The Coffin Ship (22 page)

There were no niceties. None of the expertise the chief had shown earlier, when fighting the captain. The big American simply threw himself upon the crouching Englishman. It was all the storm would allow. They rolled together, all arms and legs, upon the slick, slippery deck.

Robin was not one to stand around. She thought about warning the man on the forecastle head. Richard had set the extra watch as soon as they had left Lyme Bay, to keep lookout for Channel traffic as they were cutting across the busy sea lanes. It was Kerem Khalil and she was worried that he might be hurt should anything go wrong here. But that would mean leaving these two alone. And that was not why she had come. She threw herself forward and landed squarely on the wrestling men.

At once she became entangled in the fight. A fist slammed into her ribs. A knee dug into the pit of her stomach. She disregarded the pain and lashed back, pausing only to make sure that she wasn’t hitting Martyr by mistake. Then after a few wild but utterly satisfying punches, she concentrated on the safer and much more sensible stratagem of trying to capture and hold Ben Strong’s right arm.

Ben twisted more viciously, butting the American in the face, pressing the point of his right elbow into the woman’s chest and digging it home with all his strength.

He couldn’t last much longer. He could feel his energy slipping away. He would have to break free and destroy them both. There was a gun in his life raft nearby. He slammed his head up into Martyr’s face again and bore down with his elbow with rib-cracking force.

And managed to break away.

It was that indefinable feeling of unease, so vague but so overpowering, that called Richard off the bridge at last.

He did not go willingly, too well aware that if the grounds for his almost subconscious suspicions were of any real consequence, then his place was here; but for once John Higgins let him down. John could feel nothing wrong at all, beyond the night and the storm.

“There’s more to it than that…” growled Richard.

“Only the absence of Robin and Ben.”

“They’ll be here soon. Sidetracked, probably…” In all honesty, Richard was so deeply wrapped up in his internal search for what was wrong that he hadn’t noticed the time pass. He was completely unaware just how long it had been since Robin left the bridge.

He prowled up to the helmsman’s shoulder, peering out vainly into the whirling, screaming murk. Able occasionally to see the glimmer of a navigation light; once in a while the distant ghost of a Sampson post. And, as he looked down the invisible deck, the feeling in him grew.

Until he could stand it no longer. “Quine, get onto the R/T, if you please. Warn a team of GP seamen to wait for me at the port exit from A deck. Get one seaman up here to take over a watch. John, you have her.”

He stepped out onto the port bridge wing. The wind hit him like a sledgehammer, sending him staggering back before he angled his solid body and fought his way across the pressure as though he were crossing a river in flood. At the far end of the bridge wing was Salah Malik, night glasses round his neck, solidly on watch. He jumped when Richard crashed into him.

Richard thrust his lips against a cold, wet ear. “There’s something wrong,” he yelled, gesturing at the deck. “We’ve got to go and check.”

The big Palestinian nodded vigorously. In spite of everything else going on around him out here, he had felt it too, that formless chill of unease.

At the A deck door, a group of half a dozen waited. Tersely, Richard explained that there was nothing he could put his finger on, but they had to check the ship from stem to stern. He split them into teams. They checked their R/Ts. They went out into the night.

Out here, the storm was a little more restrained than it had been on the bridge wing. Here there were all the protuberances of the deck; from tank tops to pipes, catwalk-capped, to break the power of the wind. But on the bridge wing there had been safe rails, each upright closed with a steel plate. Here there was nothing small to hold on to; nothing safe. They felt exposed, as though they were on a mountainside, and they gathered together, like animals afraid.

Slowly, painstakingly, they began to work their way down the deck. Every now and then, when they reached some kind of shelter, Richard and Salah would crouch side by side, one checking with the teams, the other with the bridge. Richard was becoming seriously disturbed by the nonarrival of Ben and Robin. And, while it did occur to him that they, too, might be exploring
the ship, subject to the same formless fears as he was himself, never once did he imagine them locked in a life-or-death struggle less than one hundred yards away.

But the moment he stepped past the Sampson posts halfway down the deck, all thought of Ben and even Robin was driven from his mind.

Like everyone else who had crossed this line to night, he did so in the heart of a vicious squall; blind, deaf, dumb: distanced by a quirk of the storm from what was happening on the deck. And yet he knew at once. Even through the thick-soled yellow Wellingtons, lashed securely to his strong calves, the soles of his feet felt it instantly. The vibration of the deck was different. Up to the Sampson posts, the green steel throbbed to the rhythm of the mighty engine. Here it did not. Scant feet back, the deck was alive. Here it was dead.

Ice-cold inside as well as out, he whirled, falling to his knees. Salah came up beside him, reaching down to help, thinking only that the wind had toppled him. But Richard shrugged off the helping hand. He was peering at the green, fat-welded seam that stretched across the deck here. And as he looked, its thin lips ground together.

Was the movement in his imagination? It had been slight enough! He tore off his heavy gloves, pushing his fingers into the glassy streams of water, feeling for the truth before his hands went numb. Salah crashed to the deck beside him—and his hands were also there, long, dark-skinned fingers lost under the mill race of the water on the deck.

And then, proof positive! Simple and undeniable. The deck opened just wide enough to take the tip of the surprised Palestinian’s left ring finger and then closed to nip it off.

Salah lifted his hand, unbelieving. The finger was
simply gone from the top knuckle, severed with surgical neatness. It wasn’t even bleeding. It simply wasn’t there. The two men looked at it, thunderstruck. And then Richard’s R/T exploded into life. All along the line, from port to starboard, the horrified seamen had seen the deck open and close at their feet.

Richard sprang upright, overcoming the force of the storm by sheer will. He stood astride the breaking seam, facing out to port. There was no denying it: his left leg felt the engine’s throb. His right leg did not. Then, in a motion that translated itself almost into seasickness in his taut belly, he felt the bow on his right ride down the back of a great wave while the stern on his left was still riding up it. This time they all heard the
Clang!
as the two halves closed together again.

There was no training for this situation. He kept up, like any competent professional, with the literature of his profession, but nowhere had he ever seen the article he needed now: “Correct Procedures to Be Followed During the Break-up of Supertankers in Heavy Seas.” If he survived, perhaps he should write it.

But it was laughable even to be thinking like this. What they needed now was seamanship and leadership. Or nobody would be going home.

Was there time to secure the two halves of the ship together in some way? Out of the question. Dismissed at once.

Was there time to bring her head round so the seas hit beam-on and stopped working the weak joint? The instant the thought occurred he was on the R/T. “John! John, this is Richard. Bring her head round.”

“Aye. What bearing?”

“Fifty-five.” But would the torque of the turn widen the crack? Cause it to split apart altogether? God knew.

What next? He raised his R/T and opened the general band. “Attention all. Attention all. This is the captain speaking. Anyone forward of the Sampson posts, return to the bridge at once. Report in forecastle head watch.”

“
Crackle, hiss
…Khalil here, Captain. Returning to bridge as ordered…”

Richard, too, stepped back a few feet onto the living half of the deck. He turned and looked down toward the bow, his mind already lost in the innumerable practicalities of the situation. Better get Quine to send a general distress signal. Have some Vessel Not Under Command warning lights ready in case the bow stayed afloat. Better get those down there quickly. Two red lights in a vertical line, not less than six feet apart, visible for at least two miles.

Visible for about two hundred yards in this lot…

Suddenly, a prolonged, mournful howl burst out of the throat of the storm. Richard jumped, looking wildly around, before he realized it was the cry of his own ship. John had managed to get the fire-damaged foghorn working. It would sound a prolonged blast every two minutes now until visibility cleared.

He turned and looked back toward the bow. The wind rammed him again, sending him staggering back into Salah, who had put his glove back on as though his hand were still complete. It would be useless to order him to the sick bay until Kerem came safely back from the forecastle head.

And there was a figure now, stumbling out of the screaming murk. Running oddly, but that was surely the effect of the storm…

And, behind, two more figures…

Richard stepped forward onto the dead section of the deck. Immediately it seemed to jump down a couple of
feet, throwing him flat, as though his extra weight were too much to bear.

He picked himself up. The running man saw him and froze. Then he turned and was gone sideways into the shadows.

Richard staggered forward again, only to be driven down by another lurch as the whole bow fought to tear itself free. The other two figures fought to pick themselves up as he did, staggering in toward him. He recognized them at once—Robin and Martyr; there could not be two others like them aboard. And the running man…Ben!

What in hell’s name was going on here?

Yet another figure appeared, this one much closer. Kerem. He jogged unsteadily up to Richard, gesturing over his captain’s shoulder away toward the bridge, his normally impeturbable countenance twisted with concern. Richard turned again. The dead deck beneath his feet had fooled him, giving no warning. Behind him, what had once been a plain was now an escarpment. The stern was riding three, perhaps four, feet higher than the bow. The edge of the decking gleamed dull silver, sharp as though machine-tooled.

He looked back. Martyr and Robin had vanished again. He swore and turned away, running back toward the bridge, aware that in all probability only the horizontal pipes running along the center of the deck toward the forward tanks were keeping the ship together. As he reached the edge, the gap yawned again and he saw, incredibly, sixty feet below, clear water boiling through the heart of his ship.

He hurled himself forward wildly into the waiting arms of Salah and Kerem. “Get me rope!” he yelled.

“On its way,” yelled Salah in reply. “I counted three still on the other side.”

“That’s right. We’ll set up near the walkway. Those pipes are all that’re holding her.” They stumbled across the deck, reeling like landsmen as the stern section began to ride the waves with the beginnings of freedom, like a normal ship.

The rope arrived at the same time they did, carried by Bill Heritage himself. Pausing only to clap the grand old man on a yellow-coated shoulder, Richard led them up one of the midship companionways to the walkway amid the flexing hawser of pipes. It was like some terrifying fairground ride, half remembered from his youth: as he and Salah stood side by side while Bill and Kerem secured the ropes around their waists then belayed safely behind them, they watched the narrow path they were to walk twisting and writhing like a live thing. Steel was flexing with more and more freedom; beginning to steam in places where the cold rain hit. Wood bent like a bow, sparking and splintering. The halves of the ship ground together like toothless jaws, moving with wilder and wilder motion.

She had never had a real keel like a lesser vessel, so you could hardly say her back was broken. She had been constructed simply of great U-shaped sections—six in all—welded together. The bow and stern sections had been added later. Within these sections, the tanks had been placed, discrete and solid with huge double walls at their ends. And the join between the third and fourth U-shaped sections, currently breaking open, mercifully coincided with the double wall between the two main midship tanks. Both bow and stern remained, for the meantime, watertight; and there was little or no leakage of oil.

—Or of South African water, thought Richard grimly.
Even now, dying like this,
Prometheus
was keeping her secrets safe. Like a battered child protecting its parents with silence.

A blow on his shoulder broke the train of thought. The rope round his waist was secure. He shambled forward onto the snaking, roller-coaster walkway.

At once he was glad of his heavy gloves. He had to keep tight hold of the railings, and the mahogany—not the most flexible of woods—was quilled with splinters already. He was glad, too, of his thick-soled boots, for the metal beneath them was hot—and getting hotter—as he moved through the steam over the yawning, snapping chasm in his ship.

Wildly in the blinding bluster he searched below for the bright wet-weather gear of the officers on the dead deck. At first he could see nothing, but then the storm relented and he began to see glimpses of furtive movement.

There was a bizarre game of hide-and-seek going on down there. What in blazes was happening? Didn’t they realize the danger they were in? He could have screamed with frustration. And, at the very thought, one wild figure hurled up a companionway immediately in front of him.

“BEN!” he bellowed.

Ben whirled to confront him and Richard staggered back. The expression on his godson’s face was beyond belief. Their eyes locked. Ben stopped and suddenly pulled something from his pocket. It was a gun.