Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

‘In and out for two days and a night. It’s eight a.m. now. Jim and I just got here. Jim flew in yesterday after you had that talk with Audrey at Crewfinders.’

  Did I? thought Richard. Then how come I don’t remember . . .

  ‘But they say you slept well last night,’ observed Jim cheerfully. ‘You’ve had periods when you were compos mentis enough to be throwing out orders like Bligh of the Bounty . . .’

  ‘And others when you were more like Rip Van Winkle,’ added Nic.

  ‘Two days!’ Richard sat up without further thought. Discovered he could handle the pain. ‘We’ve got to get moving!’ Swung his legs out of bed and thought for a moment he must be wearing purple pyjamas. ‘Get moving,’ he repeated a little less decisively.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nic. ‘You made that clear when you were in Captain Bligh mode. But you’re the only one holding us up now that Jim’s here to hold the fort in Tokyo – and everything’s in place like you ordered.’

  Richard had only the vaguest memory of giving any orders at all but he wasn’t about to admit this for fear of being held back to undergo further medical checks – especially now that he was getting the measure of just how badly bruised he was. He glanced automatically at his left wrist but there was a bandage round it instead of his trusty Rolex. His blood went cold with fear that the beloved timepiece might be broken.

  ‘Eight a.m., local time,’ confirmed Jim helpfully. He handed over the watch from a bedside table and Richard checked it – at least it seemed undamaged – and slipped it over the bandage.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked as he began to pull himself out of bed, gathering the hospital robe more tightly as he moved.

  ‘The Fuku Sunshan private hospital,’ answered Nic. ‘It’s the one my guys at Tokyo Greenbaum use. Part of the health plan. You became an honorary employee when you saved the boss’s butt. As far as the health plan goes, anyway.’

  ‘How close to the airport is it?’ asked Richard as he tried to push himself erect. And failed. Sat down again and gathered his strength.

  ‘Close enough,’ answered Jim. ‘And all your kit is here, packed and ready.’

  ‘Christian Hassang and the folks at the Mandarin said Hi and Bye,’ supplied Nic. ‘They sent the flowers.’ He gestured and Richard looked through a doorway into a private room which seemed to have become a greenhouse.

  ‘I need a laptop and an update,’ grated Richard. ‘And some clothes.’ He tried again. And this time he made it to his feet.

  ‘Clothes and laptop are next door somewhere under the greenery,’ answered Nic. ‘Update’s easy. All three vessels are closing with the bottle. We’re looking at maybe a day – probably no more than that. Time’s tight.’

  ‘How are the girls?’ demanded Richard, taking his first steps like an over-adventurous toddler.

  ‘They seem OK,’ answered Nic shortly. ‘Communications come and go. We didn’t tell them about our little contretemps. Or about the lottery ticket. And I guess they’re keeping stuff from us too.’

  ‘OK,’ decided Richard. ‘I’ll have a look at the laptop while I dress. Nic, what do I need to do to get checked out of here?’

  ‘I’ll go see . . .’ Nic vanished.

  ‘Jim. Is there a car?’

  ‘A Merc in the private car park five floors down and a Gulfstream in the corporate bay at Haneda Airport. Both fuelled up and ready to go.’

  Richard leaned against the wall as he stepped into his underwear then sat a little gingerly on a providentially firm sofa to put on his socks. As he did this, he scanned the readout on the laptop screen over the top of his purple-splotched calves. Cheerio was flashing cheerfully at three two point five degrees north one six two degrees west. ‘The middle of nowhere with a vengeance,’ he mumbled to himself.

  Reona Tanaka’s laptop was switched on and accessing the Tokyo University cloud, which was registering it at 350 miles north of the bottle. Katapult was 200 miles east and Flint seemed to be about the same distance west of it. All four signals were as far away from dry land as it was possible to get. Three-and-a-half-thousand miles away from where Richard was sitting now, as the crow flew.

  ‘Chuck over that shirt, would you, Jim?’ he asked, his mind racing. ‘And alert both the driver and the pilot that we’re ready for the off.’

  By the time Nic came back, Richard was dressed, washed, shaved and experimenting with the least painful way to carry his case.

  ‘That’s done,’ said Nic cheerfully. ‘They didn’t like letting you go without another series of tests but I said you didn’t have time. So they’ve given you this medication to take if the pain gets too severe or if you really start to stiffen up. Watch it, though. It’ll make you drowsy.’

  ‘If anything goes wrong I promise not to sue them,’ said Richard.

  ‘I told them that when I signed the waiver,’ said Nic. ‘You promise not to sue them. Or haunt them.’

  ‘Very funny,’ grated Richard. ‘Let’s hit the road.’

  ‘Been there, done that,’ chuckled Nic, taking his friend’s suitcase and turning to lead the way out. ‘Hitting the road is what got us in this hospital in the first place.’

  The car sitting in the private car park, gleaming beneath the watery sunshine of a promising-looking morning, was a brand-new Mercedes E Class Avantgarde. Among its other advantages, it was configured to allow full use of all the communications equipment they had with them, so Richard was able to double-check the readings he had scanned on the laptop as the taciturn driver pushed the saloon as close to its 150 mph top speed as law and circumstances allowed. Then he was able to contact the twenty-four-hour desk at Crewfinders in London and double-check the arrangements he and Audrey had put in place during a conversation he could not remember having more than twenty-four hours ago. While he did this, Nic contacted the airport again and alerted the pilot that they were on their way confirming that a flight plan had been filed and clearances put in place on the expectation that they would be lifting off as soon after ten local time as humanly and bureaucratically possible.

  Then the three men went into closed conference while the car sped like a black rocket along a route which, Richard noted with a subconscious shiver, was all too close to the one that had taken them to Rage and the nearly fatal dock area. But soon enough they were turning on to Metropolitan Expressway 1, and not long after that, they had to close their equipment down as the Mercedes plunged into the tunnel designed to take them under the water and out on to the island which contained the airport itself. And nothing much more than the airport, in fact. A lot like a good number of islands, large and small, between here and Canada, thought Richard.

  They eased past the Terminals One and Two, and sped directly down to the handling areas where they drew up beside the gleaming Gulfstream G650 in Greenbaum International livery that was parked on the apron. Richard made use of his initial stiffness and slowness getting out of the Merc to admire the jet that seemed to tower above him. It was as near as dammit, he knew, a hundred feet long from nose to tail and a hundred feet wide from wing tip to wing tip. The folding stairs were down and the three businessmen climbed aboard to find a range of officialdom awaiting them. Even allowing for three executives, half-a-dozen officials and four crew members, the passenger compartment seemed spacious and thinly populated. Richard stooped – painfully and uneasily – though he could just about have stood erect in the very middle of the cabin, and folded himself into a leather-covered sofa as soon as he was able.

  A certain number of the necessary questions had already been answered by the pilots, flight engineer and the air hostess who were wearing the green uniform of the Greenbaum International flight crew. Nic was an old hand at this and what little he could not settle on behalf of Richard and himself was covered by Jim, as a senior executive with Heritage Mariner, who went with the men from Customs, Immigration and Security, when they all left the plane.

  Twenty minutes later, the pilot reported that they had clearance and a place in the queue for lift-off.
So it was, as planned, a little after ten a.m. local time, that the Gulfstream accelerated down the runway with its twin Rolls-Royce BR725 A1 – twelve engines powering up to maximum revs, and lifted into the watery sunshine of the lower air above Tokyo Bay.

  At the earliest possible opportunity, the air hostess came over to the two occupants of the exclusive executive cabin and enquired, ‘What can I get for you, gentlemen?’

  And Richard answered, feelingly, ‘Food!’

  By the time the Gulfstream was levelling out at 40,000 feet over Chiba and the east coast of Japan was falling away at a whisper less than the speed of sound behind her sleek belly, Richard was tucking into smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on pale but plentiful toast. The percolator was chugging cheerfully and the aroma of Blue Mountain high roast Arabica coffee was filling the atmosphere.

  At last he sat back, sated, with a cup of the nut-brown nectar in his hand and enquired, ‘How long to Henderson, Nic?’

  The answer was, ‘Just over two hours at Mach point nine five.’ And a little more than one hundred minutes later, the Gulfstream was throttling back towards 500 knots and settling on to the long finals that would bring it to a safe landing on Sand Island in the south-west section of the remote Midway Atoll, a couple of thousand miles east of Tokyo.

  Like many of the deserted atoll islands in the vast emptiness out here, Midway, famous as the most decisive naval battleground of the War in the Pacific, had once been a USAF base. It was unmanned now but nevertheless kept stocked with supplies and fuel for emergencies. The last one had been way back in June 2011, but the avgas was still kept fresh and plentiful by the Boeing Corporation. The Greenbaum International Gulfstream touched down there at twelve forty-five Tokyo time, which was sixteen forty-five local.

  Nic and the stick-stiff Richard helped the two pilots and one engineer fire up the diesel-fuelled generators that powered the gas pumps, though the flight crew insisted on overseeing the refuelling themselves. So, by eighteen hundred they were in the air again, with the pilot reporting to the nearest flight controller, at Barking Sands Airfield, Kauai, Hawaii, that the avgas supplies on Sand Island needed the Boeing gas supply team’s urgent attention. The hostess served an early dinner – or a late lunch, depending on which time zone their stomachs were in. And by the time they had consumed their vichyssoise, chicken chasseur and wild rice accompanied by a medley of green vegetables, followed by pots de crème au chocolat, they were on long finals once again.

  The airstrip on Tern Island, French Frigate Shoals, was like that on Midway – unmanned but well maintained. At nineteen hundred hours on a tropical evening it was dark, and, had it not been for the crew of the chopper awaiting them there, there would have been no landing lights, and the runway as impossible for them to see as Howland Island had proved for the unfortunate Amelia Earhart. But the crew of the Changhe CA 109 which was waiting for them there had had the opportunity and the forethought to get everything ready.

  Richard and Nic transferred to the helicopter and left the Gulfstream’s flight crew loading enough avgas to get them down to Hilo International on Hawaii. Then, pausing only for Richard to make a swift survey of the deadly shoals that had nearly stopped the redoubtable Robin in her tracks, they were whisked up into the night sky once again.

  The Changhe’s accommodation was far less sumptuous than aboard the Greenbaum International Gulfstream, but Richard and Nic were strapped safely into bucket seats and given headsets that dulled the relentless thrumming of the rotors. Luckily neither of them was hungry, and both had relieved themselves before the Gulfstream touched down on French Frigate Shoals.

  By nine thirty p.m., the Changhe was settling on to the landing area aft of the massive bridgehouse of the Heritage Mariner supertanker Prometheus, which, having emptied its huge tanks of a quarter of a million gallons of fresh water at Tuvalu, was now making its leisurely way north towards Alaska to fill up with oil for the European market. Like all Heritage Mariner supertankers it carried an emergency supply of avgas suitable for use in choppers. There was a quick turnaround on Prometheus and the Changhe was off again by ten p.m.

  And so, by midnight local time, though it was only coming up for eight p.m. in the heads of its passengers, even as eight bells were sounding for the change of watch from the first to the middle, the Changhe arrived home. And waiting to greet her on the afterdeck of the adapted corvette Poseidon as she carried the submersibles Neptune and Salacia at flank speed into the all-too actual Pacific Garbage Patch, were Captain Mongol Chang and her first officer, Lieutenant Straightline Jiang.

  ‘Ho,’ she said in characteristically gruff greeting as they both climbed – equally stiffly – down on to the deck. ‘I hope you will not bring me any monster jellyfishes or Moby-Dick whales this time!’

  English Defence

  It was only an overdose of the pills which Nic had got from the Tokyo hospital that allowed Richard six hours’ solid sleep. He took a handful while concluding a swift briefing with Captain Chang. And then another as he stood increasingly dopily through a couple of abortive attempts to contact Katapult, whose red dot seemed so tantalizingly close ahead of them. Then he went into his bunk at one a.m., lay down as though poleaxed and woke at seven the next morning.

  He knew at once that something was not quite right. He eased himself on to the thrumming, choppily heaving deck and was shocked and relieved both at the same time to note that he had collapsed into bed without getting undressed. Even his shoes were still in place. But at least the fact that he was still dressed meant he could get on to the bridge more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. Pausing only to freshen up, check his reflection, brush his hair and rinse his mouth, he rushed up two decks. Rushed, he observed wryly, like a centenarian who has lost his Zimmer frame.

  When he did make it up there, he found himself standing stiffly between the silent forms of Captain Chang and her first lieutenant, staring ahead over the garish brightness of the two submersibles on the foredeck. The morning had dawned overcast a couple of hours earlier, and the leaden colour of the sky was reflected by the surface of the ocean, in sharp contrast to the brightness of Neptune and Salacia.

  As far as the eye could see, the legendary blue of the Pacific was hidden beneath a layer of plastic. The majority of the rubbish seemed to be clear bottles of every conceivable size from 330-millilitre water bottles through two-litre stalwarts the same size as Tanaka’s good ship Cheerio, to family-sized containers capable of holding a gallon or maybe two. There were personal items: trainers, flip-flops, footballs. Then there were the ubiquitous bags – from small ones that had once contained crisps or chips to big silver-throated multipacks. Shopping bags without number, from a worldwide range of stores and business outlets. There were black bags that had once held garbage – and some of them still appeared to do so. Green bags full of garden rubbish. And, floating in among the billions of bags, there were commercial containers. There were square ones – everything from Tupperware sandwich boxes to plastic dustbins – to massive water tanks such as could be found in any Western attic. There were barrel-shaped ones varying in size from fizzy drink cans to oil drums to the occasional hot water central heating cylinder.

  And that was before he began to add in the kinds of flotsam that he was already familiar with from his adventures with the jellyfish. Floats and nets from day fishermen’s tackle to huge commercial trawler gear. Fish crates, life jackets, Day-Glo working jackets that looked at first glance like the torsos of corpses, thick red rubber gloves, yellow boots, tyres, ships’ fenders of every sort, size and shape. There were even full-sized containers like modest houses floating half submerged out there. And God alone knew what they contained.

  Frowning with concern, Richard hobbled over to the starboard bridge wing and opened the bulkhead door that connected to the outside world. At once the bridge was filled with a strange, unearthly rumbling grating sound and a piercing, oily stench. ‘Where is Katapult?’ he croaked, concerned for Robin.

  ‘
Dead ahead,’ answered Straightline. ‘We have had to cut speed but so has she. We’ll be up with her by midday.’

  ‘Which is when she will be at the bottle Cheerio’s location,’ added Captain Chang. ‘Though how Captain Mariner will find one bottle in the midst of this . . .’

  Nic arrived on the bridge then. ‘What the . . .’ he said in disgust, looking out at the mess on the water.

  ‘What about the others?’ asked Richard, swinging the bridge door closed.

  ‘The same,’ said Straightline. ‘Mr Greenbaum’s daughter in Flint seems to be making steady headway towards us. The wind is a light northerly – they can both tack across it even though they are heading in opposite directions. The two vessels are in the teeth of a fierce competition now, but they don’t seem to be taking any risks from what I can judge of heading and speed from the locator beacons and the radar.’

  ‘Other than sailing through this crap in the first place,’ grated Nic. ‘Where’s Professor Tanaka?’

  ‘Here,’ Straightline gestured to the twin displays that showed the red dots familiar from the laptop screens, and Poseidon’s combat-standard radar display. ‘We will all get there to the same place at about the same time – the middle of nowhere – and the middle of whatever this excrescence is.’

  ‘That’s something I must remember to ask Professor Tanaka when I see him,’ said Richard thoughtfully.

  Then Nic demanded suddenly, ‘Are we all right to be doing this? It looks pretty flaming dangerous out there.’

  ‘It is!’ snapped Chang. ‘Dangerous for us but also very dangerous for Katapult and Flint. Much more dangerous for them, in fact. If we cut and run to safer waters, then who will help them if anything goes wrong?’ She swung round and looked at her two employers with her fiercest frown. ‘And is that not what we are here for? To help them if anything goes wrong?’

  Over a breakfast of cold noodles, congee warm rice porridge and crullers deep-fried doughsticks, Richard and Nic began to finalize their plans for the fast-approaching endgame as eight quiet chimes announced the start of the forenoon watch at eight a.m. ship’s time. As the bustle of the watch change went on all around them, they fell into an increasingly deep discussion. For they had a fine equation to balance: two yacht captains locked in the final stages of a race that neither was willing to lose – though neither of them knew the true worth of their prize. To make matters worse, communications with the vessels in question was intermittent. And, as wild card against them, Dagupan Maru was also closing on the bottle. Also being highly selective with regard to communications. And she was a container vessel more than capable of running them both down, smashing them to kindling and killing everyone aboard. ‘I wonder,’ mused Richard, mid-conversation, almost an hour later, ‘if Sittart could have had anything to do with the car that almost killed us?’