by Dayle, Harry
The door opened and ship’s doctor Grau Lister hobbled in, supported by crutches. He nodded solemnly at the men.
“Grau, thank you for coming.” Jake found a chair for him and helped him to sit down. “You should be in a wheelchair, Grau.”
“Nonsense. That is no way to rebuild muscle tissue. I have to walk as much as possible. And before you say another word, I will remind you that it is I who am the doctor. Who else are we waiting for?”
“Coote. He says he may have something important. And Amanda, Ella, and Silvia are all coming down too.”
The captain of the Royal Navy submarine was the next to arrive. Jake was surprised to see that he’d brought ‘Eagle-eyes’ Jason Fletcher with him too.
“Captain Noah, gentlemen,” Coote said, tipping his cap to the gathering. “Terrible business. Losing a man at sea is a special kind of awful, one I have, sadly, experienced too often. One that never gets easier.”
“He’s not lost yet,” Jake said. “You know that, Coote. A man is only lost when he gives up, and those around him give up on him. We have not given up on Stieg.”
“Yes, of course,” Coote said kindly. But there was something in the way he said it that made Jake think that the navy man knew the fisherman was not coming back.
Martin wasn’t so diplomatic. “You’re wasting your time, Jake. You’re wasting the time of everyone aboard. We’ll never find him. We don’t even know how long he was missing.”
“Yes we do.”
“We do?”
“Yes. He was there when the bridge crew sat down for lunch. I saw him. And when I’d finished eating, he was gone. It was twelve thirty-six when I called full stop. I wasn’t eating for more than ten minutes. Let’s widen the margin just in case and say he went missing sometime between twelve twenty and twelve thirty-six. That’s a sixteen-minute window. We were cruising at fifteen knots, as we have been since leaving Scotland. That means we covered about four nautical miles between him falling out of that raft and us cutting power. We’ve gone another mile since. You think we have no chance of finding him in five nautical miles? Seriously?”
“Gentlemen,” Coote said, raising his voice, an occurrence so rare as to make everyone stop and listen. “I think it would be wise to listen to what Jason here has to say. I didn’t bring him here just for his charm and good looks.”
All eyes turned to Jason. Amanda and Ella entered the room as Coote was speaking. They said nothing, waiting for Eagle-eyes to have his say.
Jason cleared his throat. He wasn’t used to an audience. “I believe we spotted something, around the time you think Stieg went missing. The sonar picked up a blip, very close by. It lasted about forty-five seconds.”
“A blip? What’s a blip? Be more specific, man,” Martin said, frowning.
“I’m afraid I can’t. There was no manual lookout at the time. The sonar alerted me to something apparently popping onto the screen, but by the time I’d deployed the full optronics mast array, it had gone again. So whatever it was, I never got eyes on it.”
Jake pulled out a chair and sat down, forehead in his hand, elbow resting on the table. “I assume you tried to find it again?”
“Of course.”
“No sign?”
“Nothing. I ran a full array of checks. Sonar, visual, infrared, the lot. There was nothing there. I was about to call your bridge to see if your lookout had seen anything, when you ordered the full stop.”
“So there we are, old boy. What do you make of that?” Coote said, taking a seat next to Jake.
Jake shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re the experts.”
Martin looked at the two captains, his face creasing into a look of exasperation. “Well it’s obvious, isn’t it? It must have been some kind of malfunction. Or are you suggesting that a Martian UFO materialised out of thin air, kidnapped Stieg — presumably for one of those alien autopsies — then dematerialised just as quickly?”
Nobody appreciated the sarcasm.
“A malfunction is a possibility, but a very remote one. All our systems are twinned. False positives are extremely rare. Both systems have to be in agreement to generate the kind of alert I saw. I will, however, run a full diagnostic.”
Jake nodded. “So, Grau, what are his chances, if he’s in the water?”
“I do not know the man personally, but assuming he is in good shape, he should be able to survive a couple of hours. The water is cold, for sure, but not so bad that it will kill him instantly.”
“Stieg very strong,” one of the fishermen said. “Good swim. Strong.” He repeated the words to his colleague in their own tongue, and the other man nodded vigorously.
“Then I don’t think we need to waste time with a vote, do we, ladies?” Coote looked at Amanda and Ella. “No point gathering the others. We’re already headed in the right direction. Let’s try and find the man.”
• • •
Grace was beginning to regret ever having insisted on doing something other than patrol work. In her determination to get back to solving crime, she had forgotten the arduous leg work involved in most police investigations. Sitting at the tiny desk in the gloomy office, with the continuous noise of the food preparation area outside, and the service counter beyond that, she leafed through page after tedious page from the file.
Back home, in the real world, the world that had gone forever, she would have had uniformed officers to do this sort of thing for her. Here on the ship, she was reduced to the role of foot soldier, taking orders from a company man with no experience of real policing.
Another page. Another name: “Jones”. She banged a fist on the table. “I’m not sorting any more of these into order,” she shouted at the light fitting. Instead of locating the Js and inserting the ration record into its correct position, she threw it to the floor. She picked up the next sheet and checked the name: “Addison”. It fluttered down to join the Jones’. Grace felt immediately better. She should have worked through them this way from the start; she would be done by now. Her conscientious effort to restore the file had been a huge waste of time. Lethbridge had dropped it, she could fix it. Or, more likely, get one of her put-upon and overworked minions to do it for her.
Grace’s renewed optimism was short lived. A bleep and a crackle from her belt wiped the smile from her face.
“Grace Garet, please respond. Grace Garet.”
She looked at the small black radio from the corner of her eye, and decided to ignore it. It was noisy, and so perfectly reasonable to think she hadn’t heard the call. She picked up another wad of forms and worked through them in short order. Wright, Jobson, Patel, O’Halloran, Atton, Paschal, Washington, Gautier; the names tumbled to the floor like autumn leaves.
“Grace, answer your radio or you’re off the security team!”
Max had somehow managed to remotely increase the volume of the device to maximum. There was no pretending now. Even some of the restaurant staff outside had heard the call, looking up from spooning out portions of rice.
“Argh!” She slammed the remaining pages down on the desk, and unclipped the radio.
“This is Grace,” she said stonily.
“About bloody time. Listen, I need you up on deck seven. Call in at the stores on two and get some binoculars on your way. We’ve a man overboard. I need you on lookout.”
“Max, I can’t just drop what I’m doing. It’s not just Mr Moran who’s missing, his wife is too. We have a responsibility to find them.”
“Deck seven. Ten minutes. If you’re not there, you can go straight to Silvia Brook’s office for reassignment.”
“But—”
The radio bleeped once and cut out before she had a chance to respond.
Grace checked her watch. She figured she could get down to the stores and back up to seven in about six minutes. That still left a few minutes to find what she was looking for. She sped through more and more ration records, cursing the committee for not having prioritised a project to computerise the whole syste
m.
Then she found it.
“Moran, Giles. Moran, Claire”
“Yes!” She punched the air.
“No!” Her fist fell, dropping limply by her side. She read the sheet, then read it again. According to the restaurant’s ration sheet, the Morans had been in and claimed their meals every day of the last week. They weren’t missing at all.
Five
GRACE REACHED DECK seven with barely thirty seconds to spare. To her amazement, and anger, Max was actually standing there counting down the time from his wristwatch when she arrived.
“Shame,” he said, lowering his arm. “I thought you might be for farm duty.”
“It was important, what I was doing.”
“So’s farm duty.”
“Of course. But my skills are better utilised in the detection and prevention of crime.”
Max grunted. “So, what crime have you detected? Here, we need to go this way.” He pointed towards the bows of the ship, and they set off walking. A stiff breeze whipped at them, making conversation difficult.
“The Morans have been claiming their rations.”
Max let out a roar of laughter. “Not missing at all then? Good, so you can be back on deck patrol after we’ve finished this charade.”
“I thought we were looking for someone overboard?” Grace sounded shocked.
“That we are. And I can tell you right now that we won’t find them.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because we’ve never found anyone who’s gone overboard.”
“But you said people went over all the time? You’re telling me you’ve never managed to find one of them?”
“Miss Garet, we rarely even try.”
Grace stopped dead. “What?”
Max looked over his shoulder, but kept walking. “This way, Miss Garet. Or are you considering a change of career?”
Grace closed her eyes, breathed deeply, then jogged to catch up. “What do you mean, you rarely try? You must make some sort of effort when people disappear.”
“This is the high seas, Miss Garet, not your ‘downtown precinct’ or whatever you call it. People wanna jump? We let them. Not our problem. We’re not spending a fortune in fuel going round in circles just so we can bring back a body for the family to bury.”
“But…but…what if they didn’t go overboard? Or what if someone fell and didn’t jump? You have a responsibility to your passengers!”
“Yep. To all our passengers. Thousands of them, who’d rather be spending their time and money visiting the pyramids than sailing in circles.”
“And if someone was murdered? Their body thrown overboard?”
“Miss Garet, are you a bit slow? It’s not our problem.”
“You have a legal responsibility to investigate possible crime!”
“No, actually, we don’t. Not in international waters anyway. If someone goes missing, the company bungs the family some cash and a free holiday and hopes the problem goes away. That’s the way it’s always been, and not just with us. All the operators are the same. Ah, here we are. Right. I’m stationing you here. Got your binoculars? Good. Just…search the sea, or something. The captain wants us to make an effort, and as he has the ear of the committee, we are unfortunately bound to comply with his, frankly, ridiculous wishes. When we’re done, you can stay on deck. You’re back on patrol.”
“But the Morans—”
“Aren’t missing, according to your own investigation. Deck patrol, Miss Garet.”
Grace clenched her hands and swallowed the expletive that was on the end of her tongue. Max was gone anyway, positioning the rest of the security team around the deck. She looked at the binoculars in her right hand and considered throwing them overboard and going back inside. That, she realised, would be a bad move. Her mind was already made up. There had to be some sort of conspiracy. It seemed obvious to her. Someone had bumped off the Morans, thrown them overboard, and was now claiming their rations. She was going to catch them.
• • •
The cold steel handrail dug into Jake’s belly and pressed against his lower ribs. He couldn’t feel it, although he would probably have bruises in the morning. He was at the very prow of the ship, leaning forwards as if every centimetre he could extend himself would somehow help him to spot the lost man in the sea. Binoculars gripped firmly in both hands, he scanned left, then right, left, then right. The wind had increased in strength the further west they had travelled, and it had begun to whip up the surface of the channel into little white horses. Every now and then he would spot one that just for a split second could be a person. Then the wave would roll over and disperse, popping the tiny bubble of hope that had ballooned inside him.
“Anything?” Coote called from his right. The submarine captain, less optimistic and perhaps less agile than his cruise ship counterpart, stood back a little way from the railing. He surveyed his patch calmly and, Jake knew, with little real hope of success.
“Nothing,” Jake replied solemnly. “Anders?” He glanced left at the fisherman.
“Nej.”
More people — sailors, the entire security team, a few off-duty farm workers, and some of the submariners — fanned out along the perimeter of the ship, one person every five metres. The Ambush, sailing parallel to them on the port side, was scanning the area with its full array of sensors. If anyone was in the water, somebody would see them.
And yet, they had seen nothing.
Nobody said it, but Jake knew they were approaching the limit of their search area. He thought that they must already have covered more than five nautical miles. The current was against them, so if it had carried Stieg away from where he had presumably fallen from the raft, they would already have passed him by now. Even so, they would keep going, backtracking their route for another mile or two. It was always possible that, disoriented, he was swimming away from them.
“Captain Noah!”
Jake pulled his binoculars away and stepped over to Coote. “You see something? What is it?”
“Not sure. What do you think? Dead ahead. I’d say three hundred metres away.”
Jake followed the older man’s finger and focussed, sweeping left and right a few degrees at a time. He spotted it almost straight away.
“What do you think, old boy? Your eyes are younger than mine.”
“It’s an oar. I’m sure it’s an oar.”
“Aha! Yes, now you say it I can see you are right. Gosh, I have become so dependent on our fancy gadgets and gizmos, old-fashioned eyeballing is not my forte.”
“This is good, right?” Jake’s voice rose in pitch. “It means we’re in the right place.”
“Can’t argue with that, old chap.”
“Listen up!” Jake turned and addressed everyone who was within earshot. “We have an oar in sight, three hundred metres to the starboard side. We’re on the right track. Keep your eyes peeled. We’re going to find him.” He unclipped a radio from his belt and called to the bridge, instructing Chuck to turn ten degrees starboard.
As they ploughed on though, the burst of optimism began to fade. Not only was there no sign of Stieg, there wasn’t even another oar.
Jake felt a tap at his shoulder. He didn’t turn; he didn’t want to peel his eyes away from the expanse of sea before him.
“Jake, something’s come up. I think you need to come and see.”
He knew the voice. It was his friend, Ewan Sledge, submariner from HMS Ambush.
“You see something?”
“Yes. But not Stieg. Captain Coote, you’ll need to come too, sir.”
“I can’t leave here,” Jake protested. “The lookout—”
“It’s okay, Eric will take over.”
Eric O’Brien, Ewan’s colleague and close friend, took up position alongside him.
“I’ll keep a good watch, Jake,” he reassured him. “You really should go with Ewan.”
Jake finally, and reluctantly, stepped away from the railing. Coote was already on
his way. He followed, catching him up at a bank of lifts, with Ewan tagging alongside.
“Not going to tell me more about what this is about, Ewan old boy?” Coote asked.
“Probably best to, er…” Ewan dropped his voice and paused as a family walked past, chatting and laughing. “Best to wait until we’re on the sub.”
The three of them continued in silence. They descended to deck two, and then took the walkway that was rigged up between the Arcadia and the Ambush while the submarine was out of the water. Jake hated the walkway. It was designed to let passengers on and off the ship when docked in port. It was most definitely not made for passage between two moving vessels. The engineering team had done a good job though, and the system was sturdy and reliable. It had been improved since its original incarnation, with more substantial sides to keep the buffeting wind at bay. Even so, it had a tendency to wallow in the middle, and Jake was never quite convinced that it wouldn’t buckle and send him into the ocean at any moment. He wiped his brow the moment he reached the safety of the Ambush’s conning tower.
Ewan led them through the warren of cramped passages, into the communications control room, the heart of the submarine.
“Ralf, Jason.” Jake nodded to the two men he knew well. The other officers he had barely met, and quite out of nowhere he felt a sudden flush of guilt at that fact. He made a mental note to spend more time on the Ambush, getting to know all of its crew better. There were only a hundred of them, and the whole community was dependent on the work they did. As chairman of the committee, it seemed the right thing to do.
Dispensing with greetings, Ralf reported what was so important as to drag them away from the search for Stieg.
“We’ve picked something up on the radar.”
“Stieg?” Jake asked, his pulse quickening.
“No. Bigger. Much bigger. We’ve detected a boat.”