The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  And somewhere in the Pump Room Gallaher had chosen to plant his bomb.

  Nicoli moved first, then the drunken Gallaher, then the reluctant Kanwar in chain reaction. The two GP seamen followed. Ibrahim, last in, closed the door behind him.

  In the harsh white lighting, the room gleamed dead silver like a pathology lab in a hospital. The pipes dominated everything, like massive robot snakes frozen to silence in the midst of some sinister, serpentine orgy.

  At once they were in the middle of the room. 'Where?' snarled Nicoli.

  The bemused Irishman looked around, as though surprised to find himself here. Then his face cleared. Even the habitual drunkenness in it vanished, to be replaced by horror at what his sadistic, whisky-loosened tongue had done.

  'Mary, Mother ...' he began, turning to escape from the place and his folly alike.

  But Nicoli caught him by the arm and swung him back. 'Where is it?'

  'Sod you, Nicoli!' The fear of the explosives replaced by terror of the people who had paid him to place them.

  All the rage in the Greek, held pent through the whole episode so far by his need to get the truth, exploded to the surface. Without a further word, he drove his fist into Gallaher's face and the Irishman hit the deck without ever knowing what had hit him.

  For a second they stood looking down at him. There was no sympathy in their faces. They were a hard crew - except for Kanwar, perhaps - on a hard ship. And Gallaher had never been popular. 'He's in the way there,' said Nicoli coldly. Ibrahim and Majiid took an arm each and dragged him clear, but Nicoli was already looking into that harshly bright forest of pipes. 'Now we'll have to do it the hard way,' he observed.

  It took them nearly an hour, but at last Kanwar's keen eyes saw the tiniest twist of green wire in a junction twenty feet up.

  'There it is!' His excitement was almost boyish until he remembered what he had found.

  Nicoli was at his shoulder at once, the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes deepening as though he was gazing at some far horizon. 'Yes!' His broad hand clapped the Third Mate on the back. 'Well done, boy!'

  'We'll have to get a ladder.' Kanwar was all professionalism at once. He turned even before the First Mate nodded and led Ibrahim and Madjiid to the fire control room.

  The low, stage-set door opened inwards and Kanwar held it wide. The ladder stood, telescoped down, amid the canisters on the back wall. It was the work of a moment to release it.

  The two seamen lifted the ladder up on to their shoulders, turned and took two steps forwards, back towards the door. The ladder was slightly unwieldy. As they moved, the front rose just enough to hit the lintel above the door. It caught some wires there but pulled free easily enough when the two men stepped back again. Ibrahim lowered the front and they stepped safely past Kanwar and out into the Pump Room. Kanwar closed the door and followed them at once. He did not hear the faint sound of wires shorting in the room behind him.

  Within a minute, the ladder was extended and in place. With the other three at the bottom, Nicoli climbed up for a first look at Gallaher's bomb.

  It was surprisingly innocuous; hardly more threatening than a neatly wrapped present, with its gaily coloured wires. Without thinking, Nicoli reached down and touched it. His fingertips no more than brushed it, but that was enough. It settled back into the junction of pipes and wall with a decided Clunk! Nicoli jerked back, turning away. He would have fallen had the ladder not been so firmly held below. But the expected explosion did not come.

  After a mental count of three, Nicoli turned back, pushed his arms through the rungs and hugged the safe steel to his broad chest, waiting for the shock to die. Waiting for his heart to stop racing; waiting for the roaring in his ears to fade.

  But then he realised that the roaring in his ears was nothing to do with shock. It was real.

  Automatically, he looked down. At the foot of the ladder, Kanwar stood, gazing up. On his face was the most frightening expression Nicoli had ever seen. The boy's fists were locked on to the ladder and his whole body, like his fingers, seemed closed in some kind of seizure. His eyes were wide and his mouth stretched open, as though he were drowning. His lips and tongue were blue. He was standing there screaming silently up at his friend and he was dead.

  Nicoli saw all this in the time it took for the first agony to hit his chest like a breaking heart. And in the instant it took him to die, he understood: something had switched on the automatic fire-fighting equipment. Every single atom of oxygen had been driven from the place.

  From everywhere in the Pump Room: including their lungs.

  When the first spasm hit him, he locked on to the ladder and remained where he was, apparently about some business; looking just as much alive as the three other corpses at the ladder's foot.

  The roaring of the automatic fire-fighting equipment continued for five more seconds. Then, as there was no more oxygen left anywhere in the Pump Room, right up to the ceiling, it switched itself off and there was silence.

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