by Bear Grylls
And, far too often, the Lumos corporation raised its ugly head. He never went looking for it, but it turned up all the same. Corrupting people, corrupting the environment, all for money. Not cool at all.
As Beck wondered how he could change the subject, James did it for him.
‘Hey! Porpoises!’
Beck looked down at the water. Sure enough, five or six porpoises were keeping them company. They streamed effortlessly through the ocean, exactly matching the ship’s speed and direction. They barely seemed to move their tails or fins. Every now and then one would emerge from the water and re-enter with barely a splash.
‘It’s just amazing how they do that,’ he said out loud. ‘They look like they’re hardly moving.’
‘You know they ride the shock wave?’ James said. ‘The ship’s moving through the water and it sends a shock wave ahead of it. It just pushes the porpoises along too.’
‘That’s cool.’ Beck smiled and thought of his friend Peter, who had shared some of his adventures. ‘I’ve got this friend at school you’d get on with. He knows the science behind everything.’
‘There’s usually an explanation for most stuff,’ James said casually.
‘That’s what I generally tell myself. Steven tried to wind me up about the Bermuda Triangle.’
‘OK, there’s definitely an explanation for that!’ James laughed. He was absently drumming his fingers on the deck rail, making a faint tapping noise. ‘Like, there’s this famous story about a squadron of American fighter planes that got lost in the Triangle, right? Only, if you look at the details, it was lousy weather, and they were probably flying on a reciprocal course – that’s when you go in exactly the opposite direction to the one you want; I mean, a compass points in two directions and you can get confused – and so they flew away from land instead of towards it, then ran out of fuel and crashed in the middle of the ocean. No mystery.’
Beck knew all about travelling on a reciprocal course. He had done it once or twice. If a compass was pointing north, that meant the needle was also pointing south. It was easy to get confused. It was scary to think it could also happen to trained pilots.
‘What about the ships that went missing?’ he asked. ‘I mean, if a ship runs out of fuel it doesn’t crash, it just floats.’
James smiled, and the tapping started again. ‘Oh, that’s where it gets even cooler. There’s masses of stuff called methane hydrate on the sea floor. It’s a really powerful fossil fuel. Heard of it?’ Beck shook his head. ‘Every now and then it erupts, and giant bubbles come up to the surface. But – get this – methane hydrate reduces the density of water. Ships can only float because water has a particular density. If it suddenly becomes less dense, then a ship is just a big lump of metal trying to float on nothing. So it sinks – drops straight down. I’m betting you that’s what causes most of the disappearances.’
‘Scary.’ Beck couldn’t help looking more closely at James’s hands – that tapping was distracting. A silver ring on his right middle finger was making the noise when it hit the metal. It seemed an odd thing for a teenage boy to wear.
‘Nice ring,’ he commented.
James seemed to jump as if Beck had caught him doing something he shouldn’t, and he curled his fingers up into a ball to hide it. ‘Uh, yeah . . . Family heirloom. So what’s that you’re wearing? Heirloom of your own?’ He pointed at the light chain that showed above the collar of Beck’s T-shirt.
‘It’s not an heirloom yet.’ Beck laughed. ‘Maybe one day.’ He pulled out the chain and showed James what was on it: a flat metal square and a small metal rod.
James’s eyes lit up. ‘OK, I read about that in one of the articles Mum showed me! That’s your fire steel, right?’
‘Right.’
It was one of Beck’s oldest possessions. The flat square was steel and the rod was made of ferrosium. Striking the rod against the steel created a shower of sparks that could start a fire just about anywhere except underwater. He carried it wherever he went.
He gave a demonstration and then let James have a go himself. The sparks gushed out and blew away in the sea breeze.
Eventually James laughed and handed it back. ‘See? That’s science too. Everything makes sense if you ask the right questions.’
Yes, Beck thought, James and Peter would make great friends. He tucked the fire steel back inside his shirt and looked at his watch.
‘Well, here’s one question – when do you think dinner is?’
CHAPTER 11
Dinner was served at the captain’s table in an otherwise deserted dining room. There was an undecorated Christmas tree tucked away in one corner, and the room had tables for all the other passengers who would eventually join the ship. For the moment it was just Beck, James, Steven, Abby and Captain Farrell. Abby had changed into a very smart, sleek black-and-white trouser suit. Beck privately thought it made her look like a zebra. He was reasonably certain that women don’t like being told they look like zebras, so he kept the thought to himself. It wasn’t hard because she did most of the talking.
‘And your uncle is your only family? He does sound a fascinating man. I do hope I meet him one day. Have you been in touch since you reached the States?’
‘Sure,’ Beck said. ‘He likes to know I’m OK. I called him just before we set sail.’ That would have been evening in the UK; he had wanted to make contact before Al went to bed. ‘He’s fine.’
‘Well, you can certainly tell him you’re in the hands of a very good chef. Wasn’t that excellent?’ She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. Beck noticed she also had a silver ring on the middle finger of her right hand. He supposed that made sense. She and James were the same family, so why shouldn’t they wear similar family heirlooms?
At the end of the table, Steven, Captain Farrell and James were chatting. It sounded like Steven had tried his Bermuda Triangle joke on James, and was now living to regret it.
‘There have always been mysterious disappearances at sea, and there’s always an explanation,’ the boy was saying. ‘Like, have you heard of the Mary Celeste?’
‘That ship that disappeared?’ Steven asked.
‘The ship didn’t disappear, just the crew. It was found drifting in the middle of the Atlantic, completely abandoned. No one on board. But there was no sign of violence – the ship wasn’t sinking or anything . . .’
Farrell was sitting slumped in his chair, his expression grim. Beck suddenly realized that the subject of disappearing ships was not one that would be appreciated by a man who had lost his own.
‘So, did scientists solve that one?’ Farrell asked, tight-lipped.
‘Sure they did.’ James seemed oblivious. ‘They worked out that it all came down to the cargo the ship was carrying. Over a thousand barrels of alcohol. This guy figured that vapour from the barrels could have sparked and set off an explosion. But it didn’t sink the ship, and because an alcohol explosion doesn’t create flames, nothing would have been burned. There would have been no sign of an explosion when the Mary Celeste was found. But the crew must have abandoned ship, thinking it was about to sink, and then, taken by the current, died at sea.’
‘Neat,’ the captain said. ‘Apart from the sailors who died. Kind of hard on them.’
‘Odd that you can have an explosion without any flames,’ Steven commented.
‘Well, there’s all kinds of explosions. Like, there’s this stuff I was telling Beck about, methane hydrate—’
‘James, sweetheart?’ Abby interrupted. ‘That might be enough science for today . . .’ Beck wondered if she had also noticed that Farrell seemed dangerously close to an explosion of his own. ‘So, Captain, how long have you been at sea?’
‘Me, ma’am?’ Farrell seemed grateful for the change of subject. ‘Thirty years, give or take. I first went to sea when I was sixteen years of age. It’s good to be back.’
‘Back?’ James asked innocently. ‘Why were you away?’
The captain abruptly fixed him with a hard g
lare, like James had asked a really impertinent question.
The boy suddenly looked anxious. ‘I, uh, didn’t meant to pry. I’m sorry—’
‘You must remember there’s a recession on, dear,’ Abby cut in. ‘Not a lot of work around, even for a hard-working man like our captain.’
‘The recession,’ Farrell grunted. ‘Right.’
Beck got the feeling that it ran deeper than that. Was it connected with Farrell’s lost ship? Maybe it was hard to get another job as a captain if your last ship had sunk.
Abby went on, ‘Anyway, wasn’t there something you wanted to ask the captain?’
‘Oh, er, yeah . . .’ James gave Farrell a shy smile. ‘Do you think we could look around the bridge? It sounds really cool.’
CHAPTER 12
It was cool. Beck decided that the moment they set foot in it.
It was like the bridge of a starship. A wide wraparound window stretched from one side to the other and looked out into dark space. The room was dim, lit only by the glow of screens on different consoles. Two more of the Sea Cloud’s uncommunicative crewmen were on duty. One was the helmsman, the man who steered the ship. He sat in a chair on one side of the bridge holding a wheel that looked just like a car’s steering wheel. The other crewman was moving instruments over a chart and occasionally giving directions to the man at the wheel. They both looked up when the others came in, then went back to their jobs, not bothering to introduce themselves.
Abby went to stand in front of the big window and gazed out into the dark. Farrell took James over to a console to demonstrate the controls that ran the ship. Beck wandered over to the bank of screens and tried to guess what they all were. He recognized one of them immediately: it was the radar. A beam of light swept round and round the screen. The small specks and shapes it left behind were distant vessels. There were also larger blobs which Beck guessed were islands. A very large glow that took up one whole side of the screen had to be the mainland, Florida itself, now many miles behind them to the west.
Beck looked up, out of the windows. Ahead was all dark. He stared out of the side window, back where they had come from, in order to try to match what the radar showed with his own eyes. Cheerful, sparkling lights shone behind them on the horizon. In real life, that was the Bahamas. Now they were past those islands, the ship would be heading out into empty ocean.
Another screen showed a jagged line that moved slowly across the screen. It took Beck a moment to work out that it was tracing the contours of the sea bed. He saw that there were over three thousand metres beneath them.
Then there was something else that looked like radar – though it wasn’t quite the same as the main screen. This one showed large, glowing, multi-coloured blobs with no particular shape. They changed and pulsed like a balloon being blown up by someone with very little breath.
Steven came to stand beside Beck. ‘Weather radar,’ he said. ‘It picks up clouds and rainfall and it synchronizes them with the weather reports. Look at this chappy . . .’ He tapped the screen in the bottom right-hand corner. The radar had picked up a very dark mass of something. It looked ominous and was surrounded with little red warning tags.
‘What is it?’
‘Some heavy weather, if I’m not mistaken. The red flags are a potential hurricane warning, but this baby is a way off both in distance and in velocity. I’d still only classify it as a bad storm that is going to pass us by.’
Beck looked wide-eyed at the screen and Steven chuckled. He pointed at the scale that showed how far away it was. Beck was pleased to see that it was still a couple of hundred miles off. He remembered Farrell talking about the ship’s weather-tracking systems. If you could see the low-pressure weather system, then you could avoid it. That was reassuring.
Abby had begun pacing slowly around the bridge and Steven looked up at her. ‘I’m still not impressed with the paintwork, but I can’t deny the systems are all up to scratch!’
She stood elegantly with one hand rested on a console. She was absently tapping her fingers just as James had, and she flashed Steven one of her catch-up smiles. Tap.
‘Well . . .’ she began. Tap. ‘Of course . . .’ Tap.
And at that moment every screen on the bridge went dead.
CHAPTER 13
‘What the—?’ Farrell exclaimed into the darkness.
Beck blinked. Images of the glowing displays were still printed on the back of his eyes. They had to fade away before he could see properly in the dim red light of the bridge.
The captain hurried from console to console, pressing keys with more and more urgency. Finally he gave one a good hard kick, with no result.
He barked at the helmsman, ‘Power? Revs?’
‘All normal, skipper.’
Farrell seemed reassured. ‘OK, we’ve got power. We just don’t have eyes. See if you can raise Miami Coastguard.’
There was a pause, then: ‘Nothing, sir. Radio’s completely dead.’
‘Say what? No eyes, no ears? This is ridiculous. All our electronics can’t have just gone for no reason at all.’
One of the crew politely moved Abby away from the console where she had been standing, and bent his head over the keyboard, fingers tapping urgently.
‘I reckon it’s the ship’s mainframe, sir. Seems completely dead.’
‘And it’s taken every system plugged into it. Radio, radar, navigation – oh, peachy!’ Farrell hurried to the windows and peered out into the gloom. ‘OK. All stop.’
The helmsman pulled on a small lever on the board in front of him. Beck had ceased to notice the vibration of the ship’s engines under his feet, but he was aware of it again now that it had changed. He looked out of the side windows. The wake of the ship had been foaming and white in the night; now it was dying away. Within a minute, the Sea Cloud was at a dead stop, floating alone in the middle of the ocean.
James gave Beck a nudge and a wink. ‘It’s the Bermuda Triangle effect!’ he said in a loud whisper, and Beck managed a faint smile. It was kind of off-putting to be on a ship whose electronics had all just failed – but on the other hand, it didn’t seem to be sinking. As he had pointed out to James earlier, when a ship ran out of power, all it did was float, right?
‘Boys,’ said Steven. He still had his good-humoured smile, but when they looked at him he put his finger to his lips. ‘Shh.’ The message was clear: don’t give the captain a hard time that he doesn’t need.
But Farrell had already heard James’s remark, and that was when he seemed to remember he had guests.
‘Yes, very funny,’ he said. Beck detected a certain coldness in his tone. A captain took pride in his ship. He didn’t want things going wrong at the best of times. In particular he didn’t want them going wrong in front of his boss. ‘Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you all to leave. Me and the boys have a long night ahead of us. We need to trace the fault and repair it.’
‘Did you really need to stop the engines? We don’t want to get behind schedule,’ Abby commented.
Farrell glared at her. ‘With respect, ma’am, we’d need to stand a full watch to keep sailing in the dark – lookouts fore and aft and up the mast – and we don’t have enough people on board. Don’t worry, we’ll get it fixed. If the worst comes to the worst, we can return to port in the morning and get an expert in, but I doubt it will come to that. So, will you all please leave the bridge? Now.’
Steven gave a good-natured smile, then jerked his thumb and herded Beck and James towards the exit. ‘Come on, lads. You heard.’
Beck awoke suddenly, but he didn’t know why. He was surprised he had managed to sleep at all.
His cabin was dark except for a very faint wash of moonlight through the porthole. He lay in his bunk and thought back through his clouded thoughts.
In the wild he often woke when something changed. Some small clue might reach his subconscious and tell him that there was an animal nearby, or that the weather was about to change and there was a storm on the way – something
important that he needed to be awake for. He had that same feeling right now. But he wasn’t in the wild; he was in the cabin of a small cruise ship floating in the Atlantic.
So what was it? He ran through what he could hear. Somewhere at the back of his skull he picked up the noise of the engines . . .
The engines! They were moving again. That must mean the crew had got the electronics fixed. Maybe that was what he had heard.
Beck lay back and closed his eyes, then opened them again. It was no good. His instincts were still insisting that something was up. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe his wilderness instinct was just getting it all wrong. Maybe it was confused by being safe and secure on a cruise ship.
But just in case something was wrong . . . he decided to investigate.
CHAPTER 14
Beck swung his legs out of bed. The T-shirt he wore would be fine for walking around the ship at night. He pulled on his jeans and found his shoes. Automatically he slipped his watch onto his wrist and picked up his fire steel. But then he realized that, hey, he wasn’t going to need it on a ship. He really only needed it to give a demonstration during his talks. So he left it where it was and stepped outside.
The passage was fully lit, and the first thing he noticed was that Steven’s door was slightly open. Maybe he’d noticed the change in the engines too and gone to investigate.
‘Steven? Hello?’
Beck pushed the door fully open and peered in. The bed didn’t look like it had been slept in. There was no sign of its occupant, and in a cabin that small there was nowhere he could be lurking.
Beck checked the hook behind the cabin door. Steven’s leather jacket was missing, so he was definitely up and about somewhere. But what would he be doing at this time of night? Would he have stayed up to help the crew? Beck doubted it. The problem had been with the ship’s mainframe, and so far Steven had shown no sign of being an electronics geek.
