, the
Komarevo.
She is what you might call a professional scavenger of the seas. Amongst other things. The yacht, I imagine, is doing a little macabre sight-seeing.”

Rogo scowled at the yacht. “Rich kids rubbernecking. Don’t I just know the type.” Then he was questioning the officer across the aisle again and he seemed deeply perturbed. “Why ain’t she sunk yet? Jesus, we thought she’d go down any lousy minute.”

“Air,” the officer replied succinctly. “Air pockets. There must have been many trapped in the forward and aft, now there must be one huge air bubble holding her up. Most of her engines and boilers will have fallen out. You saw them, perhaps?”

Rogo did not answer. “Yeah, but how long can she stay up?”

The officer looked out of the window again; the ships below were now little more than toys. He shrugged. “Five minutes, five hours, five days, five weeks. Remember, she is one-third above the water. There was an iron ore ship, the
Yacob Verolm,
forty thousand tons. She was capsized in a storm, the crew escaped, most of her cargo and engines fell out. She floated, keel up, for forty days.”

The policeman slumped back in his seat as though shot. His eyes were open and staring. He did not appear to hear the officer’s final comment. “In the end they had to shoot her down.”

In a hoarse whisper, Rogo asked, “What happens if it doesn’t sink?”

The young Frenchman was frowning. He could not understand Rogo’s obvious concern. “Well,” he said, “they will try to tow her into shallow water. Then salvage everything they can. Cargo, machinery, anything of value.”

Anything of value. Rogo knew what he must do. In his mad dash to escape death, and what had seemed the certainty that the ship was sinking, he had lost sight of his mission. He had forgotten he was a working cop. Now the cargo could be recovered and claimed by God knows who. It would be the end for Rogo. He could hear O’Hagan’s taunting voice already. His simple sense of duty and primitive pride boiled inside him, but most of all he could hear O’Hagan.

He slipped his hand into his pants pocket. It was still there. The tiny Colt .25 automatic, no bigger than a bunch of keys. He had scoffed when they had issued it to him. A handbag gun, he had said. You couldn’t punch holes in paper with it. He wanted his .38 Police Special, but they had insisted: on a security job you needed a lightweight pistol you could carry at all times. He remembered what Linda had said the previous evening when he had put it in his pocket. “Who we having dinner with, honey—Frankie Costello?” But it was a gun, it had a full clip of six, and that was all that mattered.

He stood up slowly and flicked the neat two-inch barrel at the French officer.

“Okay fella. Tell the driver to turn around. I’m going back.”

The tidal wave which eight hours earlier had been launched by an underwater earthquake was almost entirely directional. The huge wall of water which spun the S.S.
Poseidon
over like a leaf tore across the Mediterranean destroying everything in its path. Fishing vessels and millionaires’ yachts, motor cruisers and simple weekend boats were obliterated by that rampaging flood. Even when it hit the northern shores of Africa, it pounded angrily at the land.

Although it struck most savagely to the south, the effects were felt in varying degrees all around the Mediterranean. Tall yachts in safe harbors bucked like thoroughbreds in their stalls; halyards chattered in terror to the metal masts. Tax exiles with sea views dashed to their shutters as they heard their blue and kindly waters suddenly ravage the tourist beaches.

In the wardroom of the Dutch freighter
Magt van Leiden,
Captain Klaas van Zeevogel and his sixteen-year-old daughter Coby were sent spinning from their seats and crashed against the wall, wide-eyed with fear.

A few miles away, the young American at the helm of
The Golden Fleece
felt his thirty-foot Bermudan sloop wrenched from beneath him like a rug and turned into matchwood within a minute.

Then that one huge wave was gone. The seas stilled to an almost unnatural calm under the clear unseeing eye of the moon.

In those moments of high danger, all the practice and training in the world counted for nothing, and you had to fall back on pure instinct. Sharpen your reflexes on dangerous living all you like, but it was instinct that governed split-second action when there was no time for the rational processes of thought.

Before the wave, he had been at peace. The hours he spent in
The Golden Fleece
seemed to be his only time of true contentment. All day he had enjoyed clear skies. His twenty-five-year-old sloop had cut through the water on a broad reach, genoa and mainsails full, at a good six knots. The sun picked out the laundered whiteness of the patches around the batten holes and the bits of peeling varnish, but nothing could conceal the fact that his was a classic boat of beautiful performance and design, the perfect reflection of a man with taste and spirit. And if such a man should not really have his dinghy inflated and skimming behind the stern, well, it was a relaxed sort of day, everything was going well. As it turned out, his laziness in not bringing the dinghy on board and deflating it saved his life.

Then the wave had hit, and in that moment of atavistic instinct, all he could hope was that his body did the right things. It was exactly the same when he boxed at college. He would see the right cross coming over and, almost as a theoretical exercise, wonder if his left arm would rise to block it and his own right swing over. It was true, too, out there in those jungle-strewn hills. The black leaves against the piercing blue of the sky. One patch would be too black, too solid, and he would drop to one knee and feel the shudder of the automatic in his arms, and after he fell there would be another of those faces, brown and meaningless as the face on a coin.

He had been beating to windward under the clear night sky and watching the bow. In this tideless sea, wind and weather came together. He had heard the noise, turned, and caught a glimpse of that white-capped avalanche roaring through the darkness. Quickly he had thrown the tiller to starboard and brought her through the eye of the wind so that she took the wave across the bow. Even as he did, and felt the sloop tossed like a scrap of paper, he knew it was no use. Not even his yacht could weather that one. Then he was flying over the water and dragged in a great gulp of air before he felt himself rolled and tumbled powerlessly in the all-engulfing dark of the wild waters. He struck upwards through the tumult and his lungs strained when it seemed he would never see the sky again. Then, just as inexplicably, it had gone. He paddled on the rapidly calming surface. The dinghy was there, waiting like a well-trained dog.

He was alive. He had a boat under him. But
The Golden Fleece
, his home, his office, and his love, had gone. With it the highly refined radio equipment that was by no means standard on a sloop of that size, the documents entitling him to collect a shipment of oranges, and the Navy .45 automatic hidden in the cabin sole.