The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  But the simple fact was that he had to go aboard somehow, to night. There was no alternative. First thing in the morning, the investigators would arrive. Investigators from Rotterdam, Lloyd’s, Scotland Yard, the FBI, and God knew where else. And the first thing they would do would be to check in the tanks. And the next thing they would do would be to come looking for him.

  And the only way he could think to make good use of the bomb was to get the damn thing aboard. His only real hope was to get it somehow into the ullage where the scum from the unwashed tanks would have oozed enough lethally explosive gas to blow what was left of Prometheus apart.

  And he had known in his bones for an hour and more that the only way to get across was going to be to swim. And luckily, he had come prepared even for that eventuality. He pulled out the wetsuit from on top of the bomb and started to put it on.

  Richard sat in his dayroom, staring at the blank ply over his window, with Robin curled at his feet. Her shoulder rested on the right leg of the chair and her golden head rested on his thigh. She was exhausted, sound asleep. As was her father, gray with fatigue, in the owner’s suite. He was on his last legs himself, staring mindlessly at the wood with its swirls of grain like sea ribs on pale sand. He should be writing up the log. The Accident Reports. This was his first chance to do any paperwork since Bill Heritage had pulled the pair of them back aboard nearly forty-eight hours ago with Robin’s kisses still burning on his lips. That was the moment he was trying to record in the log. The power of the emotion that memory brought was all that was keeping him awake.

  No. Not all that was keeping him awake. There was something else. A formless sense of something. Too imprecise even to be called a feeling. Danger. Much less powerful than the sensation that had traveled magically up through the soles of his feet as his command had begun to come apart. It was nothing he could feel, even subconsciously. It was perhaps only the feeling that it was all but over and they were safe, that feeling twisted into a worry by all that had gone before. A thought. A fear. An unprovable certainty.

  They were not safe yet. They ought to be but they were not. Not here. Not anywhere above the waves. Not like this. Not as they were, in one piece. Not now. Not until it was too late to stop the inspection. The report. It was almost too much to ask. After what they had been through already, it might well be too much. But he had to ask it. He had to go round and wake them all up. That was why they were still here, after all.

  He had insisted on remaining aboard, on keeping his own watch instead of letting the Dutch harbor watch take over. The port authorities had allowed it, understandingly; and doubled the security on the dock. It was the dock nearest the sea, farthest from the other ships and the refineries. The closest Europoort had to an isolation dock. If they could not have put them, effectively, in quarantine, the careful Dutch would never have allowed them in here.

  But were they well enough quarantined? Not from Demetrios. Never from the owner, until his fraud had been exposed.

  Facing this, at the end of his long, weary, meandering train of thought, forced him into action. He slammed the log shut loud enough to disturb Robin, though this was not his object. She sat up sleepily and he rose stiffly, feeling ancient and arthritic, and stooped to help her to her feet. He was about to lift her into his arms and carry her through into his cabin and his bunk, but once she was on her feet she stopped him. “What is it with you?” she asked. “It’s like being in love with a guard dog.”

  He smiled wearily at her. “I know.” His voice was rusty with fatigue. “I’m a natural-born worrier.”

  “Okay,” she acquiesced. “So let’s go guard something.”

  He nodded. “Not something. Everything.”

  She sobered down. “You think he’s coming?”

  “Maybe not him.”

  “But someone?”

  “Sure as death.”

  “Tonight?”

  “To night is all they’ve got.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  They went out together, side by side, as though going on patrol in the jungle.

  Rice was keeping an eye on the generators. McTavish was with Martyr on the bridge, waiting for them. Quine dozed in the captain’s chair, beside the quiet radio. They had run a landline from the shore and a telephone lay in a cradle beside it. John went over toward the sleepy radio officer as soon as he saw Richard, but the captain smiled and shook his head: let the boy sleep. The youngest and the oldest aboard could sleep undisturbed. For the time being. If all went well.

  Salah looked up from where he was standing by the wheel and met their eyes in the glass. Kerem, at Salah’s shoulder, swung round.

  Richard paused in the door with Robin at his side. Just for a second they looked around the bridge and in that time their eyes met every other pair of eyes there.

  No word was said, no obvious message exchanged. Yet when Richard turned away, they were all, except John, behind him.

  Damn! The water was cold. No—beyond cold: it was freezing. He eased himself into it inch by inch, thanking God he had got the full wetsuit, just in case. Also what he should have got, he thought ruefully, was flippers. And some way of carrying the bomb through the water. It had been heavy enough on land, but as soon as he tried to swim with it slung over his shoulder, he became certain it was going to drag him under to his death. Reluctantly, he turned round and regained the shore.

  He sat there, breathless, looking across at the great hulk of his ship. In a fit almost of temper, he hooked his left thumb into the big metal ring on the zipper of his wetsuit and jerked it down to his belly. The metal teeth of the zipper parted and he automatically began to scratch his chest as he looked around. There was no lighting on this side of the anchorage, but the security lighting cast enough light across the water for him to see everything around him here. He didn’t have to look for long. Unusually for Holland, but inevitably for any seashore, there was a line of jetsam at the high water mark, and among it was a half-collapsed cardboard box with a picture of a television on the side.

  Demetrios felt a sudden flood of energy. He jumped to his feet and crossed to the box. Two kicks burst it. At either end, originally designed to protect the set in transit, where firm trays of polystyrene. He took them out of the cardboard and carried them speculatively to the water. One on top of the other, they made a raft that was so buoyant it hardly seemed to penetrate the surface. Even with the bomb sitting snugly on top of them, they still had enough flotation to give him a little support. He zipped up, leaned forward, pushed it out to arm’s length, and kicked off like a kid learning to swim.

  John remained on the bridge because he was on watch. Literally, because from his elevated position, he could see the outline of the deck quite clearly under the security lighting from the dock. But all the many protuberances on the deck, from manifolds to tank caps, cast weird, sharp-edged shadows that might well conceal a saboteur, so a watch had to be kept below as well. And a search made and remade, from now until the first inspection team arrived. He crossed to the sleeping Quine and took the captain’s R/T from beside the new telephone. He removed the binoculars from their holster on the side of the chair and returned to his position by the wheel.

  A moment or two later, he was joined by two of Salah Malik’s best men, each armed with a walkie-talkie and a pair of night glasses. They nodded to him as they passed and each went out onto one of the bridge wings. Just the way they moved seemed to knot up his belly. He had never experienced anything like this before. Most of his endeavors had been lonely ones. He lived alone and raced his yacht for the most part alone. He had never before been a part of such a team. And to think, only a scant matter of weeks ago he had secretly wondered if Richard were finished. But not now. He would never doubt the man again. It was like a miracle.

  He had been there when the four of them, with Khalil’s help, had been pulled back over the brink of their ship. That brush with death, that exploration they had made into another kingdom, seemed to have added the final touc
h to their extraordinary relationship. The last doubts and suspicions had been destroyed by the destruction of the bow. To see Richard then with Robin or with Martyr was a revelation. If blood was thicker than water, it was as though they had discovered something thicker than either.

  Effectively leaving him and Rice to run the ship, with young McTavish filling in where necessary and Sir William fitting in where he could, the three of them had gone off into some sort of secret conclave. Robin had turned up first, coming onto the bridge to give John some relief while Martyr, his head bandaged, and Richard went down below and examined every inch of the hull from the Engine Room forward—as far forward as they could get.

  Richard had been back on the bridge, of course, when John and Salah’s best team had been down at the terrifying new bow taking the Dutch lines aboard. Things could hardly have reached that stage without the full involvement of the captain, who was the owner’s representative, the one person aboard empowered to agree to Lloyd’s Open Form for the salvage.

  But once they were safely under way, Richard had vanished again, first with Martyr, to clarify the last of his suspicions; and then with Robin to write his reports.

  But it had been inevitable that the pair of them should prowl back, their almost silent footsteps cloaked by the haunting wail of Nihil’s distant flute. He had known the moment Martyr appeared on the bridge that the others would not be far behind. And it was as obvious to the Manxman as to any of the others why all this was going on.

  The R/T hissed into life: “Any sign, John?” “Nothing.” He answered automatically, never for an instant wondering that Richard should have known he would be standing there, watching, with the set by his side.

  “Okay,” said Richard quietly. “We’re going out onto the deck.”

  Demetrios paused under the shadow of the blunt bow, tempted almost beyond enduring simply to put his bomb against the relatively thin metal of the tank wall and get the hell away. But such an action would not be guaranteed to bring success. Success was all that could save him now. On this one last throw of the dice rested more millions than he could readily calculate, or absolute destruction. He was not the sort of a man who would go almost all the way and then back off, saying he had done his best really; knowing he had not. He went all the way under normal circumstances, no matter what the risk or cost. He was not about to shortchange himself now. The bomb was going into one of the tanks and Prometheus was going to the bottom. In as many million little pieces as he had dollars coming.

  Thirty yards in front of the ship, a set of steps led down from the quay to the water level. Even in docks made for these oceangoing giants, some provision had to be made for smaller vessels. Demetrios swam across to these and pulled himself out of the water. Then he scampered silently up them and paused. With the bomb by his side, he crouched in the shadows, trying to catch his breath, waiting for some vigor to return to his chilled and weary body. Willing his dull brain to plan ahead.

  The quayside was deserted. It gleamed in the security lighting as though it had just been varnished. It was far too bright for his taste. But at least there was nobody obviously watching out for him. Silently on his numb bare feet, he ran for the next shadow.

  The deepest pool of darkness lay beneath a squat crane opposite the blunt end of Prometheus. He made it safely, and paused there, narrow-eyed, looking at his ship. A set of steps reached up from the quay to the deck just in front of the bridge house, but almost exactly opposite where he was standing, the automatic accommodation ladder also led down to his level, more because the mechanism was broken than because it had been set, by the look of things. That seemed his best bet. He took it without further hesitation.

  As soon as he reached the deck, he ran for the nearest shadow again. This one was at the foot of the Sampson post that had once marked the halfway point of the deck, starboard side. Now it marked the end of the ship. He flattened himself against the white-painted steel upright and looked around. The deck seemed deserted. He could see a figure in the distant bridge windows, and he suspected there would be others invisible in the shadows on the bridge wings; but the deck at least was his alone.

  He sucked in a great ecstatic breath. He had overestimated his enemies. He stood an excellent chance of pulling this off.

  But then, in the distance, the A deck doors opened and in the brightness he saw them all coming out, the beams of their torches like golden swords cutting the darkness before them.

  * * *

  Richard led the starboard team, with Kerem, Robin, and a gang of seamen to back him up. Martyr led the port team, with McTavish, Salah Malik, and more seamen. Behind these two teams, in another thin line stretching from port, overlooking the water, to starboard, overlooking the dock, came Ho and the stewards.

  They moved forward slowly, inch by inch, disturbing anything that might conceivably hide a man, their eyes busy at their feet. They remained quietly in contact with each other and with the men on the bridge, using the R/Ts that at least two of each team carried. The teams searched the most likely places methodically and thoroughly. The stewards behind them searched everywhere else. It was a system that should have been absolutely foolproof.

  And there is no doubt that if Demetrios had stayed on the deck, they would have caught him with that first sweep. But he did not. Desperately, lent a touch of genius by the pressure, he ran forward from shadow to shadow, toward the line. He was lucky. Their eyes were on their feet and they did not see the pale oval of his face or the flash of movement made by his black wet-suit. The watch on the bridge wing missed it, too, and so did John, because the wily owner chose that moment to move when one of Martyr’s men called out and all eyes were on the port side for an instant.

  There was no scupper at the edge of the deck. The flat green decking curved down to become the side without any runnel or channel to collect and guide the water. Welded to this rounded edge, just inboard of the line where horizontal green became vertical black, were the uprights supporting the deck rail. At the foot of one of these lay a small pile of rope, perhaps thirty feet in all, neatly coiled. It was obviously far too small to hide anything, and its neat, flat, circular shape made it obvious that there was nothing under it. But its edge was exactly at the foot of the upright. Demetrios saw all this and formed his plan, such as it was, in an instant. Then he had slid silently over the side, and was dangling there invisibly, a black shape against the black side, with his pale hands hidden beneath the rough coil of rope.

  A slow count of ten brought the footsteps close. Unashamedly, he squeezed his eyes tight and ground his forehead against the icy side. If they found him like this, he was lost. Watching them come nearer would only make the tension unbearable. Then their voices came. Not the captain’s, thank God; but the girl talking to one of the Palestinians. “What’s that?”

  “Where?”

  “There! By the deck rail.”

  “Rope.”

  “Right.”

  “Check it out?”

  A pause. Demetrios could feel the sweat streaming down between his tanker and his cheek. The tip of his nose itched unbearably.

  “No. Leave it. We’re falling behind anyway.”

  Their footsteps moved away. Demetrios took a great shuddering heave of breath…

  …and nearly lost it at once in a scream of fright as the rope moved. It was a Chinese steward. Demetrios had heard nothing. The man had approached on silent feet and conscientiously looked under the rope.

  But he had looked under the inboard half only. Demetrios’s hands stayed safely hidden by the outboard coils as they lay piled against the white upright.

  The movement of the rope stopped. This time he heard a sibilant shuffle of footsteps, like the slither of a snake over tiles, as the steward moved away.

  At once, near the end of his strength in any case, he began to pull himself up. He paused with his eyes at deck level and glanced around. Fortunately there was no one nearby so he did not have to wait—he could not have done so in any case, for
his muscles were jumping with fatigue. He hurled himself forward under the bottom rail. Luckily the bomb case landed on the rope with the dullest of thuds. The stewards, ten feet away, heard nothing. Sensed nothing. He was in a squat in an instant, bowed like a sprinter on the blocks. Then he was off into the shadow of the central walkway, under the fat, safe pipes.

  “Richard!” John’s voice hissed over the captain’s R/T. Demetrios could just hear it. He froze and listened, running with sweat again. How could someone as cold as he was perspire this much? He slid the heavy metal ring of his wetsuit’s zipper down to the middle of his chest absently, listening with all his might.