The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  And sure enough, although the forward, smaller lifeboat hung in splinters from its davits, the other two big boats, each capable of carrying forty at a pinch, were gone. It came to him then, with a force that brought a cry of alarm to his lips, that he was utterly alone on the doomed ship. Alone except for the man whose face he had just beaten in.

  He tensed himself to dash down the length of the deck, past that horrific column of fire, to his life raft, hidden under the spare anchor on the forecastle head.

  But then, above the dreadful roaring of the fire, he heard a voice. “Here’s one!” it yelled to someone far away. Close by, between him and his distant goal. No way past but to kill again.

  The murderer turned. “Here!” he called.

  A figure appeared beside him, its features masked in shadow. The only light on the stricken ship coming from the column of fire before the bridge. “Glad to’ve found you,” said the figure. “Seen any of the others?”

  “Who’s still missing?” asked the murderer, as though he, too, had been looking.

  “Nobody’s seen the chief since the generators went.”

  “No,” said the murderer. “I went down to the Engine Room to see if I could help, but there’s nobody there at all.”

  “You sure? We’d hate to lose the chief.”

  “Absolutely certain,” said the murderer decisively. “If there was anyone alive down there I’d definitely have seen him.”

  “That’s it, then,” said the other. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Richard fought to keep the big lifeboat snug against the side of his blazing ship as the last of Salah Malik’s search party climbed down the rope ladder into her. Even down here the sound and the heat were incredible. He licked the sweat off his upper lip and squinted upward, trying to see how many more were to come.

  The smaller lifeboats, the port one of which he and Martyr had used to rescue Slope, had been reduced to kindling by the blast. They had taken the two large ones from the starboard side, though all of them could have fitted into one in a pinch, in case they needed extra of anything, or in case the equipment in one proved faulty. Robin was in charge of the other one. If he looked over his shoulder he would be able to see her lights seemingly on the horizon, but actually only a couple of hundred yards distant. She had McTavish and Rice with her, together with Kerem Khalil, “Twelve Toes” Ho, and some of the wounded.

  He had the rest with him and was waiting now only for Tsirtos, Ben, John Higgins, Martyr, Napier, an unknown number of GP seamen—say five. That meant ten in all still missing.

  While he waited, his mind was occupied, his stinging eyes were busy, watching the silhouetted figures coming over the high side, then changing magically from black to white against the black cliff of Prometheus’s hull. After Malik only two more figures appeared, and he began to fear the worst even before John, the first aboard, came up the length of the boat and reported. “Tsirtos is gone, Richard. The shack is a mess. It looks sabotaged to me. I doubt he even had time to send a mayday. Napier and the chief are still missing. Salah says two of his men are also unaccounted for. There must be seven more seamen and stewards dead. We’ve searched everywhere. No sign of life at all. And, with the generators down now too, I’m afraid there’s no real chance of finding anyone else, even if they’re still alive.”

  He had hardly finished speaking when Ben was at his side, and his terse report confirmed everything the second mate had said. “That’s it, then,” said Richard crisply. “Let’s go before she blows. There’ll be time to mourn them later, when all the rest are safe.”

  He gunned the engine and pulled the tiller toward him. The big lifeboat gathered way, heading out into the cool dark to join her sister in a great arc to starboard.

  Nobody was sitting idle. By the light of the big battery-and oil-powered lamps, they were tending the wounded, most of whom had suffered bad cuts from flying glass; a few of whom had been deafened and blinded and scorched by the blast. Luckily nobody was too badly hurt. The simple fact was that the explosion had been so fierce that anyone who had been close enough to get themselves seriously injured was dead. Only those well clear or well protected had survived, though everybody, it seemed, was covered in scratches, cuts, and bruises.

  While the wounded were being seen to by Ben and Malik, John was checking through the stores, starting, in the light of what they now suspected about Tsirtos, with the radio. Nobody had much to say, or any real occasion to speak. There was the odd murmured instruction to a wounded man, a stifled groan or two; but generally, as they came out of the rumble of the fire into the silence of the night, there was only the growl of the lifeboat’s engine and the soft slap of the waves.

  So the concern in John’s voice as he said to Ben, “Would you mind shining that lamp over here a moment?” was evident to everyone at once.

  “What is it?” asked Richard.

  “Dunno. This radio…Thanks, Ben…”

  The silence returned for a few more minutes, then, “Nope. That’s the damnedest thing. Ben, was it okay when you tested it?”

  “Fine,” replied the first mate. Then, with gathering concern, “Why…”

  John interrupted him. “Could anyone have put them out of action since?”

  “Wouldn’t have thought so…. Captain?”

  “You’re right, Ben. It’s not very likely. And the cover was still on when we swung her down.”

  “There you are, then,” said Ben morosely.

  “But has it been sabotaged?” asked Richard, thinking grimly of what he had been told of the mess in the Radio Shack.

  “Hard to tell.” John was still fiddling with it, trying to find out what was wrong. “Probably find that out when I find out why it’s not working.”

  Silence returned until they came within hailing distance of Robin’s boat. Then she called across, “Our radio’s been sabotaged. Whole panel of transistors gone. How about yours?”

  “The same,” yelled back John.

  Ben left the man he was nursing. “Maybe we’d better check in case anything else has been mucked about with since my last full inspection,” he whispered. He needn’t have bothered lowering his voice. His words carried clearly to everyone on both boats.

  They looked as carefully as they could under the light of the lamps, and everything else seemed fine until Richard, almost out of sight now of the blazing Prometheus, checked the compass. No matter where it was pointed, the needle remained glued to N on the card. Robin’s was the same. Even when N was pointed due south by the faint, cloud-masked stars, and the overcast gathered rapidly so that the stars soon were obscured. In the end, the captain and his third mate simply put their backs to the distant column of light that marked their wounded ship, and hoped that they were sailing east into an African dawn.

  They were still so far from land that the sun rose through the sea ahead. It was a sudden thing, almost like an explosion. One moment the horizon was a steady line above which the cloudless sky was like a duck’s egg gilded with almost transparent foil. Then the sea lit up, first at a point, then from north to south, a dazzling emerald as the sun shone through it. And this was only the beginning. As soon as the rim of the sun peeped over the edge of the world, it sent great beams speeding almost visibly toward them, through the cobweb tendrils rising with silent majesty off the slick backs of the waves. All around them, the huge sea, heaving rhythmically in the dead calm with the great green rollers that would pound Africa in time, was smoking with greater and greater intensity. The nascent fog, rising out of the heart of a warm current into the crisp chill of the clear morning, gave the beams of the rising sun form and substance, seeming to flatten them first into great blades; eventually obscuring them altogether. By midmorning visibility was down to a matter of yards. Richard had a rope secured between the two boats in case they lost each other. The sun became a pale copper disk. At noon, instead of making his usual announcements, the captain said a service for the dead. Nobody felt like eating. The afte
rnoon began to pass. They remained lost, but safely wrapped in a cocoon of coolness. Richard did not look forward to the moment when a blazing tropic sun burned that protective layer away and revealed to them all the immensity of the ocean on which their frail little boats bobbed so helplessly. Prometheus had been so vast that she had kept them utterly apart from the seas they were sailing. The contrast, when it came, was likely to be a shock.

  For another day and two more nights they drifted in the fog. The boats, held almost magically in still water at the confluence of three great currents drifting south, nevertheless were pushed by what fitful wind there was so that their heads kept turning north. Indeed, at dawn on the third day, Ben Strong, who had the tiller of the lead boat, looked unbelievingly as the sun lit up the emerald sea behind his right shoulder instead of dead ahead. So surprised was he, for he had been certain that they were heading due east, that it took him a moment or two to realize that the fog had gone. The boats were still tied together and he glanced back into Robin’s boat where Rice was dozing at the helm. Nobody seemed to have noticed how badly off course they were. Good. He put her over and took them in a gentle arc toward the bright new dawn. Richard felt the change at once and looked up from under lowered lids, noting what was happening before he apparently went back to sleep.

  Two days in the fog had been frustrating, occasionally almost frightening, but in the end simply a sort of waste of time. With little or no idea where they were heading, they kept only rudimentary logs, though sometime during each watch, the watch officer made some kind of observation on the state of sea, weather, anything else of interest; and added a guess as to where they were and which way they were pointing. There was a surprising lack of tension, even though it was plain to all that they were in the middle of something mysterious, murderous. Richard made sure that they talked the situation through—though he kept his own suspicions quiet—and they concluded with the rueful cheerfulness of people who have been the victims of a practical joke that the saboteur must only have wanted them out of communication for a while: not out of the way permanently. They had plenty of food and water—all untouched. They were in busy sea lanes and not too far from land. They were cocooned by the fog—it was like being wrapped in cotton wool. Apart from the boredom, it might almost have been taken for a holiday. A lark. There was no real sense of danger at all.

  The third day changed all that. The sun slid up out of the water into a strange hazy shadow line that in the tropics appears at the foot of the sky on clear dawns and sunsets. Moments later it was filling the sky with a disproportionate amount of glare and both Ben and Rice found themselves steering toward it with their eyes shut, so fierce was the brightness ahead.

  The simple change in the weather was enough to alter the tenor of life in the boats, just as Richard had feared it would. As the sun went higher, so the horizons withdrew all around. The wider the horizons became, the smaller the boats seemed. Their total fragility, riding on the back of the Atlantic as though it were some fierce but sleepy monster, was brought home to everybody in an overwhelming rush as they woke. They had grown used to seeing the ocean from a great distance, tamed by the size of the tanker. Now they were face-to-face with it. All too aware of its unimaginable force; its overwhelming capacity for violence. Even its simple depth became a source of fearful wonder. They sat in silence looking over the side. The ocean floor lay some three thousand fathoms, eighteen thousand feet, two-thirds of the height of Everest beneath them.

  With visibility so good, there was no need for the boats to remain tied together, so the line was slipped and Robin’s boat came up alongside Richard’s. They both took the next watch and sat, side by side, separated by as little water as possible, watching their crew with increasing concern. John was in his element, of course. Ben was fine. Rice and McTavish weren’t too happy. Malik and Ho were hard at work trying to keep some spirit in their men. While covered with the fog, they had tried all the singing, storytelling, jokes, and games they knew, and now everyone was being required to recall anything new, or to recount the favorites. Under other circumstances it might have been an interesting cross-cultural exercise, but not now. Now everyone watched listlessly as the great swells came out of the west behind them, seesawing them rhythmically, but seeming to push them no nearer to land. Even the stewards had given up betting on which of each series would be biggest.

  The fishing contest seemed a stroke of genius. It galvanized them as soon as Richard suggested it. As the lines were being prepared, a babble of excitement spread between the boats. The stewards arranged a dazzling array of wagers. The more staid Palestinians joined in of course, many of them the offspring of generations of fishermen. McTavish glowed, having fished the Clyde estuary from Largs to Ardrossan as a boy. Ben looked down his nose at them like a schoolmaster with an unruly form, but he took a line. Then, thinking that no one was looking, he took another and tied them both together, doubling the length and the number of hooks. John became adjudicator, even though he was taking part himself. Watch officers, it was decided, should remain aloof. Such tinned meat as they had would have to do for bait. The lines were readied, and on John’s signal, dropped. A concentrated silence descended. The boats moved apart slightly. They had to. With more than twenty lines out, the risk of a massive tangle was high. The contest began.

  The day was hot and bright. The sun might have been overpowering, but the steady south wind that had blown away the fog remained surprisingly cool. The boats rose and fell easily on the shoulders of the great waves. The water was limpidly clear, though once in a while the telltale rainbow effect would blemish the glassy surface, showing where oil had been spilled. Every now and then they would see small black globules of tar. The first man to pull in his line, certain that his bait must have fallen off, found his hands covered in sticky black marks.

  One of the stewards caught the first, a small tuna. He made much of the effort required to pull it in, drawing out the performance skillfully, convincing the others that he had caught something big. Taking it off the hook for him, John said to them all, “Remember. If you hook into anything really big, just let your line go.” He said it without thinking, and it was a wise thing to say; but it reawoke that very element that Richard had been most hard put to quiet: the nervousness they all felt at the simple size of the ocean.

  As the morning wore on, the sea moderated and the waves became smaller, though they continued to roll silently by, like the backs of huge fish. With their attention on their lines, they all became intensely aware that they had entered one of the great currents of the deep, at the point when the Canary current swings west to become the North Equatorial current. It jerked and pulled at the lines like a live thing. One moment they would all stretch away to port then for no reason they would be pulled to starboard, kicking and twisting as the strength of the water grasped them. The lines plunged down out of sight, though the water remained so clear you would have thought the seabed should have been easily visible, and there was no way of telling what was at the bait. Even John became depressed, unconsciously suffering from agoraphobia and an overwhelming sense of his own frailty. Suddenly a particularly vicious cross-current tore at the lines and there was pandemonium in the bow of Robin’s boat. One of the stewards, convinced the current was the jaws of some monster clamped around his line, had let go of his tackle with a cry of fear. “He say it just pull an’ pull,” yelled Ho to the adjudicator. “He say he couldn’t hold on no more.”

  “It was just the current,” John called back bracingly.

  “Maybe yes. Maybe no. You look out all same.”

  Ben gazed dreamily into the limpid water. The effort of holding the long line had proved too arduous for him some time ago and so he had just tied it to the boat’s side and was sitting with one finger on the bright, braided nylon line, daydreaming contentedly.

  Noon came and went. There was no change of watch. Some of Ho’s stewards desultorily set about preparing lunch. It would be baked beans. The meat content of this partic
ular meal was being offered to the fish.

  “Hey,” called Ben in the middle of this, “I’ve got a bite!” He knelt up on his seat, leaning over the side like an excited boy, pulling in his catch hand over hand. Lunch forgotten, the men in Richard’s boat strained round to see.

  The line stretched straight down in the still water, jerking and jumping as the still invisible fish fought every inch of the way. After a few minutes he came to the knot that joined the two lines and he wrapped the heavy-duty nylon round his hand for a breather.

  “There it is,” shouted someone excitedly. Vague at first, but becoming clearer as it swam up, trailing the line behind it, came a large tuna, its blue-and-silver flanks flashing. “Twenty, twenty-five pounds,” said John knowledgeably. “We’ll have a job getting that one aboard.”

  “What’s that?” Robin’s voice came sharply over the water. She had pulled closer so that her lot also could see Ben’s tuna come aboard. She was leaning over the side, looking down. “There…No…But there was something.” She looked across at Richard. “Something big.”