by Peter Tonkin
Demetrios had not taken him fully into his confidence about what was due to happen with the new crew aboard, but the Greek Captain expected a simple variation on what he himself had planned: an orderly abandonment close to some convenient shore, preferably with several thousand fathoms under the tanker's keel, with distress signals telling of some vague disaster aboard but giving the wrong co-ordinates until they were well clear and Prometheus long gone.
He had never before done such a thing himself, of course; but he supposed it was the accepted routine.
He knew nothing about Gallaher's bomb; but then neither did Demetrios, and even the sinister Diavo was unaware that the Irishman had planted and primed it against all orders.
Something did disturb Levkas, however: there was an air about the ship, an atmosphere, something more than a fantasy born of his own recurrent nightmares. Something which made him increasingly uneasy, even though everything seemed to be running smoothly. Under the Englishman's command, at close to full speed, even allowing for the time lost in Durban, Prometheus was almost exactly back on her original schedule, nearly precisely where she would have been - at the right time, to within twenty-four hours - had that first terrible accident in the Pump Room never happened.
Perhaps it was that which made him uneasy. That, combined with the suspicion that no one else aboard actually knew their ship was due to sink within a matter of days, perhaps of hours.
During the first ten days of sailing north they covered nearly four thousand miles. As the long, glass-green Atlantic swells passed with monotonous regularity under her giant keel, Prometheus returned to routine - except in one area: during that time she was redecorated from stem to stern, from keel to truck, wherever storm had damaged or sickness soiled her.
Only the Pump Room remained untouched.
The routine, of course, centred around the Captain and his day. It had come into being early in the voyage. It had varied according to circumstance but it was honed to peak efficiency now. It was far more rigorous than any Levkas had ever bothered with, even on the largest of his ships; even though he was surrounded by properly qualified officers, the quiet Englishman seemed to be involved with everything, available at all hours.
Richard's day began at 06.30 when the chief steward brought him his teak-dark morning tea. At 07.00 on the dot, he would appear on the bridge and relieve John Higgins of the last hour of his watch. At 08.00, when Robin came on watch, the Captain went down to breakfast. He ate and chatted for half an hour then retired to his dayroom to put the finishing touches to the agenda for his daily conference, which began at nine on the dot and was attended by all officers except those on watch. It was a rigid ninety minutes long and concerned every aspect of the day-to-day running of the ship. It was here that the exhaustive - exhausting- work schedules for the ship's redecoration originated; and everything else which affected the lives of all abroad.
At 10.30 coffee was served, and, in the more relaxed atmosphere, any other problems could be brought to the Captain's notice. At 11.00, Richard returned to his day room to centralise and generate the paperwork arising from these meetings - notices read quietly but clearly over the ship's PA system; notices punctiliously typed and individually signed to be displayed on the various notice boards.
At noon precisely, the PA would sound and the gentle but compelling tones would say, 'Your attention. Your attention, please. This is the Captain speaking ...' and everything would come to a halt while officers and crew alike would listen to the daily notices; any items of news which Tsirtos passed up from the World Service of the BBC; the official figures of miles sailed since yesterday, exact position now, time left before destination was reached; the exact bearing of Mecca for the Muslims among the seamen; and - most importantly (at least, so suspected Levkas, watching these eccentric English officers) - the latest score in the current Test match.
He lunched lightly from a tray in his dayroom but always appeared on the bridge at 13.00 hours, when the First Officer went to lunch. He would hold the bridge watch until 15.00, pacing up and down, his eyes everywhere, restless fingers setting everything just as he liked it. Restless hands clearing the chart table of everything except the current chart (only on the rarest occasions was there anything else there: his officers respected his punctilious neatness in a way that Levkas envied to the foundations of his soul), setting out the pencils in regimented rows like Guards on parade. At first Levkas thought this endless adjusting and readjusting petty and irritating. Then it occurred to him that in an emergency the Captain would know where everything was, right down to the smallest item that might be needed. The thought grew more comforting as the emergency drew nearer.
At 15.00, Strong returned to the bridge to complete the last hour of his watch and Richard was released to prowl the ship on an unofficial Captain's inspection. Between 15.00 and 16.00, everyone aboard who was involved. in anything of importance could expect a visit from the Captain and a few quiet words of encouragement. On the rare occasions when something was not up to standard, corrections would be suggested mildly: only if they had not been instituted by the next visit was censure actually employed. Richard didn't want them to think he was trying to catch them out with his afternoon prowls. Actually, they thought nothing of the sort, vying like students with a popular teacher, each trying to outdo the others and impress him most.
At 16.00 he returned to his dayroom to complete the day's paperwork, sometimes visiting the bridge to check the logs, but never interfering at that time; 'Not actually there at all', as he put it.
At 18.00 hours, he and Martyr, newly showered and shaved, in clean uniforms, proceeded like some theatrical double-act down to the officers' lounge for Pour Out. Like the noon announcements, this was an unvarying ritual of the day. They drank and chatted for three quarters of an hour. Dinner was served at 18.45. At 19.30, they would return to the officers' lounge. Richard had not been absolutely idle - or utterly love-struck - when in Durban. His negotiations with the Owner had resulted in a laden relief ship coming out, as was routine, from Cape Town bearing all sorts of goodies, most welcome among them a library of two hundred books and a selection of watchable videos. Having arranged for them, however, Richard did not avail himself of them. He would chat for a further half-hour, then go up to the bridge. From 20.00 to 22.00, while she had dinner and watched the film if she wanted, he kept the Third Officer's watch. But Robin never actually watched a film either. Instead, she would eat as quickly as possible and return to the bridge.
Nobody made any comment about this. You would have thought it was the rule rather than the exception for captains and junior navigation officers to share two quiet hours of each other's company after sunset each evening. Between 22.00 and 22.30 - the only timing that was not particularly precise in the routine - the Third Officer would slip down to the galley and prepare two cups of cocoa. These would be drunk in the same companionable silence that characterised the rest of this shared watch. As soon as the last drop was consumed, the Captain would bid his watch officer goodnight and retire.
He would read until midnight.
And if the Third Officer came to him at the end of her watch, there was never any evidence of it next morning when the routine began all over again.
***
In the bustle of redecoration, Levkas found it easy enough to wander round the ship at odd hours without arousing too much suspicion. But he was always wary. The fate of Haji Hassan spoke to him eloquently of the dangers of knowing too much. Indeed, the death of the unpopular crewman officially logged as accidental death in Durban, and an accident perhaps - but still the source of much dark speculation among his fellows - warned loudly against the dangers of walking abroad too late and looking in secret places. But these things Levkas had to do.
His nocturnal prowls were not without an unexpected element, however. He was not an imaginative man. He had been accused of many things, but never of being imaginative. Fanciful was, perhaps, the last word one might have used to describe him. But o
ne of the reasons his investigations proceeded so slowly was because of the ghosts.
He first became convinced that there were ghosts following him at 03.27 on the morning of the 19th. He had risen some time earlier, determined to start a thorough examination of the deck, starting with the fo'c'sle head. It was dangerous, he knew, to go wandering around out there in the dark with too large a torch - he would be seen by the officer of the watch. Oddly, he never doubted that if he showed too much light he would be seen and reported, though on any ship he had commanded, he realised bitterly, the watch officers were likely to be preoccupied or incapable at that time in the morning. He took the smallest of lights, therefore, secure in the knowledge that there was no watch in the fo'c'sle head tonight and that the light he was carrying was unlikely to cast its beam ten feet, let alone a thousand.
There was no question of him creeping down the catwalk. That was far too risky. Instead he slipped out of the starboard side door of A deck and tiptoed stealthily forward, guided between the various obstacles by the light of the stars and a nailparing moon. It was a sultry night. They were north of Walvis Bay at that time, though well out, and heading back into the heat. There was a faint, saltsmelling wind, just enough to whisper over any obstacle or irregularity. The Benguela Current pushed them over the Walvis Ridge and the great long Cape swells rose higher, became busier against the hull. There was an air of stealthy activity about the ship which only became apparent when one left the antiseptic confines of the bridge. Though from the bridge, carried magically to him by the whispering wind, came the haunting music one of the stewards played nightly on some strange oriental pipe.
The infinitely distant music, the ghostly bustle, insinuated themselves into his subconscious as he crept along the deck; of such things, perhaps, are hauntings made - if of nothing more. Certainly, by the time he reached the faint moon shadow of the Sampson post halfway down the deck, Levkas was certain that he was not alone. Under the uncertain starlight, the deck stretched vastly away. The safety of the bridge was already distant; the lights already dim. The night gathered itself around him.
Of course, he had been used from childhood to the vagaries of the dark, raised in a Peloponnesian village south of Nauplia, which even when he left to go to sea had still to be connected to any electricity supply. But this night was different to the sage scented, cicada-singing nights of his childhood. This night smelt of salt and oil and cooling iron. There was nothing in it but the whispering of the wind, the chuckling of the sea, that lone pipe like a lost soul crying. There were no familiar hillsides, bush clothed and precipitous; only the geometric, unnatural planes of the pipedivided deck. The further out he went, the more the steel claimed him, having a sort of spirit of its own: cold, inhuman, overpowering.
Conscious of none of this, he crept forward, his way illuminated only by the heavens, and that light shadowed now and then by the faintest trace of high scud.
The fo'c'sle head was more lonely than he could ever have imagined, a great metal blade coming to its blunt point far from the rest of the ship, seemingly; far, far from the rest of humanity. Under only the sibilant wind and the faint, shrouded sky, like the last man at the most distant end of the world, a sort of rapture overcame him; like the rapture of the deep, of high places and great spaces. The sort of rapture that kills.
But Levkas was an unimaginative man. He could not begin to understand the forces within and without which held him as helplessly as Robin had been held by the bow wave against the side of the ship. Unable to comprehend the dark wonder of what was really happening to him, he translated what he was feeling into a superstition he could more readily accept.
On the vastness of the fo'c'sle head he paused. 'Nicoli?' he whispered.
But Nicoli did not answer, preferring to tease his Captain with the almost-silence.
'Nicoli!' he screamed.
Nicoli, ghostly, chuckled in the darkness with a voice like water on steel.
Levkas switched on the torch then, not caring who might see it from the bridge. But they hid from him, Nicoli, Gallaher, Kanwar and the others, lurking at the edges of shadows, always in the corners of his eyes. Their dead voices murmured just behind him; their dead fingers touched his neck. He suddenly realised just how far he was away from the light: how absolutely alone he was out here in the dark.
Covered with sweat, fighting the shakes, using his torch to light every inch of the way and lucky to be overlooked by Ben Strong on watch, he stumbled all the agonising, terrifying distance back. A grown man, a captain, tough and hard to scare, he ran out of the ghostly, whispering shadows of the deck into the ghostly brightness of the empty bridge house where the accusatory murmurs lay just beneath the grumble of the generators.
In his cabin, he pulled down his suitcase and laid it on his geometrically made bunk. With shaking fingers he fitted keys in locks and flicked it open. Swearing quietly to himself, he ripped up the false bottom and paused. Between the carefully packed bottles of ouzo and the pile of magazines lay the gun he had smuggled aboard. He loaded it and put it under his pillow. Even so, he slept with his light on all night and never ventured out into the dark unarmed again.
Chapter Seventeen
It was a hot night. There was no moon. A high overcast obscured most of the stars. Prometheus was just coming east of north. She was at 14 north and 18 east, less than two hundred miles off the coast of Senegal.
Some of the general restlessness might have been attributable to these facts. Even in the air-conditioned confines of the accommodation areas something of the night's heat lingered. And these latitudes traditionally proved dangerous to ships. Even ships the size of Prometheus. For these were pirate waters. Not those sailed by Edward Teach or Henry Morgan, but waters where from time immemorial right up to the present day it has been a flourishing village industry for men to crowd into the largest boats available and sail out on dark nights to surprise ships which pass too near.
VLCCs have long proved favourite targets - if hard ones to reach, for they sail far out. They have small crews. They sail unarmed. Even those few who do carry officers with guns do so more for show than effect, for who is going to risk a spark from a ricochet setting the cargo alight?
No one, if they take the time to think.
'Shah mak!' Salah Malik used the ancient form of the phrase and sat back easily in his chair while 'Twelve-toes' Ho, with a look of resignation, scanned the board then flicked his King on to its side.
'Five thousand dollars,’ he said. The tone of his voice made it sound like the end of the world.
'Your idea,’ countered Malik. 'I would have played for the sport.'
'Where is the sport without the wager?' snapped Ho. He scanned the board again, registering his downfall, deadpan. Then he casually began to reassemble his pieces. 'Double or nothing?' he suggested innocently.
Salah gave a bark of laughter, then stretched theatrically. 'No. It is too late.’
Ho leaned forward suddenly, pushing the board to one side. 'Soon it will be too late for many things,’ he hissed.
Salah was all attention at once, his eyes cold and calculating. He and Chief Steward Ho had formed their relationship quickly and of dire necessity: each responsible for a large team of men; each too well aware that this voyage was about to put all those lives at risk. Each with secrets of his own - each still searching for the man they believed to have murdered Haji Hassan.
Each willing to look into the other's heart but less willing, perhaps, to open his own.
Until now. When it was all but too late.
It was the last-but-one night of August, thirteen days since they had turned north. The Cape rollers which had followed them almost to the Equator had moderated and they had left the Flying Dutchman's haunted waters without the expected crisis overtaking them. This good luck in spite of the report by Nihil the pipe-player of a distant, pale three-master heaving up over the horizon at midnight exactly four days ago, then turning away and running south, glowing eerily as she went. Th
ere had been a stir among the superstitious at the news. But this had not worried either Salah or Ho nearly as much as the less fanciful reports of midnight movements.
Levkas was constantly about. Constantly armed, if the reports from his cabin steward could be believed. But he was not their only worry.
Salah waited a moment after Ho's sibilant outburst. He pushed the chessboard further across the teak table top. He glanced up and out of the porthole at the soft, blue, gently clouded sky. He glanced out of the open doorway into the shadowed corridor outside the crew's lounge. No one was near.
'Too late for what?'
'For secrets. Mistrust.'
'Very well. Explain the situation as you see it ...'
Ho gave a bark of laughter and Salah smiled in sympathy.
'Little by little, then, one at a time ...'
They leaned forward secretively and began to exchange confidences in low whispers, face to face over the table.
Unable to hear any more, Martyr turned away and tiptoed silently back down the corridor. He had been fortunate to come so far and hear so much without being discovered. He did not wish to push his luck any further. But he knew enough for the time being: if those two were safely ensconced in there, then their men, all but the watches, would also be out of mischief - for the rest of tonight at least.
And tonight was important, of course. Was he the only one who knew that this was the time - and this the place - where Prometheus had been destined to sink, according to Demetrios's original plan ...?
The corridor he was following led down from the crew's lounge at the back of the bridge, overlooking the makeshift swimming pool and the green afterdeck down to the stem, into the main A deck corridor which ran from side to side across the base of the bridge.
In this corridor he paused, narrow-eyed, thinking. Then he crept forward towards the Cargo Control Room. He paused silently in the doorway, scanning the ranks of computer consoles. If the Pump Room was the heart of the ship, then this in many ways was the brain. Here were stored all the orders and information controlling and reflecting the condition of their volatile cargo. It was a compact room but one filled with an apparently bewildering array of instruments.
