The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  Hardin ripped off the earphones and yanked the jack to reactivate the loudspeaker. “Foxtrot-Bravo calling Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. . . . Do you receive me, please?”

  He raced onto deck, began working the big hand pump in the cockpit. Clear water poured from the outlets in the transom. The radio fell silent. Hardin pumped, lifting and dropping the plunger with mechanical regularity. Sweat glistened over his body, trickled down his brow into his eyes. His heart pounded more and more rapidly. He switched hands. His arm was aching.

  The radio snapped aloud again, the voice obliterating the softer beeping of morse code. “Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. Hotel-Oscar-Yankee.”

  Crouching beneath the awning, flinching from the sun, he switched hands again. Somewhere, beneath the waterline, the hull had opened wide. It was probably around the propeller shaft, but he couldn’t find the leak and work on it until she was pumped out.

  His whole body and concentration were married to the beating up-down-up-down of the pump. Raise the plunger, lower the plunger. Raise-lower, up-down. Over and over and over in the killing heat. A roaring in his ears began to drown the sound of the engine. He could hear his blood surging through his head, racing to carry oxygen from his straining lungs to his throbbing brain. Up-down, up-down, up-down.

  “Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo. Stand by just a moment, please.”

  A new voice. Accented English.

  “How do you receive me?” asked LEVIATHAN’s radio operator.

  There was silence.

  Hardin leaned over the transom. The bilge water still looked clear. It hadn’t sat long. He dragged himself back to the pump. When he looked again, it was the same. He pumped some more.

  “Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo,” said the accented voice. “This is Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. Doha Coastal Station. Good afternoon. Is that LEVIATHAN?”

  “Lima-Echo-Victor-India-Alph—”

  “Yes, LEVIATHAN,” interrupted the Doha operator. “We’ve been expecting you. How are you today?”

  “We’re well, thank you. Is that Ahmed Shied?”

  “Yes, LEVIATHAN.”

  “Gordon MacIntosh here. Good to hear your voice again.”

  “And yours, my friend, after all this time. Did you have a pleasant voyage?”

  The bilge stream spouted air and Hardin sank to the cockpit floor, quivering with exhaustion.

  “Very pleasant,” said the radio. “Have you been well?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Say again, please. I’m losing your signal.”

  “I said, I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I can’t make you out, LEVIATHAN. Say again.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Please switch to channel eight.”

  Hardin forced himself to his feet and stumbled into the broiling cabin to tune the radio to the new frequency. LEVIATHAN and Doha were just reestablishing contact when he did. As their chatter resumed, he returned to the cockpit, switched off the engine, and looked around the water. The low swells were the same sullen gray, but the cloud canopy seemed to be thinning.

  He went below again, removed the companionway steps, raised the engine box, and peered into the water swirling in the bilge. Stretching full length on his stomach, he dipped his hand in the water and probed the slimy bottom, crawling aft, feeling under the engine bed and finally behind it. The boat drifted silently, the cabin grew hotter as it slowed, and the engine, which had been running wide open since last night, ticked and pinged and exuded the stink of burned oil.

  He felt around the gland where the propeller shaft speared the bottom. The radio conversation between LEVIATHAN and Doha continued unabated as the operators traded news and salutations. Abruptly, the Arab asked, “And what of this crazy man?”

  The Scot replied, “The Old Man said he didn’t want it nattered about on the air.”

  “We’ll catch him soon,” said the Arab. “Do not worry, my friend.”

  A chill that had nothing to do with the Arab radio operator’s empty promise strolled down Hardin’s spine. He felt pressure on his fingers like the solid-inside-a-liquid thrust of an underwater inlet in a swimming pool. It was a handspan in front of the shaft, and it felt enormous.

  He played his fingers over the hidden flood, estimating the size of the hole. The engine must have shaken open a crack from the pitchpoling. Would it split further?

  “What is your ETA?” asked the Doha operator.

  “ETA twenty-two hundred tomorrow. Repeat: LEVIATHAN ETA Hll twenty-two hundred tomorrow.”

  His mind racing, his fingers stroked by the unseen torrent, Hardin listened to the Scot and the Arab sign off.

  Twenty-two hundred. Ten o’clock at night. Good for cover, bad for aim. He wished the Dragon had an infrared scope. Thirty-four hours from now; less than a day and a half. Move!

  He plugged his twelve-volt electric drill into the outlet on the switchboard above the chart table and carried it, his tool box, and a bag of wood scraps to the cockpit. The boat, stopped, was rocking gently in almost flat seas, and the heat closed on it like a vise.

  He drilled four holes through a small piece of oak six inches square and three quarters of an inch thick. The holes angled into the wood an inch from each corner. Then he dragged brass flathead wood screws over a bar of soap, lubricating their threads. Movement caught his eye. He glanced over the side and recoiled with stomach-wrenching horror.

  A fat yellow sea snake with a body as thick as his arm slithered on the Gulf’s placid surface. It raised its head inquisitively as it approached the Swan. Twin nostril flaps quivered on its snout. Unblinking eyes took in the hull. Its flat rudderlike tail flipped sideways, the snake’s soft, sinuous movements turned swift and jerky and it struck the boat.

  Terrified that it would climb up the side, Hardin yelled and swung at the snake with a boat hook. He missed, just grazing the blunt head, but before he could pull the pole from the water, the sea snake struck back angrily, fanging the boat hook and coiling its six-foot body around it. The aluminum tubing quivered in Hardin’s hands, conveying the serpent’s muscular spasm.

  Hardin wrested the pole away and the snake dove out of sight. Gasping for breath, his skin crawling, he saw that other snakes swarmed the water. Some swam lazily past, others like the first seemed more inquisitive.

  He was afraid that they would slither aboard and follow him into the cabin. Never entirely easy with what lived in the water, he was in the grip of a fear that threatened to paralyze him as completely as the sea snake’s ghastly bite. He walked the decks, heedless of the leak and the dispersing mist, armed with the boat hook, lashing out at any that came close.

  That they were poisonous—far more deadly than land snakes— he knew too well. He’d treated a United States Navy officer who’d been bitten while skin diving in the South Pacific. They were closely related to the cobra. There was no serum for most of them. Their bite was painless—a neat injection through a pair of slender fangs— but death was slow and inevitable. After several hours the legs were paralyzed, then the eyes closed and the jaws locked. Convulsions in two or three days, paralysis of the diaphragm, then respiratory failure—none of which repelled Hardin as much as the hideous sight of the fat bodies slicing through the water. He couldn’t believe that they couldn’t climb aboard the boat if they wanted to.

  The macabre joke of it saved him. If he watched the sea snakes long enough, the Swan would sink. It would take a day or so, but they would still be in the water when the boat went under. So he had to turn his back on them while he patched the crack.

  He looked up and saw a new danger. Ominous patches of gray-blue mottled the overcast sky. As the barometer had indicated, clear air was moving over the Gulf. He gathered his tools and the wooden patch and hurried below.

  Prone on the sole, aft of the engine, he spread his tools within easy reach and dipped his hands into the bilge water. An image of a snake, no less vivid for its irrationality, flickered through his
mind. It had come down the forward hatch and swum the length of the bilges, squeezing through the drainholes that connected them. Or it had entered through the split itself, sucked in by the pressure of the leak. He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see a thick, yellow body sliding down the companionway.

  Fear and the heat were stifling his breath; there didn’t seem to be enough air this low. He forced his mind to the repair. The bilge had already filled four inches since he had pumped.

  He crammed caulking into the split and drove it deep with a caulking iron and hammer. Then he felt with his fingers. The water still flowed. He shoved in more of the thick, rubbery compound and hammered the caulking iron until the flood stopped. Waiting a minute, he felt again. When he was sure the compound was holding, he went on deck.

  He cooled off and rested. Then, casting an anxious eye at the thinning overcast, he pumped her dry and returned to the bilge and sponged out the remaining water.

  He slid the oak patch under the propeller shaft and seated it in the caulking. There was a slight belly in the fiberglass, so he took the plate out and planed the bottom edges. When he repositioned it, it sat snug and flat on the bottom of the boat.

  He drilled starter holes in the fiberglass through the holes in the oak. Then he inserted the screws, bearing down hard as they turned through the oak and bit into the hull. Using his largest power-grip screwdriver—and recalling his realization when he was becalmed that the screwdriver handle was really an infinite circle of levers— he twisted each screw tighter and deeper, alternating from one to the other, until a thin line of caulking compound squeezed out between the patch and the hull.

  Nauseous from the heat, Hardin fled to the cockpit and collapsed beneath the awning, his head roaring, his stomach turning, until, gradually, buoyed by the job done, he regained his strength. The sky was much clearer. In places, open patches glowed distinctly blue in the sunlight.

  Several snakes drifted by, sunning. One, lacing its way past the boat, lowered its scaly head and drank the salt water. Another turned its black, lidless eyes toward a sudden breath of burning air that ruffled the Gulf’s gelatinous surface, and then, quickly followed by the others, dove simultaneously into the turbid water.

  Hardin tore his eyes from them and looked at the horizon.

  He was astonished by how much clearer and more distant it had become. He could see black oil tankers parading in the north. Ahead, dark billowing smoke smudged the western sky where waste-gas fires flared atop offshore oil wells. Beneath the smoke, drilling rigs and well derricks dotted the Gulf like fence posts on a prairie.

  A second puff of hot wind fanned his cheeks. The water rippled tentatively. A low black squall line appeared in the northwest, between the oil fields and the tankers, and spread wider and darker. Steep, dark anvil-topped cumulonimbus storm clouds rode above it.

  Hardin was watching blearily, trying to muster a response to the swiftly advancing squall, when a bubble-top helicopter pounced out of the sky like an angry wasp.

  Preceded by an oblong shadow which grew quickly longer and wider, a big twin-rotor helicopter with Persian markings swooped low and lighted on LEVIATHAN’s starboard landing circle. A young Iranian naval commander descended from the aircraft and strode jauntily toward the bridge.

  Overhead, a flock of Saudi Arabian helicopter gunships circled like jays raging at a hawk in their nest. The Saudis had been escorting LEVIATHAN—darting between the giant ship and the land, searching coves and river mouths—when the Iranian had suddenly appeared from the east, flown through their formation, and descended to LEVIATHAN’s deck, asking clearance from neither the ship nor its escort.

  Captain Ogilvy sat seething in his chair on the bridge, watching the trespasser walk his deck, hating everything the binoculars showed. The Iranian’s pressed and starched blue uniform glittered with garish service ribbons and the vulgar sort of decorations the wogs passed around like a packet of cigarettes. His hair was thick, black, and shiny. Dark-green sunglasses in the United States Air Force mode covered his eyes, and a small automatic pistol hung from his hip. He seemed impervious to the heat that baked the decks as LEVIATHAN began its voyage up the Arabian coast. Ogilvy snorted an oath: The upstart carried a swagger stick.

  The Iranian officer had established two points. Iran could patrol the entire Gulf of Oman as well as the Persian Gulf. And the Iranian Navy would board any merchant ship it pleased. Ignoring the seamen Ogilvy had ordered to meet him, he continued into the tower and appeared, moments later, on the bridge.

  “Good afternoon, Captain,” he said, approaching his chair.

  Ogilvy surveyed him with a cold eye. “Not only have you violated the sanctity of this ship, sir, you have also jeopardized international relations by challenging Saudi Arabian sovereignty.”

  Puzzlement crossed the Iranian’s lean, gray-dark face, then anger. He spoke English with an American accent.

  “The Iranian Navy is here to help, Captain. We don’t need any lectures from an English subject on matters of international relations.”

  Ogilvy purpled. “Seventy-five years ago,” he said, rising to his full height, “long before you were born, young man, British subjects brought order to this territory. We stopped your warring and bickering, we established free trade, and we even charted your waters. You can learn a thing or two from British subjects, sir.”

  LEVIATHAN’s helmsman raised a hand to cover his smile and the second officer wondered for a wild moment if the Iranian’s savage expression meant that he would draw his pistol. The man flushed darkly, but Ogilvy spoke again before he could respond.

  “What is your business here?”

  “We are pursuing this man Hardin,” said the Iranian after a long pause, apparently willing to change the subject. “We must ask you to stop your ship until we capture him.”

  “He’s in the Persian Gulf,” said Ogilvy.

  “No, he did not enter the Persian Gulf. He fled in this direction.”

  “Then why haven’t you captured him?”

  “He is one man on a small boat. The Gulf of Oman is large and the Musandam coast is riddled with hiding places. We will have him shortly. In the meantime—”

  “He’s not here,” Ogilvy repeated. “He’s is in the Gulf.”

  “He can’t be,” said the Iranian. “We blocked the Strait.”

  “You were all looking the other way,” said Ogilvy. “And in the dark you missed one man on a small boat. He foxed you by doing the unexpected.”

  “Why are you so sure he is in the Gulf? Why not the Makrn coast? ”

  “I know he is in the Gulf because I know the man.”

  “There is no escape from the Gulf.”

  “Escape matters less to him than sinking LEVIATHAN.”

  “You’re playing a hunch,” said the Iranian. “Just a guess.”

  “I am right,” said Ogilvy. “You’re wasting your time searching the Musandam Peninsula.”

  “Perhaps,” the Iranian conceded patiently. “But until we know that, we must ask you to stop.”

  “No.”

  “LEVIATHAN is threatened, Captain Ogilvy. You can’t risk your ship and crew on a hunch.”

  “LEVIATHAN has a schedule to keep,” Ogilvy replied. “The Saudis are doing a good job of covering us. We’ll be quite safe, thank you.”

  “And what will happen at night when the helicopter pilots can’t see?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ogilvy. “Hardin is in the Gulf.”

  The Iranian commander shook his head briskly. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I have orders to stop your ship until the threat is past.”

  The Englishman stared disbelievingly. The Iranian crossed his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels. Ogilvy’s expression turned thunderous. His lips tightened, his brow knitted, his nostrils quivered. The second officer took a step toward him, alarmed that the captain might suffer a stroke. Ogilvy chased him with a glance.

  His voice trembled with emotion. “LEVIATHAN will not stop
.”

  “We command you to stop for your safety.”

  Ogilvy glanced out the port windows. A grim smile gladdened his face. “You are in the territorial waters of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman,” he said crisply. “A bit out of bounds, what?”

  “If you won’t stop now,” said the Iranian, “we will board you in our own territory for pollution checks. I can guarantee you, Captain, it will take many days to inspect a ship this size. Many days.”

  “That’s extortion!” Ogilvy shouted.

  “It’s for your own good.”

  “Let me tell you something, young man. I know what is best for my ship. Get your helicopter off my foredeck.” Ogilvy stalked across the bridge and buried his face in the radarscope.

  The Iranian followed him. “I’m warning you, Captin. We’ll hold you for weeks.”

  Ogilvy straightened up from the scope. His face white with anger, he pounded the console.

  “I’m not some Chinaman on a ten-thousand-tonner you can push around. This is LEVIATHAN. I am Captain Cedric Ogilvy. And when I inform the world that you dare blockade my ship, you’ll wish you’d never heard of me.”

  The Iranian opened his mouth, but Ogilvy cut him off. “You people have been getting rather cheeky with your shiny new navy, and the merchant shipping community is getting mighty fed up.”

  “These are our waters!” the Iranian shouted back.

  The two men glared at each other oblivious of the gaping helmsman, the second officer, a cadet at the course computer, and an Indian steward with a tea tray.

  The VHF radio broke the silence. The second officer picked up the handset. He turned to Ogilvy. “It’s the helicopter. They’re calling this man.”

  The Iranian reached for the phone. Ogilvy nodded and the second released it. The Iranian listened. His mouth tightened and he handed the phone back to the third.

  “Well, Captain, it seems you were right.”

  “Yes.”

  The Iranian smiled sardonically. He removed his sunglasses, revealing a pale untanned mask around his eyes. “An Aramco company helicopter pilot has spotted Hardin’s boat in the Gulf, sixty miles east of Jazirat Hll.”