The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  The phone rang and he picked it up without moving more than his hand. “Mariner.”

  “Good God! Do you ever sleep?” It was Audrey, the night secretary from the agency.

  “As little as possible. What is it?”

  “Emergency. Call from a Mr. Kostas Demetrios. Accident aboard his VLCC Prometheus. Can we replace the master and all deck officers except the radio officer? Also all engineering officers except the chief?”

  “How soon?”

  “Now.”

  He glanced at his watch. The steel Rolex his wife, Rowena, had given him just before they set sail that last, fatal, time. Why wear it? Waste not, want not.

  The same reason he maintained the membership to the Royal Automobile Club Sir William, her father, had bought him so long ago. Maintained it even when his back was to the wall and it had seemed an unnecessary expense. But the marble halls in the basement of the club’s Pall Mall headquarters, with their exercise areas, pools, and saunas had stood him good guard against the fat pot belly of city life ashore.

  Rowena’s Rolex said the time was a minute or two past midnight, British Summer Time. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.

  Seventeen minutes later, he stepped out of his long black E-Type Jaguar and walked briskly to the door marked CREWFINDERS. They owned a suite of three rooms on the fourth floor of a Victorian building overlooking St. Mary Axe in the City of London. Cheek by jowl with Leadenhall and Lloyd’s, it was in the best possible position to keep his finger on the pulse of world shipping—as was necessary if it was to become what Mariner dreamed: the largest in de pen dent crew-finding agency in the world.

  Twenty minutes later, to the second, he stepped out of the lift into the reception area. “Any idea what went wrong?” he called to Audrey.

  Audrey was at the night desk, with a small switchboard on her left and a slave monitor on her right connected to the computer’s central file. “No,” she answered at once. “Must have been something big, though; unless it was industrial action.”

  “An officers’ strike, led by the captain?” His tone said it all.

  “Have to be one hell of an accident. An explosion…” She tailed off in horror. She had uttered the forbidden word. Mariner seemed hardly to notice. “…would hardly have left enough of the ship to require a full complement of officers.”

  He swung past her, already in his shirtsleeves and ready to get down to business. When he sat in his deep leather chair at the main console it was exactly 00.30 British Summer Time. Exactly three hours since he had left, exhausted, for home.

  He got up again, with the back of the assignment broken, at dawn. And, had he been one for keeping anniversaries, he would have known that it was exactly five years to the minute since the nightmare began.

  After the disaster, Mariner had chosen to remain ashore, yet at first sight, this man, one of the great sailors of his generation, seemed ill qualified for life on the beach. He had been a sailor for twenty-four years, a captain for eight, and a senior captain with Heritage Shipping for six. In all the long years before he had settled down as senior captain, heir apparent, husband to Rowena, his boss’s eldest daughter, he had moved about and worked for all and sundry. Before he became senior captain at Heritage Shipping and Mr. Rowena Heritage, he had not only earned the papers to command almost anything afloat, he had also set up an unrivaled network of contacts.

  Contacts which, during the years of estrangement with the Heritage family after Rowena’s death, had formed the backbone of Crewfinders. It was not a company that would ever rival Heritage Shipping, even though Heritage had been half crippled by the loss of Richard’s last command, but it was Mariner’s own company. And it was growing stronger every day. And would continue to do so as long as its reputation remained intact.

  That reputation rested on one fact: Crewfinders could replace officers and crew faster than any other agency in the business. Between one and three days. Any officer. Anywhere in the world.

  But never before had they been asked to replace almost all the officers on a supertanker all at once.

  Dawn came slowly and late, edging into a low gray sky only the thinnest strip of which was visible to Richard Mariner in any case, looking up as he was from a small side window between high building frontages. He watched it, nevertheless, deep in thought, with a huge mug of coffee cooling in his fist. The junior officers were already on their way, summoned by Audrey from beds and other haunts all over the world. But the first mate was proving more difficult to find. And there were no captains at all.

  It was the merest chance, nothing more. He had four captains on paper, but none in fact. One had gone cruising somewhere in the Greek Islands. One had fallen off a ladder. One had been involved in a motor accident on the Kingston bypass, and the last had run over his foot with a lawn mower late yesterday evening. The soonest he could supply a captain was in about a week. Which would not be good enough.

  Still, first things first. Let him get the mate sorted out and he would worry about the master then. He put the cold coffee down and went back into the computer room. He had no sooner sat down in front of his console than his phone purred.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve just had a call from Ben Strong. He’s available.”

  “Are you sure? I thought he was still in Bangkok. So did the computer.”

  “He’s just reported back. The computer will be updating his file now. And it’s an expensive city, from what I’ve heard…” He knew that tone in Audrey’s voice. Ben had spun her a hard-luck story and flirted with her a bit to get preferential treatment.

  Well, he deserved it, God knew. He was an excellent officer. And his father had been Richard’s own mate, once upon a time. He was Ben’s godfather. The closest thing to a real father Ben had left.

  “Get him back. Tell him he’s now first mate on Prometheus. He needs to be there as soon as he can.”

  After that he hit a block. He could not replace the captain. With all favors called and all debts cleared, he was still that one vital crew member short. There was simply no one he knew who could take command.

  When the idea popped into his head he would never know. Suddenly he saw his own master’s papers as he had thrust them into his desk drawer at home after the inquiry five years ago. At first he dismissed it, but as his desperation grew the vision persisted.

  He made excuses: he had always run a one-man show; there was no one to look after Crewfinders if he went. But he was in a cleft stick: if he didn’t go, there would be no more Crewfinders in any case. And anyway; he knew perfectly well that his capable, dedicated secretarial team could run it flawlessly without him.

  So, at last, in spite of his bone-deep feelings of foreboding, he drove back to his flat by Vauxhall Bridge, packed his bags, and settled his affairs as though he knew he weren’t coming back.

  Then Audrey drove him to Heathrow to catch the last flight out to the Gulf. Then, exhausted herself, she went straight home to bed. As soon as she arrived at the office next morning, she telexed Prometheus.

  John Higgins heard about it first, because he happened to be outside the Radio Room when the telex came in and was able to take the flimsy off Tsirtos because the young radio officer was still disoriented by all the new arrivals and so easily browbeaten.

  “Well, blow me down!” said the wiry Manxman, and, clutching the stem of his cold pipe firmly between his teeth—one of a range of pipes he sported constantly but never, ever, smoked—he strode off in search of his old friend the mate.

  Ben Strong, here only a few hours but already very much in charge, was on the bridge. He straightened up as Higgins came in and caught his eye. “What is it, Number Two?” he asked at once. Higgins was one of those men who almost sparkle with ill-controlled energy—every muscle in his lithe frame always seemed at full stretch and he chewed through pipe stems at an alarming rate. Now he was almost luminous with glee.

  “Message for the owner, Number One. Seen him?”

  “In hi
s cabin, I expect. Anything I should know?”

  “New captain due aboard later this afternoon.” Higgins tried to keep it nonchalant. He failed.

  “Oh?” Ben was suddenly all attention. “Anyone we know?”

  “I should say so. Mariner’s coming himself.”

  Ben just managed to hold himself in check, refusing to rise to Higgins’s bait. “Is that so?” he asked equably after a while. “Well, you’d better run along and let the owner know at once, if you’d be so kind. And we’d better get the last of the coffins ashore as soon as possible.”

  “Righty-ho.” Higgins refused to be dashed by his cold reception and loped off in search of the owner, pipe jutting jauntily up toward his left ear.

  As soon as he had gone, Ben mopped his brow. “Christ on a crutch,” he muttered. “Dick himself. Now, who would have thought of that!”

  He was by no means alone on the bridge. As well as the seamen on duty, the third mate Danny Slope was there. Like John Higgins, Slope was of medium height, just topping Ben’s shoulder, but unlike the Manxman, he was plump and furtive. He habitually wore a veiled, secretive look. He was an unknown quantity among the Crewfinders men, not on the list long enough to be known to anyone other than the computer in St. Mary Axe. “What’s that all about, Number One?” he asked now, his voice high.

  Ben looked at him with something akin to distaste. He had nothing against the third mate, indeed he seemed quite a competent man, but he looked and sounded like the school sneak in the sort of books Ben had enjoyed reading as a boy.

  “Don’t you know anything, young Danny-me-lad?” he demanded; a schoolteacher with a criminally inattentive pupil. “Richard Mariner’s the man you work for. The man who owns Crewfinders.”

  “Well, I know that…”

  “You just don’t know what that has to do with the price of eggs. Right? Well, I’m precisely the man to tell you.

  “Five years ago, Richard Mariner was senior captain of the Heritage Shipping fleet. He was married to Sir William Heritage’s eldest daughter and was captain of his most beautiful new tanker. Both the daughter and the ship were called Rowena. He took Rowena aboard Rowena for her maiden voyage—a sort of second honeymoon because their marriage had hit a bumpy patch—then lost them both in a collision and explosion in the Western Approaches.

  “The inquiry exonerated him. Came out smelling of roses to everyone except Sir William Heritage, who was short one ship and one daughter—and was not happy about either.

  “And the long and short of it is, Dick Mariner brushed the dust of supertankers off his shoes. Set up Crewfinders. Swore on the grave of his beloved, which was empty of course as her body lies blown to atoms at the bottom of the Channel, never to sail in these iron monsters again.”

  “God,” said Slope, simply awed by the story. “How come you know so much about it?”

  “You see before you a poor orphan boy, Number Three. Lost my mum on the day I was born. Lost my dad five years ago, almost to the day. He was Mariner’s first mate on that Heritage tanker.”

  The news went round the ship like wildfire after that. Mariner was the sort of man legends clung to. Everybody in Crewfinders had their own favorite tale or memory of the great man. Tales that grew in the telling.

  Chief Steward “Twelve Toes” Ho had no trouble in finding out all he wanted to know. As well as being perfectly trained stewards, his men were a finely tuned information-gathering machine.

  Salah Malik, leader of the seamen, also heard what he wanted to hear, when he wanted to hear it. He was not displeased. The previous officers—late and unlamented, in his book—had not been the sort of men he relished dealing with.

  The pair of them got together in the galley later that afternoon, prompted by almost telepathic communication, and decided what should be left and what concealed of the previous occupancy. They decided to conceal nothing and let matters take their course.

  Only two men aboard remained relatively unaffected by the news. The owner, Kostas Demetrios, was a shipping man and not a sailor. He knew of Mariner’s reputation distantly. He knew nothing of exploding tankers, lost loves, and lost fortunes. It seemed to him fitting that on a contract this size, the boss should get his hands dirty too. He thought no more of it than that, as far as anyone else could tell.

  Martyr heard. He heard some of the story from young Andrew McTavish, third engineer supplied by Crewfinders. It moved him not at all. It spoke to him of a man who had married the boss’s daughter for advancement in the firm; who only took her on the fatal voyage because he had been told to and was afraid of queering his pitch with the old man; and who had fouled up anyway and run away from the sea.

  It was a story utterly without romance, as far as he was concerned; the tale of a man who by luck or circumstance had built himself a reputation, but when the testing time had come had simply cut and run. So now, probably down on his luck again, with his vaunted company at full stretch, he was being offered a fortune to come and get his hands dirty again. Dirty in more ways than one, Martyr thought.

  As far as the taciturn American could see, this was just the man to replace the late, unlamented Levkas.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They had left the last three coffins close to the top of the accommodation ladder so that they were the first things Mariner saw as he pulled himself wearily onto the deck.

  They were the worst things he could possibly have seen during his first moments back aboard a supertanker and he froze, horrified. For a moment even his massive reserves of emotional strength were taxed to their limit.

  Ben Strong pushed forward at once, shocked to see his godfather’s long, aristocratic face all bone and line; the massive chin steely with stubble; the incendiary blue eyes dull and dark-ringed, sunken with fatigue. His hand was raised, but more to support than to greet.

  He was unceremoniously shoved aside by the owner. “So this is the great Richard Mariner,” boomed Kostas Demetrios. “Welcome aboard, sir. Welcome aboard.”

  Mariner took Demetrios’s hand and shook it formally. He dragged his tired eyes away from the boxes and glanced around the deck. He saw little enough—only the expanse of green overlain with huge pipes, fifteen feet above, running fore and aft; port and starboard. Odd-shaped columns of manifolds, winches, hatches, tank tops; all standing to shoulder height—all dancing and wavering in the furnace heat of a Gulf afternoon. And beyond them, the incandescent brightness of the bridge. Five stories high. Far, far away.

  Ben succeeded Demetrios at last, shaking Mariner’s hand. “Hello, Dick,” he said quietly. “Welcome back. No ceremony, I’m afraid. I thought you’d rather not…” His eyes, gentle brown in a mahogany tan and deep-slitted against the murderous glare, searched Richard’s pale face anxiously. Then, as his godfather’s eyes came alive again, he gave a broad grin. They shook hands vigorously and might have embraced, had Demetrios not interrupted. “C’mon. Let’s go. Time’s money.”

  Richard looked at him properly, and didn’t much like what he saw. Demetrios was a short man, lean in body but with something self-indulgent, almost de cadent, about his huge dark eyes and full red mouth. His luxuriant black curls just topped Mariner’s square shoulder. As he spoke, sunlight blazed on a gold tooth. And when he spoke, it was with an American accent. Among the most dangerous combinations in the world, mused Richard grimly. Greek pirate’s soul and a Harvard Business School mind. And greed. Demetrios had greedy eyes. But then, which self-made millionaire did not? he wondered. And pushed the bluff, honest gaze of his father-in-law out of his memory.

  These thoughts occupied his mind for the walk up to the blessed shade cast by the port bridge wing. He opened the bulkhead door and stepped ahead of the others into the cool of the A deck corridor. There was a distant hum of generators. The lights and the air-conditioning were on. He shivered. Then Ben was by his side. “Good trip out, Dick?” Richard was momentarily distracted. Ben’s cheerful smile, dark tan, and sun-bleached hair seemed to give off energy. He gave a wry smile.
/>   “Fine. How soon can we weigh?”

  “As soon as the owner, and…and the others leave.” If Richard closed his eyes he could see the coffins. The three, full no doubt, at the head of the accommodation ladder. Others, older, at the memorial service five years ago: empty every one.

  They got under way at 16.35 local time. The interim was taken up with a brief conference between the owner and his new captain, during which Demetrios seemed determined to answer as few questions as possible and to emphasize the overwhelming need for a swift passage. When he left, he took the last three coffins with him.

  At 17.00, Richard began his inspection.

  He started high in the navigation bridge with Ben Strong at his side. Then they went down to the bridge and chatted briefly to John Higgins on watch there; checked the equipment, chart table, course, logbooks. Looked down the long deck, changing color from green to ocher in the early sunset. Went down to C deck, then B deck, then A; then the crew’s quarters and the rest.