Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘The cargo’s not important,’ snapped Aika Rei. ‘Can you accommodate us?’

  ‘The captain’s usually happy to make a little extra on the side.’ The big fists opened. ‘If you can afford the passage, then you’ll be welcome aboard.’

  ‘And you’ll be going straight across the North Pacific,’ said Reona, pulling a printout from an inner pocket. ‘Past this position here?’

  The sailor took the piece of paper, spread it on the table top and looked at it. ‘This isn’t a chart,’ he observed, as though mildly surprised by the fact.

  ‘But the position is given very accurately,’ answered Reona, pointing with overeager emphasis. ‘You can see it there. Northings and eastings to three decimal places . . .’

  The brutal face looked up. The edges of the eyes crinkled just as though Lieutenant Sakai was smiling. ‘Yes,’ said the sailor decisively. ‘We go right past there.’

  ‘Then we’d like to book passage with you,’ Aika Rei concluded, equally decisively. ‘How much will it be, when do we need to come aboard and what documentation do we need to bring?’

  The first officer of the Dagupan Maru looked at her silently. ‘You seem pretty eager,’ he observed after a heartbeat.

  ‘It’s our honeymoon . . .’ insisted Reona weakly.

  ‘OK,’ decided Sakai. ‘We have a deal subject to the captain’s agreement. Leave me a contact and I’ll get back to you within six hours. High tide is just before midnight tomorrow night. We’ll be sailing on that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Twenty-six hours. Plenty of time.’

  While Aika Rei gave contact details, Reona Tanaka asked the barman to call them a taxi – but he just gestured to a business card beside a payphone. Still, the taxi turned up five minutes after Reona called, and the pair of college doctors were heading north towards civilization again within fifteen minutes of the deal being struck. Reona was so relieved to be getting out of the place that he forgot to reclaim his printout.

  Half an hour later, the printout was lying on the chart desk in the chart room of Luzon Logging’s freighter Dagupan Maru. Navigating officer Sakai had marked on the chart of their voyage the precise location of the dot marked on it – northings and eastings to three decimal points. Captain Yamamoto stood beside him, looking down with a frown. The battered old freighter stirred as the tide swept up towards the flood. Her holds full of priceless timber – the ruins of a palace, in fact. Rain thundered out of the low sky, but the harbour watch officer hadn’t bothered to switch on the clearview wipers so the whole bridge seemed like something from a submarine. The grumble of the generators was lost beneath the thunder of the deluge. Captain Yamamoto would normally have been in his bunk – especially on the night before setting sail – but Sakai had got him up and about. ‘You’re certain, Number One?’ he demanded harshly.

  ‘As certain as I can be. The man is Doctor Reona Tanaka. He even let slip his first name. And his face has been all over the media for months. I guess you can get to be a doctor these days without being too bright at all. I have no idea who the woman is.’

  ‘But she’s in charge?’ probed the captain thoughtfully.

  ‘Decidedly.’ Sakai shrugged.

  ‘Very well. What is the next step in your thinking?’

  ‘The chart reference he gave was the most recent location of his famous bottle. The Cheerio. That’s according to Nippon News.’ Sakai nodded towards the screen of a laptop he had tuned to the station’s online broadcast. An animated young woman reporter was talking silently in front of a vast map of the Pacific – like a forecaster in front of tomorrow’s weather chart.

  ‘Very well,’ allowed the captain. ‘Then?’

  Sakai pressed a button on the laptop’s keyboard and a recording replaced the live broadcast. The big blue chart with its telltale three dots was replaced by Tanaka’s streaming face, and the Cheerio bottle he was holding up beside it. The railings of a bridge were visible in the background, and, beyond, the surface of a river in full spate. A set of figures in the lower right corner gave a time and a date the better part of three months back. ‘It already has a fan club,’ bellowed Dr Tanaka over the thunder of the downpour, nodding at the bottle. ‘My students and I have purchased tickets for the Jumbo Lottery and put them in here. The bottle is packed with several hundred of them, in fact. At about the time I expect the bottle to arrive – unscathed and showing no signs of decomposition at all – in the middle of the North Pacific Gyre, in mid-August, the lottery will have been drawn. And the winning ticket will be worth in excess of 100 million US dollars!’

  ‘You think that’s it?’ demanded Yamamoto. ‘You think one of those tickets hit the jackpot?’

  ‘I think that’s the guy I just talked to in Rage,’ answered Sakai. ‘I think he wants to get to where that bottle is. I think he wants to do it in secret. And I think every news service in Japan is trying to work out who did win the grand lottery jackpot.’

  ‘But how in hell’s name do they think they’re going to get the bottle even if we do sail right past it?’

  ‘I think they think they’ll think of something. They have one-hundred-and-ten-million US reasons to do so, after all. Shit. If it came right down to it, they could promise every man aboard the Dagupan a million US dollars to help – and still walk away with one hell of a fortune!’

  Captain Yamamoto nodded. ‘OK,’ he decided. ‘You tell them it’s all fine. Just enough cash up front, paperwork and bullshit so she doesn’t get suspicious. But I want them both aboard this time tomorrow night. Meanwhile, I’ll refer this all upstairs.’ He glanced at the chronometers above the vacant helm. The high tide he planned to sail on would be here in twenty-two-and-three-quarter hours’ time. It was one a.m. precisely, Japan Standard Time.

  At one a.m. Philippines Time, one hour later, the deaf man in his office on top of the Luzon Logging Building in Quezon City Manila was watching the latest broadcast from Katapult. He was uncertain how to react to the almost arrogant display of flesh, but every now and then one of the younger women would turn and flaunt herself with a brazen arrogance that made him shake with suppressed rage. The Indonesian girl seemed to be sporting little more than underwear. It pushed her breasts into a prominence that almost infuriated him. It emphasized her thighs and posterior in a manner that made him shudder with indignation. The Indian woman and the Australian were hardly wearing anything more. They were as alluring as a lingerie catalogue. And such things were not at all to his taste. The unthinking display of oiled skin was not something that appealed to him in the slightest. And yet, every now and then, he found himself shouting insults at them as though they were the most common street harlots from the red light districts down by the docks.

  On the other hand, he found himself straining to see through the far more modest covering worn by the English skipper. The turquoise wrap covering her loins would go transparent in certain lights allowing his eager eyes to invade her modesty as far as to the convex V of cotton covering her private parts. The wind – what there was of it – would flirt every now and then with the exciting curls of her hair, seeming to suck her nipples into prominence through the thin stuff of her bikini top. And she seemed unaware of what she was occasionally revealing, which added a frisson of voyeurism to his sensuous contemplation of her. A frisson of pleasure extended almost unbearably by the fact that he actually knew the woman in question. Had met her, and his enemy – her husband. Had touched her, felt the firm grip of that hand upon his own. Where he shouted insults at the others, he whispered endearments to her. Which, had anyone been there to hear him, would have been far more unsettlingly sinister than the shouting.

  But the deaf man’s nature was by no means simple. He was no thug, no back-alley assassin. Those who had damaged him – and there were a good few across Indonesia and beyond – had not yet met unexpected, lingering and agonizing ends. Had he been, like his adversary Richard Mariner, an aficionado of Star Trek, he might have agreed with the villainous, cloned super-being Khan Noonien Singh and the K
lingon authorities he cited that revenge is a dish best served cold. That indeed was the way in which Professor Satang S. Sittart, Chief Executive Officer of Luzon Logging, among many less legitimate concerns, certainly preferred it, and how he planned to serve it should the chance arise.

  As, it seemed, the chance might soon, in fact, arise.

  He continued to study the TV picture of Robin Mariner, trying, with only limited success, to see right through her skimpy clothing. Imagining what he might take lingering pleasure in doing, should the body he was observing so avidly ever come within his reach once more. Beginning to feel his way towards plans which might in fact ensure that it would do so. Increasingly enraptured at the prospect.

  But this time when the phone beside him started to ring and flash, he registered the fact. He dragged his eyes away from Robin’s bikini bottoms and flicked the audio switch. ‘Yes?’ he barked.

  ‘Professor Sittart,’ came a nervous voice on the far end of the connection. ‘It seems that there is a situation aboard Luzon Logging’s freighter Dagupan Maru, due to depart Tokyo docks tomorrow night, which might be worthy of your interest . . .’

  Run

  The captain of the Walt Disney cruise liner would have no chance of turning aside. Liberty could see that. He had no option other than to do what he was doing. Honking his horn and hoping. The siren sounded again; the decibels hitting her ears like something solid.

  Liberty, on the other hand, could do something. If Flint stayed still the liner would hit her midships on the port side, break her in two, ride over what was left of her and kill her. If she just ran forward under reefed sails she might make it clear by the skin of her teeth but that huge bow wave would come in over her low stern and flood her – she would still go down, literally pooped, and probably still roll over as well. It seemed to Liberty that her all too vulnerable command’s only hope was to control the angle at which the yacht’s hull met that deadly wave, always assuming she could stay clear of the massive hull which was creating it.

  Liberty was holding Flint’s big wheel over to port as hard as it would go, and watching through narrow, streaming eyes as the huge bow wave rolled towards her like a tsunami and she swung her frail vessel’s head round to meet it.

  ‘Are you mad?’ bellowed Maya in the moment of relative silence between the second and third warning blasts. ‘My God, are you turning towards the liner? Are you flaming mad . . .’

  ‘Probably,’ answered Liberty through gritted teeth, dropping her voice slightly. Very slightly, given the storm wind, the torrential downpour, the howls of protest from B Watch in the cabin and the avalanche of water bearing down on them. ‘I want whatever hits us to come in on the bows, not the side. I want Flint up and over that bow wave – not rolled on to her beam ends, pitch-poled or pooped. But we’re leaning too far over into the turn. I don’t want my mainmast smashed to kindling either. Start the motors, would you?’

  The motors were a blessed addition; the result of an indulgent father and godfather worrying about the safety of their child and godchild. Liberty had discussed mechanical propulsion at some length with Richard, Robin and Flo’s father, revolutionary ship designer Doc Weary. Then they had all talked their discussions over with Dad’s design team, who had been told to spare no expense. The result was a pair of specially adapted Mercury 1350s which combined maximum propulsion with carefully calculated ballast weight and negligible environmental impact. They were actually positioned beneath the cabin and right above the centreboard where they could steady the hull as well as powering the vessel.

  The minute Maya hit the start button, the massive motors exploded into action, spinning the propshafts in parallel and making the twin screws thrash into motion almost as swiftly and effectively as those beneath the counter of Richard’s flame-red go-faster Cigarette Top Gun launch Marilyn. And she could reach seventy knots from a standing start in a little over five minutes.

  Flint didn’t have anything like five minutes, of course, Liberty calculated, her mind chilled by the immediacy of violent action, like Richard’s which always acted coldly under pressure. She certainly didn’t have Marilyn’s sleek, slim-hipped carbon-fibre hull either. But then she didn’t actually have to get up to seventy knots. She just had to thrust her head round hard against the irresistible dictates of her tiller, so that all the power beneath her stern could swing the slim bows at her other end those few degrees further to port before the wilderness of foam and water tumbling massively ahead of the liner hit Flint’s vulnerable beam and rolled her under as fatally as a pyroclastic flow roaring down the side of an erupting volcano.

  As soon as Liberty felt the massive surge of power beneath her feet she began to let Flint’s head ease off fractionally. The super-buoyant polystyrene hull was swinging swiftly in an arc that threatened to bring her on to a reciprocal with the liner. From sitting across the big ship’s path like the cross on a capital T, Flint would soon be in danger of meeting her head to head. And ramming the Disney vessel was by no means part of Liberty’s plan either.

  As Flint felt the pressure ease, and her hull came to rely on the twin Mercuries rather than the squall wind, so she began to come upright, her mast heads swinging away from the black-painted, gold-signed flare of the liner’s bow. And as she did so, the bow wave hit. A wall of foam came washing up over Flint’s port forequarter and solid green water went thundering across her foredeck, twisting the vessel over, shrugging her aside, sitting her further upright even as it pushed her away until the masts were penduluming out towards the starboard like the fingers of a metronome and the deck was rolling back the other way.

  Under Liberty’s iron grip, the hull slid sideways down the great surf along the liner’s flank, as the bow wave rolled over into wake at the point where the next great wave was born. And still Flint held doggedly upright as the wake simply carried her further and further from the black cliff of her side. Heading for safety, even though the angle of the water meant that foam came rumbling aboard over the uphill port side even as it flooded in over the downhill starboard and met in the middle like the Red Sea closing behind Moses.

  But Flint simply refused to roll, and her skipper held her steady through it all. Her head went down until the white water exploded against the arrowhead of her raised bridge house. But then she tossed her head up, thrusting the deadly water away like a white whale breaching.

  It was only when the huge, square stern swept past, thirty metres from their port side, and Flint swung back upright once more, bobbing safely over the crest of that great wake wave and down into the first trough, that Liberty at last swung the wheel over the other way, sending her command skipping nimbly back and away out to starboard, safely under control again.

  ‘You can kill the motors now, Maya,’ said Liberty breathlessly. ‘Check the B Watch and look for damage below. Then see if you can raise Mickey Mouse on the two-way. That rodent and I need to talk.’

  ‘Yes, Skipper,’ said Maya.

  And suddenly there was no more doubt about who was in command of Flint.

  The wind faltered so unexpectedly that Liberty looked up, wondering whether it was another trick of the liner’s massive hull. As though it could be followed by a wind shadow as well as by a wake. But no. The clouds thinned suddenly. The sun came out high in the eastern sky as though it was going to shine exclusively on Portland or Vancouver. A rainbow appeared in the west and Liberty turned Flint hard over and ran for the foot of it like a leprechaun seeking her pot of gold.

  By the time Maya and the B Watch came up out of the cabin to report everything shipshape and secure below, the rain had eased to a drizzle and Flint was running steadily under clearing skies across a brisk north-easterly that sent her racing back on to the course Liberty had planned for her.

  Then, while Maya checked the electrical equipment and raised the Disney liner’s radio officer, who swiftly passed the irate skipper on to an extremely shaken captain, Emma Toda and Bella Chung-Wolf trimmed the sails so that Flint could settle down and a
ccelerate smoothly towards the top speed of her design spec in the precise direction she needed to be sailing. Within twelve hours they had picked up a westerly-flowing outrider of the great Alaska Current and that great liquid travelator grasped the yacht’s solid keel, working in tandem with the breeze, allowing Flint to run steady and true towards the convergence zone, the garbage patch and the telltale red dot of the locator in Dr Tanaka’s Cheerio bottle.

  And that was a situation which was to last the better part of the next three days.

  Robin had faced waterspouts before. But none as big as this one, and never in a vessel as small or fragile as Katapult. ‘I need power, Flo,’ she ordered. ‘B Watch, get below and break out the life jackets!’ As she spoke, the last of the deluge of mackerel fell on to the deck and bounced back into the sea from where they had been sucked by the spout. Except for the ones trapped in the well deck below her. Which would make a nice fresh supper for Katapult’s crew – if they weren’t feeding the fish themselves by suppertime.

  Katapult’s design meant that the foresail could be wrapped around a line running up from the forepeak to the top of the single mast. And that the mainsail wound around a matching spindle inside the aerodynamic body of the mast itself. Under most conditions these actions would be hand-cranked by the crew. In an emergency they could be controlled by the computer. This was an emergency. Katapult went from full sail to bare sticks in fifteen seconds, even as her motors kicked in.

  The multihull’s propulsion system was nowhere near as powerful as Flint’s but it was responsive and potent enough to give the beautiful vessel a solid boot up the backside. On the other hand, Liberty only had her masts and hull to worry about. Robin had the two sleek outriders that sat on the end of computer-controlled gull-wings and steadied the vessel without the need for a centreboard or keel that could slow her down in races by dragging through the water below. But Robin didn’t want the outriders torn off. Didn’t want the articulated gull-wings damaged. So, though the circumstances were vastly different, Robin’s reaction was the same as Liberty’s had been. She put the big wheel of the helm hard over to port.