The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  John remained on the bridge and Richard took charge of swinging out the only lifeboat they still had left. Everyone else aboard—scientists, engineers and deckhands, stewards and even the chef’s helpers all gathered on high points of the ship, looking for Jesus. Bernadotte came up from the infirmary, leaving the third officer and Fatima as the only people aboard not involved in the search. But there was nothing to see in the water.

  They gave up at the end of the morning watch, and all of them gathered below. Niccolo still had had no luck with the system Jesus had died trying to fix. There was one other option: the short-range radio kept ready to go in the lifeboat. But as it became more likely that they would have to use the lifeboat and its radio for real, John decided to keep working with the main set for the time being. Meanwhile, the hold cargo was no doubt hotter than it had been when Ann last checked it, and they were still right over the Titanic, no further forward on their voyage to nowhere.

  Richard looked round at the expectant faces. Eduardo had replaced Niccolo as third translator, but otherwise it was very much as at John’s first such meeting. The circumstances could hardly be more different, however. Then it had been a case of a disunited inefficient group of people being asked to get their act together and keep their ship safely afloat. Now, Richard was explaining to a unified, very much more efficient group of men and women how they might all get safely off the ship before her imminent loss at sea. An abandonment under the current weather conditions would be quite simple. Getting them all into one lifeboat would be a bit of a crush, but short-term it should be possible. He made sure they understood that the abandonment would be completed carefully and with lots of warning, should the captain decide to proceed with it. They would all get into the remaining lifeboat with only their most valued possessions. Then they would withdraw to a safe distance, hopefully towards or even on board whatever ship might come to their rescue. No one but volunteers would remain on board to scuttle the ship, under the direction of the captain, and they would not proceed until the rest of the crew were safely in the lifeboat.

  But one way or another, the decision to abandon ship could not wait. They had spent precious hours looking for Jesus. If they did not get Napoli’s hold cargo—and Napoli herself—down beside Titanic soon, there would no longer be any point in putting her down at all. It would be too late to stop the nuclear waste from going critical.

  26

  Richard and John looked at each other across the chart table. Neither man could really believe that it had come to this. They had spent their lives keeping ships afloat no matter what the power of nature or the perfidy of man could do. Ten years ago they had stood side by side, captain and acting first officer on the bridge of a tanker which had broken in half, and they had still brought her to safe haven. Richard had only ever lost one ship, and the price he had paid for that was so high it had nearly destroyed him. John had never lost a ship.

  But things were different now. This was far beyond anything even the most outstanding seamanship could control. There was no miracle that could get them across a thousand miles of ocean to port in less than four hours; even if there was, Ann said the filth in the hold would still go critical, and they believed her.

  There was only one course of action left and both of them knew it. Everyone aboard knew it. And while these two stood like shadows of their former selves staring in silence across the table, the rest of the men and women aboard were packing their kit ready for the abandonment—except Salah, who was still at the helm, and Niccolo who was still trying to raise an answer on the radio. And Asha who was pounding up the stairway towards the bridge.

  She burst into the silent room and ran across to embrace John. It had seemed so unreal before, but now the quiet, hopeless preparations below had really brought home to her the loss he must be feeling; the risk he must be preparing to face. After all he had been through trying to bring this ship and her foul cargo safely to port, he had been defeated. And the price of his defeat—the immediate price, for she knew it could not end with the scuttling—would be to remain aboard until the last, no matter what the danger—though at this stage she had no idea what the scuttling of Napoli would actually entail.

  The greatest of all the things she loved about him was the self-deprecating way he went about doing the most impossible things. He seemed so uncertain of himself. He had about him that old-fashioned air of boyish, amateurish enthusiasm which she remembered from films about fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain. And yet, like them, he came through, shrugging modestly at what it cost. It was a typically English strength, it seemed to her, and it amused her to remember that he was a part-Irish Manxman. He seemed out of touch with the hard professionalism and corporate fanaticism she saw all around her these days. His integrity was so deep and inbred it took itself for granted and never made a show of being out of the ordinary at all. So easy to overlook or undervalue. So easy to mock. So utterly defenceless. So easy to love.

  ‘I say, darling, what’s the matter?’ he asked as she hugged him with all her might.

  She made no answer and at last he was forced, gently, to break her grip.

  ‘You mustn’t hang about, you know. Get all the kit together you want to take with you. Don’t bother with my stuff—there won’t be much room. Better get some emergency supplies from the infirmary too. And you haven’t got very much time. I’ll be sounding “Abandon Ship” soon. And for once it won’t be one of my damned drills.’

  She would have liked to have stayed with him a little longer, but she could see that he was right. She had better get some warm clothing for them both in case they were in the lifeboat for any length of time. And he was right about getting emergency supplies from the infirmary. She would ask a couple of seamen to look after Marco Farnese who was still in the infirmary, almost comatose with shock. And someone else to look after Bernadotte, who still could not use his hands. Could she rely on Ann Cable to help Niccolo? His leg would prove a severe handicap on the sloping deck, and on the way into the lifeboat, she suspected.

  These thoughts were enough to take her out of the bridge and away from John’s agonised gaze.

  ‘So, Richard,’ he said, after she had gone, ‘how do we go about putting this mess down on the ocean floor?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. We’ll need to talk through the details with El Jefe for a start. He’s shut down the pumps in case of cavitation because the valves don’t work. I don’t know whether that’s just the pumps or whether it’s the seacocks as well. I mean, if the seacocks are working, we can just open them and climb aboard the lifeboat. She’s down by the head already and so she should just slide under like a lady. We’d have to be careful, though; work it out in detail if we can. We don’t really want her breaking up. Professor Faure or Ann can advise us, but I’d have supposed it would be better to try and keep the hold cargo all together in a controlled ride down rather than risk Napoli coming to pieces and scattering it all over the place.’

  They caught up with Ann on the way down to the engine room and took the opportunity of checking with her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it depends. If it does go critical, then if it’s all in one place it’ll just make a bigger bang. But if it’s spread all over the bottom of the ocean, it’ll be much messier. If it doesn’t go critical…’ She thought for a moment. ‘They’ve reached the Titanic, so I guess they could reach Napoli too, if push comes to shove. In which case it’d make much more sense to be able to get it all up together. Yeah, that’s what I’d do. Keep it all in one place if you can.’

  ‘Right,’ said John. ‘We’d better pray the seacocks are working.’

  *

  ‘Seacocks are fucked,’ said El Jefe. ‘They won’t open now. I can’t make any of the systems under the holds work at all. Or in the holds either. Is deck cargo who leaks, j’ou understand?’

  ‘Any idea how we make this tub go down in one piece, then?’

  ‘No. I make her move until j’ou say stop but I cannot make her sink.’

  ‘That
only leaves one alternative,’ said John thoughtfully. ‘We’d better find Faure.’

  ‘Yes, of course I can set the charges for you,’ said the professor. ‘I know how to use explosives. I was in charge of the excavation in the desert. The rest of them are just scientists, you understand, but I served in the army, in Algeria. I was trained.’

  They took him to John’s day room and pored over the drawings of Napoli which accompanied her papers.

  In the rooms next door, Asha was packing a case for the lifeboat, her movements quiet but plainly audible. For once, her proximity did not distract John.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s obvious. We want a small hole punched in the bow just below the water line. We want a hole in the stern too. That way she’ll go down quickly and with a minimum of damage to the hull. It’s the pressure of trapped air that actually destroys ships when they sink—that and shifting cargo, I suppose. And exploding boilers.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Richard agreed. ‘We’ll have to time things carefully and trust to luck. But if we open a hole at each end of the hull, she’ll go down very fast with the least possible disturbance from air trapped in the hull because the water coming in at the bow will simply push all the air out of the stern. If we want to be very tricky, I suppose we could open the front and wait for a while before blowing open the stern. That way the holds will flood more slowly, and then they should stay secure. You see the way they’re designed? Three huge boxes simply bolted into the hull. The Gdansk shipyards made simple U-shaped hulls and added box holds or oil tanks or whatever later on. But once they’re flooded, the holds should sit quite happily through the changes in pressure as she goes down. And the cargo is heavy, laid flat on the bottoms of the holds and as secure as we can make it. The only things we should lose are the containers off the deck, and we don’t want those sitting too near the hold cargo anyway, even at two and a half miles down. And if the engine does explode, it shouldn’t do too much damage. Look here: the aft section is self-contained. If Napoli is well down by the head, all the force will simply come up out of the hole that’s already there!’ He looked at the two other men, his expression one almost of elation that he should have solved so many complex problems so simply and so elegantly. But then he remembered what it was he was talking about and what the risks really were. And how great the incalculable elements all their best-laid plans could never hope to encompass.

  ‘So,’ said Faure slowly, ‘you want a charge at the bow and another at the stern. You would like the bow charge to be timed so that it goes off some time before the stern charge in the hope that this will allow the holds to flood in a controlled manner before she goes down fast. That way even the explosion of the engine should help the process to be more effective, should such a thing occur. It is asking a lot but I will see what I can do. In the meantime, do you have anyone else aboard who can handle explosives? What you ask will take a long time for one man to prepare.’

  *

  The next stage of the discussion started between John and Salah in the captain’s office. ‘Yes,’ said the Palestinian at once, ‘I might be a bit rusty but if the explosives and the timers are standard then I can set them.’ He laughed drily. ‘Though it is Fatima you should be asking. Her training is much more up-to-date than mine.’ John buzzed up to the bridge at once and asked that Faure be found and sent to his office.

  While they were waiting, he suddenly remembered Richard’s suggestion about the passports. He rose abruptly and crossed to his safe. ‘I don’t know what you think of this idea, Salah,’ he said as he span the combination, ‘But that passport you found wasn’t the only spare one aboard. I was supposed to check whether they were still valid but haven’t had the chance. Still, you might be able to use them. What do you think?’

  Salah looked at the two little booklets with stunned disbelief.

  Had John no idea what they were worth? Had he no conception what people like himself and Fatima would do to get a pair of documents like this? He had not looked closely at Lazar’s before he gave it in. He looked closely at it now: yes, there was the treasured American Visa. And Gina’s. It actually was an American passport. The girl obviously had dual nationality. With these, the new life was really possible. When Napoli went down, Salah and Fatima would go down with her. Carlo Lazar and Gina Fittipaldi would be picked up with the rest of the crew. The nearest landfall was the eastern seaboard of the United States. When they were rescued, they would be taken there, and the two ex-terrorists would just vanish westwards. He opened Lazar’s passport again. The face looking back at him was not so unlike his own. Height two metres it said. Lazar had added a good few centimetres out of vanity—enough to make the height close to Salah’s own. And Gina—dark, brown eyed, plump. If she dieted enough she could be Fatima; and who did not diet, these days?

  Salah had been on a roller coaster during the last few weeks. Until Ali ibn Sir had come after him, he had never questioned his place in the PLO or his right to argue against political fashion and expediency. He had never questioned his position in the organisation he had served so well. Until the disturbing silence when he radioed in for help. Until Fatima’s chilling question. Until the gunboat had opened fire. But then had come that great upsurge of hope when Tewfik had told him to go to Blackwater Hall, and the death of all hope when the trap there had been sprung. Now there was a new hope here. Hope of a kind he had never experienced before. He felt like the first plainsman looking west across the unmapped prairie and he found it very sweet.

  A gentle tapping at the door heralded Professor Faure, and a short conference established that Salah could handle the explosives and the timers, which were designed for general commercial use.

  A rather more forceful sound warned that Asha and Fatima had discovered exactly how John proposed to put Napoli down beside Titanic and had come to talk about it. Richard was just behind them.

  ‘You can’t be serious!’ snapped Asha at once. ‘You expect the rest of us to get off and sit in the lifeboat while half a dozen of you stay aboard and blow the ship up?’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ said John firmly. ‘And it is not as dangerous as you make it sound. I’ll keep her as steady as possible while Professor Faure places just enough explosive to blow a small hole in the bow. Salah will place just enough to blow open a small hole in the stern. We will set timers. We will come off into the lifeboat with the rest of you. We’ll all be well clear before the timers even detonate. There’s really no danger.’ John looked around the silent room, rapidly coming to the conclusion that he was not a very convincing liar at all.

  But then Fatima sprang to his aid. ‘It is no big deal, Asha. If the people placing the charges know what they are doing, it should be quite safe.’

  Asha looked from one to the other and she knew she was beaten. ‘What can I do?’ she asked.

  ‘Continue with what you are doing. Get the sick off. As ship’s doctor, check your stores for anything we might need. But be calm and keep the crew calm. The only things which can hurt us are panic and bad organisation.’

  ‘And bad luck,’ Asha observed. ‘Still, I’ll do what you say. You are my lord and master now. And anyway, with Fatima to help me…’

  ‘Oh, but I am staying with Salah…

  ‘Oh, now look here…’

  *

  Normally, the first officer would have been detailed to oversee the launching of the lifeboat and the safe disposition of everyone within it, but Niccolo’s leg would not allow him to stand on the sloping deck and in any case he was still working as stand-in radio operator. The acting third officer, Eduardo, was officially on watch while John and Richard were below. The second officer, Marco, was in the sick bay.

  When everything else was sorted out, John went to talk to him, for there was no one else who had the training or the time to take charge. He found the boy awake but still stunned by what had happened to him. Sitting uneasily on his sloping bedside, too well aware that time was very limited, John explained their simple plan and the r
easons for it, quietly stressing Marco’s place in the scheme. The young man was distressed to learn of the loss of Cesar and the deck parties, and of the disappearance of Jesus. The current state of Napoli and her cargo shocked him too. And, slowly, he began to understand the importance of his own position: that his captain had no one else to rely on, that his shipmates and all the other men and women aboard had no one else to rely on.

  Privately John thought that his quiet, patient explanation and gentle, reasonable insistence was probably a stupidly wishy-washy way to approach the problem. He knew captains who would have snapped orders and threats of professional disgrace in the face of hesitation. He knew one or two who would simply have hauled the blubbering coward out of bed and kicked him up on deck. But that was not his way; reason and calm was. He had been brought up to believe that these were important strengths, and now above all he hoped they were, for they were the only strengths he had, as a man and as a commander.

  Asha chanced to come in while the conversation between the two men was taking place and she waited, unobserved, watching. She had expected to have Marco carried out of here by a couple of burly seamen. Instead she watched in wonder while her quiet, gentle husband, coaxed a resolve and determination out of the young officer that she had never suspected Marco possessed. By the time John stood up and turned to continue with his next task, Marco was ready to get on with his duty. It was little short of a miracle. Emotion swept over her again.

  ‘Darling!’ John said in surprise. ‘I didn’t see you there. All ready to go? Young Marco here is just about to get the lifeboat swung out. I say, what is it? There, you mustn’t cry. Everything will be all right, I promise.’