Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  Abruptly the laptop screen lit up again. Maya’s camera followed a pair of torch beams in a slow pan round an engine room. The engine and all the ancillary equipment seemed to be almost floating in a great dark sea that came most of the way up its rusty, battered sides and stretched away into the cavernous shadows, apparently coming halfway up the engine room walls.

  ‘Is the surface of the water really black?’ asked Liberty. ‘Or is that a trick of the light?’

  ‘It’s black,’ gasped Maya.

  ‘Because it’s oil,’ choked Emma.

  ‘The fumes . . .’ Maya coughed.

  ‘You’d better get out,’ ordered Liberty. An engine room flooded with fuel oil had to be a very dangerous place indeed. Even in a powerless, abandoned ghost ship. Stories she had heard from the Mariners and their children whirled in the half-remembered recesses of her memory. Of supertanker holds exploding during cleaning because the static generated by too-powerful hoses set off the lethally explosive gases. Fumes ignited by the spark from the fibre of a nylon shirt.

  Were Maya and Emma wearing or carrying anything that might set the volatile atmosphere ablaze? Did they have anything on or near them that might cause static? Anything powerful enough to generate a spark? The torches? The camera? The two-way radios?

  At the very least, she remembered, her flesh going cold at the thought, the gas given off by fuel oil could be dangerously poisonous. ‘Hurry,’ she urged. ‘Switch off the camera and get out fast. And close the door behind you.’

  ‘Emma,’ said Maya’s voice distantly on the two-way. ‘Emma . . .’

  The picture on the laptop screen swung wildly through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to show the corridor reaching back. Then the square receding lines of the perspective seemed to spin and tumble as the camera fell to the deck.

  Humpback

  Robin sprang awake. She looked around, blinking, all her senses on the alert. Something had just happened. Something bad. She looked at her watch. Just after six a.m. It would soon be dawn. She had been asleep for two hours.

  It was Day A on the watch rotation. At the end of Day B, at four a.m. this morning, she had crept sleepily down into her bunk having relinquished the wheel to Flo Weary. Everything had been plain sailing then. They had enjoyed four days of a steady westerly trade wind that had driven them forward at the better part of thirty-five knots tacking across it in the traditional sawtooth pattern along their north-easterly course from Tuvalu past cursed Howland Island, heading for the vastness north of Hawaii and their rendezvous with Tanaka’s bottle.

  It was the kind of a run that Katapult seemed to love best of all. But, as with each of those last four days, there had been little to do except to perform the occasional tack. There had been nothing to see, no one to talk to except for their crew mates and the occasional wider contacts. And nothing registering on the radar or sonar except for the occasional reef.

  But now there was something wrong.

  ‘Robin!’ Flo Weary’s voice echoed down from the green-grey glimmer of the communications area, and Robin registered that Flo had called her an instant earlier, just as she was jarred awake. ‘Robin! Did you feel that?’

  ‘What?’ asked Robin, rolling out on to the deck of Katapult’s main crew cabin and pulling herself as close to upright as she dared. The deck leaned a little – a little more than she expected, in fact. She paused, one hand against the solid column of the leaning mast, feeling the power of the wind on the sails pushing the mast over against the buoyancy of the starboard outrigger. But the deck was unexpectedly steep. The outrigger wasn’t sitting right.

  Thank God she had crawled slovenly into bed fully dressed.

  ‘We hit something,’ called Flo loudly enough to make Robin’s watch-mate Rohini stir but not wake. It usually took something really major to wake the Indian round-the-world yachtswoman.

  ‘I can’t see how we did,’ said Akelita from her place by the laptop, comms and safety equipment. ‘There was nothing on the radar or the sonar. Well . . .’

  ‘Well what?’ demanded Flo. ‘Was there something or not? Because we sure as hell hit something. Or the starboard outrigger did.’

  Robin was up beside them now, stepping past Akelita to stand with Flo at the helm. The great mainsail strained above her the boom just touching her tumbled golden curls, the whole hull vibrated with the speed they were running at, crossing the steady airstream from one long tack to another, for maximum speed, running as close to the wind as they could. The air was steady, fresh and bracing. It blew the cobwebs of sleep away. The new day was just beginning to expand as the sun rose on the eastern rim of the world, almost dead ahead. The sky was light, speckled with the palest ghostly stars and the lightest of blues. The hissing, chuckling sea was beginning to gain substance, colour, shadowy green beneath the quicksilver blue of the sky’s reflection. The morning was simply vast.

  A point of intense green appeared on the far horizon almost dead ahead, as though a flare was exploding behind a sheet of bottle-green emerald. It was the sun, rising beyond the translucent, water-covered curve of the earth. And out of the nearby sea, silhouetted against it a humpback whale suddenly soared into the lower air, as though in answer to Flo’s terse question.

  Almost the whole of its twenty-metre length came out of the water, seeming to tower threateningly ahead of them for an instant as though it could stand on its tail indefinitely, crucified against the dawn. The light in the Eastern sky caught the barnacle encrustations on its long, sharp jaw and the leading edges of its wide, wing-like fins, seeming to etch its black outline in rugged white. It seemed to turn in the air, giving the entranced, horrified women a glimpse of its pale, seamed jowls and belly. Then it exploded back into the water like a depth charge.

  ‘Shit,’ said Flo roundly. ‘Could we have hit that? At the better part of forty knots? With the starboard outrigger? Christ!’

  ‘Well, we hit something,’ said Robin tersely. ‘And the outrigger looks wrong . . .’

  ‘Feels wrong too,’ added Flo. ‘Katapult’s not riding right.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else that could have come and gone so fast it didn’t register on any of our equipment,’ said Akelita. ‘I hope the poor thing wasn’t hurt.’

  ‘OK,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s hope not. And let’s hope Katapult didn’t sustain too much damage either. Akelita, keep an eye out for any more humpbacks. As far as I know they swim in pods or family groups. Flo, ease off our speed while we think this through – and we’ll need to tack as soon as practical. We’ll rely on the port outrigger as much as we can for the moment. Once we’re steady, Flo or I can go out on the starboard wing and take a closer look. We’ll make an assessment as soon as we can, and see whether we’re going to need to call for help. We should be fairly clear about our situation by the next routine contact at noon. In the meantime, Akelita, where’s the nearest land?’

  They didn’t have a spinnaker up – like Flint they were relying on the simple sloop rig of mainsail and the foresail – so it was easy enough to swing across the steady easterly wind and let the canvas lean towards the port outrigger instead of the starboard. The simple manoeuvre was enough to wake even Rohini, however, and Flo handed over the helm to the Indian woman while Akelita kept looking alike for whales and islands.

  By the time Katapult had settled into her new position, Robin and Flo were dressed in life vests and safety harnesses. The vests themselves went over the black bibs of the harnesses which had shoulder straps and a gusset strap. The black webbing was guaranteed to withstand weights in excess of fifty kilos. In theory the girls could safely have bungee jumped in them. Flo led the pair of them up on to the foredeck to the right of the mainmast, and they paused to clip their carabineers in place like mountaineers before they walked forward to give the damage an initial look-see.

  This time, Robin’s attention was focused on immediate minutiae rather than on the vastness of the morning. Under Rohini’s practised helmswomanship, the port outrigger behind
the straining mainsail was porpoising just below the surface of the ocean, cutting through the water like a speeding dolphin, Robin knew. On the other hand, the starboard wing she was examining was raised slightly, its torpedo-shaped outrigger just above the waves, skimming like a flying fish the better part of twenty feet in length.

  Robin’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Between the main hull and the flying outrigger, was an articulated wing, hinged against the central hull, capable of being raised and lowered – like the sails – either by the yacht’s central computer or by the crew on manual override. The top edge of the hinge was normally a rule-straight black line, for the major part of the articulation was designed to push the outrigger down into the water, the tension between the forces exercised against this and the sails generating the vessel’s fearsome speed. It could be raised to the vertical, Robin knew, but only if secondary, articulated hinges were employed. A massively strong variant of the kind of system that allowed modern cupboard doors to swing wide. But both of the hinge systems seemed to have been knocked out of kilter by the outrigger’s impact against the unfortunate whale. That straight-edged black line was wider towards the bow than it was towards the stern. And the delicate curve of the wing, designed to have the perfection of a Spitfire’s aerofoil, stepped back slightly at the hinge-point of its leading edge.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Robin asked, glancing up at Flo’s frowning profile.

  ‘We did good getting it up and taking the pressure off,’ answered Flo, sweeping her fingers back through the wild pre-Raphaelite tumble of her red curls. ‘We can’t rely on its vertical movement unless the hinge sides are true and parallel. And it might even tear off, I guess, if the damage at the front gets any worse.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do to help matters now?’

  ‘Fix it, you mean? I don’t know. I mean, I know the design of the hinge mechanism pretty well. My dad designed it, after all. It’s really robust. I guess, if we can get the right angle on it we might be able to snap it back into place. Might be worth a shot.’

  ‘Let’s go for it, then,’ decided Robin.

  ‘It’s not really designed to have people crawling around on it while Katapult’s under full sail, mind. There’s not much in the way of handholds and so forth. We’d need to be really flaming careful.’

  ‘Flo. We’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for Christ’s sake. The nearest land is three miles straight down. Apart from the whale that did this, the nearest life forms are likely to be sharks. Of course I’m going to be careful.’

  ‘Just so’s you know.’

  Flo stepped gingerly over the starboard deck rail and eased herself on to the outrigger wing. She stopped, seeming to will the soles of her deck shoes to take the firmest possible grip. Then she slowly sank to her right knee and took hold of the wing’s leading edge just beside the step-back of the damaged hinge. Surf exploded up into her face. Her streaming Titian hair was suddenly slick and heavy with moisture. ‘Come on out,’ she called, and all at once Robin realized how much noise the wind and the water were making as Katapult thundered across the restless plane where they came together.

  Shaking her safety line like a rat’s tail behind her, she too stepped over the knee-high safety rail out on to the upward slope of the wing. She steadied herself as Flo had done, feeling the way the hull reacted to the movement of her weight across the critical balance of wave, wind and straining sails. The white composite surface she was standing on had been treated with non-slip paint, but even so, the pressure of the wind behind her and the weight of the water breaking back to slap into her face were dangerously disorientating. She swept her own suddenly sodden locks back, glad that they were nothing like as long and heavy as Flo’s were. Then she took a careful step forward to stand beside her crewmate.

  Flo looked up at her. ‘See?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ shouted Robin, sinking slowly to her right knee.

  ‘This hinge-clip is sprung. Here. See? That seems to be all that’s wrong,’ Flo bellowed again.

  ‘I see. What does it mean?’ asked Robin, leaning closer, putting the knuckles of her right fist on the sandpaper roughness of the non-slip.

  ‘It means we can fix it if we can get it to snap back into place,’ Flo explained.

  ‘How can we do that?’ demanded Robin.

  ‘It must have snapped out when the impact with the whale pushed the bow section of the outrigger back. Then the whole thing settled back a bit.’ Flo didn’t answer directly. But Robin nodded vigorously to show she was following her companion’s reasoning.

  ‘I see that,’ she answered. Then she repeated, ‘So what do we need to do?’

  ‘I guess we’ll have to get to the aft of the wing and try to push it forward,’ decided Flo. ‘And hope that does the trick.’

  ‘Can we do that?’ asked Robin sceptically.

  ‘We can try,’ said Flo. ‘We’ll give it a go from the aft section of the wing itself first, then maybe jury-rig something from the main hull later if we have to. Come on.’

  Flo led the way back across the ten metre breadth of the wing’s inner edge. At least it was a little easier to move, thought Robin grimly, with the wind in your face and the water slapping your backside instead of the other way round. Though in actual fact Flo’s body was protecting her face while her backside was getting the worst of the bargain – and then some.

  Still moving slowly and laboriously, Flo squatted back on her haunches, then sat gingerly on the wing. Lying back and stretching out, she tried to position herself so that her hands could hold the edge of the composite level with her hips while her feet could push against the side of the main hull as though she were the base of a triangle or the crosspiece in a capital letter A. As she heaved and strained, Robin gingerly copied her, lying outside her, for her legs were longer. She could feel the roughness beneath her back and shoulders; the smooth edge under her palms beside her hips. Her feet struck and slipped against the side of the hull beside the cockpit almost level with Rohini’s shoulders.

  One moment she was squirming backwards, trying to balance on an edge, with her hands slipping on the slick, streaming composite and the soles of her deck shoes slithering over the side of her vessel, the next she was under the water. She had an instant of disbelieving shock. Then she thought, Oh, shit, this is going to hurt!

  Her safety line snapped taut and her harness jerked forward to pull her helplessly through the streaming surf at the better part of forty knots.

  Johnston

  Robin had never felt anything like it. Had she been able to catch her breath she would have screamed blue bloody murder even though she was not a woman easily reduced to extremis. Her life jacket inflated automatically as soon as she hit the water and was forced up beneath her chin by the relentless pressure. The unbreakable grip of the mountaineer’s carabineer juddered down the safety rail making Robin feel as though a large number of soldiers in massive hobnail boots were giving her a good kicking. Until, with a jerk that almost tore her apart, it stopped. And things got worse. She found herself smashing through Katapult’s wake like an extremely well-endowed mermaid trying for the aquatic world speed record.

  But the life jacket was nowhere near equal to the forces it was trying to overcome, so every second or so, Robin’s head would be dragged under as though Poseidon himself was pulling at her legs. Her eyes were full of water: she could feel the lower lids sagging and ballooning like water-filled echoes of the canvas airbags pummelling her boobs. Her ears were filled with pressure that was simply agonizing. Her nose was running like Niagara and it felt as though the Congo, the Nile and the Amazon were all trying to flow down her throat at once.

  Her safety line was now just the right length to allow Katapult’s rushing wake to hurl her against the yacht’s hull with the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes one of her shoulders hit; sometimes an elbow, sometimes her back or her front. She tried to put her hand out once, hoping for some control – and almost broke her wrist. Her legs waved behin
d her with all the strength and reliability of overcooked spaghetti and even though she was only wearing deck shoes, the force with which they banged together all but broke her ankles.

  But all of this was as nothing compared with the exquisite agony of the gusset strap. The thin webbing that ran between her legs dug into the tenderest parts of her anatomy with a level of pure discomfort she had not experienced since childbirth. And, aptly enough, just as she had done in the midst of having the twins delivered, she knew exactly which bloody man had got her into this. And she suddenly remembered with almost shocking clarity every name she had called him in the hospital delivery room then. So of course she started calling him the same names all over again.

  Which was why the first word that Florence Weary heard as she finally succeeded in securing the back of Robin’s life jacket and pulling her head and shoulders up on to Katapult’s square afterdeck was enough to shock even a woman of enthusiastically Australian heritage who had spent her entire life in the company of sailors.

  ‘Steady on there, girl,’ she said. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘Not you!’ choked Robin. ‘Bloody Richard!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Flo, with sisterly understanding. ‘Right!’

  She heaved again and Robin’s legs flopped up on to the afterdeck like the tail of a dying halibut. The pair of them rested, side by side, fighting to regain their breath.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Robin after a moment’s choking near silence.

  ‘My pleasure. I got you in, so the least I could do was fish you out.’

  ‘Not the least,’ gasped Robin. ‘You’re going to have to do a certain amount of anointing and bandaging. I feel like I’ve been keelhauled.’ She blinked the last of the seawater out of her streaming eyes and wondered whether she felt strong enough to wipe her nose. ‘Did we fix it?’