The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  This was not true, but Hajji went anyway, muttering viciously, unaware that Malik had just saved his life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The last evening in July found Robin hanging over the port bow of the supertanker, twenty feet below deck level, suspended from the forecastle in a boatswain’s chair. In spite of the curve of the tanker’s stem, she was close enough to inspect the rust-blistered area a foot or two in front of her. The stem of a supertanker, never riding over the seas but always punching through them like a mobile pier, took unimaginable punishment. The slightest flaw down here had to be checked—even a rash of rust blisters. Kerem Khalil had reported it when he was repainting the ship’s name earlier in the afternoon. Robin had come down to inspect them: as was her duty and her pleasure. Behind her, on the darkening horizon, lay the purple mountaintops of Madagascar, dark as thunderheads. Around her lay the massive beauty of the nightfall, making even this routine inspection almost unbearably pleasurable.

  Kicking against the side, she pushed herself out like a kid on a swing, feeling the bustle of life around her—something Prometheus normally managed to keep at a distance. A cormorant passed low overhead, having just launched itself from a Sampson post. The big black birds used Prometheus as an island, to the cheerful resignation of the seamen they kept swabbing day in and day out. Above the lonely cormorant, varying from specks to individual crosses, the gulls wheeled all the way up into the crystal sky. And if she twisted to look down into the equally clear, smooth sea, she knew she would see a school of dolphins playing in the great bow wave whose roaring filled her ears to the exclusion of all other sounds except the occasional keening of a low gull and the song of the wind in the ropes by her head. A warm, gentle south wind that had blown into their faces now unvaryingly for days; ever since they had pulled in toward the coast of Africa. This time of year there was a wind that seemed to blow from the Cape to the Gulf with hardly a break, following along the line of the coast; and even in midwinter at the Cape, the wind was rarely anything but warm. In Durban it might be as cool as sixty degrees Fahrenheit now. Here it was seventy-five.

  Her reverie was broken by a muffled thump that made her jump as something hit the metal by her head and fell flapping into her lap. She had caught it with automatic revulsion and was just about to hurl it away when she stopped, realizing what it was. It was a flying fish. Holding tightly on to it now, she looked down over her shoulder just in time to see the whole shoal break surface and skim along the side of the ship, glittering like a golden rainbow, pursued by dolphins or a passing shark. As abruptly as they had appeared a foot or two above the swells, they were gone, sides glinting deeper and deeper until they vanished.

  She swung back, looking up toward the tumblehome above, calculating whether or not she could lob the fish up and over the side. Probably not. It twisted in her hands again and she nearly dropped it so she thumped its head against the plank she was sitting on and it lay still, stunned. Impulsively she unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt and stuffed it down to lie cold against her belly, held up by the waistband of her shorts.

  They were a good team, the men on the forecastle deserving her loyalty as unstintingly as they gave theirs. She reached up and pulled the warning line. At once Salah Malik’s head was thrust into silhouette against the darkening sky. She waved. He nodded. Vanished. A moment later she began to rise. After a few feet, she began to walk up the metal.

  By the time she reached the top, the fish was no longer waving its bright tail from her cleavage—that would have been no fun—it was thrust into the waistband of her shorts at the back. As she stepped aboard it gave a wriggle and caused her to gasp as though she had been pinched, but no one seemed to notice. In an instant, the fish was out of her clothing and sailing through the air to land at their feet. There was a moment of stunned disbelief, then they all pounced except for Salah, who turned to look at her. With a howl of glee, Hajji Hassan straightened, holding the thing aloft. Robin sighed mentally. It was always the way. The one who hadn’t earned it, always got it.

  The Chinese stewards had started the pot, of course, inveterate gamblers to a man; but the seamen had joined in cheerfully, half expecting their money back in Rotterdam, for who had ever heard of a flying fish jumping nearly forty feet onto a supertanker’s deck?

  But here it was, a flying fish, right on the deck in front of them, and consequently worth over two hundred dollars.

  Hajji was not popular, but such good fortune could not fail to lead to celebration. He and the fish were swept into the air and the team bore them off raucously, looking for “Twelve Toes” Ho, who was holding the purse.

  Salah looked at Robin. Did she want the boatswain’s chair dismantled and stowed? Should he call them back?

  She shook her head. The mate would want to check her findings. They might as well leave it up for him.

  He nodded, understanding more even than she suspected, and turned to follow his men.

  After a moment, Robin followed too, feeling, in the aftermath of her elation, slightly depressed. No; it was not just after the elation. It was the thought of talking to Strong. Of handling his thinly veiled hostility, his nit-picking, double-checking, sexist, petty desire for revenge. She had come across men who found themselves incapable of seeing women as their equals—plenty of them—but, she realized, there had always been some sort of a buffer before. Now there was not. At the moment it was her and the first mate, head to head.

  But, to be fair, it wasn’t all simple sexism on his part: she couldn’t think of many women who would be too charmed at having every stitch of their clothing stolen in front of thirty people, either.

  But only John was on the bridge. “What happened down there?” he asked cheerfully, nodding forward, his trusty briar bobbing above the purposeful jut of his chin. “They going to chuck that lazy beggar Hajji overboard at last?”

  “Found a flying fish.”

  “On the forecastle head? That’s not a fish, that’s Superman.” He looked at her suspiciously. “You spoil that lot.”

  “They’re worth it.” She grinned, warmed by the comradely twinkle in his eye.

  “Up to you. Anything wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine as far as I can see. Just rust blisters. Needs a paint job at the most.”

  “If you say it’s fine, then it’s fine.”

  “Better check with the mate.”

  “Look, Robin,” John turned to her, “don’t let him get you down. He’s a picky sod, but nice enough. He’d be giving any junior a bit of a rough ride now, and you…” He hesitated, took his pipe out of his mouth, and scratched his chin with it.

  “Bring out the worst in him?”

  “You said it!”

  “Bring out the worst in whom?” demanded Strong, coming onto the bridge at that moment. “Number Three, why is your team running riot below when there’s still work to be done for’ard?”

  “Looking for you, Number One. Thought you might like to double-check. Some nasty rust, but nothing dangerous: looks all right to me.”

  “Then I’m sure it is all right. Get your lot up and get that lot stowed.” He turned to go. John glanced at her behind his back: told you so, he grinned.

  Ben Strong turned back. “No, leave it,” he ordered inevitably. “I’d better check it all for myself.”

  “Have you seen the Little Mistress?” asked Hajji of Salah Malik some time later. “I would like to share my good fortune with her.” He had made up the nickname for Robin himself when one of his more intelligent colleagues explained to him that a pun existed in English upon the word mate.

  Salah eyed him with even more disfavor than usual. “The third mate is a better officer than you have a right to expect,” he said severely. “She is a better seaman than you will ever be and is superior to you in every conceivable way. I do not like to hear the wise insulted by the foolish, although I know it is the way of the world.”

  Hajji stalked off in high outrage at that. But he did not stay in a bad mood for
long. He would attend to the Little Mistress soon. For the present, he was a fortunate man. And what do such men do? They celebrate. Now he knew for certain where the old woman Malik was, he would smoke the last of his hashish.

  It was the work of only a few moments to liberate the little packet from behind the black cylinders and to slip out of the haunted Pump Room; then he was scurrying down and down to the secret hiding place where he could indulge his vice leisurely.

  As he descended, the pounding of the engine grew louder. The air grew warmer, out of reach of the air-conditioning, and more redolent of oil from the engine room. Hajji liked it down here. The deeper he went, the more things shrank to an acceptable scale until, in the farthest depths of the great ship’s bowels, he arrived at a tiny alcove. It was too small to be a room. It was deep and dark, though not pitch dark, and warm. The walls were covered in pipes. The engine throbbed like a heart.

  Hajji sat contentedly on the floor and slowly rolled himself a joint. He regretted the loss of his pipe—Malik had found that and confiscated it as though the seaman were a child—but this way was better than no way. His fingers were clumsy but he persisted dreamily, his mind drifting from Malik back to the Little Mistress…

  The cigarette was rolled by now, but he was having trouble with the matches. Were they damp? He could not get them to light. At last he tried three together and was rewarded with a small blue flame. He held it close and puffed hard. A trace of the drugged smoke filtered into his lungs. He took the matches away, holding them high as he drew on the joint again. His mind still on Robin, he glanced up, surprised to see that the matches were burning more brightly now. Slowly, he brought them down toward his eyes again, watching with wonder as the flame grew smaller as it came nearer. No matter, the flame was still burning. He brought it back toward the end of his cigarette but for some reason he could not understand, at that very moment the deck came up and hit him in the face. He thought about getting up, especially as he seemed to have broken his nose and it was becoming difficult to breathe—but in the end, it was simply too much trouble.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Think they’ll ever find the little twit?”

  “Nope. I think he went overboard. Probably got drunk celebrating his win and fell into the ocean.”

  “Didn’t think Malik let them drink. Anyway, they’re Moslems.”

  “Think that’d stop Hassan?”

  “Probably not.”

  It wasn’t much of an epitaph, but it was almost all Hajji got.

  Ben and John were standing on the bridge at 07.30 next morning, chatting idly about last night’s excitement as they watched Robin lead her depleted team down to the forecastle head. The boatswain’s chair was still rigged there because Ben Strong hadn’t had time to stow it between his cursory examination of the suspect area and the sudden first search for the missing man.

  The second, more exhaustive, search was going on at the moment, under the leadership of Salah Malik; with young McTavish notionally in charge, because they were in the engineering sections, and going on down.

  It was a glorious morning. The sky was high and brilliant, the sea translucently clear. The wind had shifted east of south and carried in each gentle gust a tantalizing complex of spicy scents born of Madagascar.

  Robin walked down the deck with a youthful spring in her step, tired after last night’s taxing searches but uplifted by the beauty of the day; utterly unaware of how close to death she was.

  The chair itself was like a child’s swing: a short plank of wood served as a seat; another plank, a few feet above it, held the ropes far enough apart to allow one occupant, lashed safely, to sit on the lower. Above the top plank, the two ropes supporting the seat became one, rising through a pulley. The pulley was raised six feet above the deck and angled out over the side by a carefully anchored tripod made of metal bars.

  The equipment and its arrangement were to be found on any ship. Its use was entirely routine. Robin was not even supposed to be using it this morning. She was simply supposed to be stowing it away. But what she saw as she came onto the forecastle head changed all that instantly.

  It was a ship. A felucca, with tall castles fore and aft; with what once must have been a proud mast bearing a gull-winged sail now snapped off short and gone over the side. She was not small. From stem to stern she must have measured all of forty feet. Nor was she a weak or ill-found vessel. That was obvious from the fact that her hull was still in one piece, wedged across the tanker’s bow like that.

  Robin stood on Prometheus’s prow and looked down upon her, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. The others clustered round her, silently, also struck with awe. The two ships must have collided sometime during the night. After midnight, the forecastle head watch had been searching for Hajji Hassan with the rest. Such was the size of the supertanker that the shock of impact had gone unnoticed. The felucca’s lights, had she been carrying any, had gone unseen. The cries of her crew, had she been manned, had gone unheard. She had simply ridden up onto the bow-wave above the great torpedo-shaped protrusion at the base of the bow, and hit at its thinnest part.

  And there, in spite of the width of the forecastle, of the bluntness of the upper bow; in spite of the weight of the felucca herself sitting well clear of the water, there she remained: wedged across Prometheus’s bows like a tiny cross on a huge capital T.

  Looking straight down from her current position, Robin could see where the tanker had chopped into the little ship, crushing her planking out to either side exactly amidships on the starboard side, cutting in almost as far as the broken mast. Cracks, some of them ragged and wide, stretched left and right, nearly from stem to stern, showing here and there a glimpse of what lay below. Everything on the felucca was still and silent, except for the hollow thud of the swells against her bottom.

  Robin looked across at Kerem Khalil. “You ever seen anything like this?”

  The Palestinian shook his head.

  “The rest of you?”

  “I heard of something like this,” said one. Some of the others nodded. Robin found herself doing the same. They had all heard that it was possible. That it had happened before. None of them had ever seen it. Until now.

  They stood, looking down at it for a few more seconds. Stories like this were once in a lifetime. They didn’t want to share this one yet.

  And then the screaming started.

  Again they did nothing, looking askance at each other, knowing that what they could hear was some kind of illusion. Had to be some kind of illusion. There could be no crew left aboard. There could be no one left aboard. Unless some youngster was there, too badly hurt to join the rest. Unless it was not a crew member, but someone else. A slave, perhaps; for the felucca must have been up to no good, running dark and silent in the night.

  Robin thumped the rail once, hard, as she had thumped Angus El Kebir’s desk not so long ago, and was in action. “Swing the chair round here. I’m going down.”

  Kerem was about to argue, but he asked himself—as Salah Malik would have done—Would I argue with the mate? The answer was no. He saw no reason to argue with the woman, therefore. She was perfectly competent.

  And the screaming was that of a child.

  “What’s that woman up to now?” asked Ben testily, looking down the length of the deck from the bridge.

  “Checking your work, perhaps,” John needled cheerfully.

  “Damn cheek. She’d better hurry, though. She’s due to relieve you in twenty minutes.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I do. I’ll have this run like a proper ship. Women or no women,” snapped the first officer, and stalked off the bridge.

  Kerem looked down at the woman walking across the felucca’s deck, every bone in his body shrieking danger. He wished Salah was here. He glanced back at the bridge with an overwhelming feeling of frustrated impotence. There were four of the team now, instead of six. Himself and three others. He must keep an eye on the third mate. The other three m
ust hold the rope. When the felucca went, they would have to pull her up at once, or she was dead.

  He had no walkie-talkie and there was no one he could send for help.

  Down here the noise was almost overwhelming. The drum roll of the bow wave sounded continuously against the felucca’s keel. Each separate BOOM! of a larger wave was followed by a cacophony of screeches and groans as planks and pegs strained to tear apart. It was a wonder the child’s screams could be heard above it all.

  Yet there it was again: a plaintive, terrified howl. But where was it coming from?