Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘’Fraid not, possum. We’ll have to beach her and try again.’

  ‘Beach her? Where, for God’s sake? We’re in the middle of the Pacific! Seven-hundred-and-fifty miles south-west of Hawaii, the last time I looked.’

  ‘Right,’ said Florence. ‘And according to Akelita that puts us about five miles upwind of Johnston Atoll.’

  Johnston Island was protected from the trade winds and the waves they brought with them by a semicircular reef. It would also have been protected from Katapult’s approach had not Rohini been forewarned of the fact by the British Admiralty Pilot, Sailing Directions Volume Sixty-two, which that bloody man Richard had insisted that they carry. Several of the earliest boats sailing these waters had ended up wedged on these reefs. So they came in carefully from the south-east, skirting round the lower end of the wall of surf that suddenly, almost inexplicably, appeared from the lazily heaving ocean surface like an avalanche going nowhere, and piled itself high enough along the crest of the coral to all but obscure the low, flat-topped landfall behind it.

  ‘It looks like a big aircraft carrier more than an island,’ observed Akelita as she strained up out of the snug to look through the clearview, checking what she could see against what her equipment was telling her.

  ‘That’s because it’s mostly man-made,’ said Rohini. ‘The Americans have been adding and adding to it to make it long enough to hold a runway. You’re right: it’s really nothing more than a static aircraft carrier.’

  ‘Time to take the sails down and motor in,’ called Robin, climbing stiffly out of the cabin. ‘Where’s the harbour?’

  ‘Over there,’ answered Akelita, pointing. ‘There’s a jetty and everything.’

  ‘We’ll need a shelving beach or a slipway,’ warned Flo, following Robin up, wiping antiseptic cream off her hands.

  ‘Says here that there’s some pretty reliable communications equipment available there, too,’ said Rohini, who had the Admiralty Pilot open where she could see it. ‘It used to be an American airbase till relatively recently . . . the Military Radio station, a UHF/VHF air-ground radio, and a link to the Pacific Consolidated Telecommunications Network satellite. It says here. Amateur radio operators occasionally transmit from the island, using KH3 as a call sign. Think we can get hold of any of that stuff and use it? Our equipment has been unreliable lately.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s get there, let’s get Katapult moored safely and then we can get a good look at that hinge system. What’s the water depth here in the lagoon, Akelita?’

  ‘Shallowest is three metres, deepest looks like about ten.’

  Katapult motored gently towards the jetty under Rohini’s experienced helmswomanship while Robin and Flo stiffly wound the sails away. Then Flo secured the bowline to the rickety little jetty and all four of them sat for a moment, catching their breath and simply looking around.

  ‘Bloody big for an aircraft carrier, though,’ said Flo after a while. ‘Must be more than a mile long.’

  ‘True enough,’ agreed Akelita. ‘But like Rohini said, there’s not much more to it than the runway, the handling areas, the control tower and ancillary buildings. And there’s been no one actually stationed here for the better part of a decade.’

  ‘There must have been visitors, though,’ said Robin, shading her eyes as she looked around. ‘What was that you were saying about people transmitting from here using the KH3 call sign, Rohini?’

  ‘It said they did it,’ answered the Indian woman slowly. ‘It doesn’t say when they did it.’

  ‘Let’s go ashore and explore,’ suggested Akelita.

  ‘Of course we will,’ said Robin easily, ‘but our main priority is to get that wing fixed. And in any case, Rohini, there’s something at the back of my mind about this place. What does the pilot say?’

  ‘It was the base for the American Operation Dominic series of nuclear tests in the fifties and sixties,’ answered Rohini. ‘Rocket launches, nuclear explosions. There’s some debate about how well the radioactive material was cleared up. It’s mostly plutonium, and it’s all buried somewhere out there, apparently; covered by something called Safeguard C. Doesn’t sound all that safe to me.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Flo.

  ‘Wait,’ ordered Rohini, ‘It gets better. The island was also used in the sixties and seventies as a dumping ground and disposal area for the full spectrum of biological and chemical weapons used by or confiscated by the US. Everything from Agent Orange to PCBs and PAHs . . .’

  ‘PAHs come from oil,’ said Robin. ‘They are part of what makes fuel oil so poisonous if it begins to evaporate in a confined space. Effectively a potent poison gas . . .’

  ‘And there’s apparently a load of Sarin nerve gas buried out there too,’ added Rohini.

  ‘My God,’ said Robin. ‘Is there no end to it? One way or another it looks as though we’re just sailing through one huge garbage patch after another. Talk about a dead sea! Professor Tanaka doesn’t know the half of it!’ She stood up and looked around at the low heave of the island as its grey-green scrub-covered flank mounted dully towards the flat blackness of the runways and the half-ruined buildings beyond. ‘Let’s fix our outrigger, take a quick look around, see if we can find some of this comms equipment Rohini mentioned then get on our way again.’

  The beach of coarsely ground coral sloped down to the curve of the little anchorage just beside the jetty, so the women were able to pull Katapult into shallow enough water for Flo to get a close look and start working on repairs. The multihull sat high, with her forepeak up on the beach itself and the outriggers resting in the shallows on either side. The curve of the outrigger wings made two short tunnels, one either side of the hull, where they reached out and down to the surface. Allowing for the water of the bay beneath them, the tunnel roofs, with the hinges at their apex, stood a little less than six feet high. The tall Australian waded in and vanished beneath the starboard outrigger. Robin followed her, in spite of the unguents smeared over her. Unlike her last encounter with it, this section of the Pacific was warm, restful, almost soothing. She waded deeper.

  The underside of the wing immediately above their heads was lined with panels designed to give access to the hinge mechanisms. ‘I reckon all I have to do is open the forward panels and reset the clips,’ Flo said, her voice echoing in the enclosed space. She reached up easily and felt the first of the panels with her fingers, like a proud owner stroking the soft nose of a winning horse. ‘We have the kit. It looks like a one-woman job to me. Why don’t you go ashore with the girls while I get things sorted here? We don’t want to fall too far behind schedule.’

  As things turned out, Rohini, having read the entry in the pilot, was put off the idea of exploring too far, so she took the kit down to Flo and stood beside her ready to help. Akelita was almost childishly excited, however; and was certainly well enough versed with communications equipment to make full use of anything live they found. So it was she and Robin who walked purposefully up the deserted slope towards the nearest buildings. There was a thin, dispirited-looking scrub which gave a vaguely herbal savour to the steady easterly wind. But over that there was an odour of decay, thought Robin sadly. Given that this was a coral island in the middle of a remote atoll at the heart of the Pacific Ocean, it was depressingly reminiscent of a run-down city tenement. The ground beneath their deck shoes levelled out and the coarse-ground coral gave way to pocked and mouldering paving. The runway stretched away on either hand like a wide blacktop crossing some Arizona desert, beginning to twist and waver as the sun heated up the air. Had it not been for the restless roaring of the surf on the reef and the presence of the functional box-like military buildings ahead, they might have been walking across the highway in Death Valley. The skin on Robin’s legs prickled as the gathering heat dried them off after her brief paddle.

  ‘This,’ said Akelita, looking around with a shiver, ‘is not a good advert for humanity.’

  ‘Even if we didn’t know wha
t’s buried here somewhere it’s still a bit of a shock,’ agreed Robin, thoughtlessly scratching her thigh. ‘What it looks like to someone raised on an island paradise such as Tuvalu I simply cannot begin to imagine.’

  ‘Well,’ said Akelita bracingly, ‘I don’t suppose you’d want to test nuclear bombs and bury poisonous nerve gases on somewhere beautiful.’

  The conversation was enough to take them across the runway into the nearest semi-derelict building. It looked like it had been the control tower, three stories high ending in a windowed observatory that reminded Robin a little of a command bridge. ‘If there’s communications equipment anywhere,’ she said, ‘it’ll probably be in here.’

  The door swung wide with a push. ‘It’s been broken open,’ observed Robin, looking at the splintered jamb. She led the way, walking into the shady corridor ahead. ‘Maybe ransacked.’ She pushed the nearest door wide to show a room that had once been some kind of book room, the volumes scattered across the floor now, torn and mouldering. There were telephones on a table but their old-fashioned plastic bodies had been smashed.

  ‘Let’s go up to the observation room. See what’s there,’ suggested Akelita. ‘We should get a good view of the island, if nothing else.’

  A functional set of stairs led up through two floors to the control room. As Akelita said, the circle of sloping glass windows gave a good view all around. Katapult rested on the sand of the little anchorage beach surprisingly close at hand. The runway reached straight and flat along the squared length of the enhanced island, and two smaller islands sat ahead of it, like tugs waiting to position this massive aircraft carrier. On their left the shallow lagoon reached palely out to the reef where the white foam rose and fell as the great ocean rollers broke across it and the steady easterly trade wind took diamond-bright droplets of their spray and blew them in rainbows towards the land.

  Robin and Akelita stood for a moment looking out, because there was nothing within the room to see. The banks of equipment beneath the panoramic windows had all been rifled or removed. Wires and cables hung out of conduits along the walls like colourful creepers going nowhere, connected to nothing. Cupboards and cabinets stood gap-toothed and gaping, anything of use or value long gone.

  Robin walked thoughtlessly towards the window, looking down on Katapult, suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to be gone from this place. Her feet and legs were tickling and prickling even more intensely as they continued to dry after her paddle beside Flo Weary to examine the underside of the damaged wing. The feeling was distracting enough to break into her reverie. She shifted her feet uncomfortably and looked down. Gasped. Stunned. Looked across at Akelita. Almost choked in simple horror.

  ‘Akelita,’ she cried, feeling an unreasoning wave of hysteria sweeping relentlessly over her. ‘Akelita, look!’

  From knee to ankle both of them were covered in swarms of big bright yellow ants.

  Dagupan

  It didn’t take very long for Professor Reona Tanaka to suspect that he had made a terrible mistake. Perhaps a fatal one. But by the time his suspicions grew towards certainty it was far too late to do anything about them.

  First Officer Sakai met Reona and Aika Rei secretly behind Rage, as agreed, on the evening after they had talked to him in the bar, an hour or so before the ship was due to sail. Using the noise and bustle of an illegal drift meeting where a range of souped-up motor cars went screaming sideways across the rain-slick dock, they stole up the gangplank and crept aboard, certain that they were unobserved. Reona and Aika were carrying suitcases – which the sailor did not offer to help with. Reona also had his laptop case slung over his shoulder. He was still too excited, too infatuated, to see how totally he was breaking with his past now. And everything he had ever worked for. The instant he stepped aboard, his eyes riveted firmly on Aika’s shapely derrière, his old life closed behind him, but he really only understood that later.

  Reona followed the slim woman and the bulky officer across the ship’s deck to the tall bridge house, surprised to find himself aboard a modern bulk carrier, with its bridge at the stern and four fat, squat cranes standing midships between five-square hatch covers stretching away in brutal perspective through the drizzling darkness towards a stubby mast on the distant bow. He had somehow tricked himself into thinking of the romantic freighters of the early 1900s with their three-castle design and their associations with black and white Hollywood films.

  The functional brightness of the A-deck corridor with its white walls and green decking came as a second shock. It made him think of hospitals and laboratories, though it was nowhere near as clean and well maintained as his own. And it throbbed gently. Every surface around him seemed to be vibrating as the various power sources aboard growled and grumbled, supplying light and heat, electrical current, water pressure and, eventually, engine power. There was a purposeful bustle about the place that the throbbing seemed to add to. Crewmen in boiler suits hurried past. They seemed to be drawn from every ethnic group around the West Pacific rim. The only thing they had in common was the brutal expression on their variously shaded faces. None of them seemed to pay Reona any attention, though he felt Aika was the subject of some searching second glances.

  Sakai led them along the corridor to a lift. The three of them crowded in. The first officer crushed against Reona, his donkey jacket smelling of cigarettes and fuel oil, the rest of him smelling sharply of sweat. The men did not look at each other. Reona stole a glance at Aika but she too was looking away, trapped against the first officer’s other side. But he thought she looked excited, and was a little disappointed that he was not more excited himself. ‘The port officials have been aboard and OK’d us for departure. Customs, immigration and so forth,’ growled Sakai. ‘We’re just waiting for the pilot and the tide. You’ll have to stay low till we’re well clear, though. You do realize that? There are sometimes spot checks.’ Reona’s heart lurched with nervousness, but both he and Aika both nodded silently. The lift hissed on upwards through three decks with the atmosphere relentlessly thickening before it opened on to the vessel’s command bridge.

  Captain Yamamoto welcomed them coolly and accepted both their story and their passage money with a blank stare and a shallow smile. He was a middle-aged man with long white hair and a silvery goatee who seemed out of place among the taciturn officers and crew aboard his relentlessly workaday command. He was preoccupied with preparations for departure, however, and clearly wanted rid of them before the pilot came aboard.

  Sakai immediately showed the disorientated young couple to the owner’s suite, one deck below, and gruffly advised them to settle in. He looked around the room, narrow-eyed, then went and pulled thin curtains across the widows. As he did this, he informed them that he would send something up from the galley when the crew had their dinner. Other than that, they would not be disturbed until the ship was well under way. They stood a little forlornly in the middle of the day room as he worked and nodded that they understood his orders. He looked at them thoughtfully, then left them to their own devices.

  Reona found the suite a pleasant surprise, for the Dagupan Maru herself had by no means impressed him so far. The door from the corridor opened directly into a decent-sized day room with a square window that had looked aft across the poop deck before Sakai closed the curtains. The walls and ceiling were painted in cream, and the whole suite seemed to be mahogany-panelled to waist height. There were framed prints of famous harbours around the South China Sea. The throbbing deck was carpeted. There was a desk convenient for his laptop, a small square table and a couple of chairs. While he put his precious computer in place, Aika dropped her case beside the table, shrugged off her damp coat, draped it over a chair and went through the next door. ‘There’s a little corridor with a shower room off it,’ she called, sounding as excited as if she really was on her honeymoon. ‘And a bedroom at the end. Oh, Reona, it has a lovely bed. Wardrobes. A nice mirror for my make-up. And windows that look to the side as well as to the rear, though you ha
ve to peep round the curtains . . . I can see the dock and those silly boys in their racing cars. And it’s so big! Bigger than your room at the university and my room put together! How fine!’ There was a rhythmic squeaking and Reona hurried through to find her bouncing on the double bed like a child, arms and legs wide. She caught him looking up her skirt like a naughty schoolboy and laughed at his blushes.

  They were still unpacking when a sudden peak in noise and activity coupled with a slight lurch warned them that the voyage was beginning. They both ran over to the port-side window and peeped round the curtain, watching in wonder as the dock appeared to slide slowly past, vanishing surprisingly quickly into the drizzling darkness. ‘What an adventure!’ she whispered, turning to him with her eyes wide.

  Suddenly breathless, Reona found himself undressing her, slowly at first, but then with dangerous urgency at her imperious dictates. ‘Be careful,’ he gasped at last, holding her hands still for an instant. ‘We don’t want to tear our clothes! We haven’t all that many spares!’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ she laughed, opening the wings of her warm silk blouse to reveal a basque of black lace and red silk that plunged provocatively past the waistband of her conservative-looking skirt. He had already caught a tantalizing glimpse of black lace stocking tops and matching red silk knickers. ‘Live a little. See! I bought you a special present at the sexy underwear shop! Isn’t this just what the naughty girls in the dockside Soaplands houses wear?’

  He laughed with sudden excitement, thinking although it was a present for him, it was she who was wearing it. For a moment longer, at least.

  Reona was never quite able to put his finger on the precise moment when it stopped being an adventure. Perhaps there was no moment – just a series of tiny incidents and growing feelings that only seemed to make any kind of a pattern when he looked back on them later. He had not expected this to be a pleasure cruise such as he had seen advertised on television travel programmes. With expensive shops, swimming pools and saunas; fawning stewards and dinner at the Captain’s Table. This was a working vessel. The officers and crew had jobs to do and pandering to passengers was not one of them. But it seemed to him, even on the first morning after they had dropped the pilot and were safely under way in international waters, that Aika and he were being viewed as more than simple unexpected passengers – something between customers and cargo.