Dead Sea (8 page)

‘Look,' she snarled, pulling herself erect, trying not to let too much moisture get on to the electrical equipment beside her. ‘Why don't I go and shake a leg for them, Libby? Roll them out and up? Someone has to run this boat right no matter what!'

Liberty swung the helm over hard enough to make her watch-mate sit down again. Sit down painfully hard, in fact. Water sloshed across the afterdeck and cascaded into the sea. ‘
You
look,' she snarled. ‘First, I'm the skipper. I run the boat. I say who shakes a leg and when – and who rolls who out. Secondly, it's
Liberty
, not Libby.
Never
Libby. Thirdly, you signed on for this. Come hell or high water, come what may. There was no clause saying, “When the going gets tough, Maya gets going
home
”. There wasn't even a codicil saying, “When the going gets tough, Maya starts bitching”! Fourthly . . .'

But they never found out what ‘fourthly' might have been because just at that moment, the driving squall-mist to port of them was parted by the cutwater of a ship. A cutwater at least twice as tall as
Flint
's main mast, its forepeak leaning out and almost over them at once, so steep was the rake of the bow. And the whole thing was coming directly towards
Flint
at what seemed like supersonic speed. Liberty got a horrified glimpse of a sheer, sharp steel blade rising and spreading like a black metal awning above her from an avalanche of white foam at its oncoming forefoot to a broad forecastle high enough to be wreathed in low clouds above. A wide, wide forecastle with, of all things,
Walt Disney
written in gold across it – as though the man himself had come down from heaven as a gigantic spirit with a gargantuan autograph pen full of golden ink.

A siren bellowed like the last trump, so loud it seemed to be sounding inside Liberty's head. She screamed, really believing for a second that the overwhelming noise had burst her eardrums. But even as she screamed, Liberty was spinning the wheel hard over, tearing the muscles in her shoulders and back, looking up though tear-bright eyes to see the storm-reefed mainsail slam hard over, tight as a drumskin and straining fit to burst. Maya was thrown further back into her seat. The whole hull tilted hard over – so hard, in fact, that the equipment Maya was using began to slide down on top of her. There was a muffled scream as the B watch were actually rolled out of their bunks.

Liberty found the breath to articulate her terror and her rage. ‘I will NOT,' she screamed at the oncoming monster, ‘I will NOT be run down and beaten by MICKEY FUCKING MOUSE . . .'

Robin looked up from
Katapult
's wheel at the listless sag of her mainsail. The sunlight glinted on her golden curls, hazy but still strong. ‘Four days,' she said to herself, quietly but dejectedly. ‘What was that song? ‘Don't say there's nothing to do in the Doldrums'. Four days of almost total calm. And how far have we come?'

Rohini Verma the Indian sailboat champion and companion on the A watch looked up. Her brown eyes widened slightly and her forehead gathered into a thoughtful frown between her straight black brows and her severely swept-back hair. ‘Just on two hundred miles according to the GPS,' she answered. ‘That's—'

‘About two knots mean speed,' answered Robin. ‘And when I think that
Katapult
can pull nearly forty-five under full sail . . .'

‘It's frustrating,' Flo Weary said, picking up the conversation as the B watch came up at eleven a.m. on the dot, straightening to sweep back her mahogany red mane and stretch her long, lithe body after the constriction of seven hours in a narrow bunk. ‘But it's not the end of the world.'

‘We might as well be at the end of the world,' said Robin, uncharacteristically glum. ‘We're at the heart of a dead calm surrounded by a combination of mist and heat haze you could cut with a knife. If the world ended a couple of hundred metres ahead we'd sail right over the edge and never know it.'

‘Naaaw,' said Flo with an irrepressible chuckle, coming up past Rohini at the console, stepping up into the well of the afterdeck and up again to stand beside Robin at the multihull's big wheel. ‘We'd all have died of old age long before
Katapult
sailed another couple of hundred metres.'

‘Look on the bright side,' insisted Akelita, as she relieved Rohini at the communications console. ‘We could be aboard
Flint
!' She shivered as she spoke, and her silky skin rose in goosebumps.

Robin looked down as the island girl shivered, looking very much like she had in the photos Fox had got hold of – wearing nothing more than a micro-kini and mega tan. And coconut-scented sun oil. Flo was dressed much like Akelita – as were the others. Robin emphasized her age and seniority by simply slinging a scarf around her waist and knotting it at her right hip to serve as a short skirt. But her shoulders and the upper slopes of her breasts were as brown and freckled as everyone else's aboard. And as thoughtlessly on display. They were due to film another half hour of lively footage at noon, she thought wearily. But unless the girls covered up, it would only be suitable for the adult channels.

‘Yes,' added Rohini. ‘
Flint
's travelled nearly twelve hundred miles, running down the coast past Portland almost as far as San Francisco, then back up and out towards her planned course. Twelve hundred. That would be hard sailing even without the weather they're having. Maya MacArthur checked in at eight and boy did she sound pissed.'

‘Sick and tired,' added Robin. ‘Literally.'

‘Yeah,' agreed Rohini. ‘They've not been putting in the news footage as agreed because they've been too busy. Can we do extra? I mean . . .' She looked around her nearly naked companions, her speaking gaze seeming to echo Robin's thoughts. Too little news; too much adult content.

‘What was the name of that English girl?' asked Flo, apparently apropos of nothing. ‘The one who told the papers she sometimes sailed in the nude when she was single-handing? Now that's what I call publicity . . .'

A short silence fell then.

B Watch had relieved A Watch. Flo was beside Robin at the big wheel and Akelita beside Rohini at the multihull's massive bank of computer equipment, but nothing had really changed. Nothing much had changed for eighty hours except that sunlight and moonlight had succeeded each other beyond the haze of the high, hot sky.

The sail flapped.

Robin felt a tiny caress on her cheek. The mist ahead seemed to stir. The ocean beneath them heaved gently, a deep-water roller going almost invisibly from one part of the sixty-five million square miles of vacancy surrounding them to another.

Robin drew in breath to tell her crew it was time to get decently dressed for the noon broadcast, but paused. The ghostly caress on her cheek was strangely reborn as a fluttering right at the back of her throat. She began to frown, all thoughts of filming or communicating whipping straight out of her mind.

The mainsail flapped. And the sound seemed to trick off something in her head. There was the deepest, quietest, rumbling sound seeming to come from the writhing mist all around her. For just one heart-stoppingly superstitious instant, she actually wondered whether
Katapult
was just about to sail blindly over the edge of the world as she had said.

‘Can . . .' she said. She intended to ask,
can you guys hear that?
But she stopped at that one word because what she was hearing suddenly seemed less important than what she was seeing. The mist ahead of them began to darken incredibly rapidly and as it did so, it became strangely agitated.
Katapult
pitched strongly enough to make the women stagger.

‘Hey,' said Rohini. ‘What on earth . . .'

And a fish fell out of the sky. A sizeable, fat-flanked fish. It landed on the well of the afterdeck and bounced, twisting, down the steps to land at Akelita's feet. ‘Is that a flying fish?' asked Rohini.

‘No,' said Akelita. ‘It's a mackerel. A jack . . .'

And another jack mackerel smashed into the well deck, narrowly missing Flo. Then, incredibly, it was raining fish. ‘What the hell . . .' said Akelita, her voice almost lost in the roaring of the finny deluge. In the roaring of something ahead. Something monstrous – something that sounded every bit as dangerous as the end of the world itself.

‘Sails in,' ordered Robin. ‘Get the sails in. Start the motor.
MOVE!
'

Robin had been watching the darkening, writhing mist ahead, more and more acutely aware of the gathering rumble. Even before the fish started falling from the sky in simply biblical numbers.

Suddenly the mist was whipped away entirely, like a magician's cloak off a spectacular illusion. And there, dead ahead and lazily approaching, was a towering black-headed, dark-hearted waterspout.

R
eona Tanaka had never been as far south as the Yokosuka dock complex before. Indeed, once the taxi passed through the Kawasaki Ward, except for a distant glimpse of the familiar buildings at Kanto Gakuin University, he was effectively as lost as if he had been on the moon. Or rather on Mercury, he thought angrily. On Mercury it never stopped raining, which gave the planet a lot in common with Tokyo this summer. Seething, he looked out of the streaming windows at the districts the taxi was speeding through. He would never have ventured into an area such as this had he not been desperate. And the fact that he was desperate enough to do so now simply filled him with a boiling sense of outrage.

Had not the far more intrepid Dr Aika Rei not agreed to accompany him? Even at this unnaturally late hour and on a night such as this. Just as it was she who had convinced him that he should keep his good news secret even from his friends at the university; even from his ultimate employers Mr Greenbaum and Captain Mariner. But at least she was willing to help him. And it was she who had made the discreetest possible enquiries about how on earth they could get to the priceless bottle before anyone else could do so. But even her presence was hardly proving to be reliable armour against a seething childish sense that life was being spectacularly unfair to him at the moment
.

Reona kept an eye on the taxi's meter, watching the price of this unnerving excursion clock up relentlessly. It made his mind fill with bitter amusement that he, a US dollar millionaire one-hundred-and-ten times over, should be forced to watch his yen so carefully. Particularly as the yen stood at eighty to the dollar this morning. And a mathematical mind such as Dr Tanaka's had no trouble in calculating that he was a Japanese yen millionaire eight thousand, eight hundred million times over. That made him a billionaire in anybody's language. A multi-billionaire, if such a thing existed. A multi-billionaire who could not get his hands on his multi-billions.

A thought that Aika Rei clearly shared. Had she snuggled against him any more tightly, their bodies would have melted through the layers of clothing separating skin from skin. The erotic idea was far more appealing than thoughts about what Mr Greenbaum or Captain Mariner would do when they discovered his perfidy; or about the meteorology of Mercury – or the destination they were heading for. And so he allowed it to linger as the taxi sped through the terrible weather further and further down towards the docks. ‘Where are we now?' he enquired for perhaps the tenth time since they had left the university.

‘Natsuchimacho,' came the not very helpful reply.

Not very helpful to Reona, at any rate. ‘Nearly there,' whispered Aika Rei. ‘If we look out carefully we'll see some really hot cars. They do a lot of drifting down here in the docks.'

‘Drifting?' he asked, intrigued.

‘Like in the movies,' Aika Rei explained. ‘
Tokyo Drift
.'

Which left him none the wiser.

She had clearly ventured far further out of her ivory tower than the Greenbaum Professor had. A fact proved by her sexual technique as much as by her breadth of contacts – and her urban cultural knowledge.

‘Do you know what to do?' she demanded abruptly.

‘Act casual,' he answered uneasily. ‘Be vague. We're honeymooners looking for a bit of an adventure . . .'

In the four days since he realized the enormity of what had happened to him, it was the best that they could come up with. Though to be fair, in an attempt at maintaining normality in the face of the increasingly rabid media hunt for the owner of the winning lottery ticket – definitely worth $110 million according to the publicity – they had both worked their normal hours as usual and only really got to make plans during their brief sleeping time together. When, one way and another, not a lot of sleeping had been done. And, he thought in an angry panic now, as the taxi slowed, nowhere near enough planning either.

The taxi coasted to a halt. ‘Here we are,' whispered Aika Rei.

Grimacing against the brief brightness of the taxi's interior light, Reona handed over the fare and climbed out. With Aika Rei at his side guiding him with her body, he hurried through the shadowy downpour towards the door of a bar illuminated by a bright red neon sign. He glanced up as the pair of them stumbled in.

The place was called RAGE.

How apt.

Half-blinded by the bar's dim atmosphere, Reona was just able to make out a short, shiny bar backed with glass shelves laden with bottles of every colour he could imagine. Behind the counter a tall, slim young man was mixing a cocktail with all the theatrical bravura of a sushi chef. The bar was busy but not packed; half-a-dozen tables in the middle, all but empty. A dozen private booths around the walls, all full of couples. Every head turned as they stumbled in and hardly surprisingly. Aika Rei was the only woman in the place.

But at least that fact speeded things up. A tall man in immaculate uniform stood up and beckoned them to a nearby booth. Close-to, his face seemed to belie the neatness of his turnout. It had a battered, almost brutal quality and seemed to be set in a perpetual frown.