Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  Richard paused. There was an instant of silence. Then, from Katapult there came a sharp report, as though someone had fired a pistol shot. A tiny black object flew out from under the white canvas awning he had rigged that morning and performed a perfect parabola into the water, where it bobbed like a cork. Because, he realized, it was a cork.

  ‘And, of course,’ he continued without missing a beat, ‘the captain will be following the naval tradition of blessing the voyage with a glass of champagne . . .’

  ‘Naval tradition,’ said Willy, highly amused, an hour later. ‘That was impressive.’

  ‘Years of practise,’ answered Richard round a mouthful of foo yung. ‘I could bullshit for Great Britain at the next Olympics.’

  The camera lay between them on a table in the Chinese restaurant, its side panel open to reveal the vivid picture of Katapult vanishing northwards across the lagoon towards Te Ava Tepuka Vili channel under full sail. ‘Captain Mariner could skipper Katapult for Great Britain at the next Olympics,’ observed Willy. ‘I thought you said she’ll find it hard to tack straight through the channel south of Tepuka . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Richard, laying aside his chopsticks in favour of a spoon. ‘She went out like a ferret down a drainpipe. I never cease to underestimate her.’

  His cell phone purred. He slid it out and pressed it to his ear. ‘You got any footage left on that?’ he asked after a moment or two of attentive silence.

  ‘Half an hour or so,’ answered Willy. ‘Why?’

  ‘Something I want you to see. More news, maybe – though something for later, when the heat’s gone out of the Katapult story.’

  Half an hour later still, Willy and Richard were at the north end of the airport runway, looking west away over the breathtaking Lake Tarasal towards the eastern horizon. And here, as though by some massive magic trick, a supertanker had appeared. Willy could see the name Prometheus on her forecastle, and Heritage Mariner colours at her masthead and on her funnel. Behind him, the New Zealand Air Force choppers began to thunder up into the afternoon air.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Willy, confused, bellowing to get his voice over the thrumming rotors. ‘An oil tanker?’

  ‘A supertanker, yes,’ answered Richard. ‘But in this case not an oil tanker.’

  ‘Then what?’ demanded Willy, pulling out his camera as the first of the choppers began to settle away across the South Pacific towards the massive vessel like a dragonfly dipping towards a lily pad.

  ‘Well,’ began Richard, satisfyingly aware that, just as he had underestimated Robin’s seamanship, so she had underestimated him. ‘What you’re actually looking at there is a quarter of a million barrels of fresh, clean drinking water.’

  Fears

  Richard had no trouble hitching a lift on one of the RNZAF choppers and was back at their base in Ohakea, North Island, a couple of days later, all too well aware that he was heading in exactly the opposite direction to the woman he loved. But he had little time to mope or to indulge the lively fears that peopled his nightmares during the few restless hours of sleep he achieved in the interim. The guys at Ohakea were happy to drop him down to the nearest international airport, but only after he agreed to be guest of honour for dinner at the station’s mess.

  Another all but sleepless night of travel twenty-four hours after the mess night put him on the six ten a.m. BA flight from Wellington to Heathrow, and he touched down, nearly five thousand dollars poorer, frazzled and full of unreasoning fears – even after thirty-five hours in the pampered calm of first class – at five fifty BST on a cold and overcast morning at the beginning of the second week of August. He took a taxi to the company flat the Mariners kept at Heritage House on the corner of Leadenhall Street in the City of London – using the opportunity of a hold-up at seven a.m. as they crawled past Heston services to phone ahead and warn the twenty-four-hour people at Crewfinders that he was on his way home. And so he heaved himself in through the private entrance and stepped into the lift a little before eight thirty.

  He stepped out, feeling himself relax amid the homely familiarity of the place thirty seconds later still, at eight thirty on the dot. There were fresh flowers in the reception. In the bedroom, beyond the freshly made bed he had a wardrobe full of pressed coats and suits. Cupboards full of shoes. Drawers full of socks and underwear. Shelves of shirts. Ties, cufflinks – everything he could wish for. En suite, a bathroom stocked with his preferred shaving equipment, soaps and fragrances. Across the sitting room, a kitchen groaning with his favourite foodstuffs. And, in the garage far below, both his Bentley Continental and his classic E-Type Jaguar. What more could a man require? He just had to be careful not to open the wrong door or to slide out the wrong drawer or look in the wrong cabinet – or he would find himself face-to-face with Robin’s stuff. Head to head with her absence once again. And the fears it brought, no matter how much faith he had in her.

  Fighting off his preoccupation, he showered, shaved, checked messages, found there were none from Robin or about her, ordered a wake-up call for ten o’clock and tucked down for a slightly longer power nap than Lady Thatcher had preferred, feeling very much at home. Having decided, in fact, that this would be his home for the duration. With the twins safely in the hands of irresistibly indulgent grandparents in the South of France until the academic year began in October, he had every intention of staying in the flat until Robin returned. He loved Ashenden, their great old house on the south coast, but simply could not face the thought of spending the month there alone. And in any case, staying in the London flat would put him right at the heart of the action. Not to mention, of course, that he had a world-class business to run.

  But, he had to admit to himself as he rose in response to his wake-up call, that he was hardly slumming it. He shrugged a brand-new cotton shirt over his broad shoulders, buttoned it, slipped his favourite cufflinks through the double cuffs, then stepped into midnight-blue pinstripe suit trousers. Tightening the belt around his trim waist, he strolled through to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich of crisp dry-cure smoky bacon and wholewheat toast. A cup of his favourite Blue Mountain high roast Arabica coffee, black, no sugar, and a glance at the Financial Times he found nestling in the wire cage behind the letterbox, then he was ready. Ten minutes later, he stepped out of the flat’s front door, every inch the leading British businessman dressed for a busy day, turned right and right again, then slid his security card into the slot beside the interconnecting door that led him through into the Heritage Mariner offices. ‘Now that,’ he said to himself, suddenly almost buoyant, ‘is what I call commuting!’

  Throughout a packed schedule of meetings, he made sure he was kept as fully abreast of the progress made by Katapult and Flint as he was of the fluctuations in market prices, of shipping schedules, of project progress, of panics; grist to the mill of Heritage Mariner. But there was nothing substantial to report on the two yachts until a conference call came through from San Francisco at seven p.m. London time. It was Nic. ‘How’s it going, old buddy?’ the American demanded, bright-eyed and ebullient as ever. It was ten a.m. PST.

  ‘Fine.’ Richard growled. ‘Any news of the girls?’

  ‘Nothing you won’t be on top of. But I wondered if you’d seen the Fox Special? They’ve edited it all together in record time, so I hear. I’d guessed they’d run it by your guys if they haven’t run it by mine.’

  ‘No.’ Richard sat up, frowning. ‘Nobody here has said anything about it. When’s it going out?’

  ‘Part of their package in the One O’Clock News programme.’

  ‘If that’s Eastern Standard Time, then that’s now,’ said Richard. He reached over and grabbed the TV remote. He flipped through the Sky channels until he hit Fox International.

  Suddenly it was as though Richard was looking into a mirror. His face half filled the screen. And Robin was sitting beside him. ‘Of course we have fears,’ she was saying. ‘We’d be stupid not to see the risks.’ The camera panned across to Liberty,
scanning over a line of vital young female faces as it swept past the two crews. On the big photo wall behind them were pictures of the girls in younger days. The earnest young adventurers answering the questions were revealed in a range of attractive but alluring beachwear.

  ‘Flint is almost invisible, for example,’ said Liberty, her face serious; the picture behind her showing her in seemingly skintight fencing whites. ‘A polystyrene hull doesn’t give much of an image on radar after all. We’ve had to put extra radar reflectors aboard so that nearby shipping can make us out. We’ll be sailing through some pretty busy waters, certainly to begin with . . .’

  ‘And how will you all get along, cooped up together for a month and more?’ asked the interviewer.

  ‘Yes, that’s another fear,’ Liberty admitted. The camera lingered first on her, then on the other members of her crew as she spoke. Each of the others seemed – in younger, less sensible days – to have been beach bunnies and wannabe Playboy pin-ups. ‘Maya and I are old shipmates, but Emma and Bella have only sailed with us during the training and the short shakedown voyages.’

  Liberty looked across towards Robin. ‘I’ve actually done more sailing hours with Robin and Flo Weary than I have with them. But I’m sure it’ll all be fine . . .’

  ‘And what about your crew, Captain Mariner?’

  ‘The same,’ answered Robin shortly. ‘We’ve trained together. But only Flo and I have done all that many hours together.’ The pictures behind her were like something out of a beachwear catalogue. Or a lingerie directory. Nothing really in criminally bad taste, but enough to raise Richard’s eyebrows. ‘But you have to understand, there was an exhaustive selection and profiling process. Catfights are the least of our worries,’ insisted Robin seriously.

  ‘What other worries do you have, then Captain? What fears?’ probed the interviewer. And Richard realized. The beachwear backdrop was not designed to make the girls seem sexy. It was to emphasize their vulnerability. And it was doing a good job.

  ‘Well, obviously, there’s communication. We can’t just pick up a cell phone and call for help if the radio crashes or the computer goes down. And in many ways the North Pacific is more remote than the Amazon rainforest or the African jungle. But I’m experienced with navigation of course, and, like Maya over there, Flo is one of the leading yachts women of her generation. As is Rohini here, in fact. And Akelita has been sailing Oceania since she was born.’ The backdrop changed abruptly. Bikinis were replaced by sailing kit. Suddenly the women looked as competent as they sounded. But still the subtext lingered. Eight girls going out into the great unknown – their lives at the least at risk . . .

  ‘You getting this?’ Richard asked Nic.

  ‘Yup. Scary stuff.’

  ‘It would be,’ Richard agreed, ‘except that they’re all first-rate yachtswomen as Robin says. Even if things get a bit hairy, they can handle it.’ He emphasized the words, not because he needed to convince Nic but because he wished to counteract the message given out by the programme itself.

  ‘I hope so. Liberty’s mom is worried . . .’

  ‘But you’re OK yourself?’

  ‘As calm as I was the day her grandfather celebrated her fifth birthday by letting her sail out alone across Nantucket Bay. Comes with the territory. Father of boys – you worry. Father of girls—’

  ‘You pray. Yes. I get that. So do husbands.’

  ‘Some husbands. Some wives. Some prayers, I guess . . .’ A light flashed beside Nic. Communication failed abruptly.

  The Fox programme had cut to footage Richard had not seen before. Shots of Katapult sailing like a white gull across the deep blue of Te Namo Lagoon from Willy’s digital camera; others of Flint being whirled like a snowflake across the stormy grey of English Bay.

  And this cut to a big, bright map of the Pacific Ocean. All sixty-four million square miles of it. Three bright red spots gave the current positions of the yachts and of their objective. Richard strained to get some kind of accurate fix from the display, but with no success. The spots were too small; the map was too big. He sat back, his frown deeper still. He’d check up more closely on his own laptop later. In the meantime he wanted to listen.

  ‘And you can see at once,’ said the voiceover from the invisible commentator, ‘that Katapult has made little progress so far. She is all but becalmed there a little north and east of Tuvalu, well south and west of Hawaii, in the middle of that huge, featureless, mid-Pacific wilderness. Whereas Flint, on the contrary, is sailing almost at the limit of her design speed and seems to have covered a great deal of distance. Just not quite in the right direction so far! She has been pushed well off course by the storm system above her – though she could hardly be sailing any faster, as I say. And Doctor Tanaka’s bottle, the famous good ship Cheerio has also made surprising progress – and is very nearly at the spot he predicted it will have reached in seven days’ time from now!’

  It was just after two a.m. in Manila but the man who occupied the equivalent flat to Richard’s at the top of the huge building that housed the main offices of Luzon Logging in the heart of Quezon City rarely slept. He too was watching the Fox Network programme, but unlike Richard he was not bothered with the excited tones of the voiceover. He had turned the sound off and was watching the subtitles instead. He slept little and was careful how he listened because of the terrible damage done to his ears. His head was long, lined, bald. His nose was pronounced. Hooked. His chin was broad and square. He had been a striking man given the mixed heritage from Dutch/Indonesian parents that had left his skin the colour of old ivory. Now he was simply memorable because of the great black boxes that clamped to either side of his skull like the jaws of a vice. If he took them off – loosened them, even, he was profoundly, helplessly deaf. His ears and much of the delicate bone structure immediately within them had been catastrophically shattered by an uncontrolled plunge from high in the air to the bottom of a deep river.

  A disastrous fall for which the deaf man blamed Richard Mariner.

  The long, dark Indonesian eyes watched the screen intently. Then, when the programme was finished, an unsteady hand rewound it so that the intent gaze could observe the bikini-clad forms of the eight contestants once again.

  Like Richard, he recognized that the message here was one of vulnerability, not of sexual availability. But the problem was that this man was excited by power. And he most enjoyed exercising it over people who were vulnerable. It was the exploitation of vulnerability, the pressure he could bring to bear on his victims towards helplessness and humiliation that most excited him. It was a pleasure that he practised in private on the rare occasions that the desire overcame him. And those few victims whose helplessness he enjoyed to the full never survived to tell the tale.

  And now his greatest enemy seemed to have sent eight of his most attractively vulnerable associates in two almost laughably fragile craft into the vastness of the North Pacific. Into the deaf man’s playground. And, as with the ridiculous Japanese doctor’s pointless bottle of Cheerio, the women’s vessels were fitted with tracking devices so he would know at any time of the day or night exactly where they were. Exactly where he could get his hands on them, when the desire to do so became too strong to control any longer.

  The phone began to ring but he did not hear it. And such was his concentration on the defenceless bodies frozen on the screen that he did not even see the warning light flashing in time to the urgent sound.

  It was just after three in the morning in Tokyo, but Dr Reona Tanaka still found it impossible to sleep. A man of lifelong abstinence, he was on his third bottle of Sake. A man of strict propriety, he had nevertheless spent an evening of extremely improper, unprofessional abandon in the arms of one of his most beautiful colleagues. A man of almost monastic self-denial, he now found that the sight of his new-found love returning naked from the bathroom of his tiny university flat made him ready for action again – for the fourth time since he had realized the truth.

  Seeing how ready
he was once more, Dr Aika Rei stepped delicately astride him and prepared to lower herself. ‘You’re sure?’ she teased again, taking him gently in hand. ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘I have the number written down. There can be no mistake. I have the winning ticket.’

  Satisfied, she settled into place once more and leaned forward until her hair formed a fragrant tent around his face. ‘And where have you put it? Where is the ticket itself?’ she whispered.

  And the realization cut through the euphoria then. Through the euphoria, the sake and the sensuality. He felt himself begin to soften as he looked up at her with simple horror.

  ‘I put it in the bottle with all the others,’ he whispered soberly. ‘It’s in the good ship Cheerio somewhere out in the middle of the ocean. All one-hundred-and-ten-million US dollars’ worth of it.’

  Calm

  ‘Look,’ shouted Liberty, raising her voice only just above the relentless storm to reach Maya down in the communications and navigation area – the snug, as they called it now. Maya, like the rest of them, was dressed in orange oilskins as though they were sailing at the North Pole instead of British Columbia. ‘We just have to stay calm. This won’t last, and at least its swinging us round so we’re almost back on course. Think how far we’ve come already!’

  ‘Yeah. More than a thousand miles. Mostly in the wrong direction.’

  Liberty closed her eyes for a moment and tried not to get distracted as the wind inflated her hood like a beach ball, almost literally making her light-headed. Thank God she had abandoned the idea of live camera coverage almost immediately, she thought. What they lost in publicity value they would gain by protecting their reputations. ‘Oh, come on, Maya! Where’s the grit you showed in your last scheduled contact with Katapult? Flint is streets ahead of her. All we have to do is stay calm, keep going and try not to weaken.’