A Thousand Suns

by Alex Scarrow

  The net suddenly drew fully taut, and the port outrigger bent alarmingly.

  Jeff jumped to his feet and hastily leaned over the port side. He could hear the twang of nylon fibres stressing and snapping.

  The net was beginning to tear.

  ‘Stop the boat! It’s ripping!’ he bellowed towards the pilothouse.

  The trawler’s engine kept the same monotonous note. The outrigger looked like it was beginning to buckle.

  ‘Shit! Tom! Stop the goddamn boat!’

  The trawler continued at a comfortable six knots.

  The young lad at the helm turned wearily around, and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Jeff as he wrenched the door to the pilothouse open and stormed in. He angrily pulled the boy aside and immediately grabbed the throttle and threw it into neutral. Tom pulled his headphones down off his ears and Jeff could hear the irritating sibilant hiss of rock music played too loudly.

  ‘What’s up, Skip -?’

  ‘Dammit, Tom! How many times have I said no music when you’re on the wheel? . . . Huh? How many?’

  The young lad fumbled for his Walkman to turn it off. Jeff reached for it, tucked into the gathered swathe of the slicker tied up around the boy’s slender waist. He pulled it out and threw it on the floor. Its cheap plastic casing stayed in one piece, but from the internal rattling sound it made as it slid across the floor of the cabin Jeff didn’t think Tom would be getting much more rock music out of it.

  Tom opened his mouth to complain.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about your tape recorder if I were you. That’s the least of your worries.’

  He grabbed the boy’s shoulder, turned him round and pointed at the buckling portside outrigger. ‘If the net’s screwed, I’ll fucking throw you over the side.’

  ‘I’m s-sorry, Skip . . . I -’

  He watched the young man’s mouth open and close silently as he struggled for something useful to say.

  Jeff turned abruptly and left the cockpit, cursing his stupidity and weakness for promising to take the boy on. Clearly the fool would much rather be at home (in the warmth) with his feet up on his mother’s threadbare furniture and staring lifelessly at the drip feed of daytime cable.

  But a promise was a promise.

  Tom’s mother had pleaded with him to take the lad along, with a beseeching smile that seemed to promise a little more than gratitude for his troubles.

  She’d wanted to shake the idle waster out of the rut he’d comfortably rolled into. She was confident that a few days of hard graft rewarded with several hundred dollars of his share on the catch, maybe even a full thousand for him to play around with, would be the kick in the pants he needed.

  Next time, you idiot, Jeff muttered to himself, let the Big Head do the thinking.

  Outside he walked across the aft deck towards the portside outrigger, where the other two members of his young crew were leaning out studying the net with the aid of a torch. Ian and Duncan were cousins, or second cousins or something. They seemed to come as a pair, neither prepared to crew without the other. Which was fine. They were both good workers, he’d taken them on over a dozen trips before, and they’d made good money on all of them.

  ‘Net’s rigid, Skip,’ said Duncan as he passed the torch to Jeff.

  Jeff shone it on the outrigger, which was bent like a fully drawn bow and buckled near the end. That was going to cost a little to straighten out or be replaced.

  He panned down to the net. It was as taut as cable wire and beginning to fray.

  ‘Shit, we better back up a little before something gives.’

  He turned towards the pilothouse to see Tom standing in the doorway, shuffling from one foot to the other guiltily awaiting instructions and, it seemed, eager to make amends.

  ‘Put her in reverse . . . gently,’ he shouted. Tom nodded eagerly and went back to the helm. The trawler shuddered as gears engaged and the gentle diesel rumble changed to a rhythmic chug. Slowly the boat eased back, the outrigger swung with a metallic groan and the net slackened.

  Jeff waved his hand at Tom, and the rhythm of the engine changed again as she went back into neutral. The trawler drifted a few more feet backward under its own momentum and then came to rest.

  On the calm, mirror surface of the sea, the boat was unnaturally still.

  ‘Shall we try and pull in the net, Skip?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Yeah, but go gently . . . I don’t want any more damage done if it can be helped.’

  Ian reached for a lever beside the base of the starboard outrigger and pulled it down. With a clunk and a rattle the motor on the hydraulic winch whirred to life and began winding in the net. Jeff watched the fibres of the net begin to stretch and the winch’s motor began to struggle.

  ‘It’s not coming in,’ shouted Ian above the noise. He looked at Jeff and placed a hand back on the lever, ready to put the motor out of its misery.

  ‘Nope. Damned thing’s snagged. Shut it off.’

  The lad slammed the lever down and the motor on the hydraulic winch sputtered and died.

  Jeff was looking at losing a hundred-dollar net if he didn’t play his cards right. A hundred-dollar net, four days of cruising diesel, the cost of groceries for four hungry mouths . . . and a less than stellar haul on ice, below decks, to pay for it all.

  It was getting too dark to see anything. ‘Tom!’ He barked towards the pilothouse. ‘Put on the floods.’

  Twin beams bathed the aft deck with a powerful white light, and all of a sudden twin 1000-watt halogen bulbs obliterated the last, faint glow of dusk. It was officially night.

  ‘Whad’ya want to do, Skip?’ asked Duncan.

  Good question.

  Jeff headed back inside the pilothouse. He looked sternly at Tom and tapped the depth sounder display with his knuckles.

  ‘You been watching this, right?’

  Tom nodded. ‘Sure.’

  ‘All the time, right?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. It’s been nothing but flat bed for the last hour, Skip.’

  ‘Yeah? Well obviously it hasn’t because we’ve snagged our nets on something, and it sure as hell ain’t cod.’

  Tom’s jaw flapped ineffectively again, his Adam’s apple bobbed in sympathy.

  ‘Don’t say anything boy, or you’ll just piss me off even more. Put this boat in reverse and let’s retrace our steps.’

  ‘Sure, Skip.’

  ‘And this time keep your eyes on the sounder. Reckon you can do that for me?’

  Tom nodded vigorously. Jeff left the pilothouse once more and found himself muttering under his breath yet again.

  Somebody else can take his sorry ass out, next time.

  Outside, Ian and Duncan were awaiting orders.

  ‘Okay, Ian . . . you’re on the winch. We’re going to carry on reversing, and I want the slack on the net pulled in as we go.’

  The boat began to shudder again as the engine engaged reverse gear, and slowly they started backwards. Ian operated the winch, intermittently slamming it on and off to recover the net as the tension allowed, and Jeff studied the wet folds of braided nylon netting for damage as it slowly built up on the aft deck.

  Ten minutes had passed when he heard Tom calling out from the pilothouse.

  ‘What is it?’ he shouted back.

  ‘I think you should see this, Skip. Not sure if I’m reading this right.’

  Jeff threw down the net and started towards him.

  So NOW he sees something.

  Tom turned towards Jeff as he entered, and pointed towards the green glow of the sounder’s display.

  ‘I umm . . . didn’t notice that there before -’

  Jeff looked at the ghostly image on the display screen, a grainy rendition of the seabed in profile. Flat from left to right, but with an unmistakable spike building up on the extreme right.

  ‘Didn’t notice? How the hell did you not notice that! . . . or maybe you just weren’t looking? That’s the shitting thing that’s going to ruin my net.’

 
; ‘I’m sorry, Skip . . . I just didn’t see it -’

  Jeff angrily waved a hand to shut him up. He studied the green screen as the spike slowly progressed towards the middle of the display. The spike was followed by another and then the line became a plateau at a new height for forty, fifty feet, then dipped back down again.

  ‘Stop the boat,’ Jeff ordered. Tom slammed the engine into neutral. Whatever that thing was, it was directly beneath them.

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t spot that first time round,’ Jeff said, shaking his head with incredulity. Tom ashamedly lowered his gaze, anticipating another roasting. He knew he wouldn’t be going out on Jeff Westland’s boat again.

  The door to the pilothouse swung open, and Ian entered. ‘The net’s not moving, Skip. I reckon we’re on top of whatever we’re caught on.’

  Jeff nodded at the sounder display. ‘A wreck, I think, we’re sitting right over it. Genius here didn’t notice it.’

  Tom’s cheeks turned crimson as Ian stared silently at him.

  Overheads settled before shares paid out. That’s the way it worked. With the net totalled, the outrigger damaged, and the crappiest haul of the season on ice down below, Ian could see a lean fortnight ahead of him, until the Skip was ready to take his boat out again.

  Tom realised he’d be best avoiding the bars in Port Lawrence for a while. At least until Ian and Duncan had been out again, and found themselves flush with money once more.

  ‘If we lose the net we lose the evening haul,’ Ian said bitterly.

  ‘Leave him be,’ said Jeff, ‘I’ve already spoken to him.’

  Ian studied the display carefully, trying to comprehend the three-dimensional shape described by the two-dimensional profile on the screen.

  ‘Is that a shipwreck, Skip?’

  ‘Yeah. There’re no rocks out here. This section of the banks is nothing but sixty miles of flat silt. It’s just great I find the one shipwreck out here when my net’s down. Just fucking great.’

  Ian continued to study the form on the sounder. It was fifty feet long and pretty flat, peaking at one end with a tall spike.

  ‘That’s a wreck all right, Skip. Reckon maybe that spike there’s a mast or something?’

  Jeff looked closely. ‘Maybe.’

  Tom pointed at the screen. ‘It doesn’t look like a ship.’

  The other two turned to look at him.

  ‘I said I don’t think it’s a ship.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care whether it’s a ship, the body of Moby Dick or the lost city of Atlantis, the damn thing’s got my net and it’s going to chew it up pretty good before I get it back.’

  Tom’s cheeks continued to burn under their withering gaze. But he knew that wasn’t the profile of a boat. It was obvious if you looked at it right.

  ‘So,’ said Jeff tiredly, the force of his anger spent leaving him feeling only exhausted resignation, ‘given that this is the seabed we’re looking at, if it’s not a ship, what the hell do you think it is?’

  ‘It’s a plane,’ said Tom with a voice he’d hoped would sound certain and confident, but in fact came out as little more than a whisper.

  Chapter 1

  The Assignment

  Chris Roland adjusted the arrangement of photographs on the table in the conference room. He had spent last night in his hotel room at the Marriott reviewing the contact sheets and from this he had carefully picked out several dozen of the most striking images. He’d developed and printed them in the en-suite bathroom through the early hours of this morning.

  He was exhausted.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the glass partition walls that separated the conference room from the rest of News Fortnite’s open-plan office. A tall and gaunt apparition stared back at him, his weather-tanned forehead at odds with the fish-belly white of his recently shaved chin and topped off with a marine buzz cut. Chris shook his head and smiled. He looked like the top half of his head had been zapped by a ray gun.

  His coarse brown hair had grown long, and he’d developed a full beard while on the last assignment, a wildlife shoot on the island of South Georgia. He’d begun to look like one of those hairy geeks they wheel out from time to time to talk about the good old pioneering days of the computer industry. Guys who looked like they could do with a little help-me-out cash but whose handful of gratis Apple or Microsoft shares are worth billions.

  After clearing immigration at JFK, he’d headed for a barber, yearning to feel the smoothness of his chin once more and lose the dead weight of his long, greasy hair tied up carelessly in a ponytail.

  As the interminably itchy and aggravating facial hair was whisked away by the barber, Chris had been shocked by how thin his face had become. The last few months of existing on a basic hi-sugar diet and spending all day long in the freezing winds of the South Atlantic seemed to have robbed his face of any spare fat. He knew if his mother could have seen him then, she’d have scolded him for not eating properly.

  Chris’s focus extended beyond his reflection in the glass towards a trim, silver-haired woman moving swiftly. He watched her weave her slight frame across the open-plan floor of the Features Section through a labyrinth of shoulder-high partitions towards the conference room. She was moving quickly and purposefully towards him, not a woman you’d ever want to risk keeping waiting, he fancied. Clearly she was running late with her own strictly imposed schedule. Chris had time enough to hurriedly straighten a couple of the pictures before Elaine Swisson, the deputy editor of News Fortnite, pushed open the door to the conference room and entered.

  ‘Hey, Chris, how’s my favourite little cockney urchin doing?’ she said with a no-nonsense Brooklyn accent.

  Chris had once described Elaine to a friend by asking him to visualise Susan Sarandon’s older, more aggressive sister. He wasn’t sure whether the actress even had an older sister, but if she did, Elaine should be her.

  But that was perhaps a little unkind. Sure, he’d seen her chew out a member of her staff here at the magazine once before, and she had a reputation for being an incredibly harsh negotiator with his agency, but for Chris, she seemed to find a warmer centre, inside the sharp edges of her business persona.

  ‘I’m fine, a little tired . . . but otherwise fine,’ Chris answered.

  ‘Yeah?’ She appraised him. ‘You look a lot like shit. Bad flight back?’

  ‘It was okay. It didn’t crash, which is always a good thing.’

  Elaine smiled. ‘Cute. How was South Georgia?’

  Chris could quite happily never go there again. Cold, wet and rough. It really hadn’t been one of his better assignments. ‘Weather wasn’t particularly great,’ he answered flatly.

  ‘Oh, surely no worse than an English summer?’

  Chris smiled. She wasn’t exactly the world’s most ardent Anglophile. Elaine had spent several years in London working for a sister publication. As far as Chris had worked out, the only thing she’d liked about her time in the city was the money she was being paid to tolerate it. There were many things over there that she casually described as ‘second-rate’ or ‘third-world’ to the irritation of her English colleagues, such as the ineffectual London Underground, the blandness of pub grub, the appalling cost of living and, of course, the miserable bloody weather, moans that any self-respecting Brit would happily indulge with her, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was American and quite happy to go on to say how much better things were back home.

  Chris had first met her while he was tentatively starting out on his freelance career after five years of relatively secure employment for MetroLife, one of the seedier, freebie-tabloids in the capital. After delivering promptly on a couple of assignments, she had begun requesting him by name through the agency Chris had signed up with. After she had returned to New York, he still found she was specifically requesting him and putting a decent amount of work his way, despite having any number of good photographers on her doorstep to choose from.

  Somehow she had managed to erase from
her mind the fact that he was one of those wet-fart Limeys. It had probably helped that he’d moved away from the east end of London, used a New York-based agency and worked on watering down his estuary accent a little.

  Or maybe she just wasn’t as anti-Brit as she made out.

  Elaine smiled warmly at him.

  Or maybe she just wants to mother me.

  Chris hadn’t failed to notice he tended to bring that instinct out in the older women he worked with.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Chris. Shall we take a look-see? ’

  She leaned over the conference table and studied the spread of pictures. There were images of a whaling station abandoned in the 1920s. Fantastic images, some in black and white, some in colour but desaturated and monochromatic. Images of beached whaling ships, their plate metal hulls rusted, exposing ribcages of corroded steel. Images of the station itself, interiors such as the dormitory huts and the canteen, complete with tin plates and cutlery laid out on a communal table ready for a meal that was never to take place.

  Nature, it seemed, had wasted little time in commandeering the station, and eighty years of undisturbed invasion had produced stunning compositions of lichen-covered toilet seats and beds and whale-rendering equipment playing host to communities of terns and puffins.

  Some in colour, some in black and white, but all of them beautiful. Elaine made no comment until she had viewed all the images on the table.

  ‘These are stunning, Chris . . . absolutely remarkable.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I think we can easily syndicate these. I can think of three other periodicals off the top of my head that will take ’em. They’re gorgeous.’

  ‘Thanks. It was a pretty good assignment,’ he said, momentarily forgetting the cold, miserable discomfort on the island.

  Elaine looked up from the photos. ‘Tired?’

  ‘I am a bit. It was a long flight yesterday, and then I was up late working on these.’

  ‘You need a break?’

  ‘I’d love a break. But then I guess the assignment you’re going to tell me about would have to go to some other young, hungry freelancer who might just do a better job.’