The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  The great lurch was repeated, as though this were the smallest of trawlers and not a sizable tanker. Tsirtos switched off and went up to the bridge.

  As soon as he stepped out of the shack, he heard the wind, although it took him a moment to realize that it was the wind. It sounded like a rolling explosion in the near distance accompanied by the music of a mad orchestra. Over the artillery-barrage bass, a thousand different notes and tones rose and fell as the air tore at every individual strut, line, nut, and bolt with that microscopic fury that only the greatest disturbances are capable of showing. Quite simply, the wind was trying to tear the superstructure off. Even in the long corridors behind battened bulkhead doors, the air was mobile, whispering into drafts and breezes. Moving curtains, setting pictures aswing, making carpets and even linoleum seem to ripple and lift. Setting everything attapping restlessly. Slamming doors suddenly, as though moved by sympathy for its wild cousin outside.

  Tsirtos had thought it was impossible for a supertanker to pitch. The hulls of such ships, he knew, were too long for even the broadest wave formation to place the stem on a crest and the stern in a trough. Supertankers, he had been told, were supposed to ride smoothly on the backs of several waves at once. But no one seemed to have explained this to the storm. Prometheus seemed to be pitching like a cockleshell. Tossing. Rolling. Performing complexes of motion totally at the mercy of wind and water, as though there were no one at the helm or in the Engine Room at all. For a wild moment in that wind-haunted corridor, Tsirtos was convinced they had abandoned without telling him.

  He reached the bridge at an unsteady run. It was bedlam. While the storm had seemed distant enough in the passages below, here it was pressed up against the windows fighting madly to get in at them.

  The twilight’s last gleaming smeared the bellies of the low, scudding clouds with blood. From the near horizon, dark gray curtains of torrential rain hung in devastating series, torn from top to bottom continuously by great jagged forks of lightning. The sea in sympathy was a crystal gray—like a leaden gemstone—but the spume torn from the backs of the maelstrom waves was red. Even as Tsirtos, frozen in the doorway, watched, bow waves like the runoff in a giant’s slaughter house exploded hundreds of feet into the air. The long hull faltered in her motion once again. A cascade of detritus flew onto the floor and slid forward. A tidal wave seethed back along the deck and exploded at the foot of the superstructure with such force that a wall of it rose to block the clear view in front of the helmsman’s narrow eyes. The sound was incredible.

  Tsirtos had seen all he wanted to see within seconds. “I’ll be in the shack,” he bellowed at Ben Strong’s back. Ben raised a hand to show that he had heard, but he was occupied with his own preoccupations. “Still at 983,” he yelled to the captain, who was sitting comfortably in his big black chair on the port side of the bridge. “I think it’s slowing.”

  The captain raised a hand: he had heard.

  There was something indefinably calm about him. No danger could approach too near while he took his confident ease in that chair. Tsirtos took comfort from this and went back below.

  Half an hour after that, Ho brought the soup.

  “Hey,” said Tsirtos happily to the chief steward. “Thick vegetable soup. Now I know we’re in winter waters.” He toasted the rock-steady Chinese. “First of the voyage,” he said.

  Half an hour after he drained the last drop of it, he started to vomit helplessly.

  It was one of the worst storms Richard had seen, but there was really nothing in it to cause him more than a moment’s worry. He was in a well-found, well-prepared ship. Only if the cargo had been incorrectly loaded; only if the tanks had been so inexpertly balanced as to put an unacceptable strain on Prometheus’s long hull, was there anything to fear. And if that had been the case, she would have broken up long ago. And he knew his godson well enough to have no doubts at all on that score. The wind could howl until it blew the world awry, therefore; the seas could become more mountainous than the Himalayas: they would not overwhelm his command. Nothing outside could seriously threaten the supertanker.

  Ho appeared at his shoulder bearing a large tray well-stocked with brimming mugs of soup. He took one of them, amused to note that not a drop had been spilled on the long trip up from the galley.

  Ho crossed next to Robin, then to Ben and John. “Some of this going below?” asked Richard, knowing the answer would be in the affirmative: the engineers were just as much under the chief steward’s wing as were the deck officers. “‘Pity poor sailors on a night like to night.’” He raised his mug, saying the old toast to John, who grinned and toasted back. John was close, by the Collision Alarm Radar, the only one close enough to hear him above the cacophony of wind and sea.

  This was still John’s watch, though he would technically be relieved by Robin soon. But they were all on the bridge, of course, each doing a vital job, working as a well-trained team under the eagle eye of their captain, the only one of them apparently idle. And in the Engine Room it would be the same. Each engineering officer with his set task and particular responsibility, and Martyr overseeing, making sure each vital task was done well. Ready and able to do any task himself if necessary, and yet at the moment probably doing nothing.

  He finished his soup and stood up. Angling himself carefully so as not to be thrown by the motion of the ship, he crossed to the chart table where Ben was carefully plotting their course, matching it to the course and reported size of the storm. “We’ll be in the eye in ninety minutes, maybe two hours,” Ben yelled, though they were close together. “We should be about here by then.” He pointed to a spot farther south and west than Richard would have expected. Ben saw his frown. “Yes,” he yelled. “It’s pushing us over pretty fast. Lucky you gave us the extra sea room earlier. Be a bit embarrassing if we bumped into Africa!”

  “Damn right! We’d better come to port a few more degrees.” He went across to Robin by the helm to check on their exact heading. The compass read almost due south. They were at slow ahead, making about five knots, if the instruments could be trusted in this. Their heading and speed were only notional anyway. The storm, pushing on their port quarter, was moving them west almost as fast as they were heading south. The Agulhas current under their keel was in motion too, the whole mass of water moving like a river toward the Cape. And the hurricane wind above, of course, was using their massive superstructure like a sail.

  He turned to his third mate. “Come to…”

  He never finished what he was saying. Even as he spoke to her, in a ghastly sort of slow motion Robin sank to her knees. “What…” He went over to her and went down on one knee beside her. Her arms were crossed on her belly, her fingers buried in the taut flesh under her ribs, knuckles white. As he reached her, she rocked forward, obviously in acute pain. She was white as chalk, her eyes huge and wide with shock. “ROBIN…”

  She vomited as he said her name, folding forward with the wrenching effort, smashing her forehead on the deck. He reached for her, but she could not straighten, her stomach obviously locked in a cramp. As he tried to lift her she vomited again.

  He looked desperately over his shoulder. John was still by the Collision Alarm Radar, his own face looking pretty ghastly in the green glow from the dish. “JOHN!” he yelled.

  The Manxman had taken two steps when the cramps hit him too. His face twisted, muscles writhing terribly. The angles of his jaw stood out in stark relief. His pipe fell to the floor, its stem bitten right through. Automatically, he tried to catch it and he lost his footing.

  During the next minute they all went down, as though this were some kind of virulent plague spreading among them. One moment the bridge was functioning normally, the next they were all in fetal positions, puking helplessly on the floor. Even the helmsman slid down, the tiny wheel slipping from his numb fingers. And the agony hit Richard too, a massive shock that warned of severe damage to the system. From solar plexus to pubis, the muscles of his belly spasmed. Vomit flooded out
of his throat, washing into the sensitive passages behind his nose, burning there and blinding him with tears. When he blinked them away, he found himself on the floor beside Robin, just behind the helmsman.

  His whole body spasmed again, raising the hurt to the realms of agony, muscles tearing themselves as they wrenched beyond control. And yet they could not be beyond control. His mind, alert even under these circumstances, knew he must overcome this mutiny in his body and force it to his will or they were lost. And yet even to stand seemed an impossibility. He forced himself half erect, only to throw up and fall down again. Once more—like some simian ancestor in Darwinian theory—he straightened his back and stood erect.

  Three steps toward the helm console. Another spasm. He slipped in the mess and crashed forward, landing with his elbows on the icy metal of the console top. There was a microphone here. When the dry heaving had stopped, he bent the metal stalk until the wire mouthpiece touched his lips.

  He pressed the button. “Engine Room,” he whispered. He flipped to RECEIVE.

  The noise of the answer confirmed his worst fears. But at least it was Martyr’s voice. “Captain? It’s bad down here.”

  “Here too. Keep going as best you can.”

  He pressed the button again. “Sparks…Tsirtos…”

  The sound of helpless puking answered him. It caused his gorge to rise again. He controlled himself, feeling the effort draining him. God! He was weak!

  “TSIRTOS!”

  “Cap…Captain…”

  “Can you radio for help?”

  “…Try…”

  A hand came onto his shoulder and he actually jumped with the shock. He turned so quickly that his grip on the console slipped and he crashed to the floor again.

  It was Robin. She had pulled herself up, obviously with as much grim effort as himself, and she stood now, filthy, agonized, sick unto death. Simply refusing to give in.

  Richard rose, inch by inch until they were in a position to collapse against each other. Breathlessly, speaking almost in shorthand, sentences—often words—broken by bouts of heaving, they discussed what they should do.

  She must take the helm and try to keep Prometheus’s head around into the storm, away from the dangers of the African coast. He must go below and check on the others. Tsirtos must be made to call for help. Anyone with any strength at all must be made ready to act when that help arrived.

  In many ways, the most difficult bit was simply making it to the door. The atmosphere on the bridge was so foul now that he had to stop every few steps, find something to cling to, and puke weakly. Once or twice the cramps hit him again and he fell down. It was impossible to bend and check his other officers. He looked down on them with a rigid back as they lay curled on the floor, beyond help at the moment. At the door he looked back, just in time to see Robin fold forward, start to go down, and pull herself erect again, using the helm to support her. He could not express how proud that made him feel.

  In the corridor, things were marginally better. Certainly, he could at least breathe without being overcome with nausea. Right from the start, he blessed whoever had retained the old-fashioned strong wooden railings along the corridor walls. Without these to cling to, his progress would have been slow indeed. As it was, he simply leaned upon them and collapsed forward into a staggering half run. This way, as long as his arms could bear him he made progress and, although he was weaker than a sickly child, he hardly fell down at all. The retching got worse, of course, now that his stomach was empty and dry.

  The atmosphere in the radio shack set him off again. He found it hard to breathe, such was the twisting and heaving of his stomach and he stood crucified in the doorway, choking and sobbing for breath. Tsirtos was lying on his chest, backside just out of his filthy chair, chin just above his filthy desk, speaking into his radio like a ghost. Every once in a while—Richard stood there long enough to perceive a pattern in it—Sparks’s left hand would depress the RECEIVE button, and Richard would hear a whisper of conversation from the headphones Tsirtos was wearing. Miraculously, the sick man was in communication with somebody. Hope and relief gave Richard added strength, though the simple good luck of the circumstances almost beggared belief. North and west of them, altering course even as they spoke, a mere three hours distant at the top of the green, were two South African oceangoing salvage tugs. If they could get their lines aboard in the relative calm of the storm’s eye, they would take Prometheus back to the safety of Durban.

  But there would need to be someone in the forecastle head to take the lines aboard.

  Three hours. Automatically, Richard looked at his watch. As soon as his hand came away from the door frame, his legs gave out again and he crashed to his knees on the threshold, but he had made the calculation. They would be here at 22.30.

  He crawled over to the nearest wall. He pulled himself erect and leaned on the railing once more, gasping as though he had just run a marathon. He was going to have to find himself some help.

  The crew’s quarters were as bad as the bridge—was there no one aboard who hadn’t eaten that accursed soup?—but, just as on the bridge, the strongest were up and about. Salah Malik and Kerem Khalil met him at the door. In the event, although three hours seemed like a long time, they only just made it.

  First, the three of them—they didn’t feel like splitting up again—went down to the engine room to try to drum up another recruit or two. They were luckier here. McTavish had been in his bunk when the soup came and had only taken a sip or two before the others became ill. Martyr had used the relatively strong young Scot as a sort of work horse to help and support the rest so that the Engine Room, though it reeked disgustingly like everywhere else, was comparatively orderly. The gaunt American, like the captain, had simply refused to give in, so he was still in charge.

  Rice was beginning to come out of it, so Martyr agreed to keep the piratical Welshman and release the one strong man aboard to join the deck party. McTavish himself was less than enthusiastic about going on deck—and who could blame him?—but it had to be done and these were not the circumstances to ask for volunteers. The four of them went off like intrepid paraplegics to get their wet-weather gear.

  Their strength did not return miraculously. They did not stop feeling sick; the stomach cramps did not abate. Nothing got easier. But they did what had to be done, inch by inch, little by little; knowing there was no alternative and therefore never pausing to count the cost.

  By the time they had got themselves ready it was nearly ten o’clock. There was no real question of checking further on the others; it was enough to ride up a couple more decks than necessary, check with Tsirtos that the tugs were on schedule, then ride back down again in the blessed lift.

  They took it for granted that the helm was—at the very least—still in the hands of the indomitable Robin. With luck, they reckoned, some others up there would have pulled themselves together by now as well. And, indeed, it seemed so: for as they exited the port A deck bulkhead doorway into the terrible night, all the deck lights came on.

  In out of the massive howling blackness, there still tumbled gigantic seas, rearing out of the shadows, foam-webbed but slick like the backs of incredible monsters. The cloud cover was gone, however, save for a high, light scud; and the moon and stars were out.

  Once in a while, at random points all around the compass card, great bolts of lightning would plunge down, defining the inner edges of the storm. On a level that was almost subliminal, below the occasional noises close by, they could hear the insane cacophony of it—like Armageddon all around them; in the distance and coming closer.

  From side to side, the storm covered more than a thousand miles. A thousand miles of towering clouds reaching from wave-top to troposphere in unbroken columns of swirling air thirty thousand feet high; a thousand miles of banshee winds gusting to one hundred and fifty miles per hour, a thousand miles of waves whipped up house-high from abyssal trough to mountainous crest.

  But at the middle of the circl
e, at the hub of this madly whirling wheel, there was a disk of calm over one hundred miles across: the eye.

  Around the outer edges of the eye the black battlements of cloud rose up. Through them the wild winds raved. Down them jumped the lightnings. Out of their foundations ran the tall, tall seas. But within them there was calm.

  Down the center of Prometheus’s deck, among the pipes, fifteen feet in the unquiet air, three feet wide with railings four feet high, nine hundred feet long, there was a catwalk. There were eight steep steps up to it from the restless, foam-washed deck. Up these they went, in Indian file, Richard first and McTavish last, all hanging on to the railings for dear life. Although the wind had dropped, and the rain and clouds had gone for the time being, the sea was still running murderously high and the combination of movement and slipperiness was fatally dangerous to their weak legs and uncertain feet. Time and again one or another of them would go forward, back, to one side or the other with bone-shaking force. Elbows and knees had the flesh on them bashed away. Ribs were bruised, welted, cracked. Every few yards someone would turn and retch helplessly down onto the deck.