Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  Wreck

  Liberty was in action without a second thought. The minute the picture from Maya’s camera settled at that strange angle she was up out of the cockpit and running across Flint’s warm, polystyrene and composite deck towards the side of the derelict vessel so ironically called Luck. ‘Maya!’ she called into the two-way. ‘Maya! Can you hear me?’

  There was the hissing of an empty channel. Liberty’s whole long body went cold, even though she was in frantic motion.

  ‘Hey!’ called Bella, looking up from the laptop, shocked by the suddenness of the disaster and by Liberty’s explosive reaction to it. ‘You take care!’

  ‘I will,’ called back Liberty. But she didn’t really believe her own words. ‘Maya?’ she called again. ‘Emma?’

  There was only quiet hissing in reply.

  The deck of the ghost ship was a quick scramble up and its look and layout were already familiar from the pictures Maya and Emma had sent back. The only thing the pictures had not revealed was the fact that, like Flint, the derelict vessel was stirring rhythmically as the big ocean rollers passed beneath her keel. That explained the unexpected movement she had been so swift to dismiss, she thought. And the heaving seemed to be intensifying. She glanced up at the hard blue sky as she stepped over the rotting safety rail, suddenly aware that the weather might be on the change.

  But Liberty had much more immediate concerns. She ran across the green non-slip and the grey section behind it. She did not pause until she reached the starboard bridge-house door, then she swung it wide until it slammed against the wall behind it and clipped wide open, shaking in its retaining clip as the echo of the bang it made faded into the moaning of the wind. She gulped a deep breath of relatively clear air and stepped over the raised section into the bridge house itself.

  Sunlight streamed in behind her, lighting the lateral corridor to the top of the companionway, but the warmth of the outside vanished immediately into a clammy chill. The pictures had not prepared her for the stink, any more than they had for the restless movement, and even that quick eye-watering breath she had caught when the wind backed hardly prepared her for the stench. She hadn’t thought to bring a torch – hadn’t really thought at all – so she slowed a little as she plunged into the shadowy stairwell like a reluctant bather entering an icy pool.

  No sooner had the shadows closed around her than the composition of the dark air changed. The sickening aroma of rotting fish was all but lost beneath the eye-watering smell of diesel gas. As though she was swimming in petrol, Liberty plunged on, taking the shallowest breath she could, praying that she could hold out against the deadly fumes, forewarned and forearmed.

  The turn of the stairwell was the darkest part of the journey, for as she went on down into the wreckage of the crew’s mess, the light cast by two torches illuminated where she was walking. They did so, she noted grimly, because they were shining along the deck from the sides of the two fallen women at the far end of the engine room corridor. Even so, the low, lateral beams made it easy enough for her to pick her way through the rotting filth on the deck.

  Emma had made it almost to the door of the crew’s mess. She lay on her face with the torch out ahead of her, as though she was pointing the bright beam at some danger hidden in the dark ahead of her. Maya lay immediately outside the half-closed engine room door with the camera and the second torch. Liberty stepped past both women and pushed the cold metal door closed then slammed the handles into place. Only then did she turn.

  Liberty had already calculated that she would have to take Emma first because she would never get Maya past the American-Japanese woman’s stocky body. Not in a passageway as narrow as this one. Wearily, feeling the weight of her own arms and legs beginning to drag her down, she took Emma by the back of her life vest and lifted her as though she were some kind of suitcase. The torch rolled free of Emma’s slack grip and continued to point urgently through the mess into the wreckage of the galley with its tank of cooking gas. The rolling of the beam gave the whole thing a weird, unsettling movement, adding to the motion of the hull, seeming to set it swinging more forcefully still.

  Emma’s arms and legs dragged along the floor of the passageway as Liberty pulled her out. Her wrists and knees slithered through the filth on the mess floor and bashed against every stair on the long upward haul. Little by little, one step at a time, Liberty’s mind closed down until only her iron will was keeping her going. Her long legs only just functioned. Her back and shoulders seemed to be on fire. Her hands, and especially her fingertips, were points of almost incapacitating agony. She didn’t dare breathe too deeply so she couldn’t call for help. Her head sang and her heart thundered so powerfully that it felt as though her chest was going to explode. But somehow Liberty managed to pull Emma up into the dazzling brightness of the lateral corridor and out on to the windy weather deck.

  ‘Bella,’ she croaked into the two-way, the moment she dared fill her lungs with the wonderful air that had almost made her puke ten minutes ago. ‘Double-check the way Flint’s secured and come aboard. I’ll never be able to do that again. Not alone.’ She rolled Emma over on to her back, sank to her knees beside her and tried to check for signs of life. Her adrenaline-filled hands were shaking so much she could hardly hold her friend’s warm throat, let alone find a pulse. Besides, the strain on her fingers of treating the rubberized canvas of a life jacket as though it were the handle of a suitcase had left her nails torn and her fingertips utterly numb. She put her ear to Emma’s lips. Could not hear breathing. Could not feel anything other than the steady wind on her cheek.

  ‘That’s really fucking risky, Liberty,’ warned Bella. ‘And the weather’s on the turn . . .’

  ‘It’s really fucking vital, Bella! Get here now!’ Liberty pulled herself back up and turned towards the clipped bulkhead door. ‘You really don’t want to finish this trip three-handed,’ she emphasized. ‘Maybe two-handed – with a couple of corpses for company! Get here or it’ll be too late.’

  She paused, leaning against the doorway, willing herself to hurry up, feeling as though she was wearing a suit of lead. Then, with startling suddenness, Bella was there beside her and, shoulder to shoulder, they went in. ‘Goodness!’ whispered Bella. ‘It’s cold in here! And that smell!’

  ‘Don’t breathe,’ grated Liberty. ‘Take one deep breath and hold it. It gets worse.’ She did what she advised, then took the lead down the dark companionway, feeling Bella close behind her. She had to put her hand on the wall to steady herself several times before she stepped down on to the lower deck once more. They went side by side through the crew’s mess, with the torch beams lighting up their feet among the rubbish, then Liberty took the lead again stepping into the narrow corridor. She slowed carefully so she could stoop and retrieve Emma’s torch without Bella bumping into her, then she gestured to her dark-haired companion to pick up Maya’s torch as well. They paused for an instant as Liberty tried to work out the best way for two women to carry a third along a corridor only just wide enough for one. Then she stooped and took hold of Maya’s life jacket just as she had taken hold of Emma’s. Bella stood back and Liberty heaved the inert mass of Maya’s head and shoulders past her knees. Then, blessedly, Bella stooped and grabbed the waist section of the sturdy vest, taking half the terrible weight.

  Liberty swung the torch beam dead ahead and began to stagger forward. As she did so, she realized with simple horror that the gas tank in the kitchen did not just seem to be swinging. It was actually swinging. Quite wildly, in fact. And even as the two would-be rescuers pulled Maya into the filthy mess, the tank finally tore free of its fixing and crashed to the floor. But one more horrified glance was enough to tell Liberty the worst. It was the pipe that had broken – not the connection. And that realization was confirmed at once by the fact that the roaring in her ears became real – the roaring of escaping gas. Cooking gas was pumping out of the bottle and through the broken pipe to mix with the already lethal fume-filled atmosphere. The smallest
spark would set the whole lot off now.

  Simple horror seemed to lend Liberty even more strength. She heaved Maya on to the steps of the companionway so fiercely that for a moment she was pulling Bella as well. Then Bella caught something of her terror and the pair of them bundled Maya up the companionway, round the bend and up again into the brightness of the corridor. Side by side with Maya dragging between them, they raced down the wider A deck passageway and out on to the deck.

  Liberty tensed to let go of Maya and grab Emma, but the Sino-American woman was already on her hands and knees, puking weakly on to the deck. The wind had picked up even further. There were clouds threatening in the distance, and the colour of the ocean had changed to a deeper green. The swells were big enough to be moving both Flint and Un Maru more wildly. The fenders between the hulls were screaming like souls in torment. ‘Quickly!’ gasped Liberty. ‘Let’s get aboard Flint and away. Emma! Can you walk?’

  Answering with actions rather than words, Emma pulled herself to her feet and staggered alongside Liberty and Bella to the side of the derelict wreck. Liberty went over first and turned at once, reaching back and up for Maya’s dead weight. Then Emma half fell aboard before Bella stepped more delicately – but no less urgently – over the safety rail and down. Then she too turned and began to untie the rope securing the two working hulls together.

  Liberty staggered down into the cockpit and the moment Bella shouted, ‘Free!’ she engaged the motor and eased the two vessels apart. With Maya still face down on the deck and Emma on all fours beside her, Liberty brought the motors up to full ahead, looking back fearfully over her shoulder, trusting that the darkening ocean ahead was clear. It was only when Bella joined her in the cockpit, settled into her accustomed place beside the equipment and whispered, with profanity that she had never been heard to use before today, ‘What the fuck . . .’, that Liberty thought to look down. And saw the laptop screen.

  In their rush to get clear they had forgotten the camera. It was still where Maya had dropped it and it was still switched on. The little light gave just enough illumination for them to still make out the corridor at its crazy angle and the openings leading into increasingly shadowed rooms beyond it. The crew’s mess and the galley, almost invisible in the darkness. Un Maru was moving sufficiently forcefully to make the camera itself rock from side to side, and the combined movement gave the impression that the derelict vessel was in the grip of a terrible storm. The corridor heaved and lurched. The angles of the doorways seemed to reel crazily. For a truly mind-bending moment it seemed that the door into the mess and that into the galley were moving out of synch, at different speeds and attitudes.

  And everything in the distant galley seemed to be alive. Cupboard doors flapped, dark veneer exteriors invisible, white laminate interiors catching the light. The last of their contents slid around, from side to side and back and forth, little more than dark shapes coming and going into and out of the darkness as the doors swung to and fro, outlined against the white of the interiors. Until, at last, the cupboard hanging crazily above the dismounted gas stove top fell off completely.

  They never knew how or why, but something in that final fall sparked off the gas. The galley exploded into flame. A cloud of yellow brilliance filled the mess, which instantly added to the brightness and the flames. A great ball of fire billowed into the engine room corridor and came rolling along the deckhead above the camera, which recorded its own destruction with shocking faithfulness. A black-streaked yellow cloud rolling forward, contained by the geometric precision of the walls and deckhead above them and seeming to drip flaming streamers into the fume-rich atmosphere immediately outside the diesel-flooded engine room. And then the screen went blank.

  House

  Liberty jammed the motor controls hard forward and looked fearfully back over her shoulder at the all too slowly receding shape of the drifting hulk. A muffled BOOM! echoed down the wind. A gout of thick black smoke burst out of the open bridge house and came towards them. Red fire followed. It came flooding out of the bulkhead doors the women had left open. It exploded through the glass and came licking out of the windows. Then with a deafening report, the oil in the flooded engine room went up, the fumes heated to detonation point by the warmth coming through the bulkhead. Liberty hadn’t even registered that Un Maru possessed a funnel until she saw it rise like a rocket and cartwheel into the water, trailing smoke. And the whole deck of the vessel seemed to tear itself open.

  Liberty could almost see the wall of force spreading across the water towards them, like a squall. Flint slammed forward as it hit her, digging her bow into the back of a wave and heaving wildly. For a moment, the air was very hot, very noisy, and full of the stenches that had marked the Un Maru when she was still alive. But there was no debris. No hard rain of nuts and bolts. No withering shrapnel of glass shards. The blazing hulk refused to sink. It sat there, low in the water, its funnel and bridge house gone and its decks open to the elements, burning, guttering, floating.

  ‘Now whoever built that,’ said Liberty wonderingly after a while, ‘should have done some work on the Titanic.’

  The chuckle Maya gave was the first sign that she was still alive.

  One by one they pulled themselves together and began to look to their boat. They stowed the fenders and set the sails. They reported to a distant, whispering radio contact that Flint was OK, and her crew were fine. They did not detail their most recent near disaster. Instead, they reported the current state of wind, weather and water. They calculated that they were currently at four five point two degrees north, one four four degrees west, and heading west along their course as agreed towards their rendezvous with Cheerio at a mean ten knots under full sail. That there would be no more video footage because their camera had sustained fatal damage. And finally that there was a burning vessel drifting as a serious hazard to shipping, a second or two of longitude east of the position they had just given.

  The wind strengthened, Flint’s mainsail swung out to starboard and their speed picked up a little. The clouds in the east behind them started scudding in low and dark as a squall came chasing them westwards. It was this as much as anything that pulled them out of the lethargy that followed the adrenaline high which had got them through the adventure. They needed to sort out their storm rig, and were lucky that the weather gave them sufficient warning to change their gear before they did so.

  They even had time for a hot meal at eight bells, though the traditional marker of noon aboard did not signify the traditional change of watch. Not under their current rotation. It might have given Liberty a chance for a noon sight, had she been minded to double-check the GPS with more old-fashioned methods. But the clouds had closed down and the exercise would have been pointless. So they sat, rigged and ready for foul weather with their speed falling off in the following wind, eating a mess of reconstituted scrambled eggs and baked beans which, by some magic, Bella rendered not only palatable but delicious.

  But in the end, the squall never caught up with them. Its southern skirts scattered them with rain and pulled the wind round a point or two, then span away northwards. The wind eased and shifted southwards in the early afternoon and they began to think of running across it, gybing into a course that took them first north of their westerly course and then south again to meet it. It would be hard work, but it would keep their speed up.

  The wind’s new quarter seemed to bring the weather some further second thoughts with it. Conditions began to moderate towards a clear calm and the swells, never really amounting to all that much, began to settle into their accustomed deep-water set. The girls began to relax once more, and fell to more active yacht-handling. This was a race, after all. And they were still more than four days away from the spot their target was calculated to be at when they met it. About the same distance as Katapult by the look of things.

  The clouds thinned and the afternoon sun came out, westering on their port bow as they continued their northerly reach. Their wet weather gear came
off, replaced by jeans and blouses. The wind stayed steady enough to keep vision clear through the rest of the afternoon, and it seemed to Flint’s crew that things could only get better from here. Liberty let her ease off a point or two so the hull didn’t vibrate so badly.

  Then, just after the watch changed at seventeen hundred hours local time, ‘What’s that?’ demanded Bella, who was using the last of her off-watch time to do a little lookout-keeping. The tall Chinese-American was back up on the forepeak with the binoculars once again. ‘Liberty, there’s something dead ahead.’

  Maya called, ‘Just a minute,’ and checked on her instruments, while Liberty looked down from the helm to see what the radar and sonar could make of whatever Bella could see.

  ‘Well,’ announced Maya decidedly. ‘It looks like there’s something there. Radar’s picking it up but I have no clear picture of what on earth it is. If the kit’s to be believed, it goes on forever. If there was anything on the sonar I might be convinced it was an island.’

  ‘An island?’ demanded Liberty. ‘Out here? There’s nothing on the chart.’

  ‘Nothing for miles,’ confirmed Maya. ‘And I mean hundreds and hundreds of miles. We’re due to hit Cheerio long before we hit anything like land.’

  ‘Then what on earth is it?’ mused Liberty.

  ‘If we stay on this course then we’ll find out because we’re heading straight for it,’ called Bella.

  ‘Well, I hadn’t planned to be until we change watches at nineteen hundred hours, then we can run back south all night,’ said Liberty, more to herself than to anyone. ‘Maybe get a smooth run. Manage a little sleep.’

  ‘Well, that’s OK,’ answered Maya. ‘We’ll be close enough for a look-see by nineteen hundred.’

  ‘But after this morning we’ll be pretty bloody careful as we close up with it,’ said Liberty feelingly.