An Incident At Bloodtide

by George C. Chesbro

  Although this man had, presumably, initiated plans to kill Garth and me not too many hours before, he gave no sign of recognition as he stared at me. One of the crewmen said something to him, and then both turned and walked out of the cabin, closing the door behind them, leaving me alone with the balding, bloated, pasty-faced drunk. He kept staring at me, bleary-eyed and swaying back and forth, then spoke to me in a hopelessly slurred mumble. Not having brought along my jiffy Universal Translator, I suspected we were going to have some difficulties communicating. But then he repeated it, and I thought I got the general drift.

  What the fuck are you?

  What the fuck was I, indeed? I was damn cold was what I was, and without further ado I stripped off the shirt that was pasted to my skin, grabbed a blanket off the unmade bunk bed, and wrapped it around me. The blanket felt greasy, and smelled as foul as everything else in the room, but at least it would help to preserve my rapidly diminishing body heat. Captain Julian Jefferson didn't protest and was in no position to do anything about it if he did; I doubted he could stand. I pulled up a wobbly wooden chair and sat down across from him at the wobbly chart table cum bar. The other man's dark brown eyes were glassy and occasionally rolled in his head as he tried to fix his gaze on me. There seemed no easy way to slide into the topic I wished to discuss, so I decided to dispense with any talk about the wretched weather, get right to the subject at hand, and see what happened.

  "My name's Frederickson," I said through chattering teeth. "I'm investigating the death of a man by the name of Tom Blaine, who got chopped up by some very big propeller blades not too many weeks ago. I believe it was this tanker that killed him. Uh, the state police and Coast Guard are following right behind me, but they don't like working in the rain. I want to know why you started up your engines while the ship was moored and you were washing out your holding tanks. Now, I know you're shipping — "

  I stopped speaking when I saw his lips moving. He was mumbling something in his drunken slur, and I leaned forward, trying to decipher it. "What?" I asked.

  He repeated it, or mumbled something else, and this time I thought I understood him.

  He was saying that the guy who was killed should have minded his own business.

  Well. For a moment I forgot about both my headache and the bone-deep cold that was racking my body as I stared at the man in stunned silence. It certainly sounded like a confession of sorts to me. I had hoped to initially shock him into at least a denial of the accusation, which I had then hoped to use to pressure him into saying something, anything, incriminating, which I had then hoped to use to goad him into saying something even more incriminating. But he had apparently been impatient for me to get on with my masterly interrogation, since he had interrupted my opening gambit to effectively admit he had known there was a diver under his ship when he'd activated the engines. Or so it seemed.

  "You're saying you knew there was a diver under your tanker when you started those props spinning around?"

  He drained off the bourbon in his glass, poured himself some more from a bottle of Wild Turkey, then mumbled something to the dark liquid in front of him.

  Sure he'd known, the drink was informed. It wasn't the first time this troublemaker had visited them, diving around and under the ship. He'd started the first night they were moored, and he'd been nosing around the last time they came upriver. He was on to the company's trick of flushing out tanks in the river and taking on water, and he was getting ready to make big trouble for the captains of the tankers, and the company.

  "You've been selling the water in the Middle East?"

  Yes. Kuwait.

  "Whose idea was it?"

  Company policy. Wanted to increase profits.

  "Were your orders in writing?"

  He shook his head.

  "Who gave you the orders?"

  The devil.

  "Fuck the devil," I said with disgust. "Jesus Christ, Captain, do you really think a tankerful of water is worth a man's life?"

  He slowly, determinedly, shook his head back and forth, then again spoke to his tumbler of bourbon.

  The devil made him do it.

  At his first mention of the devil, I'd assumed that, in his stupor, he'd been trying to be funny. Now I wasn't so sure. There was certainly nothing funny about the look of horror and anguish in his eyes. The captain, it seemed, had not only imagination but a conscience as well. And all his drinking had failed to erase his visions of what happens to a man when he's sucked up into the whirling props of an oceangoing tanker.

  "What devil, Captain? Who told the captains to start taking on river water? Who ordered you to turn on your engines while there was a diver under your ship?"

  He said the name, enunciating it clearly, with no need for straining to understand. "Mr. Carver."

  "Charles Carver?"

  He nodded.

  "Mr. Charles Carver ordered you to kill a man."

  "Start up engines."

  "It's the same goddamn thing. He was on board this ship the night that man was killed?"

  The question elicited a response, but Julian Jefferson's speech had reverted to slurred mumbles. However, by now I'd gotten somewhat used to the alcoholic garble, and I didn't think I missed much.

  In regard to the illegal water-hauling operation, Roger Wellington was the administrator all the captains reported to and received their orders from — but all communications to and from Roger Wellington went through Charles Carver, a man most of the shipping personnel considered very strange, and whom many feared. He was rumored to be the son of the founder and to have more power and influence in the company than his tide would suggest. A number of the captains had warned Mr. Carver that there was a man who seemed to be on to what they were doing and who was actually diving under their ships while they were flushing their tanks in order to gather evidence of pollution. They had been ordered to continue the practice, since the fines involved if they were ever brought to court were likely to be considerably less than the profits they were realizing from the operation. Then Mr. Carver had unexpectedly shown up one night, driving the company's black cigarette boat, and come aboard to wait for the diver to show up. The man had come and had made a dive under the ship as the tanks were being flushed out. Then Mr. Carver had ordered the captain to activate the main engines. At first the horrified captain had refused, but Mr. Carver had reminded him of his drinking problem and of the accidents in which he had been involved. The captain had been told that his family connections would not prevent him from being fired this time if he did not comply with the order to start up the engines. He had done so.

  It had been Mr. Carver, followed by a crewman in one of the tanker's motorized dinghies, who had driven off the diver's boat and wrecked it, after throwing everything on board into the water.

  Now the captain couldn't sleep, didn't want to sleep, because he was tormented by a vivid, recurring nightmare of how the diver under the boat must have felt in the cold and dark when he heard the engines come on, and the terror he must have experienced in the seconds before he was torn apart. Even awake, the captain couldn't stop thinking about it, seeing the images, and no amount of liquor seemed to help. He stayed in his cabin all the time now and let the crew handle the ship. He was terribly sorry for what he'd done, but felt he'd had no choice.

  When the captain had finished, he drained off the tumbler of bourbon.

  My heart was beating very rapidly, sending adrenaline-laced blood through my system, temporarily warming me. Never in the history of the world, I thought, had a complete confession been so easy to obtain. The problem, of course, was that it was worthless in the form it had been given, with me as the only witness. I had to find somebody else to listen to it.

  I cleared my throat, half rose to reach out and touch his shoulder, then thought better of it and sank back down into my chair. "You've done the right thing, Captain Jefferson," I said carefully, watching him. "You're going to start feeling a whole lot better about things now that you've gotten t
his off your chest. Now we're going to get the man who's really responsible, the man who ordered and pressured you into doing this thing. But you're going to have to repeat what you just told me in front of another witness. Where can I find your second-in-command?"

  The glassy-eyed captain hiccupped, mumbled some more.

  There was no second-in-command; he was the only one in command. But he wasn't interested in commanding anything. The crew ran things, and shared the bonus money, and just carried him along. Everybody seemed to prefer things that way, and he really had no place to go anyway. He wasn't even sure he would be allowed to leave the ship if he wanted to. He didn't care just so long as they kept bringing him liquor, which they did.

  I thought about going up on deck to try to coax one of the crewmen, perhaps the English-speaking Greek, down to listen to the captain's confession, then decided that wasn't such a great idea; the Greek, indeed all of the crew, might take serious exception to any plans of mine that would upset the status quo, attract the unwelcome attention of the Coast Guard, and possibly implicate them all in a murder. That meant exposing myself in an attempt to get to their radio. I just wanted to obtain Julian Jefferson's confession in some usable form, then get off this damned tanker as quickly as possible, notify the Coast Guard of what I had, then sit down under a hot shower and do some serious drinking of my own, concussion or no.

  "Okay," I said, "then do you have something to write with? Paper and pen or pencil? I'll write down everything you said to me, and you can sign it. Just tell me where the stuff is. I'll get it."

  I'd been wrong about him not being able to stand; he knocked his chair over and not only managed to stand but proceeded to stumble and sway his way across the garbage-strewn cabin to a chest of drawers at the foot of the bunk bed. He opened the top drawer, began rummaging around, strewing clothes over the floor at his feet. It seemed an odd place to keep writing materials, but a perfectly logical place to keep a revolver, which was what he was holding when he removed his hand from the drawer. He raised the gun, aimed at me, and pulled the trigger at almost the precise moment that I rolled out of my chair to my right and onto the floor. Moving turned out to be a dangerous mistake; his aim was off by about four feet, which meant that the bullet pierced the front edge of the chart table and thudded into the floor about an inch from my nose. The report of the large gun in the relatively small, closed space was not only deafening but had a most unpleasant, amplifying effect on my headache, and for a moment it felt like my head was literally going to explode.

  He fired again, and this time the bullet missed by a good six feet, smacking into a framed picture on the wall to my right. So far, so good, but sooner or later this very drunk man was going to get lucky with one of his shots — or simply walk around the overturned table and put the gun to my head, where, smashed as he was, he would still be hard put to miss.

  To make matters worse, if that was possible, I was all tangled up in the greasy blanket I had wrapped around me. However, after some shrugging and kicking, I managed to free myself. On my hands and knees behind the totally inadequate barrier of the chart table, which had been turned on its side by the force of the bullet smashing into it, I glanced behind me at the door. It was twenty feet away, and closed; it also opened inward, which was to my distinct disadvantage. The captain might keep missing if I simply stood up, ran to the door, and pulled it open — but then again, he might not. But then again, again, I obviously couldn't stay where I was.

  I raised myself to a crouch, gripped the bottom edge of the chart table, came up with it. The oak table was a good deal heavier than I'd anticipated, but I heaved it as far as I could in the general direction of Julian Jefferson, then ran to the door, turned the knob, and pulled. The door was stuck.

  The gun exploded again behind me. For a split second I thought I was hit, but it was only another matching explosion of pain inside my head from the noise of the revolver. I waited nanoseconds for a bullet to rip into my back, through my heart and lungs, but instead it whacked through the louvers on the door about two feet above my head. As I yanked on the doorknob, a rather unusual theory formed in my mind, that maybe the smartest move I could make was no move at all, to simply stand still and wait for Julian Jefferson to run out of ammunition.

  Perhaps another time. I yanked once more on the knob, and the door flew open. I headed out of the cabin, sprinting down the narrow outside corridor as the revolver fired again and a bullet whistled through the air an inch or two from my left ear. I skidded around the corner into the second corridor that led up to the deck, and found myself less than three feet from the dark-skinned crewman with the black, puffy birthmark on his cheek who had been at the railing that afternoon watching Garth and me float by on the catamaran. He grunted with surprise, crouched, and put his arms out to his sides to block the corridor. I didn't even slow down. I lowered my very sore head and rammed him hard in his exposed midsection. The air whooshed out of his lungs and he went back and down. I skipped over him, using his face for a stepping-stone, trying to ignore the spikes of pain flashing through my skull.

  I could hear the captain shouting something unintelligible behind me. I raced down the corridor and up the companionway at the end. At the top of the companionway I ducked under the outstretched arms of two more crewmen, darted between two pallets loaded with crates of supplies, turned right and ran half the length of the vast foredeck until I saw the dark shape of a loading crane looming before me in the rainswept darkness. I ducked under the crane's huge counterweight and crouched, huddling and shivering in the night, holding my throbbing head with both hands as I tried to figure out just what it was I was going to do for my next trick.

  From where I was crouched under the crane, it certainly looked like nothing less than, well, a very dark and stormy night indeed. Bare-chested, without the blanket that had for a time helped to restore my body heat, my core temperature was dropping again, and my shivering was threatening to turn into uncontrolled spasms. I was going to have to find a way to get warm soon, or I was going to lose control of my movements, probably pass out, and certainly die.

  Of course, on this night there was no shortage of ways to depart this very wet veil of tears. The captain, against all odds, had somehow managed to ambulate up on deck, and above the wind and through the drumbeat patter of the rain hitting on the steel all around me I could hear him shouting what I presumed were orders in his drunken slur. The revolver he had drawn held seven rounds, and he had already fired four of them. Of course, he could have reloaded or brought more rounds with him, but considering his condition I doubted he had done either. Then again, whether he managed to put a bullet in me or even simply stay on his feet was largely irrelevant in light of the fact that he had any number of crewmen to help search for me. If and when they did find me, the captain would no doubt order me knocked unconscious and thrown overboard, and the crew would no doubt do it.

  I took off my shoes and socks, since they were thoroughly soaked anyway and of absolutely no use to me. A great shudder convulsed my body, passed, and then I resumed my garden-variety shivering. My teeth were chattering so hard I was afraid I was going to start chipping them. I looked east, toward the Westchester side of the river, which would be closest, but could see nothing. I estimated the shore would be a half to three quarters of a mile from our present position in the deep channel, and even if I weren't half frozen to death and suffering the effects of a concussion, it would have been a very risky proposition, if not downright suicidal, to try to swim to shore without a life jacket in the six-foot waves crashing against the hull. I could always dive overboard and take my chances if I ended up cornered, but that would be a last — probably literally — resort.

  What I really wanted was to be picked up — preferably by the Coast Guard, but any old Sheriffs Patrol along the river would do nicely. That meant I was going to have to find a way to signal, and a large fire on board would make a dandy emergency flare. The problem, of course, was finding a way to start such a fire. The
re were pallets loaded with diesel oil on the deck, but diesel fuel won't burn if you drop a match in it — assuming I had a match to drop, which I didn't. I needed gasoline and a means to light it.

  There was a large tool box bolted to the deck on the starboard side of the crane. I could hear snatches of voices carried by the wind, but at the moment nobody seemed to be too close to me. I ducked out from beneath the counterweight, tried the lid of the steel box. It wasn't locked. I opened the lid, fumbled around inside. I had desperately hoped to find a supply of emergency flares, but there weren't any. What I did find was a crowbar, which would make a very effective weapon at close range. I closed the lid and, crowbar in hand and trying very hard not to think of how very cold I was, set off, keeping close to the railing on the starboard side, in search of gasoline and a life jacket. Not necessarily in that order.

  The wheelhouse at the top of the soaring superstructure that separated the massive foredeck from the stern was visible now as a pale yellow glow in the driving rain. I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at what might be on the stern section of the ship, but that meant negotiating a very narrow section of deck on either the port or starboard side of the tanker, where I would be completely exposed and vulnerable if anybody should happen to be glancing in that direction. I crouched down next to the pallet loaded with barrels of diesel fuel and looked around, watching and listening. Men shouted to each other in the darkness, and once I heard the captain's voice rise in a bellow of rage, but as far as I could tell all of the voices were coming from the foredeck. The barrels of diesel fuel were fitted with petcocks, and I opened every one I could reach. Oil began to lap out on the deck. Diesel fuel might not burn if you dropped a match in it, but it will certainly explode if the right combination of heat and pressure is applied. At the moment I didn't even know how I was going to start a fire, much less cause an explosion, but I wanted to create as many options for myself as possible.