Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Still nothing on the radio?’ Liberty glanced down at Maya in the snug where Flint’s communications equipment sat stubbornly silent.

  ‘We can’t even call her up unless we have some idea of her name,’ Maya answered.

  ‘Maybe we could try something like, “Hey, ghost ship drifting three miles off my starboard bow, this is sailing vessel Flint; how’s things with you?”’ Emma Toda called from her place at Bella’s side on the bow. ‘Something like that?’ She and Bella giggled at the thought. Liberty thought better of asking Emma to explain a little more about the meaning of the universal Maru which seemed to be added to all Japanese registered vessels. But Emma was so proud of her Japanese background they would probably have had to endure a half-hour lecture before they were any the wiser.

  ‘What about the authorities?’ said Liberty, frowning. ‘We ought to report her and get on our way.’

  ‘Not a whisper,’ answered Maya. ‘We might as well be in deep space.’

  ‘And there’s no sign of life on deck?’ she called back up to Bella, who obligingly put the binoculars to her eyes again.

  ‘Nothing I can see. She looks like a ghost ship to me. A modern-day Marie Celeste.’

  ‘Well, if we can’t raise her and we can’t raise the authorities, we have two simple choices,’ said Emma, skipping back towards the cockpit, as sure-footed as Bella in spite of her square, muscular physique. ‘We stay clear, head on, and report her as a hazard to shipping to the first radio contact we raise. Get them to pass on a warning to the nearest coastguard. Or we go aboard.’

  ‘That’s what we ought to do,’ said the punctilious Maya. ‘There could be someone aboard in trouble. We ought to make sure, you know?’

  Liberty knew very well what was going on here. After the horrors of their stormbound run south and their near-fatal encounter with the Disney cruise liner, there had followed four full days and nights of non-stop simple sailing. Coming up to one hundred hours with the wind on their shoulder, brisk, kindly and unvarying. The ocean like an aquamarine carpet undulating easily before them. A white wake spreading ever wider behind them. No other vessel heaving over the huge horizon. Not a bird, not a fish, nothing to disturb the easy passage, day after day. The closest they had been to human contact outside themselves and the very occasional burst of activity on the radio had been the high white lines of the contrails as planes passed hundreds of thousands of feet above. The girls were getting bored.

  But Emma and Maya were right. In the absence of anyone else either nearby or within radio contact, then it was Flint’s duty to offer the apparently helpless vessel aid. And if they couldn’t raise anyone on her radio or communicate by any other signal then they would have to go aboard and take a look. Though what in heaven’s name they were going to do if they found a ship full of sick and dying sailors God alone knew. Hope and pray that something that size would have a more efficient communications system than Flint’s. And that Maya, the acting radio officer, could get it to work.

  It was this thought which pushed Liberty to her final decision. The vessel drifting down on them looked to be about two hundred feet in length. Her tonnage was hard to judge because she was sitting low in the water, but Liberty would have been surprised if she was much less than two hundred tons deadweight. She was clearly a commercial vessel. Too small to be a freighter. More likely a fishing boat. But a substantial, ocean-going ship. Which might well be equipped with communications gear far more powerful than theirs, even though, by the look of things, it was probably not anything like as modern. But on the other hand, the name Maru meant that it was Japanese. And whatever else they did, the Japanese built some top-of-the-range communications kit.

  Certainly, as Flint bore down on her, the difference between the hull below her central bridge house and the equipment perched above it was striking. The drifting ship had a long, low hull with a white band on her immediately below the scuppers, sitting brightly above black-painted sides that fell to a swollen, barnacle encrusted waterline. Or it should have been a white band beneath the scuppers. In fact it was tiger-striped with broad smears of red rust. Above the scuppers themselves, the deck rails seemed thin and ill-maintained, with sections designed to fold down almost to the waterline, pulled back and secured up in grilles like hockey nets.

  From what Liberty could see, the green-painted non-slip of the deck was in little better shape than the pocked, blistered and rusting sides. And the deck furniture was, if anything, worse. But, under the relentless searchlight of the rising sun, the bridge house itself rose square and pristine above the rotting mess below. Two levels up, it stood almost glacially white, with wide windows facing forwards. And immediately behind it stood a communications mast that positively gleamed. A big white banner bearing an identity code in Western letters and numbers, aptly enough ending in thirteen; and above that the almost showroom-new radar, sonar, fish-finding and communications complex, its brand-new brilliance marred only by the filth of the lines and rigging all around it. And, now that she noticed it, the matching equipment which capped the stubby foremast looked in pretty good nick as well.

  Behind the bridge and the communications mast, halfway to the poop, there was a rusted square gantry that seemed to mark the beginning of a work area even worse maintained than the foredeck. And on the square stern itself sat a tall crane no doubt used for controlling any nets that the ship might want to deploy. A battered Japanese fishing vessel almost certainly, concluded Liberty. With a promising-looking range of communications kit that nobody aboard was apparently willing or able to use.

  The decision as to who was going to board her was easy to make, therefore. They needed someone who knew about Japanese stuff and someone who knew about radios. Emma and Maya. ‘OK,’ ordered Liberty brusquely. ‘Bella, come and take over the communications. Emma and Maya get ready to go aboard.’

  There wasn’t a huge amount of preparation to be done. Emma and Maya dressed in their thickest cotton shirts, jeans and deck shoes. They shrugged on life jackets in case they fell into the water during transfer from one vessel to the other. They grabbed torches because there seemed to be no power aboard the ghost ship. They each took a two-way that would communicate with the radio Bella was in charge of, though Liberty was careful to order that they should stay together at all times. Beyond these simple things, there was nothing much else they could take at this stage. They had no guns – and Liberty would never have considered sending anyone aboard if she had the slightest notion that there might be violence. They had a carefully selected range of medical and emergency supplies aboard Flint but the boxes they were in were unwieldy and Liberty didn’t want to risk them unless there was clear and urgent need of them. So the simple, basic equipment they gathered together within the first few minutes looked as though it would be all they would take. But then, as Liberty steered Flint along her shadowy length on the ocean’s quicksilver surface towards her mounting shadow rising slowly up the sun-bright side of the ghost ship, Maya had another idea.

  ‘We should film this,’ she announced. ‘I can take the camera and video what we find. It would be great footage for our next news update.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Liberty agreed at once. ‘And if you set the camera to transmit as well as record, then Bella and I can watch your progress on the laptop.’

  Maya raced below and was back with the little camera in an instant, then she ran back to the bow and filmed the last few minutes of the approach while Bella tested the clarity of the picture she received on the laptop and Emma in turn tested the two-ways. The immediacy of that contact lifted a nagging weight of worry off Liberty’s shoulders at once. Because she could not get over the sneaking feeling that the vessel was somehow more dangerous than it looked.

  However, the explorers had more to do than test their equipment, record their adventure and prepare to go aboard during the final moments of Flint’s approach. They had to get the sails down so that the yacht could at last come upright and lose the way she had acquired under the
steady pressure of that unvarying easterly wind. Liberty was willing to use the motors during the final approach, but her yacht-handling proved more than equal to the task. Maya merely had to reach up as Flint eased under the anchor and past the ropes dangling from the rusty forepeak and grasp the midship rail just above her head, securing the bowline carefully as Flint at last came easily to a halt beside the well of the foredeck in front of the square, white bridge. Emma, in the meantime, lowered the foam-rubber fenders that would protect Flint’s pristine polystyrene sides from the rusty metal of the vessel they could now, from this close, identify as Un Maru.

  Emma looked up at the name and glanced back towards Liberty with a smile. ‘Un,’ she called, straightening. ‘Her name is Un. It means Luck. Also it is the name of one of the temple dogs that guard the entrance to a Japanese Shinto shrine.’

  ‘Luck,’ called back Liberty. ‘But what kind of luck, Emma? Good or bad?

  ‘Well,’ called back Maya decisively, ‘let’s get aboard and see, shall we?’

  Un

  It felt strange to Liberty at once that Flint’s deck was level and the vessel was no longer rushing down the wind. As Maya and Emma pulled themselves up and aboard the Un Maru, an eerie moment descended. Other sensations threatened to overwhelm her in that intensely strange instant. The stuck-pig squeal of the fenders squashed between the vessels’ sides. The banshee whine of the wind in the rigging and in the deck rails that Emma and Maya were clambering over. The thud of the following sea beneath Flint’s solid counter. The way the deck shivered. How the tortured fenders squealed again, even more loudly.

  ‘My God!’ said Emma over the two-way, her voice loud enough to make both Bella and Liberty jump. ‘You should smell this!’ and the strange second was gone.

  The wind backed suddenly as Emma spoke and Liberty could indeed smell Un Maru for an intense but blessedly brief instant The Japanese vessel’s peculiar odour was an adenoid-searing amalgam of rust, diesel, sweat, sickness and rotting fish. No sooner did Liberty feel her stomach heave in response to the deeply offensive stench than it was gone, and the fresh, clean easterly wind was back.

  The laptop screen came alive. Liberty’s concentration on the unsteady picture was so intense that she seemed to be aboard with Emma and Maya. The green lawn of the deck heaved before her, raised into sickening molehills of rust and mess. Then the picture swung upwards. Above and before her were lines of rigging, red, brown and yellow with rust, sagging off the horizontal, bowed and bellied away from the vertical. Except that, about eight feet up there were straight lines running fore and aft from bridge house to forepeak a yard or so in from the port and starboard safety rails. These were supported by a couple of light gantries like tall, slim goalmouths for a soccer match. Under the nearest, stood a white-painted, red-streaked box that looked as though it contained hatch controls. Immediately aft of it, in the middle of the deck, an open hatch gaped, square and black.

  ‘Anybody aboard?’ bellowed Maya, making Liberty and Bella jump.

  ‘And answer came there none,’ observed Emma. ‘Where shall we start?’

  ‘I guess we should start in the bridge house,’ suggested Maya, talking to Emma, but broadcasting her thoughts over the two-way.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Emma. ‘Get ready to hold your breath, girl.’

  ‘And take care,’ ordered Liberty.

  The camera’s picture swung towards the bridge house, showing that the green non-slip deck coating stopped well before the rusty white wall. Emma’s square shoulder and short ponytail lurched into view as she took the lead. A moment later they were at the starboard side. A deck door, which opened slowly beneath Emma’s most forceful shove, screaming so loudly it made more shouting unnecessary, allowing sunlight to stream some way at least into the corridor immediately behind it. The camera jiggled as Maya stepped over the raised section and then wavered further as she reset the brightness.

  Even after the banshee scream of the door she bellowed again, ‘Hello, the ship? Is there anyone aboard? Emma, can you shout in Japanese?’

  ‘Ohayou gozaimasu,’ shouted Emma, even more loudly than Maya had. ‘Otetsudai shimashouka? It means good morning, can I help you? Will that do? I’m from Sacramento, not Sapporo.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Maya. ‘And it was loud enough to wake the dead in any language. Let’s get moving.’

  Emma switched on her torch and led the way to a companionway that Liberty reckoned must lead upwards to the bridge and downwards to the accommodation, storage and engineering sections. ‘Up,’ said Maya.

  ‘Away from the stench,’ agreed Emma, going partway to explaining her companion’s terse monosyllable.

  The battered, blistered steps led up between scuffed and black-scraped walls with dangerously unsecure banisters, round one blank-walled turn and immediately into the command bridge.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Emma as she stepped first through the command bridge door, ‘looks like we’re by no means the first people to come aboard lately.’

  Under the blistering brightness of the early morning sun, it was obvious at once that Emma was right. All of the control and navigation equipment had either been pirated, ripped free and left strewn on the deck or smashed to pieces in situ.

  ‘Looks like we won’t find much comms equipment,’ growled Maya as she followed Emma’s shoulder into the looted hollow of the radio room. There was a chart room next door, where all the charts and pilots were scattered: lying ripped, broken-backed and torn to pieces on the battered table and the littered deck.

  The camera showed the women’s progress back through the wreckage and down the companionway to the A deck corridor. Then Emma’s torch led them downwards. The foot of the companionway opened into a communal area whose benches were clearly designed to also serve as bunks, whose central table doubled as work table and refectory board and all of whose cupboards gaped, their contents burst and scattered everywhere with an abandon that might have embarrassed a Vandal.

  ‘Now this,’ said Maya grimly, ‘is what I call the crew’s mess!’

  A short corridor led forward from the wrecked crew’s quarters past the foot of the companionway to a pair of smaller rooms on either hand, and what looked in the torchlight like a galley straight ahead. One room on the starboard was completely untouched. Immediately inside the doorway sat two temple dogs. The strangeness tempted the women to step in silently.

  ‘A,’ whispered Emma as the picture showed a pug face with its mouth open. ‘And Un,’ as the camera showed its closed-mouth twin. Beyond these stood a wooden shrine gate leading inwards. Somehow it did not look strange or out of place here in a cabin aboard a drifting hulk.

  ‘It is the Torii,’ said Emma. ‘The temple gateway. Step through it into the spirit world.’ She did. Maya, with the camera, followed.

  There was a bowl full of clean-looking water with ladles beside it. Freshly folded towels. Further in, there was a small bamboo-sided collection box miraculously untouched, a table against the inmost wall with a box of bamboo sticks, some luck charts and some wooden tablets.

  ‘It is a Shinto shrine,’ said Emma, her voice low and reverent. She gestured at the tablets on the table. ‘Ema, with pictures of the divine steed. A Shuzu,’ she said, touching a decorated stick topped with a little bell. ‘If we ring it, the gods will know we wish to speak with them. And an Omamori,’ she picked up a talisman like the tablets with their vivid horses. ‘It will bring good luck.’

  ‘We should take that,’ said Maya forthrightly. ‘You never know when we’ll need a little luck.’

  Then they turned and walked out of the place. Opposite it was the ship’s head. The briefest glance in here sufficed to show that it too remained undisturbed – though for very different reasons.

  Then there was a small galley, everything in it ravished and scattered like the store cupboards in the crew’s mess. The deck awash with cooking oil, rice, flour, noodles, broken eggs and rotting fish scattered everywhere. Cupboards gaping, doors off hinges, the cupboar
ds themselves half off the walls; the simple gas-fuelled range torn off its fittings, sitting at a crazy angle, the gas bottle beneath it reeling drunkenly, only held erect by the metal hose connecting it to the burner, like a pirate hanged in chains.

  The left-hand wall of the wrecked galley contained a door that gaped half open. Placing their feet with extreme care amid the slippery mess on the floor, Emma and Maya crossed to this and stepped through into another short corridor leading forward. At the end of this there was a more substantial door and it didn’t take much for Liberty to work out that this was the coffer dam immediately beneath the forward wall of the bridge house that separated the propulsion and living areas from the main cargo area.

  Emma pulled the bulkhead door back and stepped over the raised section into the vessel’s main hold. It was a sizeable area, lit not only by the horizontal beams of the torches but also by a vertical column of white light which seemed to explode in and down through the square hatch left open in the deck above. The hold was empty, its distant walls a rotting shell seemingly supported by rust-red metal ribs.

  ‘You cannot . . .’ choked Maya. ‘You cannot imagine the stench in this place.’

  ‘OK,’ said Liberty. ‘You’d better get out before you suffocate, I guess.’

  ‘We don’t need to see any more, do we?’ asked Maya quietly, depressed by the destruction all around them as they picked their way back through the galley. ‘There’s no one here. Nothing more to see.’

  ‘Better just check aft,’ said Liberty. ‘Take a quick look in the engine room.’

  ‘OK,’ agreed Maya grudgingly. ‘But I don’t see that we should film any more of it.’ And the laptop screen went blank.

  ‘Just walking through the mess of the mess again,’ came Maya’s voice over the two-way. ‘The passage behind leads between a couple of doors. Opening into . . . cabins. Captain’s and engineer’s, I guess. Trashed, same as everything else. Bunks smashed. Bedding scattered. Mattresses gutted – if you can call these things mattresses. Back into the corridor . . . Leading back and down a short companionway to an internal bulkhead door. Opening inwards . . .’