The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  The signal came in at midnight. Tsirtos was in the shack, not because he was really expecting the signal anymore, but because he had been put aboard to be in that place at that time and so he was. And the signal came in at midnight. Absolutely. Unmistakably. When and as expected—in spite of the fact that everything had changed.

  He made no acknowledgment: there was none to make. He simply sat, unbelieving, looking at the equipment in front of him as though it had changed, become monstrous, nightmarish.

  He knew the routine. He was to destroy the radio and then take the message to Nicoli. Nicoli would take the message to Captain Levkas. The captain would sound “abandon ship.” They would all pack their suitcases and stock up with everything they needed or wanted before reporting to the lifeboats. They would abandon leisurely but would explain to their rescuers in a day or so’s time that there had been too much urgent confusion for any logs or records to be saved.

  There would be no distress calls broadcast except from the lifeboats later.

  The last man off would be Nicoli and he would have opened the sea-cocks so Prometheus would sink swiftly, silently, and deep.

  But Nicoli and all the rest were dead. Who to tell, therefore; what to do? He sat for a moment in an agony of indecision. But he hadn’t been put here to hesitate. There was only one course of action that he could see: the one he had been preparing for since he discovered the life raft. He would do his bit and then get off Prometheus just as fast as he could. He leaned forward and hit the button he had watched Gallaher add to the equipment nearly two months ago. There was a fierce hiss from behind the radio equipment and a cloud of acrid smoke filled the shack as it all destroyed itself. He slammed the Radio Room door on the first billow and ran down toward the main deck. The sense of being alone in all this was compounded by the normality of the scenes he stealthily sped past. Past the Officers’ Galley, its door ajar, where the captain and his third officer were drinking their cocoa, looking back over the ship’s pool and her fluorescent wake in the dark sea astern; past the crews’ quarters where the hum of quiet, sleepy conversation was punctuated by the plaintive wailing of Nihil’s flute; past the Cargo Control Room, empty now, where the computers stood in rank upon rank, their lights shining like multicolored stars, overseeing the safe disposition of every drop of cargo aboard. And out through the A deck bulkhead door onto the main deck itself.

  Into the arms of “Slugger” Napier taking a breather at the end of his watch before he turned in for the night.

  “Here!” said the big Mancunian, catching hold of him. “What’s your game?”

  In a frenzy of impatience, Tsirtos tore away and ran for the forecastle head. He had gone only half a dozen steps before Napier tackled him. Wrapped around each other like all-in wrestlers, they rolled toward the Pump Room hatchway in the center of the deck immediately in front of the bridge. Desperately, knowing he would be no match for the huge English bully in anything even approaching a fair fight, Tsirtos drove his head up into Napier’s face. His forehead connected shrewdly with Napier’s nose, flattening it even more. The huge engineer pulled back and Tsirtos thought he had won. He wriggled out of Napier’s embrace and gathered himself to get up. He never even saw the left hook that caught the point of his jaw with professional perfection. His head slammed back against the deck and that was that. Like Gallaher, he was unconscious when he died.

  Gallaher’s bomb had two timers. The first, the clock, had been reading 00.00 for uncounted hours; it should have detonated days ago. It had failed to do so because Nicoli had knocked loose a wire when he touched it. The second was a much more simple device, designed to trigger five minutes after Tsirtos destroyed the radio. It was a little fail-safe the Irishman had included in this bomb to make certain it did its job. Gallaher had reckoned on being safe and sound back in Durban when it went up in any case.

  It triggered now.

  The second part of the bomb was plastique, carefully molded to spread its force sideways among the pipes like a scythe through corn. Because Nicoli had moved it, however, its force cut up and down instead of side to side. It destroyed not many pipes but one, filling the air with microscopic droplets of oil from the bunker age—the oil used to drive Prometheus’s engine.

  The third part of the bomb, designed to detonate a millisecond after the plastique, was a magnesium-based incendiary. Working with the air-suspended droplets released by the first explosion, it created a fireball that blew open the decking beneath Tsirtos and vaporized both him and Napier at once. It blew away the great steel door below and filled the corridor with flame. It would have incinerated anyone nearby, but the engineering decks were empty at that time.

  It is doubtful whether the lethal firefighting equipment could have stopped the process even had the canisters been as full as their faulty gauges boasted. But they were mostly empty, so the fire burned unabated.

  The deck split open. The Pump Room hatch flew away like a champagne cork but that was nowhere near enough to alleviate the forces unleashed by the exploding oil. The deck split open from the foot of the bridge to the front of the coffer-dam space separating the engineering area from the first cargo tank. The edges of the wound folded back, white-hot in an instant, into a gap more than ten feet wide, nearly twenty feet long.

  Up out of the steel volcano came a column of force too great to be called mere fire. As it rose it pushed the air above it to either side with incredible power.

  All the windows on the front of the bridge exploded inward.

  As it passed, it sucked air back with hurricane strength into the vacuum left behind it.

  Everything loose on the bridge was sucked out except for those things closest to the floor.

  The helmsman and the watchkeepers never stood a chance. They were mowed down by the shrapnel glass from the windows coming in. And what was left of them, before it had time to fall, before it had time to do anything other than mark the scorched back wall, was sucked back out a second later as though it had never been.

  So that John Higgins, at the rear of the port bridge wing trying to get a decent midnight shot of the stars, was aware only of a terrible screaming roar that robbed him of sense and breath, which was there and was too much to bear—and which was gone in an instant.

  John pulled himself to his feet—though he would never remember falling down—and staggered over to the bridge door. The handle was hot and the door stiff, but he tore it open and ran onto the bridge. He was utterly alone. Stunned, he looked out of the holes that had been the windows down into the volcano on the deck. The first blast may have passed but there were still combustibles out of control down there. The decking below him was curved up into a blistered, dully glowing hillock sloping most strongly to port and starboard. Through the ragged lips of the opening at its summit, white-hot flames still roared, their breath enough to singe his eyebrows, fifty feet above.

  One look was enough. He hit the emergency button.

  Then, thankfully, Richard was there by his shoulder. John had never been so glad to see anyone in his life. “You all right?” asked the captain. John could only nod.

  “Pray the PA is still working,” said Richard, coolly in control even under these unimaginable circumstances. “You’d better get below, John. Find Robin. I left her in the Officers’ Galley.” Then he spoke crisply into the microphone. “Attention. Your attention, please. This is the captain speaking. There is a fire in the Pump Room and we are in danger of exploding. Abandon ship. Abandon ship.”

  In the confusion after Richard gave the order to abandon, the man who had poisoned the soup had no real difficulty in sneaking away alone. The tanker might explode; it might not: there was still work to be done.

  The saboteur’s course was fraught with danger. The possibility of an imminent explosion he took for granted, quelling his fear with thoughts of the immensity of his reward if this continued according to plan.

  Where in hell’s name had that bomb come from? Acutely, for he was a greedy man, not a stupid one,
he suspected that the bomb had been part of the original plan, the one that had died with the bulk of Levkas’s crew. What incredible luck that it should have gone off just at the right moment. Ah, but was it good luck or bad? Only time would tell. In the meantime, there was no use crying over spilled milk. It had certainly panned out suspiciously well for the owner. No one was likely to question the loss of a ship that blew up and sank with most of the crew still aboard.

  These dark musings served to take him down to deck level where he almost met some of the crew. A line of wounded men—he could not see how badly they were hurt from the shadows where he hid himself—being led to safety by Kerem Khalil. He avoided them with ease and, pausing only to check in the burned-out wreck of the Radio Shack, he headed for his first destination.

  The Cargo Control Room was a mess too. He should have foreseen that, but it came as a surprise to him. One glance through the splintered door was enough to tell him it would be useless to enter. All the machines were dead. The shattered windows were so full of searing flames from the Pump Room that he turned away at once, drenched in sweat. So plan number one—insurance number one—was ruined. All that time setting it up in Durban had gone to waste after all. Now he had to go on down below. It was the heat, he told himself, not fear, that made him sweat. And, indeed, the heat was building fiercely as he went down. As though he were nearing the center of the earth, he told himself. Or hell. Yes, all in all hell was much more likely. But down he plunged regardless, into the bowels of the ship.

  The noise increased disproportionately as soon as he got beneath deck level. It became a deafening roar, echoing through the corridors as though the ship were bellowing like a beast in agony. He was used to the incessant grumble of engine or generators, which caused a perpetual trembling in everything aboard, but this was infinitely louder and dangerously overpowering. A deafening, disorienting din that made the floor vibrate so hard the soles of his feet itched unbearably and his teeth chattered painfully. Were the walls shaking, or was it just that his eyeballs were trembling in their sockets? Tears sprang onto his cheeks, born of the acrid smoke and the juddering of his eyes. He leaned against a rail to catch his breath, but the vibration only shot up his arm and caused his very heart to palpitate. He thought only of the half a million pounds he had been promised; it bolstered up his courage. And after a moment more he went on with his secret mission to ensure the death of the ship. Unable now to log in his secret program on the cargo control computers to move the cargo and break her in two, he was going to open the seacocks and let the Atlantic into her. Even ablaze as she was, he could not rely on her cargo blowing up. And her destruction had to be ensured.

  The Engine Control Room was empty. He glanced around it quickly and did not linger. His mission must take him farther down still.

  His procedure for opening the sea-cocks and flooding the ship was designed to be relatively simple. Down here, out of the way, in a place where it would not be too hard for the engineers to overlook it, was a switch. As soon as it was turned, the sea-cocks would begin to open. Not too complicated, even under these circumstances, which were so much worse than anything ever envisioned. And so discreet! And it was very nearly foolproof, granted only two things: granted that he could get to the switch, and granted that the generators maintained enough electrical flow to make the system work. But if the ship’s power died, the switch would be useless. And in the final analysis, after all he had been through, after all his bravery, all his intrepid greed, it was the generators that let him down. He was deep in the ship, in the same place—though on the opposite side—as the one in which Hajji had died, with his fingers actually fastened on the switch itself, illumined by the beam of his torch, when the distant lights went out and that all-important element of the background noise fell silent. He flicked the switch up and down, thwarted at last: absolutely nothing happened.

  The saboteur was overcome at once by dread. At first he imagined that the Engine Room must have flooded and he waited for several dreadful seconds anticipating that first cold lick against his legs that would tell him he was dead. It did not come. Thankfully, he began to move—the switch now useless and his presence here pointless. He turned and began to pick his way back along the path that had brought him here. His first priority now was to obey his captain’s last order and abandon.

  But his steps, which had been quick enough in bringing him here through the fully illuminated ship, were slower now. The dark was an oppressive force. It had weight. It wrapped itself around him like a blanket. The sensation became so vivid that he found it hard to breathe. He pulled a shaking hand down over his running face, gathering enough cold sweat to flick an enormous shower of it away into the massive darkness.

  In the Engine Control Room there was a glimmer of light. It did not come from any of the consoles—they were all dark. As were all the hi-tech aids on the bridge now: Prometheus without her generators was blind, deaf, dumb: dead. The light came, a reflection of a reflection, glancing off bright surfaces, round corners, up and down, from the sun-bright furnace of the Pump Room.

  And still there had been no further explosion.

  But that was nearly a miracle now. Even knowing what he knew of that, he could no longer subdue the fear under promises of massive wealth. He had to escape. Now.

  He swung the broad, bright beam of his torch over to the door and lit up the startled face of the chief engineer.

  “What…” said Martyr, blinded.

  The saboteur hurled himself forward, silently offering a prayer of thanks that the brightness of the beam masked him, but at the same time cursing the chief for being here now. Why was he here? Had he come to try to fix the generators so that the others could abandon in greater safety? Or was it he who had switched them off, trying even now to save the ship? The terrible suspicion flashed into the saboteur’s mind just as their bodies met.

  They met with a shock of force, two big men charging for each other full-tilt. The torch spun out of the saboteur’s hand and rolled away across the floor. Then, but for that vague light from the furnace at the ship’s heart, they fought in darkness. And, but for their guttural grunts of effort or pain, in silence.

  As each was aware of the other only as a darker presence in the surrounding shadows, as the slightest of sounds amid the jarring rumble of the fire, they did not stand back and fight each other scientifically. They closed with each other and half wrestled, throwing in great invisible punches where and when they could; sometimes connecting with each other, sometimes with the steel-hard objects around them. They crashed back against the doorframe, the saboteur driving his head into Martyr’s face so that the back of his head smashed stunningly against the wood. The tactic was repeated, equally successfully, before the saboteur drove his knee up into his opponent’s groin. This was not so successful. His knee hit the same edge as Martyr’s head, turning what should have been the coup de grace into a painful retreat. Martyr shambled forward, punching out by instinct, connecting once by luck. The saboteur hurled forward once more, ducking under the blows to drive his shoulder into the chief’s lean belly. The American folded forward and his opponent straightened at once, bringing the bludgeon of his skull back into play.

  This time Martyr fell to his knees, badly stunned. The saboteur stepped back and unleashed a massive kick, knocking Martyr onto all fours. Another, from the side, rolled him right over, and he kept rolling, trying to avoid the merciless feet; but he collapsed motionless in the torch’s beam as one last kick relentlessly tore into the side of his head.

  The saboteur stood, choking for breath, more shocked than exhausted, wondering feverishly what he could use as a weapon. In the final analysis he used the torch because no other club was to hand and his fists were simply too sore.

  The first blow, to the back of Martyr’s head, broke the bulb so the rest was done in darkness.

  Oddly enough, after the first three or four blows—the saboteur was striking wildly and taking no account of numbers—Martyr stirred feebly
and started fighting back. He clawed at the saboteur’s face and they wrestled briefly for a moment or two. It was an uneven struggle and the American soon collapsed back against the foot of the nearest console. He did not move again. But the victim was now lying face up, and this made a terrible difference to the would-be murderer. Blind in the darkness, he translated every variation of impact communicated to his sweating palm by the rubberized handle of the torch into a vivid mental image. With his eyes tight closed, he nevertheless saw all too clearly what he was doing as Martyr’s long face disintegrated under the wild onslaught.

  He saw teeth come bloodily through lips and splinter. He saw the chin shatter and the jawbone break open. He saw the nose crushed and the temples collapsed. He saw the whole face ruined to a gargoyle horror of a death mask before he hurled the torch aside and ran like a lunatic from the place.

  He came out onto the starboard side of the stricken ship, having run wildly through the furnace of the A deck corridor, leaving footprints of molten rubber behind him from the soles of his desert boots. The emptiness of the port side had alerted him to the probability that the main escape had been made from the opposite side while he had been on his abortive mission below.