The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  “It’s bleeding a bit,” said Ben cheerfully. “You probably just saw the blood.”

  “Better get it up quickly, then,” snapped Richard. But he was too late.

  “There!” called Robin urgently. She said more, but her words were drowned out in the pandemonium.

  Ben, the line still wrapped around his hand, was slammed against the thwart. His arm stretched out, a taut extension of the humming spitting line. He looked down unbelievingly. The tuna was gone. In its place, a mere sixty feet away, firmly attached by the tangle of line to his right hand, was a hammerhead shark. Not a monster by any means. A powerful, deadly fifteen-footer. The line angled out of the corner of its mouth, stretching up behind the protuberance housing its left eye. It didn’t seem to know that it had been caught. Yet. One more beat of its majestic tail was enough, though. The flat, alien head turned. Even as Richard leaned forward to cut the line, the hammerhead turned back and began to circle inquisitively around the two frail boats.

  After a few minutes it was joined by another, a twelve-foot tiger this time.

  Then another…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The danger of the element they were now so close to could not have been brought home to the dejected crew more clearly. Above the surface, everyday normality. Below it, scant inches of wood and fiberglass away, was horror and death. And, as if to emphasize the lesson, the dangerous predators followed them, cruising in menacing circles around them, every now and then brushing against side or keel with a sound like distant thunder.

  And so the rest of the day passed, with Richard and Robin sitting together with the thinnest possible strip of water between them, the only contented people there. At sunset, the watches changed. Ben, recovered from his shock, came back to relieve Richard; McTavish came back to relieve Robin, and Richard stood up so that he could move down his boat with her, the need to be near her almost unbearably strong in him.

  And, because he was standing up, the only one doing so at that moment, and because he was looking away from the sunset into the crystal calm of the gathering night, he saw her first, surprisingly close at hand, her upper works painted blood-red by the rays of the setting sun. He knew her at once, although he could not see her name. There could not be two like her. No other would present all those black windows, lacking the glass to reflect the sun. No other would have that great scar up the middle of her bridge. And he knew her as a parent knows its child, by something deeper than sight.

  She had crept up to catch them unawares, because the watch had been watching the sharks or each other and not the horizons, and because she was moving in silence like a ghost, like the Flying Dutchman sailing north. Drifting without her engines. Safe, with the fire out.

  Robin rose and followed his gaze the second she realized he had frozen where he stood. So it was she who had whispered, horror-struck, “Look!”

  One by one, it seemed, they turned, and an awed murmur went through them like a breeze through dried grass. They watched in scarce-believing silence, each a prey to myriad conflicting emotions, as Prometheus, back from the dead, drifted down on them.

  All of a sudden, Richard, for all his misgivings, was possessed of a fierce joy; an immense feeling of the goodness of life filled every fiber of his lean, hard body. It was one of those moments that come to men and women when they know without a shadow of a doubt that what faces them, no matter how daunting, is the task that they above all others were put upon earth to overcome.

  Still standing, he began to speak, his ringing tones dragging their eyes back from the silent ship to their shining captain, outlined in fire by the setting sun. “At least one person here doesn’t want us to go back aboard: the person who sees Prometheus as what she was always meant to be: a coffin ship. A worthless hulk brought cheaply up to scratch so that she can be lost at sea as part of an insurance fraud. There is someone among us, perhaps more than one person, who knows she cannot be allowed to come safe to port in Rotterdam. And I believe that behind this person, behind the whole sickening mess, stands the owner, Kostas Demetrios, involved in an act of fraud. Nothing else makes sense.

  “But Prometheus is my command and I will bring her home, to expose the fraud. I will bring her home for my father-in-law whose oil fills her holds and who stands to lose everything if I do not. I will bring her home for us, who have been cheated, tricked, lied to, and killed to make a rich man richer. And I will bring her home for herself, because she is not a worthless hulk but a great lady: perhaps the greatest I have ever sailed aboard, and I will not let her die.

  “So I’m giving any secret enemies in our midst fair warning. I’m taking my Prometheus home come hell or high water. And the only way you’ll stop me is to kill me.”

  Robin, still on her feet in her boat beside him, added dryly, “And me.” Her narrowed eyes raked the boat and a shark’s back rumbled against the keel. Then Ben was up, and John and all the rest of them, crazily, carried away, cheering once more until the boats began to rock dangerously and they had to sit down.

  When the cheering died, Richard sat at his helm once more and led them past the lazily cruising sharks, back toward Prometheus.

  As they drew closer, however, their buoyant confidence began to diminish under her icy air of desolation. It was all too easy to see the ghosts of their dead friends and enemies in the shadows gathered behind her shattered windows. It was hard not to hear them whisper in the lapping wavelets against the black precipices of her leeward side or in the thunder of surf as the occasional roller broke against the iron cliff of her windward side. The rapidly gathering dark brought with it a chill after the clear, hot day; a chill that seemed to emanate from her, making her strange to them and eerily forbidding.

  Quietly, a little nervously, they came down her leeward side, under the accommodation ladder folded level with the deck almost fifty feet sheer above their heads. They snugged the heads of their boats at the exact point where Richard had held his more than three days ago, waiting for the last search party to come off, down the rope ladder.

  But the ladder was gone.

  They continued around, to the windward side of the silent, forbidding hulk. But that, too, was empty—there was no other way to scale her sheer sides.

  Richard watched the pale afterglow of sunset, deep in thought. This was going to be even more difficult than he had anticipated. He had assumed the ladder would still be in place and had planned to send the engineering officers up it to restart the generators so the accommodation ladder could be lowered for the rest of them. They had to use the accommodation ladder somewhere in the scheme because they would never get the wounded up otherwise. It had been all very well helping them down rope ladders in the emergency of the fire when there had been no alternative—and when several had fallen into the water anyway; but expecting them to climb one now—even had there been one—with the hungry sharks waiting for one wrong move, was simply out of the question.

  But now it looked as though he was going to have to come up with some alternative. And fast.

  More to keep them occupied than because he thought they had missed anything on the first circuit, he moved the lifeboat forward and began another circuit of the forbidding ship.

  The air of desolation had been depressing when they first approached her. Now it was overpowering. The last light of the brief tropical evening gleamed on her upper bridge works. All the rest was fast-thickening gloom. In almost shuddering silence they rounded her stem, innocent now of bow wave as she drifted without headway on the gray-black sea. They went wide enough to look up the full length of her just as the last light left her, leaving the scarred bridge gray as a corpse’s face.

  The crystal beauty of the night, star-bright in the east already, only served to make her look worse by comparison, and the lightest breeze, blowing over them toward Africa, suddenly brought the charnel stench of her, an overpowering amalgam of burned steel and blown flesh.

  One of the stewards leaned shakily over the side and began to vomit. The
others were muttering ner vous ly, overcome by her unexpected hostility. The air of tension became almost palpable.

  So that several of them actually cried out with shock when, just at the very moment they were passing underneath it, the accommodation ladder jumped noisily into motion and, apparently under its own sinister volition, hissed out and down to meet them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Martyr woke up in hell. A New Englander, born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, he had a clear idea what hell would be like—it would be a hot place, full of pain. It would be filled with the roaring of those eternal fires whose stench would make breathing another agony. Shafts of firelight would gleam through billows of acrid smoke like the livid glow of a distant furnace. Hell would be full of caverns—perhaps as many as there were mansions in heaven—and in each cavern would be a soul like his own, condemned to roast forever on the hot metal floor.

  He sat up and his head swam, pulling him back to a nauseous reality. He rested for a few moments, gathering his strength. Then he tried to stand. His first attempt wasn’t too successful. He staggered like a terminal drunkard until his feet crunched on something unexpectedly and the surprise made him lose his footing again.

  Sitting on the floor, he explored in the darkness with his fingers, trying to find what had caused him to fall. It was the broken torch. More than broken, by the feel of it: smashed to pieces. The memory flashed into his head of a figure cloaked in darkness behind a blaze of light, throwing itself at him, wrestling him down, bludgeoning him about the head in the shadows with a torch.

  Rage came. Sheer, overwhelming, bone-deep, blood-hot red rage.

  It was a feeling he knew well. It was part of him more than any other feeling in the world. “I’ll get you, you son of a bitch,” he said. And the rage gave him the strength to stand.

  He felt his way to the door and opened it. He was just about to step outside when his dazed mind warned him that he did not know which door this was. There were several doors opening from the Engine Control Room. One led to the corridor. The others led to balconies overlooking the engine. If he walked off one of those in the dark, he would simply fall to his death. He laboriously knelt, feeling sick and slightly foolish, and checked with his fingertips. The linoleum of the corridor: not the patterned metal of a balcony. He was safe so far.

  His mind had been suggesting subliminally for a time that the battering about his head might have affected his ears. Now he consciously took on the problem and found the logical answer: he was not going deaf, the fire was dying down. He stood again and walked purposefully out into the corridor. Apart from the fitful roar, the ship was absolutely silent. He felt his way along the corridors and up the eerie stairways.

  There was dawn light enough to see the charnel house of the crew’s quarters. By the time he made it up onto the deserted bridge, the sun was coming up, bringing the first ghostly tendrils of fog. Martyr sat in the captain’s chair and wondered what he should do first. Wondered what he should do, period. He was the only man left alive on a drifting, half-derelict hulk. It seemed unlikely that she would blow up now, but in becoming less of an immediate danger to Martyr, she at once became a terrible hazard to other shipping. She was drifting, without lights or horn to give warning of her presence, through busy sea lanes in a thickening fog. If the watch officers of passing ships weren’t very wide awake indeed, there could be a major catastrophe here. Which would be all the better for that murderous little bastard Demetrios.

  He sat for a long time, thinking dark thoughts about his relationship with Kostas Demetrios, such as it was, and the Greek’s fail-safe scheme. While to Richard the owner seemed American, to Martyr he seemed Greek. Still, the Greek had paid the American’s share up front, quite a lot of money, simply to turn a blind eye to the one extra circuit that would automatically open the sea-cocks—and make sure nobody else got too suspicious about it if they found it—and the money was performing its designated function now; so that even this way the sea was giving back a little of what it had stolen from him.

  Obviously, the first thing to do would be to get the generators working again. Without them, Prometheus was worse than helpless. And there was clearing up to be done. He would need light for that. And after. Plenty of light. He needed those generators.

  But they were down in the Engine Room where the sun never shone. So, step one was to find another torch. Simple.

  Why the diesel-powered alternators should have chosen to switch themselves off when they did was something that Martyr was never able to fathom. There seemed nothing wrong with them when he looked at them closely under the bright beam of a battery-operated lantern some twenty minutes later, and they started with ease. After the first kick and bellow of sound, light flooded the Engine Room and he felt comforted somehow. He patted the bellowing machine and turned away. He had taken four steps precisely when the realization of what he might actually have done swept over him.

  When it came right down to it, his involvement, expensively bought, consisted only of one thing: turning a blind eye to the one circuit down here that could not be explained. The one circuit that the real accomplice would close in order to open the sea-cocks, if the generators were still running.

  He stood there, frozen with the certainty that this was what his mysterious assailant had been doing down here the better part of twelve hours ago. The sea-cocks had obviously remained closed then, but what if that were only because the generators had failed? What if they were opening now?

  Impulsively he turned back and killed the power, plunging the Engine Room into echoing silence and darkness again. He strained his ears. Could he hear the sound of water gushing into her? He could hear little. Not enough to distinguish between imagination and actuality. Cursing quietly to himself, he reached down and lit the lantern again. Was it enough just to cut the wires? He wondered. Possibly. But even in these circumstances his natural professionalism overcame him. He laboriously followed the wire to the hidden switch and checked that it was in fact turned off before he would allow himself to feel satisfied or safe.

  He was a man well acquainted with death and it seemed to him fitting that, above all the others, he should have been chosen by fate as an undertaker. He moved the bodies and pieces of bodies—mostly Palestinian—into the ship’s cold room. His inclination was to throw them overboard, but some glimmer of rational behavior stayed alive during those hours, hazed as they were by shock and concussion. Some certainty that at last Prometheus would be found and taken in tow, as she had been to Durban, and then there would be full reckoning for Demetrios, and the dev il to pay.

  He lost a day altogether, working like an automaton at instantly forgotten tasks. He slept, without knowing it, wherever his legs gave out, and woke to take up where he had left off, apparently mere seconds later. Night drove him belowdecks because one of the more eccentric side effects of the blast was that, while much of the equipment seemed untouched, every light bulb in the front of the bridge was smashed. He woke at noon on the third day and found himself, much to his surprise, in the captain’s chair on the bridge. His overalls were stiff with filth. His long, aching body stank foully. He was nursing an empty pint bottle of bourbon and the mother and father of all hangovers. His mind, for the first time since the murderer clubbed him with the torch, was absolutely clear.

  During the next three hours he toured the ship from stem to stern, giving her a thorough inspection; surprised to find how clean and tidy she was. Surprised to find just how much he had done while concussion blanked almost everything out. The tour, unsurprisingly, ended at the engine, and, as far as he could tell, this, like the generator, was undamaged and would start again, if asked. As long as there was enough oil in the bunker-age. But it would be pointless to get under way. He could not hope to control Prometheus on his own. Far better to let her drift and hope she kept out of trouble. But the idleness, once his elementary engine checks were complete, drove him up to the bridge once more, to keep an eye out for any passing ships.


  And so it was that he, standing high and armed with powerful binoculars, though looking almost directly into the setting sun, saw the forlorn specks of the lifeboats long before anyone aboard had any idea that the stricken giant was drifting down on them. His first impulse was to let them know he was here, but it was dismissed instantly. Instead, he veiled his eyes calculatingly and returned to the captain’s chair. Here he sat, lost in thought as the sun set and the three craft closed together. By the time Richard saw Prometheus the chief was in the forecastle head watching through carefully shaded binoculars, taking careful note of who was there.

  He had just pulled up the rope ladder when the lifeboats came buzzing in and paused, like strange water beetles, puzzled at the point where it should have been. He gave a lean smile. Good. Now they would have to wait for him to welcome them aboard in his own way. As far as he was concerned, after all, one of them had tried to kill him and the rest had simply left him to die. He found he was deeply disappointed in Richard Mariner, though. He would have reckoned on the tall Englishman for at least one search party. It never occurred to him that the search party might have been fooled by the murderer’s lies. So he busied himself as they explored the other side, and was in position when they came back, with his next few moves at least worked out.