by Peter Tonkin
They didn’t open it all the way, just wide enough for Biggs to ascertain that Nico had switched on the hold lights and to scramble onto the first rungs of the ladder down the forward wall. Then, pausing only to clip his harness to the safety rail beside it, he was gone. Jamie could still hear that strange sound, a kind of extra wheezing creak, following every buffeting wave. It was coming from forward of the hatch cover. But when he got to the windlass, he found it was coming from further forward still. A wheezing groan with a low, vaguely familiar bass humming. But it wasn’t a metallic sound at all, although there was nothing up there except metal.
Except for the tow rope. Of course. It was the tow rope. He swung round, ready to dash back to warn Biggs that there was something the matter with the tow rope.
But there was a girl standing close behind him. The same girl.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘What ... Who are you?’ he gasped, stunned by her presence, and by her proximity.
‘I am a stowaway,’ she said. ‘Take me to your captain, please.’
‘What?’
‘I said, I am a stowaway —’
‘Biggs! BIGGS!’ He charged forward, bellowing at the top of his voice, shoving her roughly out of his way.
This was not at all the reaction she was expecting and it triggered a response in her which was born of the paranoia that had gripped her even before she concussed herself.
Jamie felt his left hand being taken in an almost gentle grip, and agony lanced up his arm. He froze, up on his toes, with his arm straight, elbow up, hand twisted to point at the sky. The wind paused and he heard the strange whispering sound her big camping knife made as its carbon steel blade hissed out of its plastic sheath. The position of his arm widely separated the ribs on the left side of his chest so that when she punched the eight-inch blade into his side, it cut through his lung and sliced his heart in half. The shock of it made his dead muscles convulse as though he was winded and his ribs closed down on the blade which had killed them.
She tugged at the handle twice, to no avail, and when she let him fall, he tumbled forward into the hold with the knife still wedged in his chest.
Biggs was halfway up the ladder on the very edge of panic when Jamie’s body collected him and plunged the pair of them down into the five feet of restless water which should not have been there at all. Biggs was lucky. The way he fell, with Jamie somehow draped across his back, caused his head to hit the rungs with brutal force, so that he too was dead before he hit the water.
The girl stood at the top of the hatch, looking down at the two dead men, stunned by what she had done. Instinctively, she looked around the deck, but even in the pitiless brightness, there was no one to see what she had done. Good, she thought. She still had a chance, then. Even so, there were tears on her ice-pale cheeks which did not have their origin in the terrible pain in her head.
But then the world went mad around her and she found she had no chance after all. She was never to understand the sequence of events, but it was simple enough, and all but inevitable in the circumstances. A big wave punched at last through the wall of number one hold and the weight of the water flooding in jerked Clotho’s head downwards with terrible force. That massive downward motion caused the tow rope to part. About fifteen feet out from Clotho’s forepeak there was a weakness in the rope which had caused the sound Jamie had heard, and here the line parted. Much of it whipped back to writhe uselessly like a dying serpent down into the sea by Atropos. The rest of it chopped backwards with all the force of a helicopter blade to cut across the murderess’s slim hips. In an instant even shorter than the blink of an eye that had dispatched Jamie, she was broken and destroyed.
It smashed her spine and splintered her pelvis. It obliterated her womb and what that womb had carried. It ruptured her kidneys and her liver and the shock of it stopped her heart even before she landed in the dark sea a hundred yards away.
The last thing she was aware of was a sudden resurgence of the agony in her head and she never knew that what she felt was her left heel hitting the wound in the back of her skull as her broken body folded neatly in half.
14 - Day Nine
Thursday, 27 May 00:00
‘She’s gone!’ screamed Yasser Timmins. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’
Robin stood, rigidly, willing her eyes to make out more details on Clotho as the sister ship whirled away. As chance would have it, she had been looking through Captain Black’s best binoculars at Clotho’s suddenly illuminated forepeak when the tow line parted. Because of the tilt of the ruined forecastle forward of the windlass, she had been unable to make out whether there had been anyone on the deck, but she rather feared there might have been. Why else would the deck lights have been on?
During the last thirty seconds she had seen the flat front of her command suddenly collapse. Right at the foot of the metal cliff, a cave had appeared with startling suddenness, and she had seen a big sea foam in through it, obviously flooding number one hold. She had seen the whole bow snatched downward and the foredeck plunge under with terrifying rapidity. She had seen the thick black line of the tow itself burst apart and come writhing back towards her.
She was holding the binoculars with one hand and her walkie-talkie with the other. Almost without thinking she was speaking into it. ‘Nico! Nico, can you hear me?’
But there was no reply. She wouldn’t have heard much over Timmin’s horrified exclamations in any case.
‘Be quiet please, Mr Timmins,’ she snapped, and there was silence on the bridge.
Clotho’s deck, as far as the repositioned gantry, was now under the raging water.
And worse was happening. It was like a nightmare over which she had no control at all. As the white horses foamed around the feet of the gantry halfway back along Clotho’s deck, suddenly it became all too apparent that the gantry itself was giving in to the terrible forces which surrounded it. The squat, powerful square of the mobile crane tipped crazily backwards as its footings tore loose. Then a violent wrench of the waves turned Clotho so that she tossed the whole contraption overboard.
Timmins was quiet, but Robin heard someone on the bridge stifle a sob. It was Henri LeFever, with the spare glasses. He had borrowed them from Ann. She was crying silently. All at once Robin regretted the advanced technology within the binoculars which allowed them, all too clearly, to see the death of their sister.
‘Nico,’ she persisted. ‘Come in, Nico.’ But Nico probably had things to do at the moment which did not include taking telephone calls. The problem was that they were rapidly moving out of walkie-talkie range. Already the distance between the ships was widening as Clotho leaped forward almost bodily, free of her sister’s weight, and Atropos, the way going off her rapidly, began to swing round beam on to the wind.
At last a squall came between them and the sinking ship plunged into darkness. One moment she was there, bright and solid for all that the waves were breaking over the tracks which had guided the spread feet of the gantry and the foam was up and beating against the bridgehouse itself. There was one sad, hopeless, haunting gleam as the searchlight on the radio mast shone from underneath a wave, then everything went dark. Where there had been the pallor of her white-painted bridgehouse, now there was only a winding sheet of driving rain.
Robin turned away, lowering the binoculars and letting the walkie-talkie drop to arm’s length by her thigh. There was nothing more to see and any contact now would have to be made by radio.
Or by a spiritual medium, she thought grimly.
But it was across to the door into the radio shack she went. ‘Any contact?’ she asked the radio officer.
Numbly he shook his head. ‘Her frequency just went dead,’ he said.
She turned round and leaned her shoulders against the door jamb. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs until her ribs hurt. Suddenly she felt very lost and lonely and not very sure of herself. She remembered Nico’s faith in her when they were discussing whether she should come across t
o Atropos: ‘You’re the only one who can sort it out,’ he had said. Well, perhaps. But she had never really thought that she would have to sort it out on her own with her most trusted officers swept away and in all probability dead. But when she looked across the bridge at Timmins and thought of the drug-addicted captain lost in his own private hell below, she knew that she had no option but to try. She let the deep breath out slowly and then crossed to the radar station.
It never once occurred to her that she could get on the radio and ask Richard in London what he thought she should do. Strangely, the radar station smelt of vomit. Or was it the enormously overweight young man sitting beside the bright displays who smelt? ‘Have you got her echo?’ she asked.
A plump finger pointed to a bright spark on the green disk. It was surprisingly far away.
‘It’s set at five miles?’
The crewcut head nodded, making the rolls of fat at the back of his neck tremble. She stood behind him, looking down, watching the spark get fainter and further away.
It was tempting just to stand there and let hopelessness wash over her. But that is not what captains are supposed to do. Better get things organised, she thought. Automatically her eyes went to the ship’s chronometer just above the clearview window. The time was just after midnight.
‘Who holds the midnight watch?’ she asked. She hadn’t been aboard long enough to find out the ship’s routines.
‘Reynolds,’ answered Timmins, ‘but he’s dead.’
The storm wind thundered down from the north-west and buffeted against Atropos’s port side like a tidal wave. She heeled and swooped, corkscrewing. The clinometer on the wheelhouse wall swung dangerously through the degrees. Twenty, thirty, thirty-five ...
Clotho would have rolled right over at sixty degrees. But Atropos was fully laden. She might make sixty-five, if her cargo didn’t shift. Still, if the wind could roll her to nearly forty, they’d better get a sea anchor out before the big seas joined in and piled up against her windward side to complete the roll.
Before she whirled into action, something made Robin pause and think. They had a rudimentary sea anchor out already and that was one of the reasons Atropos was swinging round so quickly. The tow cable was dragging from her forecastle, for nearly a hundred yards out into the sea. With her all-aft design, the long-hulled ship would ride forecastle on to the wind anyway. The big bridgehouse would act as a sail and it would take the lead, towing the long weather deck behind it. And the tow rope dragging out from the forecastle would only make this arrangement more stable.
She shook her head and almost laughed. She was a team player, captain or not, and was used to discussing things. It was a conscious decision which she made early in her career as a captain. She saw herself as being impulsive to a fault and, not to put too fine a point on it, overbearing. It was natural for her to lead from the front and to charge into things without consulting anyone. This was a management style she deplored in others, for it gave juniors no room to grow by experience or discussion and it led to alienation between captain and crew. So, in all ships she commanded, there were full and detailed discussions before major decisions were taken. It was the way she had done things for many years now. Indeed, it seemed strange to her to be taking decisions at lightning speed without discussing them with anyone else on the bridge. This fact had undermined her self-confidence a little. The afterthought about riding backwards was the sort of comment she was used to getting from Nico or Andrew McTavish. It was heartening to know she could still work things out quickly for herself.
What needed to be done next was to get all of the tow rope over the side and hope Atropos swung round quickly. She would take a team of men and do that herself. She didn’t like the look of Timmins, and his reactions to the two crises he had faced recently made her think that she would be safer to leave him where he would feel least stressed.
There was a chance of a big sea rolling Atropos over before the long hull swung right round, however, so there was one more task to be done before she went out onto the deck. ‘Mr Timmins,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m going to call everyone to emergency stations, but I do not expect anything will go wrong. Then I’m going to take a team of men out onto the main deck. How much tow rope did you take aboard?’
He was silent for a moment and she thought she was going to have to repeat everything when he answered, ‘About five hundred metres,’ and she realised he had just been following everything she had said very slowly indeed.
‘Very good. I’m going down to the windlass and I’m going to put it all over the bow to act as a sea anchor. Do you understand?’
‘The captain ... Captain Black ... put the sea anchor over the stern when the propeller went.’
‘I know, but this will be better.’
He fired up a little at that, clearly not liking the suggestion that she was better than Captain Black. But he said nothing.
‘I want you to stay on watch until I get back. I don’t want you to do anything. Mr Hogg will warn me if anything comes up on the radar and Sparks will alert me of any incoming radio traffic. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Captain.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Good.’ She crossed to the console and hit two buttons on it. These triggered the ship’s alarm and opened the tannoy.
‘Your attention, please,’ boomed her voice as the last echoes of the emergency alarm faded. ‘This is the captain speaking. As a precaution only, I repeat, a precaution only, I would like you all to assemble at your emergency stations until I dismiss you. Our tow line with Clotho has parted and we are turning into the wind. Do not go outside, but put on your life jackets and be prepared to abandon ship if she begins to roll.’
She lifted her finger off the Open Channel button and snapped, ‘Not you, Mr Timmins!’ She waited until he had put his life jacket back under the chart table, then she said quietly, ‘Ann, take Henri to his station, please.’ The big scientific officer seemed more affected than anyone by the situation. Ann nodded, and crossed to the dazed man. Robin pressed the broadcast button again and added, ‘Larkman, Edwards and Jones, meet me at the starboard exit onto the weather deck, dressed for work outside. That is all, thank you.’
She checked all the emergency stations quickly on her way down. She did not want panic aboard and she was concerned that her precaution would cause confusion and friction among the two crews aboard and unnecessary distress to the sick and wounded who would have to be moved. But there was surprisingly little to concern her. The movement to the stations was orderly for the most part. The badinage seemed goodnatured. Captain Black was still comatose, as were Chief Lethbridge and his second engineer, Don Taylor. But Ann Cable was pale with worry. She had seen at once the implication of the parted tow line and perhaps the toppled gantry. ‘Is Nico all right?’ she asked.
‘I expect so. At least he’s got an engine that works. You worry about us.’ She smiled to give her grim words some lightness and turned away.
Ann stood at her emergency station, with Henri silently at her side, and watched Robin bustle off to try to save them all. The feverish action which had followed the parting of the line had kept the full impact of the loss of Clotho distant in the reporter’s mind. Even her question to Robin about Nico had been delivered in only a partial realisation of what they were discussing. But the idleness now, waiting either to abandon ship or to be dismissed, allowed the scene to play over and over in her memory until the impact finally came in full. Henri was leaning back against the white-painted metal of the wall like a massive statue and she sagged into the angle made by his side and the cold, ringing iron. The whole bridgehouse shook as the wind beat against it like a hammer on a gong.
Clotho had just vanished. Snuffed out like a candle in the wind. How could a vessel so large, so substantial, simply have disappeared like that? There had been something almost supernatural about it, as though she had been taken by an alien force — or a demonic one. Nico would have no doubts o
n that score: Mala Fortuna. Ill fortune was his particular demon, always waiting just behind his shoulder to snatch away anything important to him. She had tried often enough to tease him out of his Neapolitan superstition, but she knew she was fighting a losing battle. And now it seemed Nico had been right all along. It looked as though bad luck had snatched away everything this time; Clotho, the crew, the man himself.
Nico. His face seemed to swim before her eyes, something about the apparition bringing the horrific suspicion that he must have drowned already. She knew more about that particular fate than most. Richard had described in detail to her his own experience of being trapped aboard Napoli as she plunged deep into the black depths of the Western Ocean. She knew all too well what would be happening to Nico if he was going down with Clotho. The last of the precious air would be rushing through rooms and corridors in strange submarine gales as the water boiled into the bridgehouse. There would be a wild scramble to escape from the sinking coffin. But how could anyone push out through doorways against tons of green water flooding in? To get out of a certain death trap into the near certainty of death in the freezing water. Even if he got out, even if he avoided being sucked down, he would survive for mere moments unless there was a lifeboat nearby. And even if there was a lifeboat close at hand, how long could it hope to survive in the grip of a storm which had squashed a ship like Clotho as though it were a waterfly on a pond?
He was dead.
The certainty hit her like a vicious blow in the belly. Low in the belly, deep within her, just where he could ignite the most delicious fire with one of his tiny smiles, with the merest fleeting twinkle of his wise brown eyes. She sagged further against Henri’s rock-like flank. The wind thundered against the exterior of the metal wall again, but she noticed nothing of it.
