Night Of Error

by Desmond Bagley

  Ian let Esmerelda continue to go about until the foaming area in the sea was well behind us, then straightened her out and the indicator light of the echo sounder spun the other way just as fast. He throttled the engine down and I took a deep breath to steady myself. Geordie came running along the deck.

  'What the hell was that?' he shouted.

  'I think we damn near speared ourselves on a reef – I think we've found her,' I gasped, still winded. Everyone was crowding to look astern at the jumble of white waters, but from where we were it was already impossible to see anything underneath it. 'Unless it's more fish'

  Ian said, 'No, it was a reef. I saw it – about a foot sticking out. And we shoaled bloody fast just then too.'

  Campbell came up from below, looking startled and groggy. He may have been asleep. 'What's happened?'

  'I think we've found Minerva.'

  He looked aft and saw what we were all trying to get a better glimpse of. 'What, that?' he asked incredulously.

  'Is that all?' Clare asked. Some of the crew, the non-sailors, looked equally baffled.

  'What did you all expect – the Statue of Liberty?' I asked.

  'We've got it, boys, wherever it is we're there!' Geordie was exultant and relieved, and more nervous for the safety of his ship than ever.

  Danny Williams came aft to a little storm of back-patting. 'Good job you kept your eyes open,' I told him, and he looked very pleased.

  'God, I was never so scared in my life,' he said. 'It came out of nowhere – now you see it, now you don't. I thought the bloody boat was going to ride up on it. You were pretty handy with that wheel.'

  There was another murmur of assent and it was my turn to look pleased.

  Geordie said to Ian, 'I want you to keep her just where she is. I'll bet that if we lay off a couple of miles we'll never find it again. Christ, it's lucky it's almost low water, it wouldn't show at all otherwise. It'll only dry out to about three feet at this rate.'

  'There'll be coral clusters all round,' I said, reinforcing Geordie's warning. 'And deep water between them and the actual reef. There'll be a lagoon beyond that. An atoll is forming.'

  I saw that they were all taking an interest, apart from Ian and the on-watch lookouts, so I expanded a little. 'This rock spear that was underneath us can't have been there very long, or it would have been higher – you'd have an island here. But this coral has only just started to form.'

  Geordie said suspiciously, 'What do you mean by "only just"?'

  'Within the last five or ten thousand years – I'll know better when I can take a closer look at it.'

  'I thought you'd say that. But you're not going to look at it. Do you think we could get to the middle of that little lot?'

  We all looked back towards Minerva, if Minerva it was. 'No,' I said dubiously. 'No, perhaps not.'

  Campbell had a question on his lips that he was dying to ask, but not in public. Headshakes and heavy gestures indicated his desire for a private word, so I extricated myself from the still excited crew and followed him below together with Clare.

  Campbell said, 'I'm sorry to interrupt the course of pure science, but how does this tie in with the nodules? Do you think we're going to be luckier now?'

  I said soberly, That's just the trouble; I don't see how we can. Most nodules are very old, but Mark's was comparatively young. He had a theory which I'm beginning to grasp, to do with them forming very fast as a result of volcanic action. Now there's been volcanic action here all right but much too long ago for my taste. There's been time for a long slow coral growth and it doesn't quite tie in.'

  'So this is another goddam false alarm,' said Campbell gloomily.

  'Maybe not. I could be wrong. We can only find out by dredging.'

  So we dredged.

  As soon as he could Geordie had taken careful sightings of the reef. 'I'm going to nail this thing down once and for all,' he said. Then we'll cruise around it carefully and not too closely, keeping an eye on the depth, and take soundings and chart everything we can see. And then we'll decide what to do next.'

  After we had satisfied him we got started. Geordie took Esmerelda in as close as he dared and the dredge went over the side. I could imagine it going down like a huge steel spider at the end of its line, dropping past the incredible cliffs of Minerva, plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss.

  The operation was negative – there were no nodules at all.

  I was unperturbed. 'I was expecting that. Let's go round and try the other side again.' So we skirted the shoal and tried again, with the same result – no nodules.

  I thought that there probably had been nodules in the area, but the upthrust of our friendly reef had queered the pitch. We were all calling it Minerva by now, although Geordie and I were aware that it might be a different reef altogether – the seas hereabouts were notorious for vigias. I decided to try further out, away from the disturbance.

  This time we began to find nodules again, coming in like sacks of potatoes. I was busy in the lab once more but becoming depressed. 'This is standard stuff,' I told my small audience. 'High manganese – low cobalt, just as before. And it's too deep for commercial dredging. But we'll do it thoroughly.' And day after day the dredging and the shifting of position went on, with the results of my assays continuing to be unfruitful.

  Then one evening Geordie and I consulted with one another and decided to call it off. We had been out from Panama for over two weeks, nearly three, and I was anxious to carry on to Tahiti to be there before the Eastern Sun arrived. Geordie wasn't anxious over stores or even water -thanks to his careful planning we could stay at sea for up to six weeks if we needed to – but he felt that the activity, or lack of it, would begin to irk a crew which was after all partly made up of people to whom he'd virtually promised action and excitement. Campbell was quite ready to chuck the whole thing in -on a land search he would be more tenacious, but then he was seldom out there himself during the early exploratory days, usually only coming in at the kill, so to speak. And so we decided to call a halt to the proceedings and to turn towards Tahiti the next morning. The news was greeted with relief by everyone, the excitement of finding the reef we were searching for having palled. Campbell walked heavily across the deck towards the companionway, his shoulders stooped. I realized for the first time that he wasn't a young man.

  'It's hit him hard,' I said.

  'Aye,' said Geordie. 'What do we do now – after Papeete?'

  'I've been thinking a lot about that. If it hadn't been for that damned diary then Minerva Reef would be the last place I'd go looking for high-cobalt nodules, but Mark's scribbling has hypnotized us.'

  'We don't even know if he meant Minerva. Do you think he was on the wrong track?'

  'I don't know what track he was on – that's the devil of it. I only leafed through those notebooks of his before they were stolen, and I couldn't absorb anything much in that time. But one thing did keep cropping up, and that was the question of vulcanism.'

  'You mentioned that before,' said Geordie. 'Are you going to put me in the picture?'

  'I think another little lecture is in order- and I'll deliver it to Campbell and Clare as well. It'll give him something else to think about. Get the three of you together in here after dinner, Geordie, and put a lad on watch, to keep Kane away. They'll be expecting a council of war anyway.'

  And so later that same evening I faced my small class, with a physical map of the seabeds of the world unrolled on the charitable.

  'You once asked me where manganese came from and I told you from the rivers, the rocks and from volcanic activity. And I've been doing a bit of serious thinking about the latter class. But to start with, the Pacific is full of nodules while the Atlantic hasn't many. Why?'

  The professorial method, involving the class in the answers always works. 'You said it had something to do with sedimentation,' Geordie recalled.

  That's the orthodox answer. It's not entirely wrong, because if the sedimentation rate is high then the
nodules stop growing – they get covered up and lose contact with the seawater – the colloidal medium. The sedimentation rate in the Atlantic is pretty high due to the Amazon and Mississippi, but I don't think that's the entire explanation. I want to show you something.'

  We all bent over the map.

  'One fact about the Pacific stands out a mile; it's ringed with fire.' My pencil traced a line, beginning in South America. 'The Andes are volcanic, and so are the Rockies.' It hovered over the North American Pacific coast. 'Here's the San Andreas Fault, the cause of the San Francisco earthquake of 1908.' My hand moved in a great arc across the North Pacific. 'Active volcanoes are here, in the Aleutians and all over Japan. New Guinea is very volcanic and so are all the islands about there; here is Rabaul, a town surrounded by six cones -all active. There used to be five, but things stirred up a bit in 1937 and Vulcan Island built itself up into a major cone in twenty-four hours and with three hundred people killed.'

  I swept my hand further south. 'New Zealand – volcanoes, geysers, hot springs – all the indications. South again to the Antarctic and you have Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, two bloody big volcanoes. And that completes the circle – a round trip of the Pacific.'

  I turned my attention eastward. The Atlantic is pretty quiescent, volcanically speaking, except perhaps for the Icelandic area. There was the enormous Mount Pelee eruption down here in the Caribbean but as you can see that's only just off the Pacific ring – and Krakatoa is in it, over Java way. The only place you find nodules in any quantity is on the Blake Plateau – and the interesting thing about that is that the Plateau is exactly where the current runs from the Caribbean, which I've already mentioned as being volcanic.'

  Geordie straightened up from the map.

  'You've got a hell of a lot of places to choose from.'

  That's the problem. And there are vents in the Pacific seabed which we don't know about – hell, we're almost on top of one now. But I know that high-cobalt area exists and I'll stake my reputation that we find it in a volcanic area.'

  Campbell said, 'As I understand you correctly, the nodules in the Pacific, the ordinary ones which occur in the greatest number of places, have been slowly growing through millions of years as a result of long-ago volcanic activity. But you think there are places where certain nodules might grow faster due to specific and recent volcanic activity.'

  That's it – and they'll be high-cobalt, high-nickel and so on because of the fast growth. The metals will be entrapped while they're still around, before they're dispersed into the general waters of the Pacific.'

  'Urn. That still doesn't tell us where to look.'

  'I want to stick around the Western Pacific,' I said intensely. There are plenty of known undersea vents here, and it's better fossicking round here than wasting our time.' I had other reasons, of course – I wanted to begin my investigation into my brother's death, but I was only too well aware that in Campbell's eyes the commercial venture was the main, perhaps the only reason for our carrying on. He had some personal stake but not necessarily enough.

  There was a lot to think about, and talk fell away. Presently Geordie spoke up. 'All right, let's get on to Papeete and see what we can decide on the way,' he said with finality.

  We sailed for Tahiti, first heading south to skirt the Tuamotus, and then on a direct course. Geordie didn't want to sail through the Tuamotus unless he had to; the name, he told us, meant 'The Dangerous Isles' and they were every bit as dangerous as the name implied, a vast area of coral atolls and sharp-toothed reefs, not all of them charted.

  I judged we should arrive in Papeete just about the same time as the Eastern Sun, if she kept to her published schedule. I certainly hoped we would arrive first – I didn't relish leaving Paula there without protection.

  Campbell perked up on this leg of the voyage, gradually returning to his old aggressive self, abetted by Clare. We had talked further about the possibilities ahead of us and I had tried to persuade him that I wasn't taking him on any wild-goose chases, but in fact I had nothing much to go on myself, and was feeling very bothered by this. Clare was back to poring over Mark's diary, trying to unravel a few more mysteries. I almost hoped she wouldn't – we'd had enough trouble over the Recife de Minerve. She had hidden the transcript and the photostatted drawings, but had first made copies of these into her own notebook, and studied them covertly from time to time.

  It was pleasant enough sailing but not as invigorating as the first part of the trip out from Panama. In spite of the decision to make a new beginning we were all a little depressed, and had all been at sea for a long time. We felt the urge to tread firm ground again.

  So it was with relief that everyone heard Geordie's announcement that Tahiti was within easy reach and would be sighted at any time. We were having lunch on deck and conversation was relaxed and easy. Clare sat a little way from the rest of us, still studying those damned drawings.

  'Land – dead ahead!' Taffy Morgan hailed, and we all scrambled to our feet to get our first sight of Tahiti. There was only a small smudge on the horizon and we had a long while to go before we would see any more detail. We praised Geordie's navigation and then stood lounging at the rails watching the smudge gain sharpness when Kane came over to Clare.

  'You left this on deck, Miss Campbell. It could blow over the side.'

  And he held out her open notebook, with many of Mark's drawings in full view. We were all very still, looking at it.

  Clare said coolly, 'Thank you, Mr Kane.'

  'I didn't know you could draw, Miss.'

  'I can't, not very well.'

  Kane grinned and flicked at the open pages. 'Doesn't look like it,' he agreed. That's a pretty cow, mind you, but it's a pretty scraggy-looking falcon.'

  Clare managed a smile as she took the book from him. 'Yes, I'll never be an artist,' she said.

  Geordie said harshly, 'Kane, have you spliced that new halliard yet?'

  'Just going to, skipper, no sweat.' He walked away briskly and I let my breath out. Clare said in a soft voice, 'God, I'm sorry.'

  Campbell watched Kane out of sight and made sure we were out of anyone else's hearing. 'Clare, of all the damn silly things to do.'

  'I said I was sorry.'

  'I don't think it matters,' I said calmly. 'It's not the actual diary – none of Mark's handwriting shows. And for all we know Kane isn't aware that the diary ever existed.'

  'Somebody might,' said Clare. 'That man Ramirez, he sent people to steal Mark's things – he may have known about it.'

  'If Kane is a low man on the totem pole then he wouldn't know everything. I don't think it makes a bit of difference what Kane saw. Forget it.'

  Clare looked at the drawings again, and suddenly a smile displaced her air of tension. 'Now that he's mentioned the cow, I think I may have one of Mark's awful puns figured out. Don't get excited though, Pop – it's only a wild guess.'

  She pointed to the cow and its companion, the squashed semi-circle.

  'I've been reading things, and I read somewhere that another name for the Tuomotus is the Low Islands. That's what this flatfish object is, a low island on the sea. Then he's put OR – and drawn the cow. It's two drawings for the same place – the Tuamotus.'

  'For God's sake, why?' Campbell demanded.

  'Cows go moo – they low.' And she burst out laughing. I had to join her and even her father started to smile as he saw the joke. If true, it was a good one. We put the incident with Kane out of our minds.

  As Esmerelda drew nearer to Tahiti the sea gave place to mountains, hazy green, and then we began to see the surf breaking on the beaches as we sailed along the coast. We all turned our thoughts to cold beer ashore.

  Papeete, the Pearl of the Pacific, is a pleasant town with all the usual offices – banks, a hospital, shops and so forth, but it is also a collection of tin huts set down on a tropical island and therefore a trifle squalid; but the setting is magnificent. Arriving there we tied up almost in the main street and there are not many po
rts in the world where you can do that. Looking over the harbour you can see the island of Moorea nine miles away, a volcano which exploded in the far past leaving a jumble of spires and peaks leaning at impossible angles, one of the most splendid sights in the world, and one which must go a long way to compensate for any inconveniences occasioned by living in Papeete.

  I looked around the harbour for the Eastern Sun but there was no sign of her, so I tried to relax as we waited for customs clearance. Campbell was fretful, anxious to go ashore and see if there was anything for him at the post office. He was too much in the dark concerning the Suarez-Navarro expedition. I wasn't any too patient myself. I had questions to ask and I wanted to try and see the Governor. I believe in starting at the top.

  At last a customs officer arrived, gave us a leisurely scrutiny and departed, leaving us free to go ashore. I had asked him when the Eastern Sun was due, and one of life's rare miracles occurred.

  The cruise boat, m'sieur? She come any time, I 'ave 'eard on ze radio. She is due tomorrow.'

  I spoke to Geordie before everyone vanished. 'Who are the two toughest chaps you have?'

  'Ian Lewis for one,' he said promptly. Then it's a toss-up between Taffy and Jim Taylor.'

  'Whoever it is must be good at unarmed combat.'

  Then it's Ian and Jim. Taffy's the knife expert. Who do you want laid out?'

  'Paula Nelson will be in tomorrow, on the Eastern Sun. And this place is unhealthy for her. When it comes in I want you to go and meet her, because she'll recognize you, and I want you to take the others along, collect her and bring her back here – unhurt. Anyone who tries anything is to be stepped on hard.'

  He listened carefully and then nodded. I knew she'd be in good hands.

  'Right. I'll leave you to your own filthy devices, Geordie. We'll want to get refitted so that we could leave almost any time, so warn the crew not to stray. Anyone who ends up in gaol stays there. I'm going to try for an interview with the Governor.'