The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  “Come to slow and make five.” Richard stood for a moment by the big black leatherbound chair on the port side of the bridge; then he sat with every appearance of ease.

  “Slow ahead,” acknowledged Ben, his hand moving on the Engine Room telegraph. The pounding of the engines slowed further, pulsing to a funereal beat. “Five it is.”

  The light thickened. Shadows crouched like monsters in corners, under tables. The Sampson posts, two vertical, white-painted loading posts twenty feet high halfway down the deck became almost invisible. “Jesus!” said Ben. “This is impossible. How’s the radar?”

  “Murky,” answered John.

  “Start the siren, please,” ordered Richard quietly. Immediately, the lost-soul howl boomed out over the Gulf.

  The situation was rapidly becoming dangerous. They couldn’t see the length of the deck. They couldn’t rely on the radar. Only the Channel was busier.

  “Sparks in the Radio Room?” asked Richard nonchalantly, already certain of the answer.

  “Yes,” said Ben.

  “Good.” He could warn local shipping if things got any worse. “But I think I still want a particularly sharp pair of eyes up for’ard. Mr. Slope?”

  “Sir?”

  “Take some glasses and a walkie-talkie. Stroll up to the forecastle head, if you’d be so kind. I’ll arrange for a member of the crew to relieve you shortly.”

  “Right, sir.” He turned to go.

  For some reason he would never understand, Richard added, “And keep in touch.”

  “Right-ho, sir,” said Slope cheerfully, and he was gone.

  Richard leaned back against the headrest which, with the swivel foot, made his chair look like a dentist’s chair. On the shelf beneath the port windows was his radio transceiver handset: his R/T. He picked it up and switched it on, ready to receive.

  “Third Mate here. Sir?”

  “Captain here. Receiving you loud and clear.”

  “Just going out onto the port…” Slope probably said more, but he cut himself off by switching to Receive too soon.

  “Report when you reach the Sampson posts. Over. Can you see him, Ben? The port bridge wing’s in my way…”

  “No, sir.”

  “No? Strange. Must be thicker than I…”

  “It’s not that, sir. I can see the deck. He’s not there.”

  “Third Mate. This is the captain. Do you receive me?”

  The R/T hissed. Nothing more. Like sand grains brushing over silk. A sinister sound. Something’s wrong, thought Richard.

  “Slope?”

  No reply. Nothing.

  He was on his feet without further thought. His voice remained calm, but he let a little urgency into it. “She’s yours, Ben. I’m going to look for the third mate.” There was another R/T on the chart table. He gestured to it. “John. You monitor me.”

  “Aye, sir. But take care. She’s a tricky ship.”

  Richard gave a bark of laughter, then realized the Manxman was quite serious.

  Crossing to the lift, he left the R/T on, but only a hiss came in, ghostly enough to make him think about John Higgins’s instinctive superstition.

  The lift whispered down until the doors opened on A deck. Richard hurried across and stepped out onto the port side without pausing to think. Immediately, his face filled with sand. He had forgotten about this. Now that the Prometheus was at slow ahead, the wind was effectively gusting ten to fifteen knots; and freshening, by the feel of it. He slitted his streaming eyes and bundled his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, sneezing convulsively. The sand moved down his collar with a disturbing sense of personal invasion. Into his ears and up his nose. He sneezed again.

  When his eyes cleared, he saw the monstrous tracks leading straight to the broken rail and understood at once the story they told of the third mate. Badly disoriented by the sand, he had stumbled forward into the rail which, like the Sat Nav, had not been all it seemed. Silently cursing the lackadaisical workmanship that had simply added another coat of varnish without checking the wood beneath, he shambled forward. There could be no mistake. “Man overboard! Stop engines! Man overboard!”

  A second later, the whooping of the foghorn became the howl of the emergency siren. The throb of the engines stopped.

  Richard was still by the broken rail, peering down into the red murk. Because of the sand he saw little. Because of the siren he heard nothing. Not the opening of the door behind him. Not the sand-muffled footsteps. Why he turned he would never know.

  He saw Martyr’s face locked in a strange rictus: rage—horror—surprise. He could not tell. The man might simply have been going to sneeze, his face, like Richard’s face a minute before, unexpectedly full of sand.

  Then their shoulders collided and Richard stepped back. Automatically, he caught the broken end of the rail. A substantial section of it filled his grasp, but then it simply crumbled as his full weight came upon it. Broke away and went to dust in his fist. One more step was enough and he was falling.

  His mind spun as wildly as his body for a second. Images whirled like his arms and legs while the R/T sailed uselessly away. It occurred to him that Martyr might well have pushed Slope overboard in retaliation for this morning’s prank. Or he might be trying to revenge on Richard himself the humiliation of last night’s defeat in the Officers’ Lounge. He did not yet know the man well enough to make any sensible guess. Or of course John might be right. Maybe Prometheus was trying to get rid of her second crew that week.

  He jerked in a desperate lungful of air.

  Then the water exploded around him and he was, abruptly, thinking with absolute clarity.

  He landed upright, facing in, ten feet from the tanker’s side. He plunged deep beneath the swirling surface, and was immediately sucked toward the huge metal wall. The black hull plunged down and down before him, curving away toward the keel. And that keel seemed to call to him, pulling him deeper and deeper still.

  At the final end of his endurance, just as his lungs began to empty of their own accord, he felt the downward motion slow. He crossed his arms before his face and smashed into the unforgiving steel as he started up.

  He exploded back into the air a bare few feet from the hull, still facing in. Immediately, even as he fought for the first, life-giving breath, he was half thrown, half sucked toward Prometheus as a wave worked with the ship’s movement.

  He brought his feet up just in time, pushing his sodden desert boots against the slippery metal and kicking. His feet were snatched to the left. He wrenched shoulders and upper arms, paddling wildly to keep his feet between himself and his ship, choking in great ragged breaths as he did so. Much less than a quarter of the hull to go, he thought. And as the engine stopped, so the great propeller stilled. If he kept agile and lucky, he might get past the end of the ship alive.

  Then there would only be the Gulf to contend with.

  He could imagine Ben on the bridge, bringing Prometheus round in a Williamson turn. Probably swearing like a trooper. The thought made him smile.

  He slid down another hugely buoyant, incredibly salty wave and kicked back, legs and belly smarting with the strain, water rushing in over his head and shoulders, exploding against the steel, foaming back to bury him.

  Damn! The stuff even tasted of oil!

  Abruptly, the most unexpected thing happened. The white bow of a lifeboat grazed down his left side and collided with Prometheus. There was a sound like the biggest gong in the world. Richard watched, overcome by it all.

  Then arms reached down from the point and unceremoniously dragged him aboard, past a wildly whipping vertical length of rope. Miraculously, Martyr had managed to put the small port-side lifeboat down less than an arm’s length from him. Within seconds he had recovered himself and was kneeling beside the chief in the pitching little cockleshell. They leaned against each other gasping until another wave drove in, threatening to turn the boat to matchwood. Then their fingers were feverishly at work, trying to release the rope falls bo
w and stern before the sea ground the boat to splinters against the ship like a kernel of corn in a mill.

  The next wave tumbled into them catching them still in the trough. Swamping them. Smashing them against Prometheus again. Something in the filthy foam wrapped itself lazily around Richard’s thigh. He kicked it free at once, thinking of the Gulf’s deadly sea snakes. It was only seaweed.

  As soon as the fall whipped free of his hand, Richard pushed back past Martyr and swung the handle to start the engine. It caught at once. He opened the boat’s throttle and turned her head into the teeth of the next wave. It hurled them back to slam against the tanker once more, then rose beneath them, launching them down its back as though down a slipway. Water exploded up in great arcs on either side of the bow, and they were whirled away into the storm.

  Even though the wind had strengthened, its action with the waves cleared the air down here. Richard could see farther now than he had been able to from the bridge. But it was Martyr, crouching in the bow like some misshapen figurehead, who saw Slope first, on the crest of a wave some fifty yards ahead. He turned, yelled, gestured. When he turned back, the third mate was gone.

  Inevitably, however, the random march of the waves threw up another winning combination so that the boat rose on the crest of the wave at the same time that Slope did, twenty yards away. He was either waving feebly, or the sea was playing tricks with them. But he wasn’t wearing a life jacket, Richard reckoned grimly; so if he wasn’t alive, he wouldn’t still be afloat.

  Waves rose up between them, their crests streaming forward in a continuous spray of filthy spindrift plucked off by the wind. The lifeboat began to seesaw sickeningly. Martyr yelled something unintelligible and raised his right arm. Richard brought the boat’s head starboard. The arm dropped. They straightened. The waves came in on the port quarter, slamming the boat round like pile drivers.

  They tilted to starboard, crawled crabwise up the concave face of a ten-footer about to break, and there was Slope, three feet from the stern, swirled past them in a flash and into their lee.

  Richard had the helm hard over at once. Martyr threw himself sideways, nearly capsizing them. He caught at Slope. Missed. Caught again. Slope seemed to be floating in a ghastly, foul syrup. His arms were waving madly. The dead white oval of his face projected terror. As Martyr reached the third time, Richard quickly scanned the golden maelstrom for sharks. There were none that he could see. Martyr was on his knees, legs spread, straining forward over the starboard bow. This time their hands met. Closed.

  Held.

  As the wave broke.

  The boat’s head slammed right round. Martyr went sideways so hard he nearly fell overboard. The whole length of Slope’s body crashed against the gunwale. Richard let go of the tiller, diving forward. One hand went to Martyr’s right ankle, steadying him. The other plunged over the side, deep into the sea, trying to grab Slope’s legs.

  Something brushed his wrist.

  Automatically, he jerked it back out of the water. Then he had let go of Martyr and was reaching for Slope with desperate urgency, understanding the young man’s fear. He was too late. He only saw it for a moment as it neared the surface, struck, and fell away again into the sand-clotted depths. That one glimpse was enough. It was perhaps four feet long, broad as a man’s forearm, and bright unbroken yellow like a buttercup. It moved with the sinuous grace of an eel, but it had the scaly skin and flat, diamond head that could mean only one thing.

  Precisely what sort of snake it was, Richard did not know. It had a tiny mouth—all Gulf snakes do—and a long black double tongue. And the fangs that it sank into the tip of Slope’s bare toe, they were surprisingly long, too.

  The boy’s body went rigid. The snake fell away, writhing lazily. Richard, his arms in the foaming water to the elbow, grabbed an ankle. “Now!” he yelled, at the top of his voice, and heaved. Slope came in easily, like a length of wood.

  Martyr had seen the snake as clearly as Richard had. No sooner was Slope’s body inboard than he ripped the linen belt off his overalls and made a tourniquet, as best he could, halfway up the foot. The flesh grew taut as he pulled it tight, two tiny blue pinpricks leaking blood at the tip of the smallest toe.

  “Wild West stuff,” cried Martyr, flourishing a knife. He cut once, hard. Something small and white fell overboard: the top joint of the bitten toe. It was a desperate act—but Slope was in mortal danger from the venom.

  The next wave nearly swamped them. Only the weight of the water already in the bilges stopped them tipping over; but far too much more came in over the gunwales. Richard leapt back for the tiller, opened the throttle, and swung her round until wind and weather were at his back.

  Just in time. The greatest wave so far lifted them. Crested. Broke. Tarnished silver foam boiled over the side and vomited into their laps. They surfed forward as though hitched to Leviathan through water like the surface of an erupting volcano.

  It was like boating at the birth of the world.

  Abruptly, the dancing clouds in front of them exploded as though a flare a hundred yards wide had been ignited there. It was Prometheus, with all her lights ablaze.

  Five minutes after that, they were aboard. Slope’s inert body was being rushed up to the sick bay. Martyr and Mariner were following side by side in silence, bone weary, slow, old with fatigue.

  The whole rescue, which seemed to have taken a lifetime, had actually filled only twenty minutes.

  In the sick bay, Slope was lying faceup on the bed. Ben was sticking a plaster over the stump of his toe. The third mate was unconscious, breathing with rasping gasps through a slack mouth. “How is he?” asked Richard.

  Ben looked up, a troubled expression sitting ill on his usually open, cheerful face. “Not good. We’ll have to get him to hospital in short order. Nice piece of surgery, Chief. Crude, but nice.”

  They were hove-to fifty miles north of Dubai. That was their best bet. There was a fast launch service out from Ras al Kaimah that was regularly used to ferry crews to and from supertankers. But even the fastest launch service was likely to be too slow for Slope.

  “Radio for a helicopter,” suggested Martyr, who was destroying a perfectly good towel simply by rubbing his hair with it.

  “Couldn’t get out here in this,” countered Richard.

  “Neither could the launch,” concluded the chief, looking disgustedly at the oil-smeared wreck of the towel.

  In the end, Richard radioed Dubai, who said they would have a helicopter and a launch standing by, each with a medical team. Whichever could go first would go first. Then he set Tsirtos to trying to locate Demetrios.

  They went back to slow ahead, making five knots, and altered course slightly, moving slowly southeast, south of Jesireh Ye Sirri, down toward Dubai. At last Richard went to his own cabin, pulling off his soiled shirt as he went and bunching it up in his left fist. Halfway down the C deck corridor, he paused. One more thing, he thought. He crossed to Martyr’s door and knocked.

  Abruptly, Martyr was standing in front of him, also naked to the waist; one white towel wrapped around his loins, another draped over his shoulders. His face, neck, and a V on his chest where the collar of his shirt opened, were all deep mahogany. The rest of his torso was pale. The hair on his chest bunched sand-gray and curled down his corrugated belly.

  “I wanted to thank you for pulling me out.” Richard stuck out his hand.

  Martyr gripped it briefly, then, “Forget it,” he said. “I pushed you in first.” And he began to close the door.

  But Richard, now, was no longer willing to be put off. The flat of his hand pressed against the door to stop Martyr’s action and they remained face to face. “I need to know what is going on here,” said Richard, his tone held at reasonable calm by an effort of will. “I have taken command of a ship registered as A-1 at Lloyd’s of London and yet there is some question about the strength of the pipework, the Satellite Navigation equipment is suspect, the radar is faulty, the railing round the deck is dan
gerously rotten…”

  “You know as much about that as I do, Captain,” countered Martyr warily. “All I know is that the engine’s fine.”

  “You know more than that! You know what happened in the Pump Room!”

  “No more than I wrote in the Accident Report Book. Like I said in the lift yesterday.”

  “But you must know more than that, Chief. You knew Captain Levkas and his men…”

  “Damned if I did, Captain. I tell you I didn’t know these men. What they were up to, what they were like. I…”

  “Like?” exploded Richard. “You know very well what they were like. They got drunk on bridge watch. They enjoyed watching sick pornography. They were the scum of the earth and they were up to no good.”