The Coffin Ship (9 page)

“Warned you, Number One,” said Richard.

Ben looked up and grinned ruefully. “She fooled me all along the line,” he admitted. “She’s quite a girl. An officer but
no
gentleman!”

Richard gave a bark of laughter and threw him down the towel.

General Purpose Seaman Hajji Hassan laughed quietly to himself, uncertain whether he was more pleased with
the humiliation of his friend Kerem Khalil, with the attempted humiliation of the unbeliever woman, or with her unexpected revenge upon the unbeliever mate whom he did not like. What ever. It had been a memorable evening. One worthy of a little celebration.

Hajji was the last to have any hashish hidden aboard. The austere Salah Malik disapproved, and, while his attitude was not shared by all the seamen, his word was law. With all but Hajji. He would allow himself one swift indulgence, then he would retire happily to the uncomfortable berth with the others.

He had decided to hide his tiny cache in the Pump Room while helping the chief remove the corpses of the last lot of officers. None of the others was likely to come here unaccompanied after such an occurrence. Even Hajji, who was not in the slightest superstitious, found the atmosphere of the place oppressive. Especially this evening, for some reason. He hurried in, crossed to the Fire Control Room, and brought out the little silver packet from behind the sinister black canisters as fast as possible. The air around him seemed peopled with unnatural shadows. It seemed full of scarcely heard whisperings. Every now and then his heart would flutter as though something were just behind him, trying to steal his breath.

None of this was quite as imaginary as it appeared. In spite of the checks after the accident, in spite of daily maintenance, several of the cylinders had slow leaks. The air up to Hajji’s knees was heavy with carbon dioxide. When he left the door open, as now, it cascaded into the corridor and wound along the floor, sinking into guttering and runnels, seeping down and collecting in pockets where the air-conditioning could not reach, just as both Levkas and Martyr had feared it would; silent, invisible, odorless, deadly.

Still laughing quietly to himself, Hajji closed the Pump Room door and began to creep down the corridor. He had gone less than ten feet when Malik called his name.

Salah Malik stood, watching the man with distaste. At first he had seemed an excellent seaman, worthy of the pilgrim’s title his parents had given him as a name: Hajji—one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; but it had soon become clear that this was an illusion created by the fact that he always worked in a team with Kerem Khalil, who was seaman enough for both of them. “Go to the Engine Room, Hajji,” he ordered now. “You are late for your watch.”

This was not true, but Hajji went anyway, muttering viciously, unaware that Malik had just saved his life.

The last evening in July found Robin hanging over the port bow of the supertanker, twenty feet below deck level, suspended from the forecastle in a boatswain’s chair. In spite of the curve of the tanker’s stem, she was close enough to inspect the rust-blistered area a foot or two in front of her. The stem of a supertanker, never riding over the seas but always punching through them like a mobile pier, took unimaginable punishment. The slightest flaw down here had to be checked—even a rash of rust blisters. Kerem Khalil had reported it when he was repainting the ship’s name earlier in the afternoon. Robin had come down to inspect them: as was her duty and her pleasure. Behind her, on the darkening horizon, lay the purple mountaintops of Madagascar, dark as thunderheads. Around her lay the massive beauty of the nightfall, making even this routine inspection almost unbearably pleasurable.

Kicking against the side, she pushed herself out like a kid on a swing, feeling the bustle of life around her—something
Prometheus
normally managed to keep at a distance. A cormorant passed low overhead, having just launched itself from a Sampson post. The big black birds used
Prometheus
as an island, to the cheerful resignation of the seamen they kept swabbing day in and day
out. Above the lonely cormorant, varying from specks to individual crosses, the gulls wheeled all the way up into the crystal sky. And if she twisted to look down into the equally clear, smooth sea, she knew she would see a school of dolphins playing in the great bow wave whose roaring filled her ears to the exclusion of all other sounds except the occasional keening of a low gull and the song of the wind in the ropes by her head. A warm, gentle south wind that had blown into their faces now unvaryingly for days; ever since they had pulled in toward the coast of Africa. This time of year there was a wind that seemed to blow from the Cape to the Gulf with hardly a break, following along the line of the coast; and even in midwinter at the Cape, the wind was rarely anything but warm. In Durban it might be as cool as sixty degrees Fahrenheit now. Here it was seventy-five.

Her reverie was broken by a muffled thump that made her jump as something hit the metal by her head and fell flapping into her lap. She had caught it with automatic revulsion and was just about to hurl it away when she stopped, realizing what it was. It was a flying fish. Holding tightly on to it now, she looked down over her shoulder just in time to see the whole shoal break surface and skim along the side of the ship, glittering like a golden rainbow, pursued by dolphins or a passing shark. As abruptly as they had appeared a foot or two above the swells, they were gone, sides glinting deeper and deeper until they vanished.

She swung back, looking up toward the tumblehome above, calculating whether or not she could lob the fish up and over the side. Probably not. It twisted in her hands again and she nearly dropped it so she thumped its head against the plank she was sitting on and it lay
still, stunned. Impulsively she unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt and stuffed it down to lie cold against her belly, held up by the waistband of her shorts.

They were a good team, the men on the forecastle deserving her loyalty as unstintingly as they gave theirs. She reached up and pulled the warning line. At once Salah Malik’s head was thrust into silhouette against the darkening sky. She waved. He nodded. Vanished. A moment later she began to rise. After a few feet, she began to walk up the metal.

By the time she reached the top, the fish was no longer waving its bright tail from her cleavage—that would have been no fun—it was thrust into the waistband of her shorts at the back. As she stepped aboard it gave a wriggle and caused her to gasp as though she had been pinched, but no one seemed to notice. In an instant, the fish was out of her clothing and sailing through the air to land at their feet. There was a moment of stunned disbelief, then they all pounced except for Salah, who turned to look at her. With a howl of glee, Hajji Hassan straightened, holding the thing aloft. Robin sighed mentally. It was always the way. The one who hadn’t earned it, always got it.

The Chinese stewards had started the pot, of course, inveterate gamblers to a man; but the seamen had joined in cheerfully, half expecting their money back in Rotterdam, for who had ever heard of a flying fish jumping nearly forty feet onto a supertanker’s deck?

But here it was, a flying fish, right on the deck in front of them, and consequently worth over two hundred dollars.

Hajji was not popular, but such good fortune could not fail to lead to celebration. He and the fish were swept
into the air and the team bore them off raucously, looking for “Twelve Toes” Ho, who was holding the purse.

Salah looked at Robin. Did she want the boatswain’s chair dismantled and stowed? Should he call them back?

She shook her head. The mate would want to check her findings. They might as well leave it up for him.

He nodded, understanding more even than she suspected, and turned to follow his men.

After a moment, Robin followed too, feeling, in the aftermath of her elation, slightly depressed. No; it was not just after the elation. It was the thought of talking to Strong. Of handling his thinly veiled hostility, his nit-picking, double-checking, sexist, petty desire for revenge. She had come across men who found themselves incapable of seeing women as their equals—plenty of them—but, she realized, there had always been some sort of a buffer before. Now there was not. At the moment it was her and the first mate, head to head.

But, to be fair, it wasn’t all simple sexism on his part: she couldn’t think of many women who would be too charmed at having every stitch of their clothing stolen in front of thirty people, either.

But only John was on the bridge. “What happened down there?” he asked cheerfully, nodding forward, his trusty briar bobbing above the purposeful jut of his chin. “They going to chuck that lazy beggar Hajji overboard at last?”

“Found a flying fish.”

“On the forecastle head? That’s not a fish, that’s Superman.” He looked at her suspiciously. “You spoil that lot.”

“They’re worth it.” She grinned, warmed by the comradely twinkle in his eye.

“Up to you. Anything wrong?”

“Everything’s fine as far as I can see. Just rust blisters. Needs a paint job at the most.”

“If you say it’s fine, then it’s fine.”

“Better check with the mate.”

“Look, Robin,” John turned to her, “don’t let him get you down. He’s a picky sod, but nice enough. He’d be giving any junior a bit of a rough ride now, and you…” He hesitated, took his pipe out of his mouth, and scratched his chin with it.

“Bring out the worst in him?”

“You said it!”

“Bring out the worst in whom?” demanded Strong, coming onto the bridge at that moment. “Number Three, why is your team running riot below when there’s still work to be done for’ard?”

“Looking for you, Number One. Thought you might like to double-check. Some nasty rust, but nothing dangerous: looks all right to me.”

“Then I’m sure it is all right. Get your lot up and get that lot stowed.” He turned to go. John glanced at her behind his back: told you so, he grinned.

Ben Strong turned back. “No, leave it,” he ordered inevitably. “I’d better check it all for myself.”

“Have you seen the Little Mistress?” asked Hajji of Salah Malik some time later. “I would like to share my good fortune with her.” He had made up the nickname for Robin himself when one of his more intelligent colleagues explained to him that a pun existed in English upon the word
mate.

Salah eyed him with even more disfavor than usual. “The third mate is a better officer than you have a right to expect,” he said severely. “She is a better seaman than
you will ever be and is superior to you in every conceivable way. I do not like to hear the wise insulted by the foolish, although I know it is the way of the world.”

Hajji stalked off in high outrage at that. But he did not stay in a bad mood for long. He would attend to the Little Mistress soon. For the present, he was a fortunate man. And what do such men do? They celebrate. Now he knew for certain where the old woman Malik was, he would smoke the last of his hashish.

It was the work of only a few moments to liberate the little packet from behind the black cylinders and to slip out of the haunted Pump Room; then he was scurrying down and down to the secret hiding place where he could indulge his vice leisurely.

As he descended, the pounding of the engine grew louder. The air grew warmer, out of reach of the air-conditioning, and more redolent of oil from the engine room. Hajji liked it down here. The deeper he went, the more things shrank to an acceptable scale until, in the farthest depths of the great ship’s bowels, he arrived at a tiny alcove. It was too small to be a room. It was deep and dark, though not pitch dark, and warm. The walls were covered in pipes. The engine throbbed like a heart.

Hajji sat contentedly on the floor and slowly rolled himself a joint. He regretted the loss of his pipe—Malik had found that and confiscated it as though the seaman were a child—but this way was better than no way. His fingers were clumsy but he persisted dreamily, his mind drifting from Malik back to the Little Mistress…

The cigarette was rolled by now, but he was having trouble with the matches. Were they damp? He could not get them to light. At last he tried three together and was rewarded with a small blue flame. He held it close and puffed hard. A trace of the drugged smoke filtered
into his lungs. He took the matches away, holding them high as he drew on the joint again. His mind still on Robin, he glanced up, surprised to see that the matches were burning more brightly now. Slowly, he brought them down toward his eyes again, watching with wonder as the flame grew smaller as it came nearer. No matter, the flame was still burning. He brought it back toward the end of his cigarette but for some reason he could not understand, at that very moment the deck came up and hit him in the face. He thought about getting up, especially as he seemed to have broken his nose and it was becoming difficult to breathe—but in the end, it was simply too much trouble.

“Think they’ll ever find the little twit?”

“Nope. I think he went overboard. Probably got drunk celebrating his win and fell into the ocean.”

“Didn’t think Malik let them drink. Anyway, they’re Moslems.”

“Think that’d stop Hassan?”

“Probably not.”

It wasn’t much of an epitaph, but it was almost all Hajji got.

Ben and John were standing on the bridge at 07.30 next morning, chatting idly about last night’s excitement as they watched Robin lead her depleted team down to the forecastle head. The boatswain’s chair was still rigged there because Ben Strong hadn’t had time to stow it between his cursory examination of the suspect area and the sudden first search for the missing man.

The second, more exhaustive, search was going on at the moment, under the leadership of Salah Malik; with young McTavish notionally in charge, because they were in the engineering sections, and going on down.

It was a glorious morning. The sky was high and brilliant, the sea translucently clear. The wind had shifted
east of south and carried in each gentle gust a tantalizing complex of spicy scents born of Madagascar.

Robin walked down the deck with a youthful spring in her step, tired after last night’s taxing searches but uplifted by the beauty of the day; utterly unaware of how close to death she was.

The chair itself was like a child’s swing: a short plank of wood served as a seat; another plank, a few feet above it, held the ropes far enough apart to allow one occupant, lashed safely, to sit on the lower. Above the top plank, the two ropes supporting the seat became one, rising through a pulley. The pulley was raised six feet above the deck and angled out over the side by a carefully anchored tripod made of metal bars.

The equipment and its arrangement were to be found on any ship. Its use was entirely routine. Robin was not even supposed to be using it this morning. She was simply supposed to be stowing it away. But what she saw as she came onto the forecastle head changed all that instantly.

It was a ship. A felucca, with tall castles fore and aft; with what once must have been a proud mast bearing a gull-winged sail now snapped off short and gone over the side. She was not small. From stem to stern she must have measured all of forty feet. Nor was she a weak or ill-found vessel. That was obvious from the fact that her hull was still in one piece, wedged across the tanker’s bow like that.

Robin stood on
Prometheus
’s prow and looked down upon her, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. The others clustered round her, silently, also struck with awe. The two ships must have collided sometime during the night. After midnight, the forecastle head watch had been searching for Hajji Hassan with the rest. Such
was the size of the supertanker that the shock of impact had gone unnoticed. The felucca’s lights, had she been carrying any, had gone unseen. The cries of her crew, had she been manned, had gone unheard. She had simply ridden up onto the bow-wave above the great torpedo-shaped protrusion at the base of the bow, and hit at its thinnest part.

And there, in spite of the width of the forecastle, of the bluntness of the upper bow; in spite of the weight of the felucca herself sitting well clear of the water, there she remained: wedged across
Prometheus
’s bows like a tiny cross on a huge capital T.

Looking straight down from her current position, Robin could see where the tanker had chopped into the little ship, crushing her planking out to either side exactly amidships on the starboard side, cutting in almost as far as the broken mast. Cracks, some of them ragged and wide, stretched left and right, nearly from stem to stern, showing here and there a glimpse of what lay below. Everything on the felucca was still and silent, except for the hollow thud of the swells against her bottom.

Robin looked across at Kerem Khalil. “You ever seen anything like this?”

The Palestinian shook his head.

“The rest of you?”

“I heard of something like this,” said one. Some of the others nodded. Robin found herself doing the same. They had all heard that it was possible. That it had happened before. None of them had ever seen it. Until now.

They stood, looking down at it for a few more seconds. Stories like this were once in a lifetime. They didn’t want to share this one yet.

And then the screaming started.

Again they did nothing, looking askance at each other, knowing that what they could hear was some kind of illusion. Had to be some kind of illusion. There could be no crew left aboard. There could be no one left aboard. Unless some youngster was there, too badly hurt to join the rest. Unless it was not a crew member, but someone else. A slave, perhaps; for the felucca must have been up to no good, running dark and silent in the night.

Robin thumped the rail once, hard, as she had thumped Angus El Kebir’s desk not so long ago, and was in action. “Swing the chair round here. I’m going down.”

Kerem was about to argue, but he asked himself—as Salah Malik would have done—Would I argue with the mate? The answer was no. He saw no reason to argue with the woman, therefore. She was perfectly competent.

And the screaming was that of a child.

“What’s that woman up to now?” asked Ben testily, looking down the length of the deck from the bridge.

“Checking
your
work, perhaps,” John needled cheerfully.

“Damn cheek. She’d better hurry, though. She’s due to relieve you in twenty minutes.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do. I’ll have this run like a proper ship. Women or no women,” snapped the first officer, and stalked off the bridge.

Kerem looked down at the woman walking across the felucca’s deck, every bone in his body shrieking danger. He wished Salah was here. He glanced back at the bridge with an overwhelming feeling of frustrated impotence.
There were four of the team now, instead of six. Himself and three others. He must keep an eye on the third mate. The other three must hold the rope. When the felucca went, they would have to pull her up at once, or she was dead.

He had no walkie-talkie and there was no one he could send for help.

Down here the noise was almost overwhelming. The drum roll of the bow wave sounded continuously against the felucca’s keel. Each separate BOOM! of a larger wave was followed by a cacophony of screeches and groans as planks and pegs strained to tear apart. It was a wonder the child’s screams could be heard above it all.

Yet there it was again: a plaintive, terrified howl. But where was it coming from?

Robin went down as though she were kneeling on broken glass. “Hello?” she called. Abruptly, the screaming ceased. “HELLO?” Louder. She knew the child wouldn’t understand English, of course. But at least it would know there was someone near. She paused. Silence. “Where are you?”

Silence.

She remained where she was, half kneeling, and looked very carefully around the deck. Both the fore and after castles were big enough to hold a child, and yet it seemed to her that the cries had come from straight ahead. And immediately in front of the stump of the mast there was an open hatchway. She crouched onto all fours, like a cat. Inch by inch, she began to crawl forward. Every now and then a wave slightly larger than the rest would explode against the bottom of the wreck, causing it to lift, causing great pieces of wood to spring free against
Prometheus
’s stem and fall rattling
like dry bones into the sea, causing the hulk to scream even more loudly than the child. When this happened, Robin would freeze, watching her shadow on the deck, watching her sweat mark the dry planks beneath her as the drops cascaded off her face. And as they landed, increasingly frequently they would roll forward and down, away from her as the slope of the deck increased.

I’m going to die here, she thought. I’m going to bloody well die…I’m going to sodding well die…I’m going to…As she moved, so her language became fouler.

And the hatchway came closer.

At the lip of the hatchway, she was faced with a dilemma. Should she keep the chair on as she went down? The obvious answer seemed to be yes, and yet, if the felucca went while she was below and she was still tied in, she could all too easily be torn to pieces. On the other hand, if she untied herself, then went with the felucca, she would be just another man overboard.

And, of course, the rope would make it more difficult to reach the child if anything did go wrong.

It was that more than anything which decided her.

“What is she doing?” cried one of the others to Khalil as soon as he felt the rope slackening in his hands.

“She’s taking the chair off. I think she’s going below…” Kerem turned and deliberately started signaling to the bridge.

“Sir!” The helmsman noticed Kerem’s signal first. He couldn’t make out quite what the tiny figure was doing, however, because the forepeak was nearly three hundred yards away.

John had some trouble making out what was going on
too, until he went out onto the bridge wing and used his binoculars. Then, at full magnification, it became obvious that something was wrong.

He walked briskly back onto the bridge proper, mentally cursing Ben for having left the bridge at just the wrong moment. He picked up the internal phone and dialed the captain’s number.

With the wooden seat firmly wedged under her left arm, Robin crept gingerly down the ladder from the hatchway. The noise down here was incredible, the stench damn near unbearable, the sense of danger absolutely overpowering. The felucca was quite simply—but, thankfully, quite slowly—coming to pieces under her feet. On her right, sloping away at an increasing angle, was the single below-deck area, with the foot of the mast rising immediately ahead at a crazy tilt.

On her left, incredibly close at hand, was the huge, blunt metal blade of
Prometheus
’s bow. It rose through the crushed and splintered wood almost as though it had always been there. And yet, at the same time, it was an obscene intrusion, horribly out of place. Robin felt as though she were inside Mr. Borden’s skull, just after Lizzie had delivered the first whack, looking out at the axhead.

“HELLO!”

Gripping the seat with bruising force, she stepped off the bottom rung, onto the deck itself.

There was an explosion of sound and movement immediately behind her, from under the ladder itself. This was so unexpected that she jumped forward, swinging on the rope and gasping with shock. The rope slackened at once, dumping her unceremoniously on her bottom. She sat still, looking up.

Beyond the ladder was a cavern of darkness stretching
toward the bow. Still dazzled by the early morning brightness she had encountered on the deck, she could not see into the shadows. Even as she looked, however, her vision was aided by shaft after shaft of light. Like searchlight beams, like the light under storm-clouds, flat blades stabbed down in increasing numbers from the edge of that jagged wound as the felucca began to slide off
Prometheus
’s bow.

And this light revealed, just a step or two behind the ladder but chained helplessly to its perch, a scarlet, yellow, and blue Macaw parrot. And, as Robin watched it, the terrified creature opened its bill and screamed like a frightened child.

“Damn you!” Robin was on her feet at once, her rage beyond expressing—in direct proportion to her own fear. All this. And for a bloody bird! From the bottom of the ladder, looking through the rungs, she yelled at the top of her voice, “We’re going to die! You know that, bird?” The parrot leaped toward her, but was brought up short in a flapping, squawking bundle by the chain.

“We’re both going to sodding die!” At least it had the wit to sit still while she wrestled the chain loose from the perch. Then it jumped easily onto her right shoulder. “I wouldn’t stay there, you dumb SOB,” she warned it, “unless you can swim as well.”

It screamed in her ear.

She stepped back onto the ladder.

The felucca fell into the sea.