A Thousand Suns

by Alex Scarrow

  She laughed. ‘That’s how we like you guys, paranoid and competitive.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I guess we can’t afford not to be.’

  ‘So, you sure you’re ready for another?’

  ‘I just need a couple of good nights’ sleep, a few warm baths and I’ll be good to go.’

  ‘Okay, well, the good news is it’s not the other side of the world this time, it’s local.’

  ‘And the bad news?’

  ‘The bad news is . . . it’s another cold one.’ Elaine stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy. ‘I’m sorry it’s not a photo-story in Florida or LA, but, if it’s any consolation, I think this one could be a reputation-maker for you. You want to hear about it?’

  Chris nodded.

  ‘We tend to comb through local newspapers for our human-interest stories, which is how we came across this one. It was in the Trenton Herald, which is a local rag that serves Newport and a few towns up the Rhode Island coast. There’s a small seaside town, Port Lawrence. No big deal, a few thousand people, a couple of diners and a few seasonal attractions. They’ve got a small commercial fishing fleet that still operates out of the town. It’s the real Amityville deal, old shutterboard huts, quiet inbred locals who view the rest of the world as outsiders, fishing nets strung across cobbled streets . . . you get the idea? Anyway, one of their trawlers snagged its nets on a wreck some five miles out from the coastline -’

  ‘Wreck? Are we talking an underwater shoot?’

  She nodded. ‘Why? . . . are you not keen on that?’

  He’d done underwater before, several times, but always within the luxury of warmer latitudes. After his spell on South Georgia, throwing himself into the bitter cold of the Atlantic, albeit insulated within a dry suit, simply didn’t appeal to him right now.

  Pass up this job, and they could easily find someone else.

  Chris winced at the thought.

  ‘No, underwater is fine. Go on.’

  ‘Good. Anyway, so one of these trawlers snagged its nets on a wreck. Turns out it was a plane. A big one.’

  Chris’s interest was piqued.

  ‘Yup. Oh, we’re not talking missing commercial air-liners or private Lear jets or anything.’

  ‘No?’ Chris tried to contain his disappointment.

  ‘No, it’s better than that; a World War Two bomber. One of our B-something-or-others, you know? The big ones we used to flatten the Rhineland with. Some local propeller-head expert on wartime planes identified it from an item of debris they pulled up in the net.’

  ‘Has anyone been down yet to look it over?’

  ‘You’re thinking “anyone” as in, any other news mag? No, I don’t think so. It’s not a big story. Some wartime plane goes down due to bad weather or some component malfunction. It’s not like we’ve found the remains of the Marie Celeste or anything. I think we’ve got this story to ourselves for now.’

  ‘That’s good to know. How intact is it?’

  ‘They reckon it’s in one big glorious piece. I think this is going to make one hell of a compelling photo-story. I want to go with a kind of “time capsule” slant on it.’ Elaine’s eyes widened like an excited child’s as she visualised the spread within the covers of News Fortnite.

  ‘The cold waters will have preserved it quite well, I’d imagine,’ added Chris.

  ‘Exactly! If you can get some pictures that make the plane look as if it dropped out of the sky last week, that’ll be the angle. You know? “The plane time forgot!” kinda deal. You know what I mean?’

  Chris nodded.

  ‘Focus on the small things, Chris, the little things. I don’t know, the navigator’s box of Lucky Strikes, the pilot’s picture of his sweetheart . . . the . . . ah shit, you know what I’m after, you’re the photographer.’

  Chris was glad she’d noticed. He smiled at her. ‘So when would you want me to head out and do this?’

  ‘Well now, there’s no real sell-by date on this story. If it’s waited fifty years to be discovered it can hang on a little longer for its moment of fame. But all the same, I’d like to think we could get some pictures in for next month’s issue. We’ve got a pretty weak line-up for that one . . . needs a bit of juice.’

  Chris weighed things up. Frankly he could well do with a week up on the blocks, get some serious down time. Despite catching the wave of Elaine’s enthusiasm and surfing the momentary buzz of excitement, he was really beginning to feel like he needed some R&R.

  ‘What if . . . what if I got out there by next week? Would that be soon enough?’

  Elaine stroked her chin. ‘If you think you can deliver before our next issue, that’s fine by me. I can’t afford it to miss, though. That issue really needs this story, or we risk losing subscribers.’

  She looked at Chris with the eyes of a worried mother. ‘You need some time to catch up on your sleep? Enjoy a few comforts?’

  ‘Yup, something like that. And anyway, I’ll probably need to source some equipment for deep sea -’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that deep. The article says the plane’s sitting under only seventy-five feet of water. I’m no diver, but that doesn’t sound too far down. Is that deep, Chris?’

  ‘Deep enough that I think I’ll need to make some calls. Reinforced camera casings, dry suits and cold-water diving equipment and some other stuff. It’ll take a few days to organise that anyway, but I could be on my way up there, say, middle of next week?’

  ‘You sure? I imagined you were thinking of taking two or three weeks out of the loop.’

  I was, goddammit.

  ‘No, of course not. A few days should see me right,’ said Chris with a chirpy ‘I-can-take-anything’ smile.

  ‘Great. Well I’m glad you can say yes to this one, Chris, I really am. You’ve got a good eye for visual poetry. I think you’re going to come back with some great images. Maybe some of the best you’ve ever done.’

  ‘Yup. It sounds good.’

  She draped an arm around his narrow shoulders. ‘Excellent! Listen, go back to your hotel and get some zeds. Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll sort out the details and expenses. Okay?’

  Chris nodded, finally aware that he had been a straight thirty-two hours without a moment’s sleep. She led him from the conference room onto the noisy open office floor, and patted him gently on the arm.

  Chris was uncomfortably aware that a few heads were turning their way.

  Christ, I hope they don’t think I’m her bit of sugar.

  She winked at him. ‘I want you in bed, okay? Get some rest, you look like death warmed up.’

  Chris winced, knowing that those members of her staff with the keenest hearing had only heard the first part of that sentence.

  Chapter 2

  The Coast Road

  The late-afternoon sun shone through the silver birches lining the coastal route and cast a steady procession of hazy beams across the road. Alternate strips of light and shadow dappled the windscreen of the Cherokee, and Chris found himself squinting from the intermittent and distracting glare.

  He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and slipped them on.

  ‘Giving you a headache?’ asked Mark, sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

  Mark Costas was a good diving instructor. He’d known Chris back when he’d trained him for a PADI certificate. Like the best of teachers, he easily inspired trust from his pupils, and that was mainly because of the calm, unflappable demeanour of the man. His darkly tanned face, framed with a lush black beard and topped with a Yankees baseball cap, was a picture of measured ease.

  Along this part of the coastline there were a number of small villages perched on the seafront. Quite a few of them seemed to service small fishing vessels of one sort or another, and many of these were beach-launched, from trailers reversed into the water, and retrieved in the same way. Once upon a time most of the boats along this stretch of coast were part of an industry; now the vast majority were used for sports fishing.

  On the r
ight of the road it was becoming cluttered with the detritus of generations of nautical activity - abandoned, weatherworn wooden hulls riding high on grass-topped dunes shored up with wooden pallets, and an endless mélange of crates and washed-up freight spillage garnished the roadside. They passed through a village that consisted of no more than an old boat yard, three houses, and a gas station-cum-diner, an isolated sign of habitation amidst a rolling montage of coastal wilderness.

  ‘It looks like something out of a Stephen King novel,’ said Mark in a rumbling, deep voice.

  ‘I know, beautiful isn’t it? I could live in a place like this.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Chris drove in silence. It really was magnificent, inspiring and solitary. His recent sojourn in the southern Atlantic wilderness had changed him. After so many months being alone out there, he’d found the aggressive noise and haste of New York a little overpowering. He frequently had found himself back in his hotel room relishing the comparative peace and quiet, happy to have the echoing wail of police sirens and the harsh rattle of urban noise muted to nothing more than a subdued rumble seeping through the double-glazed window.

  New York these days felt like a town under siege. Every subway train and bus station was manned with cops checking IDs. Having olive skin, or even just having a dark beard, seemed to invite suspicious inspection from every passer-by.

  It wasn’t just New York. London was the same. Cities twinned by their paranoia, waiting for the next big bang.

  Chris shook his head; it was becoming an ugly world, one waiting, spoiling for a fight. Those months away from it all, away from people, photographing terns and penguins, that had been a refreshing antidote. But on coming back from his months of solitude, the whole Muslim- Christian hate thing seemed to have gotten worse. The news seemed to be fuelled by this alone these days.

  He felt old. He certainly couldn’t face doing another ‘hot’ assignment. A year ago he’d done some work in northern Iraq for News Fortnite, documenting the appalling and bloody tit-for-tat killings between the Kurds and the Sunnis that was still going on even now, years after the second Gulf war. A few years ago he might have been able to dispassionately shut out the worst of it on this kind of field job, but that last one had finally got to him.

  From now on, he would be happy to stay away from the hazardous stop-and-drop assignments like that. It was going to have to be terns and penguins, or he was going to have to find a new way to earn a living. The world was becoming too ugly a thing to study through his viewfinder.

  ‘So how long are you planning on staying out here?’ asked Mark, disturbing Chris’s woolgathering.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll need to be too long here. I can probably do the shoot in one dive if the water’s clear and we have a good day for the weather.’

  ‘The water here’s pretty cold this time of year. I’d say not far off zero degrees down below. It’ll have to be a short dive, no more than thirty minutes tops. You think you can get all that you want in that time, Chris?’

  ‘Well, if not, then we can do a second dive, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s been a while since we did any together. How are you with diving on wrecks? How many have you done?’

  ‘Only one . . . that time with you in Florida. When was that? Two . . . three years ago?’

  Mark looked a little unhappy. ‘Okay, so tonight we’ll go over the safety rules again. It seems like you could probably do with a refresher course. It’s a dangerous type of diving, especially with all the added complications of a cold-water environment. But then you know all this, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s why I hired you, mate. So you can do all the worrying and fussing.’

  The last of the evening’s light was fading quickly as they entered Port Lawrence and parked up near the wharf.

  It was a small fishing town, with a population of five and a half thousand. On Fridays and Wednesdays it pulled in people from all over the county for the market, and in the summer, townies came from as far away as Boston and New York to enjoy the odd long weekend of provincial charm. Outside of the vacation seasons and market days, it was a ghost town.

  There was plenty of space to park along the wharf, and Chris rolled the Cherokee up beside several delivery trucks facing the wharf’s edge. He looked out of the windscreen at the row of trawlers tied up like horses outside a saloon bar.

  Most of them were stripped down and tarped up for the winter. They would sit like that, not earning money for their owners for only a couple of months, the worst of the gale season, and be out on the sea again by the end of January.

  The bigger boats headed out Nova Scotia way, towards the Grand Banks for trips that lasted four to six weeks. They were fifty- and sixty-foot Sword boats with crews of up to seven, which could sometimes bring in nearly sixteen tons of catch. They were mostly owned by cartels of investors, their skippers and crews on retainers and smaller shares.

  The few smaller boats lined up were mostly independent operators that fished nearer home, boats that were owned or part-owned by their skippers and trawled only a few miles out from the coast, up and down the silt banks for only four or five days at a time. They couldn’t afford two months tied up, and fished pretty much all year round.

  Chris and Mark climbed out and surveyed the boats.

  ‘I told you,’ said Mark. ‘You should have chartered from somewhere else. There’s no way we’re going to find a suitable boat down here.’

  ‘Yeah, looks like you might be right,’ Chris sighed reluctantly. He had gambled on finding a motor launch or a leisure boat. The place was a tourist town as well as a fishing port, after all.

  It was going to have to be one of the smaller fishing boats. Halfway along the wharf he could see a single light mounted on the pilothouse of one of them.

  ‘There, that would do us. And it looks like someone’s home.’

  Mark followed his gaze. ‘It’s a trawler, Chris, not some leisure cruiser. You’ll be lucky if they’ll take you out.’

  ‘I’m sure the rustling of a little dosh will help some.’

  ‘Dosh?’ asked Mark. ‘Money, right?’

  Chris nodded.

  Mark looked quizzically at him. ‘Just how much money do you get paid for this kind of assignment anyway?’

  Chris smiled. ‘Enough, and then some . . . shall we go and charter us a trawler, then?’ He headed across the diesel-stained concrete of the wharf towards the solitary light without waiting for an answer.

  Mark watched him go. ‘Enough and then some, eh?’ he muttered, and then he found himself grinding his teeth. Chris could be an annoyingly cocky punk sometimes.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Chris called back.

  Chris approached the trawler’s stern. ‘What time do you make it?’

  Mark pushed up a sleeve, revealing a Rolex nesting in a luxuriant bed of dark forearm hair. ‘Seven-thirty.’

  Chris leaned over and rapped his knuckles against the hull. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ he shouted. They heard some movement from inside the boat.

  ‘Jeeeez, Chris! You know how rude that is?’ Mark said.

  ‘What? . . . knocking on the boat? It’s not as if it’s got a doorbell.’

  ‘She’s a “she” not an “it”. All sea-going vessels are “shes”, okay? You don’t want to get the owner pissed before you start your shmoozing, huh?’

  They heard the clunk of a bolt sliding, and a crack of light appeared on the foredeck as a hatch lifted a few inches. They could just make out the shine of a balding head framed by a thatch of grey whiskers.

  ‘Yes?’

  Chris absent-mindedly swung the torch on him.

  ‘Hey! Get that goddamn thing out of my eyes!’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said sheepishly. He flicked it off.

  ‘Whad’ya want?’

  ‘Hi, we’re looking to hire a boat for a day, maybe two days. Yours looks like it won’t sink if we untie it.’

  Chris’s laugh quickly died in his throat as the old man stared at him in s
ilence.

  Mark shook his head in the dark. Not the best start, Chris ol’ buddy.

  The old man scowled and finally said something. ‘Are you Canadian? ’Cause if you are, you can get the fuck away from my boat.’

  ‘What? No! I’m English . . . I just -’

  ‘Shine that torch of yours on yourself, so I can see you.’

  Chris fumbled with the switch, and then turned it on himself and Mark.

  The man studied them for a few seconds. ‘Yeah, you look English,’ he said, pushing the hatch fully open and pulling himself with surprising agility out onto the foredeck.

  Chris turned back to Mark. ‘I look English? How the hell is an Englishman meant to look?’ he muttered.

  ‘You lack American cool,’ Mark smirked.

  ‘You boys want to hire this boat for a couple of days?’ the old man interrupted, scratching his chin.

  They both nodded.

  ‘Of course we’ll pay top dollar,’ added Chris.

  ‘You’d have to. This is a workin’ boat. If she’s busy takin’ you boys out on a pleasure cruise, then she ain’t workin’, and that’s gonna cost.’

  Chris nodded gravely. ‘I understand.’

  The old man looked them over again. ‘This’ll be about the wreck out there, won’t it?’

  ‘The plane wreck, yeah,’ Chris admitted reluctantly. He had hoped the story would still be relatively unknown, but, it seemed, Port Lawrence was a small town.

  ‘So . . . you boys don’t look like tourists. Where you from?’

  Chris pulled out a business card and handed it to the old man. ‘I work for a magazine. I want to photograph the plane. I’m doing a story on it. The name’s Chris by the way.’ He gestured at Mark. ‘This guy’s Mark. He’s a diving instructor and he’s here to hold my hand when we go underwater.’

  For a moment he wasn’t sure whether the old man was going to take that literally.

  The old man appeared mildly impressed with the press card. ‘What magazine? Not the Enquirer, I hope. I can’t stand that kind of rubbish.’