The Coffin Ship (5 page)

Martyr, far beyond control, threw another huge haymaker at the icy Englishman. Mariner rocked back
slightly and let the blow pass within an inch of his nose. Then he leaned in over the chief’s guard, hooking a vicious right to the angle of his jaw. Martyr staggered forward and Mariner danced behind him delivering a crisp combination of right-left-right jabs to his kidneys. Martyr answered with a right hook to Mariner’s ribs concealed by his turning body and delivered like a landslide. The Englishman hissed and staggered back a step or two before starting to dance again, using the movement to swing a left of his own back over Martyr’s guard to the side of his head.

Any of these blows would have destroyed lesser men, but the captain and the chief were hardly slowed. Martyr, his turn stopped by the simple physics of Mariner’s counterblow, put his head down and charged. After two steps, he gathered the Englishman to his shoulder, but Mariner twisted before the American’s grip could tighten and, taking that great cannonball head under his arm, he ran forward, using the chief’s own weight and the force of his charge, guiding the blind man into the door.

He had closed the heavy teak door behind him as he had entered, last of the officers, a few minutes ago. Now he opened it again with the top of Martyr’s head and his own shoulder. Not so much “opened” as “demolished.” And the massive force of the movement, centered on the top of Martyr’s skull, knocked him unconscious at once.

Richard let go as they exploded through the door and spun away, catching at the handrail along the wall, saving himself from falling, turning back at once to see Martyr landing facedown like a dead man. And in motion once more, stepping back over his adversary through the splintered door. There was a cheer quelled instantly by the look in his eyes.

Tsirtos was on his knees, puking weakly and swearing viciously in Greek. Suddenly the radio officer looked less boyish. His brown eyes were hard. His face vicious. Making Richard remember inconsequentially, that it was the Greeks, not the Sicilians, who invented the vendetta.

The video picture had changed. Its subject matter had not. “Switch that off!” snapped Richard Mariner.

There was a click. The screen went mercifully dark.

“Sweet Jesus!” said somebody.

Mariner glared around the room, suddenly overcome with absolute fury.
“Quite so!”
he snapped. Even Ben Strong quailed before his gaze.

And Richard really began to remember what it was like to be the captain of a ship.

A short while later, Richard was standing on the bridge by the helmsman looking past his reflection and the twinkling lights on the console before him into the black velvet of a Gulf night. There was no moon. The dancing stars were like the huge, misshapen pearls they collected from the shallow seabeds here. He was thinking of a dawn five years ago. Of a beautiful, spoiled woman lying alone in her berth rigid with loathing for him. Making her plans for a messy, painful divorce; looking forward to hurting her husband and her father as much as she possibly could, out of pure childish spite.

She was in his thoughts almost constantly, this woman wasting the last seconds of her life on hatred.

Slope was behind him to his left, looking down into the green bowl of the Collision Alarm Radar. In those days the Gulf was too busy to let the
Prometheus
do everything for herself. There were always dhows up to no good, smuggling guns, pearls, slaves; small tankers and cargo ships; VLCCs; the odd ULCC, twice as big; SMBs; sandbars; rigs; tiny, uncharted islands; heaven knew what else. It was almost as bad as the Channel and no place to be sloppy or off guard. There were lookouts with night glasses on the bridge wings and in the forecastle head.

As first officer, Ben Strong was also acting medic. After they had cleared the mess in the Officers’ Lounge, Richard had sent the others to their cabins and closed the bar; detailed John Higgins to go through the rest of the videotapes, and ordered Ben to report to the bridge when he had seen to Tsirtos and Martyr.

Now he shook himself mentally and cleared his mind of its ghosts. He had more immediate problems. He started pacing the bridge, head forward, hands clasped behind his back, trying to focus clearly on the jumble of events at whose center he stood. It seemed obvious that the previous officers had, to put it mildly, been a strange lot. And they had met a pretty strange end. Martyr probably knew more than he was saying—but he was strange himself, and there was no guarantee he would confide anything more to his new captain—especially now—beyond what he had said, and the accounts that bore his decided signature in the logs and the Accident Report Book.

Why did he seem to regard the others, and Richard in particular, with such suspicion?

Why, if he held the dead crew in such contempt, had he been persuaded to join them?

Was there something going on, or was it just that sort of mild lunacy that sometimes breaks out at sea?

But they had only been at sea for six hours.

Ben and John came up together. “Did he, by God?” Ben was saying. “I’d like to see that.”

“Anytime you like, Ben. That and all the rest. But watch out for the chief.”

“All the rest, John?” snapped the captain as they came round the great bank of instruments standing like a low wall across two-thirds of the bridge. John nodded, his open countenance twisted with disgust. His gaze
flickered across to the young third officer’s back, then up to the captain again.

“All right, Mr. Slope,” said Richard. “You can slip down to the Officers’ Pantry and make yourself a coffee. Take ten minutes.”

Slope hurried off, not too happy about missing the gossip.

Richard turned to Ben first and received a brief report on Tsirtos’s bruises and Martyr’s abrasions. Tsirtos had accepted aspirin. Martyr had not. As far as Ben could tell, they were none the worse for their experiences.

“I see,” said Richard, turning away. “John. What about the rest of that stuff?”

“It’s all the same. Most of it worse.” His voice was hoarse; emotion pulling his Manx accent into prominence. For once he was not chewing on a pipe; he looked pale, genuinely sickened.

“Oh, come on,” erupted Ben. “Blue movies on a supertanker—and all this fuss?”

John swung on him. “This isn’t just blue, for God’s sake. This stuff’s sick. Some of it looks like snuff.”

“Snuff?” asked Richard, startled into thinking of Regency gentlemen sniffing tobacco powder from silver boxes. “What’s that?”

“That’s where they actually kill people, right in front of the camera,” said Ben, soberly. “Jesus! That’s no joke. Are you sure?”

“How can I be? But that’s what it looked like to me.”

“Jesus. That’s horrific. Sorry.”

“I looked in the library too.” John held out a pile of books and magazines. One glance told Richard they were companion pieces to the videotapes.

Tankers’ libraries are usually stocked with old books
brought aboard by previous crews.
Prometheus
had had three crews recently. A skeleton crew who had brought her out of mothballs in Valparaiso and sailed her to Lisbon for refitting. Another, who had brought her from Portugal to the Gulf. The only full crew she had had in recent years had died soon after coming aboard, leaving only Tsirtos and Martyr. And, judging from to night, neither of then had known what was in the library.

Wearily, Richard mentally filed away a few more questions to be asked in the morning.

Slope sidled back at that moment. “Okay, John,” said Richard. “That’s enough for to night. Destroy all that filth—I’d chuck it overboard in weighted sacks if I were you—and then turn in. It’s late and you have the next watch.” He automatically glanced at the two brass chronometers above the helm. One read 20.30, the other 23.30. GMT and Gulf Time respectively.

Richard had reached the end of his strength.

As he turned to go, however, Ben said, “Dick!” in an urgent undertone.

“Yes?” Richard turned back.

“I wasn’t going to bring this up, but that porn has put my teeth on edge.”

“What is it?”

Ben motioned Richard round to the chart table where he opened a deep drawer to its fullest extent. He lifted something out of the back and handed it over. It was a bottle of ouzo, half empty. “Makes you wonder; doesn’t it, Dick?”

It did indeed. All the way to the blessed oblivion of his bunk, Richard’s mind was filled with the nightmare vision of
Prometheus
under Levkas’s command sailing up the Channel on a black night with the off-watch officers
below enraptured by the torture and murder of pretty young girls, and the on-watch officers getting blind drunk on ouzo.

He could hardly have been expected to know it, but his fears were almost identical to those of Captain Levkas. Except that Levkas had known
Prometheus
would never reach the Channel.

Richard sprang awake out of a deep, dreamless sleep. He was absolutely sure there was someone in his room. He groped for his bedside light, wondering in a panic about the rhythmic surge of sound. Nothing was where it should be.

This was not his bed!

Totally disoriented, he swung his feet to the floor. The vibration told him he was at sea, but that only confirmed his suspicion that this was part of a nightmare.

“Rowena?” He called his dead wife’s name as he always did in his nightmares and waited: sometimes she would answer; sometimes not. He took a hesitant step toward where the shadows were thickest, knowing that was where she would be. He took another. And barked his shins against a chair. The pain brought clarity.

He turned and reached for the light switch unerringly, knowing exactly where it was now that he knew where he was.

The cabin flooded with light. It was empty apart from himself, and yet the impression lingered that someone had been close at hand.

He crossed to the door and opened it. The tiny, dark vestibule was empty. So was his shower on the right. So was his dayroom straight ahead. He had been sleeping fully clothed. He opened the door and looked out into the corridor. It was empty, but it contained a hint of a
footstep, a subliminal memory of movement. The silent echo of a softly closed door. Thoughtfully, he closed his own door and returned to bed. This time he undressed and got properly beneath the sheets. The last thing he did was to check the time. It was 03.00 on the dot.

Far below, in the Pump Room, a green illuminated display on the gray box Nicoli had disturbed just before his death switched silently to 00.00; a clock-timer set not to Gulf Time, but to GMT.

The next morning, Richard held lifeboat drill before breakfast. It had been one of Slope’s first duties aboard to draw up and publish the lists, and it was one of the captain’s duties before the end of his first twenty-four hours in command to hold a drill.

It went perfectly satisfactorily, although Richard had hoped to catch one or two slackers and identify potential weaknesses in the running of his ship with the unexpected timing of the exercise. But the only man apparently caught with his trousers down was the chief. Richard was faintly disappointed in the man. They had taken an instant dislike to each other; but Richard had thought him at least efficient.

He stood by his lifeboat. The crew was lined up nearby. The cover was off, the davits swung out. He looked at his stopwatch. Martyr was two minutes later than everyone else…Three…

The sun beat down out of a hard blue sky. There seemed to have been no dawn, no cool morning—simply an abrupt transition from stuffy darkness to blazing heat sometime when no one was looking. There was that faint headwind that bespeaks flat calm—it was
Prometheus
’s movement, not the movement of the air, that made the wind.

The sea, forty or so feet below the lifeboat’s keel, was like oil; the waves flat and sluggish, disturbed only by the great ship’s passage. The horizons were far and golden, concealing Shiraz behind leagues of Iranian desert to the north and Doha to the south.
Prometheus
was heading east.

…Four minutes.

Martyr appeared at last, walking briskly, looking as if he would rather have been running. His face, as usual, was absolutely closed but there hung about him a thunderous atmosphere of rage.

“Good morning, Chief,” said Richard, putting his stopwatch away. “Now that everyone is at his station we can clear away and go down to breakfast.”

Martyr could have made any excuse: it would have been accepted as a matter of course. But he seemed content to oversee the repositioning of the boat he was responsible for, then follow the others down and to eat his food in silence.

Richard watched him doing all these things, thinking of the long-gone days when a captain could treat a chief as though he were a junior. No longer. Nowadays captain and chief had to work hand in hand—equals, except in the most extreme circumstances. Nowadays, a captain would never dream of belittling his chief.

But then, at breakfast, things began to make more sense. Richard suddenly found himself leaning forward and squinting. The sun bludgeoning through the window of the Officers’ Dining Room fell upon the white cloth of Martyr’s sleeve like a magnesium flare. Bright enough to reveal, just above the immaculate cuff, a series of tiny, dimpled pinpricks and a couple of short-cut threads.

Richard’s hard blue gaze switched to the far end of
the table to where Third Officer Slope and Radio Officer Tsirtos together were rapidly ridding the world of half a dozen eggs and much of a pig. There was about them an air of barely suppressed hilarity that explained almost as much as the marks on Martyr’s cuff.

The captain sat back in his chair, thin-mouthed. This was not a happy ship, and, for all his attempts to pour oil on troubled waters, the situation was not helped when junior officers sewed up the arms and legs of the chief engineer’s uniform while he slept. An act of insubordination which, he strongly suspected, would only make the situation more explosive.

But the rest of that day left little room for mischief. They moved farther east in that tight arc south of the Jezirehs, which guard the Gulf approaches to the Strait of Hormuz. Here, the great 250-mile width of the busy sea lanes is compressed into a mere forty miles before opening out again, into the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the magic fastnesses of the Indian Ocean.

But all that lay far beyond them at the moment.

As in the English Channel, the Strait of Hormuz is divided into lanes like a motorway. First Danny Slope, then John Higgins, then Ben Strong guided them through the day into the first stages of this invisible motorway; plotting their position with careful precision, checking to within scant yards on the Sat Nav equipment up above the chart table, giving orders to the seaman at the helm.

The engineering officers took their corresponding watches below.

Richard, by no means relieved of the burden of fatigue he had carried aboard, filled his morning with paperwork. Not a difficult task. He had forgotten how
much everything that happened on board his ship depended on his whim. He had to agree—amend, if he wished—all the menus for the day. The power made him grimly self-mocking: they would all eat baked beans from here to Europoort if he so desired.

He began to detail a list of the conferences it would be necessary to hold. The ship would have to be carefully maintained as they proceeded south toward the wintery Cape. Only a fool would take a summer-laden tanker around those dangerous, stormy, sharp-rocked shores if she were in anything other than tiptop condition. Then, as they proceeded back up the west coast of Africa, they would have to repair the ravages of the southern winter. When
Prometheus
reached Europoort, Richard wanted her to be in even better shape than she had been in when he assumed command. So he drew up schedules of maintenance and penciled in times and dates. He suspected Ben would have drawn up similar lists. They would compare notes later. Now, who should he get to check the paint lockers? He made a note to ask the chief to draw up a corresponding list for engine maintenance, though he suspected it would have been done long ago.

In the absence of much in the way of videos and books—he had already dispatched his own travel reading, C. S. Forester’s
The Happy Return
, to the Officers’ Lounge in the hope of starting a new library there—he drew up a short list for an entertainments committee.

He made notes of what he wished to say during his noon broadcast and checked with Tsirtos for any interesting pieces of international news. There wasn’t even a test match.

He gave his noon broadcast.

And at last he had run out of papers to sign and lists to make and dates to pencil and committees to draw and things to do and so he went up onto the bridge.

John Higgins was busy at the chart table. The Collision Alarm Radar, which observed the position of every ship and obstacle nearby, was set on its closest range and would warn them automatically if anything came too near. A GP seaman stood by the helm—a wheel no larger than the steering wheel of a rally car.

Jezireh Ye Queys lay off the port beam, its low golden shoulder shrugging aside the ripples of mercuric water. A VLCC inbound slid a few miles south to starboard—perhaps three miles—riding high and looking huge. Richard watched her for an instant before John appeared at his shoulder. “Captain?”

Richard turned at once, alerted by something in the Manxman’s tone. “Yes?”

“Take a look at this, would you?”

On the chart table lay a litter of pipe, papers, rulers, dividers, chinagraph pencils, calculators, and a sextant.

John Higgins, the second officer, was an old-fashioned sailor at heart. He had a yacht that he kept in the marina at Peel on the Isle of Man, in an anchorage under that tall, frowning castle—an ocean racer, as if he didn’t get enough of the ocean in his line of work. But then, thought Richard indulgently, as he crossed to the chart table, he himself had kept a yacht when he was John’s age. The yacht that had started it all:
Rebecca.

On board, John was as modern as anyone. Calm, quiet, executive; perfectly at home with the modern machinery and the high-tech aids. But once in a while, Richard knew, some old seadog of an ancestor (a Viking, perhaps, come ravishing after the fair Manx maidens a millennium
ago) would peep out of those calm dark eyes; and you would find those small, callused hands of his at some task that sailors had been about for centuries past.

Today he had taken a noon sight of the sun.

“I read it at meridian passage on the dot. Not quite when you started broadcasting. Had Tsirtos check with the World Service pips in case the chronometers were off. Perfect conditions. Perfect sights. Perfect instrument. Never been wrong. Never.” He picked up the instrument lovingly and Richard didn’t like the repetition of “never,” suspecting at once where the conversation was leading.

“So?” he prompted.

“I’ve checked my calculations three times now. Even used the calculator.” An admission of deep desperation.

“But they still disagree with the Satellite Navigation System,” Richard said, giving the Sat Nav its full name, for once.

John nodded. “Look,” he said, sweeping aside the litter on the plastic sheet over the chart. There were two black crosses marked, some inches apart. “According to my sights we’re here.” He pointed to the northernmost.

He reached up and pressed the buttons on the Sat Nav. Figures clicked onto the LCD. “This thing says we’re here.” He pointed to the southernmost cross. He looked starboard suddenly. Richard swung round to follow his gaze. The unladen tanker had moved exactly abeam of them, three miles south.

“If the Sat Nav is to be believed,” said John grimly, “we’ve just collided with her.” Then he caught his breath at the enormity of what he had just said—especially to Richard Mariner—and he stuck his pipe in his mouth at once to cover his confusion.

Richard felt the flesh on his forearms quiver. He took a deep breath. “Keep checking our position against positions obtained from the islands using radar,” he ordered tightly. “And warn the others. I’ll send Sparks up to see what he can do with it.”

On the face of it this worked well enough. Tsirtos, the radio officer—“Sparks”—spent the next couple of hours pulling the Sat Nav to pieces, checking, then reassembling it. He missed lunch. Without him, Slope was quieter.

Lunch was all too short. Officers bustled through the meal and departed busily. Only Martyr showed any disposition to linger, and Richard got the impression the chief wanted to talk to him but didn’t know where to start.

Richard sat, also silent, wondering how to help. But he had been away from the sea too long and had fallen out of the way of ruling a pride of officers.

In the end, both men remained silent and rose when lunch was over with that unspoken conversation rankling between them and making matters worse.

Richard went up to his office and began to make more lists and draw up the agenda for the first captain’s conference, which he wanted to hold in the morning.

After an hour, Tsirtos came to report that the Sat Nav was fixed. Like Martyr, he gave the impression that he would have liked to have said more than he did say, and the captain began to get the mea sure of him, seeing beneath that curious Mediterranean mixture of shy immaturity and boyish bravado another, more calculating, man.

Driven by abrupt restlessness, he rose and gazed along the deck. He had been aboard twenty-four hours now. The Gulf had used that time to get under his skin, in
spite of all the tightly enclosed world of
Prometheus
could do to keep it at bay.

There was an easy chair convenient to the window. He made himself sit down in it to watch the sea and think.

At first, as he woke, he thought something incredibly horrible had happened. Every surface around him seemed to have been rinsed in blood.

Prometheus
seemed to be sailing a sea of blood through a downpour of blood.

That was what he saw before he understood what he was seeing.

It was the Shamaal.

The desert wind had crept up behind them, carrying sand like a plague of locusts deep within it. They were traveling at fifteen knots and the wind a little faster. The sand grains and the supertanker were all but still in relationship with each other. The tiny specks of red sandstone and crystal mica percolated through the air with the balletic grace of snowflakes. The sun, halfway to the horizon, looked like a huge blood orange.

Abruptly, the deck beneath Mariner’s feet vibrated to a different beat. He glanced at his watch. 16.30.00. Ben Strong, on the bridge, had cut the speed.

16.30.30. A knock at the door.

“Come!”

It was Slope, sent down to inform the captain of the new situation.

“I’ll come up,” he decided, inevitably.

Even from the bridge, it was difficult to see the forecastle head at the far end of the deck. The usually clear lines of the deck itself were already slightly out of focus, the geometric angles cloaked by curves of drifting sand.

Ben was on watch as Richard entered, standing behind the helmsman’s left shoulder, glaring into the murk. John Higgins, although off duty only half an hour, hovered over the Collision Alarm Radar. As Richard crossed the threshold, he glanced anxiously across at the mate’s back. “Sand’s giving false echoes on this now, Ben,” he said tensely.

“What are we, Ben?” asked Richard, crossing to the captain’s chair. With his arrival, some of the tension seemed to leave the situation.

“Half ahead, making eight knots,” answered Ben, a mea sure of relief audible in his voice. He drew both hands back through the sun-bleached shock of his hair.

“Come to slow and make five.” Richard stood for a moment by the big black leatherbound chair on the port side of the bridge; then he sat with every appearance of ease.

“Slow ahead,” acknowledged Ben, his hand moving on the Engine Room telegraph. The pounding of the engines slowed further, pulsing to a funereal beat. “Five it is.”

The light thickened. Shadows crouched like monsters in corners, under tables. The Sampson posts, two vertical, white-painted loading posts twenty feet high halfway down the deck became almost invisible. “Jesus!” said Ben. “This is impossible. How’s the radar?”

“Murky,” answered John.

“Start the siren, please,” ordered Richard quietly. Immediately, the lost-soul howl boomed out over the Gulf.

The situation was rapidly becoming dangerous. They couldn’t see the length of the deck. They couldn’t rely on the radar. Only the Channel was busier.

“Sparks in the Radio Room?” asked Richard nonchalantly, already certain of the answer.