The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Back on the bridge it seemed that only Richard and Ann were fully awake. Faure looked around and then hurried below to test his samples. Richard explained his plan to the others and they stood and looked at him as though they didn’t understand. Ann listened to his short speech, then hurried below in the wake of the professor. It was clear to Richard that if he was going to get the oxyacetylene equipment out and undo Captain Fittipaldi’s work, he would need engineers to help. They at least should have had a little sleep. But he did not want to rush into action quite yet. He had to be sure that John agreed; Napoli was John’s command, after all. ‘John,’ he persisted. ‘What do you want to do first?’

  ‘Sleep!’ John’s voice caught on an exhausted half-laugh. ‘But we can’t. I think we’d better wait just a moment until we get reports back from our experts. We may need to save our energy to abandon ship. At the very least, I want to hang fire until we check up on the crew and get some competent deckhands up here. It’s ridiculous to have Salah still at the wheel. I know we have several perfectly capable helmsmen below.’

  Richard nodded. John might be at the end of his strength, but he was thinking clearly enough. He caught up a cup of cooling coffee from the work surface near the watchkeeper’s chair and gulped it down. He waited, as though expecting either the caffeine or the sugar it contained in such abundance to give him some extra energy. When it failed to do so, he stretched and crossed to the helm. Pausing for a moment beside Salah, he looked out at the morning. Then he crossed to the chart table and at last tapped the barometer as he passed it. In spite of all they had been through—and in spite of the exhaustion—they had kept up the log and movement book. Their current position was marked as of the 08.00 change of watch—which was, of course, only a theoretical change because all the watch officers were here and looked like staying here for the foreseeable future. Their current position was 41.45N; 49.50W, nearly a thousand miles out on their current course; four days’ sailing at their current speed.

  *

  While Richard was checking their course and position, Ann Cable was rushing back down the length of the deck. She had convinced Faure to accompany her because she wanted someone to check her readings. Side by side they hurried through the debris of the deck cargo, skidding in the pale-bottomed puddles, sending them trickling down the slope towards the fo’c’sle. They were completely unaware of what their feet were doing because of the depth of their concern. Their protective headgear was pushed back on their shoulders so that they could talk.

  ‘There is no doubt that your chemical, whatever it may actually be, is strong enough in its current concentration to attack almost everything it touches.’ Ann gave Faure a breakdown of what Richard had told her about the state of the pumps. ‘He says he wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ she concluded, ‘if the stuff hadn’t been leaking right from the start. It could well be the reason the hold lights stopped working. It would be logical for them to go first; the circuitry that powers them is all in the space between the deck and the top of the hold.’

  They were at the top of the forward hold now, beside the broken hatch. They climbed down, Ann first. As she stepped off the bottom of the ladder, it moved and she paused for an instant, shining her torch on it. The bolts securing it to the forward hold wall had sheered. All the bolts under the water had failed; all those above it held true. She turned away and started wading aft towards the shallow end. It was like moving through a tiny, filthy swimming pool. The surface of the restless liquid—she could hardly call it just water any more—heaved gently around her hips and the chill of it struck through into her most vital areas. She had to force her mind to trust what she was wearing; the thought of what might happen should the suit spring a leak made her blood run cold.

  A few minutes of determined movement brought her to her goal: the shallow end. Here one or two concrete boxes stood partly above the surface. She knelt and shone her torch down on them. Nothing looked wrong. She glanced up as Faure came sloshing over to crouch beside her. He had his bag of tools as well as his torch. He unzipped it and handed her a knife. She scraped the surface of the concrete just at the water line. Under the stainless steel blade, the concrete turned to powder and for more than a centimetre of its depth it simply crumbled away. The two scientists exchanged glances. Ann tried again on another block. Same result. She gave the knife back, then got out her Geiger counter. As soon as she switched it on, it started to click so rapidly that Faure jumped. He grabbed it and studied its read-out closely. Then he handed it back very slowly.

  They went into the next hold. Movement was easier here as there was almost no water on the floor. Ann had been hoping that the drier conditions would mean that the concrete of these boxes would be much more robust, but this was not quite the case. The dark areas which had been wet by water dripping in from above were pitted and as crumbly as the concrete in the flooded hold. And her Geiger counter sounded just as angry.

  Ten minutes later the two of them were back on the bridge. Ann had brought the folder in which she kept her records. She threw it down on to the chart table with a loud slap. John and Niccolo, both of whom had been dozing, jumped awake. Richard swung round, a frown creasing his strong face. ‘It’s bad, then,’ he said quietly.

  Ann took a juddering breath. ‘How long have we got at best speed?’ she asked.

  ‘To get to Sept Isles? Four days. Say one hundred hours. At best speed, weather permitting.’

  ‘Then we’re dead.’

  John cleared his throat. ‘When you say “dead”, what do you mean, precisely?’

  Ann took another deep breath. She looked at Faure as though his gentle, academic, professorial style could rub off on her and allow her to present their findings in a cool, calm, scientific way. ‘Your deck cargo is leaking so badly that it is not only eating into your ship, it is also dissolving the protection round your nuclear cargo.’ She looked at them, met each pair of eyes. ‘It’s like a kind of time bomb,’ she said more quietly. She opened her record folder and showed them the graph she had drawn based on her readings in the hold. ‘I haven’t got the kind of time frame I would like and I can’t be absolutely accurate, therefore. But the simple fact is that all that nuclear waste down there is heating up faster and faster as the concrete gets eaten away. Unless you can stop the process soon, you’ll be sitting on another Chernobyl.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Before it’s too late to stop the process? Eight hours. Before the whole lot melts down and blows us all to hell and gone? Less than twenty-four.’

  The very instant she delivered herself of this speech, Jesus received his first—and his last—clear radio message: ‘…Napoli. This is Cape Race. Receiving you strength five. Intermittent. Confirm your position 41.45N; 49.5W. Understand you have sustained damage. Nearest ship to your current position is Rainbow Warrior. Say again, Rainbow Warrior. Make contact on the following wavelen—’

  25

  ‘What did you think?’ asked Ann. ‘Did you think I was on holiday or something? That Greenpeace employs me to sit around on container ships and wander all over the world doing the odd test on a suspect cargo and flirting with the officers? I mean, it would be a great life if you didn’t weaken. But really!’

  The others looked at each other in silence. Niccolo in particular frowned thoughtfully.

  ‘Maybe when I talked my way aboard at Naples I was content just to look around and keep tabs. I didn’t know what was involved then and the fact that Verdi and Nero had been happy enough to let me come and even to bring me out with them on the Parthenope didn’t look very promising, frankly. You know the way we operate: Rainbow Warrior on the Southern Ocean, inflatables in front of whalers and sealers, rallies, books and posters, films and videos, news reports—publicity. That’s what I was looking for: something to make a story out of. Something to hold up as a warning. Things really started shaping up in Liverpool. I mean, that was publicity of another kind. And suddenly the owners and the charterers wanted me off. Of course I had to
stay. Of course I had to keep checking. Of course I had to keep reporting in. Yes, I guess I was setting you up. Did you really think we would be happy for you to go sailing up the St Lawrence ready to drop off in the North American subcontinent a cargo so dangerous that it had already been thrown out of Europe not once but twice!’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’m surprised I need to telling you this. Where do you guys keep your brains, for Heaven’s sake? But the fact is that if I set you up, it’s nothing to the way CZP and Disposoco have set you up before me. Captain Fittipaldi must have been really out of touch. The rest of you are all pretty desperate, I know, officers and crew alike. Professor Faure, you and your men were just trapped aboard by bad luck, like Salah and Fatima. John, Asha, for you it was a mistake; good intentions and more bad luck. Richard, you were just helping and God knows we may need more help yet. But I mean to say! Look at the mess you’ve gotten yourselves into. You’re just coming over the most fertile fishing grounds in the whole of the northern hemisphere, heading towards one of the most populous and widely used seaboards in the entire world and you are bringing a high-yield, extremely dirty, nuclear time bomb with you that is going to go off like a huge Roman candle somewhere in the top ten feet of water where it can infect the air as well. You’re right where the prevailing weather systems can spread the fall-out from here to Russia, and where the Gulf Stream can pick it up and spread it all the way back to Europe next time it swings north.’

  ‘In these conditions, that will be sometime soon unless we get another northerly storm anyway. And if we do, that would just take the airborne fall-out,’ observed John.

  ‘We can’t unload the deck cargo which is the root cause of the trouble because the cranes are…’ Ann looked for the correct technical word.

  ‘Fucked,’ supplied Niccolo helpfully.

  ‘We can’t unload the hold cargo for the same reason. We can’t even pump clean water over the hold cargo and give it a decent wash, because the pumps aren’t working either. So we can’t stop the process or even slow it down. We can’t get this clapped-out old scow to any port or docking facility, or to anyone who could help us. And we can’t even warn anyone what is happening because of the radio.’

  ‘But,’ said Richard, returning to the revelation which had begun this impassioned speech, ‘you say that Rainbow Warrior is on her way out to meet us even as we speak.’

  ‘Right. But aside from filming this mess as it all goes up, I can’t think what good she will actually do.’

  ‘Filming us?’ he asked, side-tracked for a moment.

  ‘Sure. That’s what it’s all about. Like I said: publicity. They’ve got the cameras, the news guys, the inflatables. They’ve even got a submersible aboard, for God’s sake, so they can get underwater shots of you if they need. But they won’t have any heavy lifting equipment and they won’t have anything to neutralise that stuff on the concrete boxes.’

  ‘The most efficient agent seems to be salt water in any case,’ observed Faure. ‘Witness Dr Higgins’s work on Bernadotte’s hands. But we cannot get enough of it to dilute the concentration of chemical already in the hold or dripping through from the deck.’

  ‘But that’s insane,’ whispered Asha. ‘We’re surrounded with the stuff. We’re surrounded by salt water. There’s nothing else as far as the eye can see!’

  ‘Yes, but our problem is letting enough in to stop the process and then letting it out again. Otherwise we just sink, hein?’ Faure’s wry observation seemed to have ended the conversation.

  Except that Richard added: ‘That, of course, might solve everything.’

  The others stared at him and he paused, gathering his thoughts. What he was about to propose was so deeply against everything he had been trained to believe as a master and a shipowner that only these circumstances would have made him entertain the thought, and even then, the thought had to be handled carefully, as though it too was unimaginably destructive.

  ‘Our first problem is that the deck cargo is now leaking with dangerous results and it cannot be moved. If Napoli sank, the ocean would move it for us. Our second problem is that the chemical cannot be washed off the hold cargo because the pumps have failed and although we can get sea water in, we can’t get it out. If Napoli sank, the hold cargo would be suspended in the one element which will bring its deterioration to a stop. Our third problem is that if we continue on our present course, we will come over the Newfoundland Banks where the water is shallow, restless and the breeding ground of an incredible range of fish; further, it might also be swept by the Gulf Stream flowing east, back to Europe. But if she goes down here, where she is now, then none of these things apply.’

  ‘Here?’ Ann looked out at the early morning ocean as though it would betray some individuality, something special for her to see.

  ‘Our current position, 41.45N;49.50W. John; you started it! Captain Smith!’

  ‘My God!’ breathed John and his eyes seemed to light up.

  ‘My God!’

  ‘What?’ cried Ann.

  ‘We haven’t reached the Grand Banks yet. We’re still out in deep water. There’s two and a half miles of water under our keel. Two and a half miles straight down to an abyss where almost nothing lives. Where the water is still, lightless, below freezing, all but dead. There may be some primitive corals down there, some extremely basic tube worms. Nothing much else. And it’s so chemically inert that it can take years just for rust to form.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Ann demanded. ‘How do you know what it’s like down there?’

  ‘Because she’s down there. Two and a half miles straight down. Right under our keel.

  ‘Who? Who’s down there?’

  ‘Titanic,’ answered Richard. ‘We’re exactly over the Titanic.’

  At that moment the radio sprang back to life and everybody on the bridge looked towards the radio shack. ‘Napoli, this is Rainbow Warrior. We hear you strength five. Intermittent. Please respond Napoli. Please re—’

  *

  In his youth, Jesus had seriously considered la corrida as a profession, but Heaven had dictated otherwise. He had kept himself fit, however, and his trim body and quick reactions would have given any bull a run for its money even now. Certainly, he was having no trouble at the moment, on this clear and beautiful morning, in shinning up to the wreck of the radio mast. He was coming up to seventy feet above the deck, well over one hundred feet above the rolling surface of the sea. He was too wise to look down and concentrated on looking up towards the twisted metal above his head. There should have been a set of steps climbing up here, but the storm had ripped them away at the same time as doing the damage he had come to repair.

  He was a conscientious man and he had found his inability to communicate from the moment the wave struck extremely frustrating. At the same time, he was sensible and very careful. He had thought of coming up here while the wind was still high, but there had been no real point in risking his life, then. The odds had been too high. Now the risk was well worth taking. He had in mind only to check what might be wrong, to see if there was anything obvious that he could fix. He was a trained electrician in his own sphere, not capable of fixing all of the machines aboard, hut well able to take care of the electrical equipment, its fittings and fixings.

  The top of the stubby main mast was perhaps four feet square and the thin whip-mast rose from the middle of it. He immediately spotted a badly broken connection. Hanging on with his left hand, hugging the mast itself to his narrow chest, he pulled out a pair of long-nosed electrical pliers. Taking hold of the disconnected wire, he pushed it back into the socket from which it had sprung free.

  A flash of electricity jolted through his body. It was not strong enough to kill him, but it was enough to cause his grip to fail. Feeling himself falling, he caught at the mast again and the whole thing tilted over. Still fighting to retain his grip on the slippery, salt-caked, white-painted metal, he felt himself being swung out across the width of the bridgehouse. Automatically, h
e twisted his body, hoping to catch hold with all four of his limbs, or, failing that, somehow to fall safely and land on his feet like a cat. The movement forced him to look down, and so he saw something which had been invisible from deck level: the top of the bridgehouse was out of line, forced back. The green metal of the top deck was rippled by slight folds. Below, the foot of the bridgehouse was no longer sitting quite correctly on the main deck.

  Jesus saw these things in an instant and he had no leisure to consider them. They were simply impressions which burned themselves into his mind during that instant. When the movement of the mast stopped, he jerked free and fell. By now he was far beyond the starboard edge of the bridge. There was no bridge wing there any more to break his fall and he tumbled overboard, falling almost a hundred feet straight down into the ocean. Reacting automatically, he performed one complete action—he pulled the toggle which inflated his life jacket. Landing head first and face down, he felt nothing of the impact his body made with the ocean. An impact so great that it burst the life jacket and killed him at once. He sank immediately and without trace. At the top of the radio mast, however, his wild movement had completed the destruction begun by the storm last night.

  *

  ‘Where’s Jesus?’ asked Ann.

  ‘He must be up there somewhere,’ said John, looking upwards to the deck head above him. But when the radio operator did not come back on to the bridge, Richard went to look for him. He saw nothing of the damage to the main bridgehouse that Jesus had noticed, but then he did not try to climb the crazily leaning mast. He understood what must have happened to Jesus at once, and dashed back down to the wheelhouse with the news. Within a very few minutes, Napoli was reversing her course and going back over the long lost Titanic looking for their man overboard. They had no second radio officer; Niccolo went into the radio shack to try and raise any ships nearby to warn them to keep a sharp lookout. When he could raise no one, he got out Jesus’s book of call frequencies and started to try for Cape Race. The radio hissed promisingly enough but there was no reception. Niccolo doggedly continued to transmit, therefore, in the hope that his messages were still being received by Cape Race and Rainbow Warrior at least.