The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  They went quickly under the high gallows and out to their favourite position on the wooden afterdeck. There they stood, admiring the breath-taking evening as it gathered behind the ship. The far east of the sky was dark, and it was difficult to tell towering clouds from thickening shadows. Such was the blueness of the sky above that the sky behind was a shimmering indigo. Across this breath-taking backcloth ran the tall seas, spindrift streaming in bright banners away into the stained-glass night. The wind buffeted them and they cuddled up together, watching the day darken down behind them. Distance began to mean less and less as shadows like a tidal wave washed towards them. The noise of the wind made it almost impossible to speak, but there was little enough to say; they simply stood, crushed together, looking at the view.

  And as the eastern sky trembled on the edge of darkness and it seemed that the shadows were piled up against the after rail just beyond their heavily gloved fingertips, the most magic moment of all was born. Stretching back along their wake, sitting like a pale carpet, long and narrow, lifting over the waves, there came a luminescence like the neon brightness of the foredeck. Across the troubled waters, under the cloudy shadows, the bright road ran away towards the east.

  ‘Oh John! I’ve heard of this but I never thought I’d see it.’ Asha supposed it was that strange but beautiful phenomenon caused by the movement of the ship through the water stimulating a phosphorescent display from tiny creatures in their wake.

  John did not.

  He was in motion at once, tearing away from her to run forward into the full force of the wind.

  ‘John! What is it?’

  ‘It’s the cargo!’ came his voice, all but lost in the roaring wind. ‘It’s the bloody cargo leaking.’

  She looked back, thunderstruck. Then she was in panicked movement, running after him.

  She caught up with him on the foredeck immediately in front of the bridge. She thought he must have stopped to look at the deck cargo. But no, he was looking at the sky.

  Right across the golden bowl of the western evening sky from the north to the south horizon there cut a mountain of absolute blackness. Only the very top of the sky showed, with just the promise of a star. Below it stood black battlements of cloud. Like basalt cliffs they fell sheer. Tens of thousands of feet they fell, seemingly from the first pale glimmer of the evening star to the wavetops.

  Then a series of flashes came dazzling out of the base of the black monster as bolt after bolt of lightning pounced down out of the seemingly infinite thunderheads. The sudden light defined the actual distance between the cloud base and the ocean; it also revealed the speed at which it was coming towards them.

  ‘My GOD!’ she screamed at him. ‘What is that?’

  ‘That’s the other half of the storm,’ he said. And even he sounded awed. ‘That’s the cold front, where the big winds live.’

  23

  ‘I know it’s bloody dangerous, but we’ve got to have a look, at the very least. Richard, what do you think?’

  Richard’s reply was drowned beneath the screaming of the black wind currently doing its level best to tear the superstructure off, and the group in the bridge along with it. Night had come with the second front as abruptly as if the sun had gone out for ever, like a broken light. The northerly storm lying under the cloudbank had arrived with stunning suddenness, far too quickly to allow John any time to check the deck cargo on his way up here. The storm beneath those tall black thunderheads was so fierce that it had taken nearly an hour just to come to terms with it, to hold Napoli’s head at exactly the right angle to the wind and waves, which were at least coming from the same direction now. The thrust of the engine pushing her into the teeth of the storm had to balance exactly the pressure of the weather pushing back. Then there were all the other actions and decisions which made up the handling of a storm-bound ship by a master mariner. Richard could certainly have done it, but only the captain could take responsibility for it.

  Now Napoli was riding as well as could be expected, and someone had to go out on to the deck to check the cargo. All through the last hour of concentrated ship handling, John had felt the worry of it at the back of his mind. He had visions of the toxic filth pouring overboard from lethally gushing tanks. He had to try and stop whatever was happening as soon as possible. But the only way he could even begin to make a plan was to go out on the deck and find out what was happening. Heaven alone knew what he would do if the chemicals really were pouring out of the containers, but he had to know. So, at the end of that first hour, when his ship was riding as safely as he could make her, he announced that he was going to take a team outside to have a look.

  Asha had pointed out the obvious: it was dangerous on the deck.

  Richard agreed with John’s decision, and not only because of the threat the toxic waste posed to the ocean around and behind them. John was worried about the stuff gushing overboard. Richard was more worried about what might happen if it was not gushing overboard. What if it was draining down into the ballast tanks and the bilges below them? He did not know he was confronting a nightmare that visited John every night. Nightmares aside, there was one other factor to be considered. The chemical was leaking. The chemical was corrosive. Quite apart from what it might be doing to the ocean or the hull, what was it doing to the hawsers holding the containers safely in place? If it could eat through a hawser or two, twenty tons of steel box was liable to come in through the clearview and on to the bridge along with the next big sea.

  ‘I agree with John,’ he said again. ‘Someone has to go out.’ But before John could say anything, he added, ‘I think it should be me.’

  John swung round to face his friend and mentor. ‘But…’

  Richard smiled. He almost let the silence stretch. There was nothing John could say, really, though he had started to say something. Richard was not needed on the bridge. John was. Richard was as competent as John to take a team and look at the cargo. His friend simply did not want him to face the danger. He appreciated that. But they had just agreed that someone had to go. At the moment it made more sense that he should go.

  When Richard read reluctant agreement in John’s eyes, he nodded once. ‘I’ll take a team under Cesar, and I’ll borrow Marco as lookout,’ he decided.

  Cesar hurried off the bridge to dig his gang out of their accommodation below and get them kitted up. Marco Farnese moved with far less alacrity.

  Twenty minutes later, they were all assembled by the main deck bulkhead door ready to step out of the bridgehouse into the maelstrom. They each wore bright yellow wet weather gear with extra covering for heads and hands against the biting cold which already seemed to be percolating in through the shaking steel around them. They each held a bright, broad-beamed flashlight. Richard, Cesar and Marco each held a portable two-way radio. Richard had given his orders, Cesar had translated them and the crewmen nodded grimly that they understood.

  It took all Richard’s massive physical power combined with Cesar’s wiry strength to push the door open against the unrelenting pressure of the wind. The huge, counterweighted steel portal trembled like a leaf as they moved it wide enough for their team to squeeze past them. They themselves would have been trapped inside, but the wind hesitated for a second, allowing two of Cesar’s men to hold it for them, and they jumped out on to the deck together. No sooner had they done so than the wind slammed it behind them, seemingly deciding to do its best to pitch them overboard.

  Had John not switched on the deck lights, they would have been utterly blind. The storm was taking place in absolute darkness. There wasn’t even any lightning now, just an overpowering, invisible bedlam of wind, rain, wave and spray. The noise was terrific. The wind buffeted them with breath-taking force and glacial cold, many degrees below zero even without counting the massive chill factor. The water on the deck was moving with such force that it might as well have been ice. Richard was more worried than ever when he noticed that the spray clinging to the deck furniture all around him was in fact turn
ing to ice. Leaning into the incredible power of it, he began to force his way forward, the quick release of his lifeline ready to snap on to the safety ropes along the deck.

  There were two teams of crewmen. Richard would take one team down one side, Cesar the second down the other side. Marco was going up on to the forward radio mast to keep a lookout in case the men on the exposed deck needed warning about the state of the seas bearing down on them. All the deck lights were on but the men still needed to use their torches; thin, impenetrable shadows sat under the tarpaulin-covered containers.

  Richard caught up with his two men and knelt uneasily beside them, then lay full length on the pitching, running, freezing steel, to shine his torch under the first set of containers. His torch beam married up with those of his men. The underside of the containers lit up, ridged and ribbed with ropes. Little icicles hung down towards the deck until another freezing wash of foam snapped them off. Richard found that he was shaking with the cold; not shivering, shaking. He forced himself to his knees just as Napoli’s head swooped. He had a vague impression of distant mountains made of black glass, then a tidal wave of foam swept back towards him. He turned his back to it and let it wash up to his armpits while he held on to a steel hawser for dear life, his safety line wrapped twice round his arm just in case. When it had passed, he simply turned round and crawled forward, dragging his line behind him like a dog’s lead. Standing up just seemed too much trouble. There was nothing to see under the second set of containers either. Richard and his two men began to crawl towards the next pile.

  On the other side of the deck, Cesar and his men were fractionally ahead. The second officer was a grimly efficient man and, like Richard, had been careful to clip on his lifeline. But, being slighter, and perhaps more energetic, he had relied upon it to hold him safely as the foam swept past and had continued to plod doggedly forward through it. Nor was he pausing to lie flat on the freezing deck. He trusted his men to do that and warn him if they saw anything untoward. He himself was concerned to test the tarpaulin lashings, something he could do while standing up. He did this by taking firm hold of the ropes and pulling them roughly from side to side. When the radio snarled, he put it to his hooded, wool-covered ear and yelled, ‘Pronto?’

  ‘Anything?’ It was Richard.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Good. Marco?’

  ‘Pronto?’ came the distant reply. Cesar turned and glanced up at the forward radio mast. He was surprised Marco had made it up there. But then Cesar was surprised when the stupid boy did anything right. Thoughtlessly, he pulled at the tarpaulin binding. And it came away in his hand. Puzzled that it should have chafed through so quickly, even under these conditions, he brought the frayed rope end up towards his face, allowing the radio to dangle by its wrist strap while he shone his torch fully upon the rope. His puzzlement deepened. It hadn’t frayed to the usual wild bunch of fibres at all. Quite the reverse; the hawser end seemed almost to have been sealed. Then he realised. It hadn’t chafed at all. It had melted.

  It was braided steel, and it had melted.

  He swung round, looking for Richard, his radio back in his hand, coming up towards his mouth. Whether he looked forward because he thought the big Englishman would have worked faster than he had or because he felt Napoli’s head begin to dip, he would never know. But look forward he did, just as the radio came up to his mouth.

  And he screamed.

  *

  Marco Farnese was fast becoming convinced that life at sea was not for him. Although he never admitted as much to himself, he had come to sea to run away from his father’s farm. And now he wished he could run away from the sea. It scared him. It made him feel sick. It did not, as he had hoped it would, guarantee him success with girls because he was a boring person who never noticed anything of interest even in his greatest seagoing adventures. And, even if he had, he could never have made an interesting story out of it. Climbing the thirty feet up to the forward observation post inside the top of the forward radio mast was the most difficult and dangerous thing he had ever done. He knew he was lucky to have got up here without hurting himself and he was not looking forward to getting down again—though he was of course very much looking forward to getting back to the warmth and safety of the bridge.

  At least the little eyrie up here above the forward emergency siren was relatively warm and snug. If only it would stop pitching about in quite such a sickening manner. Then again, he told himself, things could be worse. He looked back and down at the unfortunates crawling like vermin on the brightly lit deck. Just as he did so a sea of white foam washed along the length of it, inundating them all. He spluttered quietly, trying not to laugh. The snotty, holier-than-thou Cesar was almost washed away. The huge Englishman had to stay on his knees as it flowed past him. He looked as though he was swimming. How cold it must be! Good! Marco did not like people, captains or not, who volunteered him for unpleasant duties.

  The little room pitched again, throwing him around like a child in a fairground ride. His stomach began to heave. ‘Marco!’

  ‘Pronto!’ He hit his lips with the radio and made them bleed. He thought he had chipped a tooth.

  ‘All okay?’

  ‘Bene, Capitano,’ Marco managed, then his stomach got the better of him and he began to vomit.

  The sole reason for his being in the forward lookout post was so that he could warn the men on the deck about any big seas ahead. But he hadn’t looked forward once, and he wasn’t doing so now.

  And so it was Cesar who saw it first, though even as he screamed—an automatic reaction quite beyond his control—his mind refused to accept what he could see. It was a black wall. There was apparently no curve to it at all, neither concave nor convex. It was simply a coal-black cliff, shining slightly with reflected brightness from the deck lights. There were no ends to it. It ran into the wild darkness on either hand. There was no bottom to it that he could see. Its foundations seemed to be far below the surface of the sea, or where the surface once had been, out of sight in the abyssal depth of the ocean. There was a top to it, however. A top, mountainous and snowy white with spume, being thrust forward over the broad, black shoulders of the wall by the unrelenting power of the wind, at least thirty feet above Napoli’s falling forecastle head.

  When Cesar screamed, Marco looked up. He watched with silent wonder, never thinking to yell a warning into the radio he was holding for that very purpose. The foaming top of the wall of water was exactly level with his eyes. He saw it. He refused to believe it. The spray hurling forward from the crest mercifully blinded him. But only for a moment. When it cleared again an instant later it was as though he was looking through a porthole in a diving bell. There was water breaking gently against the glass in front of him. Glass which was thirty feet above Napoli’s forward deck. Oil-black water stretched away as far as he could see and the surface of it was exactly level with his eyes. He looked down. The lower half of the window in front of him showed the absolute darkness of the deeps of the ocean. Tiny streams of water arced in from pinholes along the bottom of the window frame. His brain told him that his mouth was under the surface. His lungs told him they were drowning. He choked. He whimpered. He began to cry in earnest.

  *

  It did not break like a roller on a beach. It just slid forward over the rails of the forecastle head and came massively along the deck. It seemed to be hissing, very quietly. All the other sounds of the storm, all the other sights and sounds in the whole world fell away. Cesar stood and looked up at it. In slow motion, it swept up to him and, as though passing through the looking glass, like Alice, the second officer stepped into it. And the force of it, the unimaginable power of it whirled him away from the deck. He felt a slight jerk as his lifeline parted. He did not even hold his breath because this was all so completely unreal. The shock of the icy water going directly into his lungs stopped his heart at once. He was dead before the force in the bowels of that water mountain whirled him in an instant along the length of the
deck to smash his rigid body against the front of the bridge with enough force to leave the faintest impression of his face in the steel before it sent him tumbling into the lower depths with the remains of his work team and the tarpaulin torn from the forward container stack.

  *

  The sound of Cesar’s scream gave Richard warning enough to take one simple action. He wrapped his arms and legs tight round the nearest hawser and hugged it to himself with all his might. There was a prayer in his mind but it could not really be said that he prayed. He was an extremely fit man with an enormous lung capacity and was a trained diver to boot. He could hold his breath for four minutes at a pinch. His eyes closed, his face screwed up, his teeth grinding together, his cheek against the metal—metal so cold it burned his flesh—he hung on. A force took hold of him. It was more than water. It was naked power, an omnipotence like the grasp of a god. It could do anything. It could so easily have torn him free. It could equally easily have ripped the container free, whose hawser he was clinging to. It could have broken the front off the ship altogether—he had seen the sea do that—or it could simply have swallowed the ship whole. He had no idea what it was doing elsewhere while it held him within it. He did not care. He was thirty feet below the surface and he concentrated on trying to protect his eardrums. On trying to move his numb cheek just a millimetre in case it froze to the metal. On little things. On staying alive, and sane.

  *

  No one on the bridge said a thing. Possibly they simply did not believe what they were seeing. For them it was black no longer once it had passed the radio mast where Marco was sitting. The lights on the deck lit up the crystal heart of it so that it looked like a mountain of glass—until it shattered against the front of the bridgehouse. Then it was as though they were caught in an earthquake. The pitching and rolling of the storm so far had been sea movements. This was much more elemental. A deep vibration came through every surface. The steel itself seemed to be rippling. The bridge window went absolutely white and Salah later swore that it bulged inwards. The noises from below were indescribable and for a moment John thought the whole bridgehouse was simply being torn off. All five storeys of it.