The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  “Yes?” The captain’s crisp reply.

  “I thought I…”

  “What?”

  “No…It’s…Starboard bridge wing: did you see it?”

  “Starboard bridge watch here: Did I see what?”

  “…Nothing. It must have been nothing, then.”

  “Captain here. Okay, John. Keep looking. We’ll do another close sweep on the way back. Did you get that, everybody?”

  “Robin: affirmative.”

  “Martyr: affirmative.”

  All the rest of them.

  Demetrios slithered into the shadow of the tank cap. The cap itself stood three feet high, and it was circular with a radius of three feet. It was designed to take the great pipe that would rapidly suck the tank dry. The cap itself was almost like the top on a massive bottle, except that it was held down by a series of clamps, like a hatch cover. In the security lighting from the dock, it cast a hard shadow like the center of a sundial. On a clockface with 12 at the bridge, the shadow would be pointing at five.

  As quickly as he could, constrained only by the need for silence, he undid all the clamps concealed by the shadow, then he slowly began moving into the light, crawling to his left, toward the starboard side, fighting to keep the hatch itself between himself and the keen-eyed man on the bridge.

  Things were becoming increasingly dangerous, second by second. When he reached the point of realizing he was unlikely to walk away from this, he never knew; but the realization that he would be lucky to survive did not slow him down.

  Abruptly, the hatch moved.

  His heart lurched within him with enough force to wind him, like a punch in the belly. The rest of the clamps, the ones closest to the volcano-sided hole in the deck, must all have been broken by the explosion in the Pump Room.

  He forced his stiff body into a crouch, and he forced his fingers under the edge of the cap.

  “There!”

  The cry seemed to echo over the whole anchorage. A lesser man might have frozen. Demetrios worked even more feverishly, trying to wrestle the top of the tank off. But it was no good. One man simply could not move it. Defeated at last, he left the top to itself and used one last second to tear the bomb and the remote control out of the camera case.

  Then, just as the rush of feet gathered itself at his back, he leapt up onto the tank cap. He held the bomb just high enough for them to see it and pressed the ARM button. At once the digital readouts started to flash. They were red and looked every bit as dangerous as they actually were. He needed to do or say nothing further.

  They gathered in a circle around him, looking up; and he was almost shocked to feel the depth of their rage, and their hatred toward him. It came up from them in waves. From every shadow-etched, black-eyed face, stained old ivory by the security lighting. He had never counted on this and it frightened him most of all, because it shocked and disoriented him. He had never really thought of them as human beings, with wishes, hopes, emotions, before. He had only ever thought of them as counters. As chess pieces to be moved about, allowed to live or sentenced to die according to the dictates of his plan. Now he saw them as they really were, as people; as human beings who abominated him for what he had done. And he could identify with them completely now, for he had become one of them—though they would never recognize the fact—destined to die with them, according to the dictates of the plan.

  Richard Mariner stepped forward to face him. “You realize we are all dead if you detonate that thing?”

  “Of course.” Demetrios kept his voice calm. Certain. There was no use in letting them see that he thought they had a long chance of survival. It was an incendiary, after all, designed to burn rather than to explode. It was possible that he might detonate the thing and immolate himself without setting fire to anything else.

  Or on the other hand, he might set fire to the very air itself and destroy the whole of Europoort.

  The second possibility abruptly became the most likely: a pungent stench of petrol fumes suddenly brought tears to his eyes. He fought for breath, keeping a close watch on them as they all fell back. But then the stench began to fade and he could breathe again.

  Mariner was still talking. “Look, why don’t you just hand it over to me and we’ll talk the whole thing through…”

  Demetrios gave a bark of laughter, almost a choke. The fumes had got into his lungs. Luckily the air was clearing of them at last. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. “What do you expect? A great confession? The full story? Repentance? Forget it!”

  “Now, look…”

  “What you don’t know now, you’ll never know!” he spat. “Now back off or I press the button!” But before he could say or do anything else, he was struck with stunning force behind the knees.

  Richard had been concentrating absolutely on keeping the madman’s attention while Malik and Martyr crept round behind him, and so he saw all too clearly through the stunning flash of action that their plan was about to backfire. And it was neither of the men who tackled him after all. It was Robin. And as he fell, Demetrios pressed the button.

  But Demetrios pressed the wrong button, the button that tripped a part of the bomb he did not even know existed: a small, powerful electromagnet designed to hold the device hard against any metal surface. The bomb slammed into his chest, attracted by the nearest metal—the toggle and zipper of the wetsuit. The blow from in front and the tackle from behind knocked Demetrios back. Flat on his back. His shoulders missed Robin’s horizontal body and slammed down onto the metal of the tank cap itself. And the damaged metal sheered. Before even Richard could move—and his reactions had been honed to almost superhuman speed—the ragged disk of metal had tilted and vanished, taking with it Demetrios, Robin, and the bomb down into the gas-filled ullage.

  They all hurled themselves forward. Martyr was already at the edge, half hanging over the black hole, for he had thrown himself forward an instant after Robin. To the others as much as to him, Richard called: “Don’t breathe! It’s deadly!” His voice was raw, as though he had been screaming for many hours. If it was deadly up here, he was thinking, then what was it like down where Robin was?

  But none of them—certainly not the canny chief—really needed reminding. They all knew the sequence that Demetrios did not. It was ingrained into every tankerman there. The sequence of hydrocarbon gas poisoning. Twenty seconds—at the most three-quarters of a minute—can render the fittest man unconscious. Four minutes after that, unless oxygen is administered, serious brain damage starts; one minute more brings death. The first and only sign is a strong smell of hydrocarbon gas, which soon fades—not because the gas has gone, but because it has destroyed the nerves in the nose.

  Demetrios had smelled the gas as soon as he stepped onto the leaking tank cap. By the time he started falling, with Robin wrapped around him and the bomb still clinging to him, he was only semiconscious. And, automatically, because he was unable to think clearly, he did the most obvious thing. He took a deep breath to clear his head. His body went into spasm. His lungs automatically emptied themselves. His right hand clasped the bomb to his breast—where the gentlest movement would have freed its grasp on the zipper—and his left closed spasmodically on top of it. This time his thumb hit the DETONATE button, just as his body hit the scum-thick surface of the water, twenty feet down.

  As soon as she felt the body she was holding curl into that rigid fetal position, Robin knew Demetrios was dead. There was nothing else she could do now, one way or the other, so she let go and fell free, holding her breath and praying feverishly. It was absolutely dark down here. There was no possibility of seeing anything at all. The water and the distant walls were all tar-covered. They would soak up light. Even a torch beam would vanish down here.

  She had perhaps a thousandth of a second to complete these thoughts before the semisolid surface of the cargo exploded against her with unexpected violence. And the thick, icy liquid seemed to suck her down. She began to struggle at once, fighting to regain the surfa
ce, though she knew she was unlikely to do so, and even if she did, all that awaited her there was a minute or two’s pointless struggle to hold her breath followed by a choking death like the owner’s at the hands of the deadly gas.

  Her only real hope was the knowledge that somewhere nearby, oil-covered, slippery, and probably useless, a set of steps led up from the bottom of the tank to the tank top itself. Intrepid to the last, she planned to find that flight of steps and climb to safety. She reckoned she had perhaps two minutes before her breath ran out. She had no idea that Demetrios had triggered the bomb.

  Martyr straightened at once and, turning toward Richard, swung his leg over the side of the tank top. “No!” barked the captain. “I’ll go.” The chief stepped back. From twenty feet down came the double splash of two bodies hitting the filthy liquid.

  Richard was speaking urgently into his R/T. “John! We need some breathing equipment down here. Now!” Then he gulped the oil-smelling air into his lungs and stepped forward.

  Salah Malik rushed up to him, holding the rope that Demetrios had used to hide his hands. He glanced at his captain, who nodded. Richard had been waiting for this, not for the breathing gear. If they waited for that before he went after her, Robin wouldn’t stand a chance. Not that she stood much of a chance anyway, he calculated grimly.

  Richard found the top step immediately inside the tank top and stood on it impatiently for five more seconds while Salah knotted the rope expertly around his waist, then went back to where Kerem, Ho, and some of the others had tight hold of the far end of it. Richard held his R/T out to Martyr. The big American took it and replaced it in Richard’s fist with his torch. Shining this into the pit at his feet, Richard started down. More than thirty seconds now since Robin had fallen in. Richard also started to pray.

  Martyr, keeping the channel to John Higgins open, started moving back toward the bridge. Oxygen mask or Drager compressed-air gear, it didn’t matter to him: as soon as anything arrived, he was going to put it on and go down into the tank himself. If the tank, if anything, still existed. He was surprised to discover just how fiercely he cared for his captain and the girl.

  One of John’s men, no longer needed on the bridge wing now, hit the emergency siren. The scream of it boomed out into the night, warning Europoort of the danger.

  On the tenth step down, Richard slipped. The rope snapped taut and he swung there, still twelve feet above the surface of the cargo. He had his torch secured to his wrist with the loop at its end, so he did not drop it. Instead he hung there, watching amazedly as the wild beam flashed away into nothingness, showing him the great, flooded black cavern he was descending into. The roof of the tank stretched away above him, darker than any stormy sky. The immense cargo spread below him like a basalt ocean, the surface of it semisolid, cracked into great thick floes, like black ice. And all he had to aid his search was that puny glimmer of light. All he had for support was that treacherous, invisible, thread-thin stair. He swung until it hit him solidly on the shoulder, then he grasped it once more, and carried on down.

  Five seconds later, the black sludge of the surface was sucking at his legs and there was nothing to be seen but the measureless, still, tarry crust of it. Robin must be out there somewhere, perhaps nearby. But she would be enveloped in oil sludge like a nymph in a spider’s web. He listened with desperate concentration. Was she too weighed down with the thickness of it even to move and make a sound? Heart breaking, he opened his tight-pressed lips and into that immense, tomblike silence, he called her name.

  “ROBIN!”

  And a bright light spread through the water, shining up through that black crust in a breathtaking array of emeralds, sapphires, and indigos. All the cargo seemed to have lit up by magic, as though, beneath the thick, floating scum of tar, a sunrise was shining through the sea, summoned by the magic of her name. And silhouetted against the brightness, surprisingly close at hand, almost indistinguishable from the black scum around it, was a human shape. Without another thought, Richard hurled himself bodily forward.

  Then, incredibly, it all exploded up into a gross black fountain, sweeping him under even as he reached for her.

  Sir William Heritage came panting out of the bridge-house carrying a heavy white Drager pack, completely unaware of his daughter’s terrible danger. Martyr took it at once and started to strap it on. “Get some oxygen cylinders too,” he ordered, gesturing at McTavish and the nearest stewards to go and help. “And more rope.” Then he was turning back, tightening the buckles and impatiently ripping the bandage off his battered head so he could slip the face mask on.

  As he went past Salah Malik, he gave him one curt nod. That was all. No time for words. Nor any need for them. He was going down: the big Palestinian was in charge up here now.

  He had just stepped onto the first rung down when the black geyser thundered up past him and hurled him back out onto the deck.

  Demetrios’s bomb operated with a built-in sixty-second delay. He had hit the button during his death spasm as he hit the thick surface. The bomb, clutched to him by his dead hand, was heavy. His lungs were empty. During the next minute he sank more than sixty feet. Then the bomb detonated. It generated very little in the way of blast, but an enormous amount in the way of heat. While the seventy thousand tons of ice-cold Cape seawater with which it was surrounded soaked up an awful lot of that heat, there was still enough generated during the next incandescent seconds to set up a violent upward current. A mixture of hot water and rapidly expanding gases.

  But the hot water had to travel up the best part of seventy feet to the surface, and through every one of those feet it was mixed with more cold water, so that the geyser it caused in the end, though it rose twenty-five feet at its apex, erupting straight up out of the tank top itself, was never more than tepid.

  And the explosion never came.

  Martyr was thrown forward over the edge of the tank top and almost swept away by the force of it, but he held himself doggedly still as the filth from the tank cascaded up and over him and sucked him toward the deck’s edge with astonishing force, and only his own iron grip saved him from tumbling overboard, down into the sea. A foul tidal wave of the stuff broke over Salah’s team, staining overalls; filling eyes, noses, and mouths; but they remained unmoving, holding on to Richard’s kicking, twisting lifeline like grim death.

  When it was all relatively calm, a moment or two later, Martyr pulled himself up onto his knees and turned to look down. The tank was absolutely dark again. Only the mess all over his clothes, the Drager gear, and the deck stood as proof that the incredible had happened.

  Then, close enough to make him jump and cry out, a perfectly black head thrust up over the rim, and, almost at once a second appeared.

  Martyr was on his feet immediately, helping first Robin, then Richard out. And Salah Malik was by his side, frowning slightly, hands busy, still holding his breath, just in case.

  Sir William joined them almost at once, stunned speechless, as they pulled his daughter and son-in-law away from the deadly hole, down toward the safety of the bridge. Salah and Sir William pulled one slack figure each, and Martyr walked hunched up between them, feeding compressed air from his own mouthpiece into their filthy mouths.

  As soon as they were sure the air was safe, beside a pile of oxygen cylinders from the emergency room, they stopped and began to use artificial respiration properly, adding to their ministrations with more and more pure oxygen, until first one, then the other, coughed and started to breathe normally. By that time even John Higgins had joined them, rushing impulsively down from the bridge.

  Only when he was satisfied they were breathing properly, did C. J. Martyr find the leisure to remove his Drager gear and collapse onto the deck, exhausted. Then Richard was sitting up, gulping great lungfuls of air, filling his chest until it hurt wonderfully, officially in charge again. “Better take the pair of us down to the sick bay and check us out properly,” he ordered John, first officer and medic since Ben Strong had gone
to the deep six with Prometheus’s bow section.

  But Robin had one word more. She sat up at once with a shudder. “Sick bay be damned,” said Richard Mariner’s new second mate. “Get me to a shower.”

  She reached up and wiped the filth from her captain’s face, then wiped a matching handful from her own. “Oil!” she cried. “God, how I hate the filthy stuff!”

  HIGH PRAISE FOR PETER TONKIN!

  “Peter Tonkin has proven himself a master of seagoing adventure. Enough taut suspense and danger to satisfy any reader.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “A bang-up story, which Peter Tonkin tells with an insider’s skill.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Plenty of adventure.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “This kind of story has built-in excitement…. Convincing.”

  —The New York Times Book Review