The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 2

by Christopher Cartwright

  “Could it have been something they were carrying as cargo?”

  “That’s what I thought to begin with. But the Global Star’s logbooks tell us she was carrying a shipment of cars. I spoke to Captain Miller and he assures me there’s no way either himself or someone aboard was taking on a private cargo of acid.”

  “Someone might have hidden it?” Sam suggested.

  “Not enough of it to cause this sort of damage.”

  Sam climbed another set of scaffolding ladders and stopped. “So what do you think caused it then?”

  “No idea. Captain Miller seemed to think you might be able to help us out with it.” He smiled. Kind of patronizing like. “Said you got some sort of sixth sense when it comes to shipwrecks.”

  Veyron smiled. “Sam’s been involved in a number of shipwreck recoveries. He’s the best in the game. If there’s something to find here, we’ll come up with it.”

  “So we’re thinking that whatever damaged the ship was acidic?” Sam asked.

  “We’re not thinking anything at this stage. We’re just thinking it’s all pretty unusual if you ask me.” Reaching the height of the lower deck, Donald opened the door and entered the ship’s hull. “Now tell me, did Captain Miller tell you about the damn phosphorescence?”

  “Yeah, he said something about it being radiant on the night of the collision.”

  “I suppose it would have been. What with all that turbulence, but that’s not what I mean. I’m speaking about the problem with the phosphorescence since we got a hold of the ship.”

  “You have a problem with plankton?” You could hear the ridicule in Veyron’s voice.

  “Not plankton. That’s for sure.” Don forced himself to smile. He’d obviously been expecting such a response from the men who’d been sent to get some answers. “Come with me, and I’ll show you the bilge. It appears some of the water from that terrible wave ended up in the bowels of the ship. You’re gonna want to see this for yourself.”

  They walked through the dark tunnels which open into the engine room. They passed the massive turbines and walked further downwards. A series of cables with floodlighting surrounded the walkways.

  Their feet clanked as they stepped along the steel grates that formed the internal working stairs, used by maintenance to check on the bilge and assess the engines at different heights. At the end of the last one, it came to a sudden ending about three floors above the bilge – giving it the appearance of a giant viewing platform.

  “This will do gentlemen.” Don stopped and then flicked off the lights.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Just wait for it. You’ll see what I need to show you.”

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Sam strained his eyes trying to make out something in the darkness, but no light came to them. He could hear the labored breathing of Donald, the overweight naval engineer who had lead him down into the dark hull.

  “Okay watch this,” Don said.

  A moment later there was the sound of a large splash, as something dropped into the bilge water. Sam’s heightened sense of hearing while in the complete darkness magnified the echoes of the splash as it ricocheted around the confined steel hull.

  He struggled to make out an image, but saw nothing.

  Veyron switched on his flashlight. “All right Mr. Richardson, what’s this all about?”

  Donald shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure, it must have died.”

  “What died?” Sam and Veyron asked in unison.

  “The phosphorescent plankton living in this bilge.”

  “You brought us here to see the plankton?” Sam asked.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m telling you, this wasn’t no ordinary plankton. This stuff glowed stronger than anything I’ve ever seen. It was like plankton on steroids – and it wasn’t behaving normally.”

  Sam was getting frustrated. “What do you mean by that? Plankton doesn’t do anything or behave in any sort of way. It just drifts in the ocean at the mercy of the currents.”

  “It’s doing stuff to this hull. I can’t prove it, but if I had to bet on it, I’d say that something in the plankton ate away at the hull.”

  “Have you done tests with the stuff? You know, taken the plankton and placed it in a metal container to see what it does?”

  “Sure have.”

  “And what were the results?”

  Donald smiled, stupidly. “Nothing. It did nothing.”

  “So, the plankton behaved normally.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t prove it was normal.”

  “If it doesn’t prove exactly that, what do you think it proves Mr. Richardson?” Veyron asked.

  Donald gritted his teeth. He looked like a man waiting to tell the most unbelievable part of the story, only to stop at the last minute, having thought better about what it would sound like. Then, crumbling with the need to get it off his chest, he said, “Only that the plankton didn’t want to lose its container of sea water.”

  “Interesting,” Sam replied. “We’ll run some tests on the water and see what we find.”

  “What do you think you’ll find with dead plankton?” Veyron asked, unable or unwilling to hide his skepticism.

  “I have no idea, but the only similarity between the story told by each Captain, whose ship was struck by this rogue wave, was their reflection that the plankton was brighter than it had ever been before.”

  “We’ve already agreed that it would be reasonable for the phosphorescence to be radiant in the wake of such a powerful wave. What makes you so willing to believe such a ridiculous theory?” Veyron asked.

  “Because I’ve seen more improbable answers to questions in the past.”

  Donald chuckled to himself. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  Sam opened his backpack and removed a sampling kit. He then climbed down the steel ladder and knelt next to the bilge water. Using a glass beaker, he withdrew 200 milliters of seawater from the bilge. “Don’t get too carried away. I agree with Veyron, it’s a long shot, but I’ll run some tests and follow the only lead we have so far. Say, you seem pretty convinced by all this. Was there something else which makes you feel that the plankton is somehow different?”

  “Look. I get it. You think I’m crazy, but run the tests. I’m telling you there’s something different about this stuff.” The man was sweating. He looked nervous near the bilge water. Constantly fidgeting, and when Sam asked him to help with the water, he took a step back. “No thank you, sir. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just wait here.”

  “Go on, as you said, we already think you’re crazy. So no reason to stop where you are now. May as well go all the way with your story.”

  “All right.” He fidgeted with some paper notes. “Just remember, I’m just telling you the facts. We have a large Mexican workforce here, and as you know, they can be prone to superstition. Frankly, we’d all be happy once this ship has been scrapped.”

  Sam reassured him it would be all right. “Go on.”

  “A few days ago one of my welders, Juan Gonzales fell into that bilge.” Donald pointed at the dark, lifeless water. “A few hours later he developed a terrible rash all over his body and by that afternoon had an intense headache, followed by a rapid deterioration of his ability to stay awake. An ambulance was called and by the time they arrived, they had to stick a tube in his mouth so that he could breathe. By 6p.m. he’s in hospital and they take him for an MRI – you know one of those imaging machines?”

  Sam nodded his head. “Go on.”

  “Five minutes into the test, he began having seizures, and the Doctors had to stop it. Then all his symptoms seemed to disappear and by the next morning it was like nothing had ever happened.”

  “Did they complete the MRI?”

  “Sure did. Waited until the morning and sent him through the same machine with some drugs on board to keep him from fitting again.”

  Sam was eager for the man to get to the point. “What did the
MRI show?”

  Donald shook his head sympathetically. “He has a grade IV brain tumor. Probably won’t live until the end of the month. Never had any symptoms before. Some shitty luck, huh?”

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Tom dived to a hundred and thirty feet. Next to him, Genevieve reserved her energy and air supply by lying perfectly still. The two of them looked out over the large sandbar on the seafloor. There were at least a dozen vessels there and maybe another dozen in the surrounding areas.

  “It’s like looking at a candy shop and being told to take photos and mark the location of each type of lolly. Then being told that if you’re a good kid, you can taste them in a few days’ time,” Tom complained.

  Gen took a photo of the shipwreck graveyard. Probably the largest collection of 17th century shipwrecks ever found together. “They say vision is the food for the soul. I’d say this is quite a feast we have here.”

  “Good point.” Tom showed her a dive slate. A single triangle marked the Bonaventure which he and Sam had explored. Tom ticked it. “Okay, that’s one down – Sam wants us to document the rest of them. We’ll start on the western side and slowly progress inwards towards the east.”

  “Got it.”

  She swam ahead of him, eagerly kicking her fins. Tom followed. They documented a total of sixteen shipwrecks before it was time to ascend to the surface again. Tom followed Genevieve’s lithe figure, as she swam to the top of a sandbar like a water nymph.

  Genevieve stopped at the top of the sandbar and stared at the wooden structure below. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Tom smiled. “I believe that’s the trimaran from Sam’s stupid oil painting.”

  Chapter Fourty

  Sam ran his hand along the inside of the cylindrical bulkhead at the bow of the gigantic cargo ship. The thing must have been nearly a foot in diameter. Once perfectly straight, it now had a single bend around halfway down. Then at its base, where it was fixed to the ship’s hull with sixteen giant bolts, it had been pushed with such forced that it now popped out through the bottom of the hull, leaving a gaping hole for seawater to flow.

  Along the hull a distinct line formed where the sea water had reached. Now drained, everything below that line appeared to have been melted, while everything above looked normal.

  “What do you make of that?” Sam asked.

  Veyron looked down at the markings on the wall. “Beats me, but it’s hard to refute the evidence – I might have been wrong before.”

  “Wrong about what?”

  “I thought this must have come from inside the ship. A leak of strong acids stored as cargo, but now this looks like it’s going to disprove that theory.”

  Sam glanced between the gash along the bow where the bulkhead broke through and back down towards the main bilge. The markings clearly showed that something had entered at one end and flowed through towards the other. Whatever that was, it caused the damage. “It came from the outside, didn’t it?”

  Veyron sighed. “It would appear so.”

  “Are you starting to give some credence to this whole plankton was behind everything theory?”

  “No.”

  “But you said this was caused by whatever came through that gap in the bulkhead?”

  Veyron grinned. “Yes, but I never said it was seawater that flowed through there.”

  “Of course it was bloody seawater. What else do you get when you make a hole in a ship’s hull out in the open sea?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Veyron climbed down the ladder and squatted over the now empty bilge compartment. “Do you remember when we flew in, how I said that the damage looked like the Global Star was struck by a solid wall, not a rogue wave which the ship would have at least tried to ride over?”

  “Yes, but a rogue wave can move like a solid wall of water.”

  Veyron put his hands up to tell Sam to give him a second to finish. “What if the Global Star did collide with another ship?”

  “She’s one of the largest cargo ships on the planet. She must have hit some pretty big ship for it to this sort of damage.” Sam looked at him. The theory of evil plankton was beginning to look more palatable.

  “Think about it. The Law of the Sea states that while underway a watch must be on deck at all times. But we all know with the invention of GPS and Automated Identification Systems, which track the directions of large vessels, most modern cargo ships are entirely automated. Their crew are rarely on deck, let alone at the helm. How many times have you heard of a cargo ship turning up to dock and being advised that a small yacht or motorboat is crumpled in its bow?”

  Sam frowned. He’d seen it once himself. It had been a 42 foot Catalina yacht. The captain of the cargo vessel hadn’t even realized he’d struck the vessel and had continued underway, unaware that the crew was drowning beneath his monstrous bow. “Okay, so why would Captain Miller weave such a different story?”

  “Because such an event would never be deemed an accident by the Maritime Safety Board. It would be an act of gross negligence and both ship captains would lose their registrations.”

  “Okay, so what happened to the other ship?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it sank. Or it was able to limp away?”

  “Okay, let’s say we entertain this fanciful concept,” Sam said. “How then would any of this explain why we have this ridiculously damaged metal?”

  “Because whatever that other ship was carrying, it was sure as shit highly corrosive.” Veyron pulled on a piece of the hull next to where he stood to demonstrate. An entire section roughly three feet wide by two feet high broke off. The tiny grooves and broken sections of the metal wove deep into the sheet like termites had eaten away at it. “Is it just me, or does this look like the entire ship has been eaten by termites?”

  Sam picked the metal up and then squeezed it. His hands broke through the metal. Crushing it like a piece of honeycomb. “Beats me. You’re the engineer – you tell me.”

  “You don’t need an engineer. You need a metallurgist. I’m a lot of things, but that I am not.”

  “Then find me one.”

  Chapter Forty One

  Sam broke the hollowed metal into smaller pieces until he could carry one without too much trouble. He and Veyron continued making their way aft of the cargo ship through the bowels of its internal hull.

  It involved climbing and descending several series of internal stairs in order to reach over the watertight barriers. Sam noted that at the base of the barriers, where the seawater should have been stopped by the large metal compartments, a hole nearly ten feet wide by half a foot high had been melted through the bottom – as though the seawater had been eating its way to reach the lowest point within the bilge.

  The strangest thing, he thought, was why the acid hadn’t simply melted through the outer hull altogether. The hull certainly wasn’t any stronger.

  Sam climbed the latest set of stairs to overcome the third watertight compartment. Just as he was about to begin his descent into the next one he noticed four laborers casually removing any wiring from the gangway.

  “Hello gentlemen,” Sam said.

  He watched as the men scrutinized him. Their eyes displayed respect and also fear. Donald had told them Sam and Veyron earlier that all staff would be willing to help with anything that they required. The men nodded their heads in response and then continued working. Making an obvious show that they were not slacking in their duties.

  “Do you have a metallurgist here?” Sam asked.

  “Yes Senior,” the shortest of the four men replied.

  “Good.” Sam lifted the honeycombed metal he’d pulled off the hull. “I need you to take this to him and have him run an analysis of what caused these holes. Can you do that?”

  The man looked frightened.

  Sam tried to hand it to him. “It’s very important.”

  “Yes, of course Senor.” The Mexican laborer held the metal with the very tips of his fingers and out from his body,
as though it might hurt him if he allowed any skin contact.

  Sam watched him turn and start running up the steel stairs and through an open hatchway. Sam turned to Veyron as they continued to descend the stairs approximately mid ship. “Is it just me Veyron, or did that man look frightened?”

  “That’s an understatement.” Veyron whistled. “Did you see the pupils in his eyes? They were like dinner plates they were so large. The man looked positively terrified of the hollowed metal. It was as though the entire thing was going to come alive and kill him and his family.”

  “I thought for a moment he was just going to turn around and walk out on his job, but obviously he thought better of the American dollars that it earns him.”

  There was very little new to be learned by examining the rest of the ship. It was very clear that whatever entered the ship at the bow, slowly made its way aft by melting its way through each of the watertight compartments.

  Sam and Veyron reached the main bilge by a quarter to five in the afternoon. It was the same one Donald had shown them that had contained the spooky green plankton. A Mexican worker strung a large woven band in the shape of an eye, on to the side of the main viewing platform. There were already another three just like it hung around the massive room. At the same time another person poured something from a large bag into the bilge water.

  Sam turned to the foreman who appeared to be planning out the work for tomorrow. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s a big job, but it’s what we do here.” The man smiled. He was American, and shorter than average with a wiry frame presumably from years of hard work. He offered his hand and said, “Adrian Sanders. You must be Sam Reilly?”

  Sam took it. “Yes, and this is Veyron my chief engineer.”

  “Pleased to meet you sir,” he replied turning to shake Veyron’s hand.

  “What do you think happened here?” Sam enquired casually.