Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  The foot of the spout hit the surface of the ocean about half a mile in front of Katapult. It was hard to be more precise than that because the point of impact was shrouded in a cone of spray that spread out in a whirling grey-white mist around it and bounced back up past thirty metres. The main column of the thing writhed sinuously above this into the low cloud that had given birth to it and Robin had an instantaneous impression of a storm front that cut the sky in half with unnerving precision. The leading edge of it seemed to be drawn across the sky with a gigantic ruler. An edge that passed immediately above her head.

  On Robin’s left it was a bright, sunny morning. On her right it was almost as dark as night. Beneath the absolute blanket of cumulus, a solid-looking wall of rain reached down to the sea like grey concrete. But that was still miles distant. The spout stood on the leading edge of the front, and Robin could swear that there were others, further away behind it, stretching into the distance like columns in a temple. As their furious activity sucked away the last of the mist, they made the air along the huge storm front absolutely crystal clear. The day had gone from blindingly claustrophobic to magisterially vast. The sea went from indigo on the left-hand horizon, through vivid green dead ahead to white-streaked elephant grey beneath the equally distant downpour away to her right.

  It was an instant of clarity that Robin had never experienced before and was never likely to experience again. The entire enormity of it burned itself indelibly into her subconscious. Then the reality slammed back into place as the icy air was in motion around her. Suddenly very actively indeed. A squall wind hit her shoulder like a rugby forward tackling high. A heartbeat later it was as though she and Katapult were trapped in a wind tunnel.

  But Robin was by no means standing idle as she took that one startled glance. The whole of her attention was claimed by the monster lazily sweeping in towards her. The wind on her back like a living force. The race to get Katapult out into the light. With the helm hard over, she gunned the motors to maximum, feeling Katapult struggling to answer the conflicting dictates of the forces unleashed within and around her. The motors turned a pair of racing propellers seeking to thrust her full ahead. The rudder sought to swing the three points of her bow hard over to the left. The wind howling through what little rigging she possessed was trying to blow her to the right, into the grip of the waterspout which – counter-intuitively – was sailing relentlessly towards her, dead against the wind itself. But of course it was creating the wind by sucking air into the enormous gyre at its heart. The harder it inhaled, the stronger the wind blew, the faster the spout approached, drawing the atmosphere relentlessly into itself. Spewing it up, like the mackerel, into the wildly writhing storm cloud above.

  Had Katapult possessed a keel like Flint, that might have steadied her, made the water cling to her in spite of the wind – but she had outriggers instead. And the starboard outrigger was porpoising increasingly deeply into the water as the triple hull fought to turn away from the spout while the wind pulled the masts towards it. Robin slammed her left hand off the wheel, overrode the computer control system and pushed both outriggers down into the water, feeling the skittish hull steady beneath her widespread feet, though the wheel began to turn back relentlessly against her one-handed grip. Immediately, a wall of spray whipped up the wind and slapped painfully into her face as though the spout was angered by her action. It was the outer edge of the inverted cone at the foot of the thing. Robin was deluged with water in an instant. Water that felt shockingly warm except that the wind chill of the relentless gale turned it icy at once. Robin realized inconsequentially how little she was wearing – and that made her feel more vulnerable still.

  For a heart-stopping moment, Robin found herself inside the cone of spray, trapped for an instant between the buffeting curtain of waterdrops made dazzlingly bright by the sunlight of the half day beyond. As though a jewel box full of diamonds and sapphires had been caught in a tornado. And, on her left, less than a hundred metres distant, the foot of the spout itself. The surface of the water in between was fizzing as though the ocean had become champagne. The sound of rushing water, foaming bubbles and screaming wind made an already dizzying experience almost hallucinatory. She saw the great white trunk of the thing lift off the water with a slow majesty she had never expected. It settled back again, then lifted once more, unexpectedly fine, almost diaphanous.

  The wind howling past her seemed to hesitate for an instant. She slammed the rudder back hard over. Katapult’s screaming motors pulled her left at last – smashed her back through the gemstone wall, which immediately lost its diamond and sapphire brightness, turning instantly as dark and threatening as the low, writhing sky.

  But that moment, that one flaw in the wind, that instant of hesitation by the monstrous spout, made all the difference. Katapult began to gather way, turning obediently on to her new heading, pulling out of the twister’s clutches like a knight breaking free from a witch’s spell in a fairy tale. And, as though the breaking of its spell could lead to the undoing of its power, the waterspout began to falter. When Robin glanced over her shoulder for the first time a couple of seconds later, the trunk had lifted once again, and the cone wall was thinning, slowing, falling back into the restless water. The fierceness began to fade from that relentless headwind, hitting her now in the face instead of the back. And, perhaps most weirdly of all, the day ahead of her was as bright, blue and sunshiny as any she had enjoyed on Tuvalu. It was only when she looked back, like Lot’s wife in the Bible, that she saw the bright day’s exact opposite still treading at her heels.

  And that was what Flo saw first as she came up out of the cabin wearing a starkly impractical combination tiny bikini and bulky lifebelt. ‘Jesus,’ she said forthrightly, ‘that looks nasty.’

  ‘But at least the spout seems to have gone,’ answered Robin breathlessly. ‘I think we can stow the emergency equipment and get rigged – and dressed – for some stormy weather.’

  Flo gave a grin. ‘That’s just what this baby was built for.’ She patted Katapult with sisterly pride. ‘You don’t win the Fastnet in anything less than a gale.’

  ‘True enough,’ agreed Robin. ‘And you don’t win it in a bikini either.’

  Rohini and Akelita appeared a moment later, both more sensibly clad in shorts and shirts. Robin handed over the wheel, then she and Flo changed and tidied up below.

  Robin found that she was moving like a very old lady indeed, her arms, shoulders and back all stiff and sore. But the pain she felt was as nothing compared to the shock she got when she looked in a mirror and saw what the wind had done to her hair.

  The storm front had closed over the sky by mid-afternoon and the lazy, misty calm was replaced by a brisk wet south-westerly which Katapult approved of very much indeed. She filled her sails, kicked up her heels, and headed towards the forty-five-knot top speed she was famously capable of delivering. At the same time she seemed to settle to work, her central hull sitting steadily in the water leaning only a few degrees off the vertical even in the strongest gusts, as the outriggers aquaplaned on or below the surface, holding her steadier than even Flint’s keel could ever have done. Holding her steady enough to allow Robin to light the LPG hob on the cooker in their tiny galley so that she could fry the fish presented to them by the waterspout that morning.

  Fish in such abundance, indeed, that they were still eating it three days later when their long fast run came to an abrupt end.

  News

  Communications with Katapult, thought Richard wryly, were a little like London buses. You waited ages for a message, and then . . .

  The first call came through a little after four a.m. London time. It came through on Richard’s bedside phone and he sat up at the first ring, his heart racing, wrenched out of a nightmare involving Robin, sharks and, of all things, a giant octopus. He grabbed the handset and slammed it to his ear, fearing the worst. ‘Yes?’ he grated, his throat dry and rusty.

  ‘It’s Audrey at the Crewfinders twent
y-four-hour desk, Captain Mariner . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ he repeated. Audrey was only about thirty metres away from him in the Crewfinders office which, with the company flat, occupied the top floor of Heritage House. Crewfinders was always on the alert. Its famous promise was to replace any crew member on any vessel, anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours. There was a team in that office waiting to send sailors from one place to another twenty-four seven. High days and holidays as well. Particularly then, for it was at the traditional celebration times that people got tipsy or careless – or both – and accidents started to happen. Therefore all the Heritage Mariner news came to the twenty-four-hour desk first.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Captain,’ Audrey apologized gently. Not bad news then, thought Richard. No emergency. Something routine.

  ‘Yes?’ he repeated, his voice still rough.

  ‘Katapult has just put in a routine status report on the ship-to-shore radio. It went to the coastguards at Falmouth but we’re monitoring the wavelength. It goes into a little more detail than is usual in such contacts so I thought it might be of interest. Shall I play it for you?’

  ‘Please . . .’

  There was a click, a brief burst of static, and then Robin’s voice, a scratchy, distant whisper. ‘I say again Katapult . . . It is sixteen hundred hours precisely, local time. Our current time is Tuvalu Standard minus one hour. All is well. We are making good progress now. Everyone aboard fit and healthy. We crossed the equator four hours ago and are currently at: nought point four eight degrees north and one seven six point three eight degrees west. Howland Island is immediately to our starboard and we are proceeding at thirty knots along a heading of nought point five nought degrees magnetic. We have come over one thousand miles since departing Tuvalu and expect to reach Johnston Atoll at one six point seven degrees north, one six nine point nought five degrees west in a little over thirty-six hours if the wind persists. We will have to vary our headings depending on precisely where the locator beacon shows the bottle actually to be four days or so from now. And, come to that, what state we find the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to be in when we get to the edge of it – let alone to the middle.’ Robin’s voice came and went during the next few minutes as she reported wind and weather, then formally confirmed their position, course and heading once again. Then it whispered away into crackling silence.

  ‘That’s all we have, Captain,’ announced Audrey, her voice in contrast to Robin’s loud enough to make Richard jump.

  ‘That’s fine, thanks, Audrey. It’s enough to put my mind at rest, at any rate.’ Even as he spoke the polite lie he wondered why he still felt so tense. He was still in the grip of whatever chemicals the nightmare had released into his system, of course – but it was more than that. It was something to do with the fact that Robin was out there adventuring and he was stuck here as little more than her audience. He longed to be doing something. Anything.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear that, Captain,’ said Audrey, over the top of these thoughts. ‘I’ll alert you if anything else comes in from them. Goodnight.’

  Richard settled down, closed his eyes and called to mind a chart of the Pacific, mentally tracing Katapult’s course from Tuvalu past Howland Island a thousand miles to the north-east, then on to the Johnston Atoll, one of the remotest places on earth, twelve hundred miles north-east again, a thousand miles west of Hawaii. Then on once again into the massive, empty vastness between Hawaii and Midway, a channel nearly fifteen hundred miles wide which only really ended with the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Strait and the south coast of Alaska. With no islands or atolls anywhere in between at all, except French Frigate Shoals, the last of the way-stations they had planned along the way.

  But even the ones he could call to mind were islands and atolls in name, but nothing more than specks of coral in fact. The only fact he could remember about Howland Island was that it had been the destination the intrepid aerial explorer Amelia Earhart never reached on her solo round-the-world flight when she vanished into that vastness in the nineteen thirties. Johnston Atoll was utterly deserted. Hardly surprisingly: it had been a nuclear test ground in the fifties and sixties before it became a dumping ground for all the chemical weapons that the US refused to admit they ever possessed. It was where the Americans had disposed of their Agent Orange poison after the Vietnam War. The girls would need to be desperate indeed to go ashore there. If they ever got that far. Beyond that, the Shoals named for the French Frigates that had only survived their encounter with the deadly coral heads by an amazing stroke of luck. And, after French Frigate Shoal, there was nothing except empty ocean and the accumulating mass of floating rubbish that lay trapped at the heart of it.

  He dosed off into another haunted slumber in which he was face-to-face with the octopus again – but this time it had a vaguely familiar human face. With a hooked nose. Long, dark eyes. Something strangely wrong with its ears. And it was holding Robin in one of its massive tentacles. It was a relief when her choking screams became a familiar ringtone and he woke to find that his cell phone was sounding.

  This time it was a courtesy call from the Falmouth Coastguard bringing him up to date with Robin’s latest report. At least their reception was clearer than Audrey’s had been. But the information was, of course, just the same. After he broke contact, he heaved himself out of bed and went to make a coffee. His Rolex informed him that it was coming up to six in any case and his day tended to start at six when he was ashore – just halfway through the morning watch.

  He switched on his radio and as he stood in the shower, the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 informed him that Liberty Greenbaum had reported in as well. The news report was briefer, but it gave him everything he really wanted to know. Flint was over a thousand miles out of Vancouver heading along her planned south-westerly course now. There were no islands and precious few vessels anywhere near her. But all aboard were fit and well. Progress was precisely as planned and they too hoped to reach the rendezvous point north of Hawaii at the same time as Katapult and Professor Tanaka’s Cheerio bottle.

  The familiar voice of the regular anchorman added a further tag to the story, ‘And, according to this morning’s Times, there is still no sign of the lucky winner of the Japanese Lottery. One-hundred-and-ten-million United States dollars – or their equivalent in Yen – are waiting to be claimed, apparently, but no one knows who holds the winning ticket . . .’

  His interest piqued, Richard wrapped a bath towel round his waist and padded through to the sitting room, towelling his short black hair dry with a hand towel as he went. He flipped up his laptop and clicked through to the live broadcast from Japan Today. The lunchtime news was just finishing as two p.m. Tokyo time clicked up. The newscaster was reporting a story in such a flood of enthusiasm that Richard stood no chance at all of following what she was saying. But the English subtitles explained that she, like BBC Radio 4, was speculating about the identity of the mysterious lottery winner. ‘The winning ticket was purchased from an outlet in the Bunkyo District,’ she was saying. ‘And this has led some people to guess that the winner may be a student at the university. However, Bunkyo is one of the most heavily populated areas of the city with more than two-hundred-thousand people registered as residing in the ward, let alone the great number of people who come into the area on a regular basis to visit attractions such as the Tokyo Dome, the cathedral and the gardens . . .’

  Frowning, Richard pulled up a chair and sat, leaning forward a little to read the rapidly changing script. As he did so, however, he noticed that the Skype logo was flashing and he clicked on it without thinking.

  The screen cleared at once to a picture of a hazy blue horizon at whose shadowy centre lay a long golden heave of land, just tall enough to rise above a wall-to-wall vista of ocean and catch some brightness from a westering sun. Lazy waves gathered themselves from the bottom of the screen and rolled gently away until they smashed into white surf on the pale flank of beach. The whole picture heaved diz
zyingly and the familiar lines of Katapult’s cockpit and after-rail came and went at weird angles. Then, disorientatingly, almost shockingly, a pair of breasts in a skimpy bikini top were all but pressed against the screen. He half expected a giant green tentacle to appear from the restless water and wrap itself around the golden body at the far end of the Skype contact. Then, at last, Robin’s sunburned face appeared amid a wild riot of wind-blown hair. There were freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were wide and grey. And her glowing face split into the most enormous grin.

  ‘Hello, sailor,’ she said. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes. Lucky it’s me and not one of the other girls getting an eyeful!’

  And he remembered with a start how little he was wearing.

  ‘Shall I get dressed?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ she chuckled. ‘I want to remember you just the way you are. It’ll give me something to liven up my dreams.’

  ‘OK,’ he answered easily. ‘I’m never one to disappoint a lady.’ He draped his hand towel round his shoulders and leaned back. ‘If that’s still Howland Island behind you then you’ve done better than Amelia Earhart.’

  ‘Ah. Someone forwarded my report to the coastguards . . .’ The smile deepened. She was having a whale of a time, he realized with a pang of jealousy.

  ‘A couple of people,’ he nodded. ‘It sounds as though you have the bit between your teeth now . . .’

  ‘And then some. We’ve been going like the clappers. There’s a perfect wind behind us and Katapult is really in her element. The only down side has been the fact that we’ve found it all but impossible to get a decent signal in or out.’