Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  The wind continued to let them run north of west along this reach as the sun settled westward. Bella continued to look ahead, but the low brightness began to interfere with her vision and so she came back to the cockpit, then went below to do some more cooking. The watch was due to change at nineteen hundred hours, so they ate curry and rice at eighteen hundred. Maya kept an electronic eye on what they were approaching as she shovelled spoonfuls of the fragrant food into her mouth, but it was not until the last few moments before darkness at eighteen forty-eight that Bella got another opportunity to check with the binoculars.

  And the moment she did so, things changed yet again. ‘Liberty!’ she called urgently. ‘Come here and look at this! You won’t believe it! All of you, come and take a look.’

  ‘One at a time,’ warned Liberty. ‘Emma, take the helm for a moment, please.’

  A minute later she was at Bella’s shoulder with the mixed-race Chinese-Cheyenne’s hair blowing in black strands across her face. She spread her feet a little and leaned her lower belly into the curve of the safety rail on the forecastle head of Flint’s slim hull. Her hip fitted snugly against Bella’s, and the tight line of the forestay with the full-bellied sail behind it separated their feet then rose solidly up behind them, holding the pair of them safely. Spray kicked up to the level of their knees, chuckling beneath the counter like a naughty child and the wind whispered past them.

  ‘What?’ Liberty asked, straining to see ahead. The northern horizon was dark, but oddly not with clouds. The sky was glassily clear and light. It was the sea that was dark. She shaded her eyes and squinted across the glare coming in from the port quarter. The horizon looked strangely uneven, rising in unnaturally square-looking sections. For a moment she wondered whether it could be a fleet of ships beating down on them, with the setting sun gleaming across their tall sides and square bridge houses. Frowning, she took the binoculars from Bella and pushed them to her eyes.

  It was all Liberty could do to stop herself from shouting with shock. For what was approaching them was not a fleet. It was a town. Had the sonar given it any undersea foundations, she would have sworn it must be an island with a considerable settlement sitting on top of it. But no. There was no land there. Maya’s sonar readings had confirmed that clearly enough. It was all afloat. Something stirred in her memory, something she had read or seen while planning this trip. Something dismissed as being too ridiculous. Too unlikely to be relevant.

  ‘Bella,’ she said. ‘Go back and take the wheel. I want Emma to see this. I really wouldn’t have believed it possible . . .’

  And yet she could see a house, clear as day. An honest-to-goodness house, with another behind it, a third in the distance. Tall, two-storied, solidly roofed family dwellings. Square windows catching the last of the light. And cars. Half-a-dozen family saloons: Hondas, Nissans, Toyotas, apparently parked haphazardly outside the dwellings. A mass of wood, some of it rising up like fences on a suburban street. It stretched from side to side across the horizon. Liberty tried for a moment or two to calculate the simple size of what she was seeing. Trying to understand it seemed so far beyond anything she was capable of.

  ‘Mother of God,’ she breathed. ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘Tohoku,’ said Emma, easing into Bella’s vacant position at her shoulder. ‘It is the wreckage that the tsunami washed out to sea from Japan after the Tohoku earthquake in 2011. I have heard tell of an island of it floating slowly across the Pacific, but I never thought I’d actually see it. Some day it will reach British Columbia, they say. Maybe Alaska and Washington State in the US. For the moment, it seems, it is here.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Liberty. She looked at the floating island with its cars, fences and houses for another unbelieving moment.

  Then she was in action. ‘Stand by to gybe,’ she ordered briskly. ‘We’re on the southward reach as of now!’

  Spray

  The first thing Flo Weary thought when Robin and Akelita came running full-tilt down the grainy grey-gold beach and splashed side by side into the water of the Johnston Island anchorage was ‘Where in God’s name did those two get yellow tights from?’ When her two companions raced silently past her, Flo was just wading up on to the beach with a satisfied smile on her face, certain that she had fixed the wing so that it would function just as well as it had before the whale hit it. The outrigger itself was still in the water, though not fully submerged. Its torpedo shape was well over a metre in depth even before it rose into the up-arching wing and a metre or so was under the water, leaving a little less than a metre between its sleek, aqua-dynamic bottom and the coarse seabed beneath it.

  As the astonished Australian watched wide-eyed, Robin and Akelita dived beneath the surface, wedged their bodies into this space and remained there for minute after minute, their legs wriggling like massive shrimp-tails. After about thirty seconds, the wavelets on either side of the outrigger started to get a yellowish-looking scum on the top of them. Fascinated, and still utterly unsuspecting, Flo turned round and started wading back out, frowning with concentration as she looked at the weird phenomenon. By the grace of God, as she later observed, her eyes were pretty sharp, and a childhood experience with a swarm of green ants in Cairns made her realize what was going on pretty quickly. And so she turned in a flash and was back aboard, yelling, ‘Rohini? Where’s the insect repellent?’

  Perhaps it was the Cairns experience or perhaps it was simply her native caution, but Flo had made sure Katapult was well stocked with Rentokill. She waded back in with a pressurized can of the stuff in each hand. She came as close to the bright yellow creatures as she dared, and then sprayed the struggling swarms with two streams of the deadly mist. No sooner had they stopped twitching and begun to float away out to sea than Robin burst out of the water, panting like a walrus, taking great gulps of air and tearing at her clothes. ‘Up on the beach double quick,’ ordered Flo. ‘Strip off and I’ll give you a speedy spray. Better safe than sorry, girl.’

  Akelita followed, also streaming and gasping, and was given the same brusque orders. The lovely Polynesian baulked, her ecological sensitivities outraged, and might have refused altogether had she not seen her skipper dancing from foot to foot, stepping out of her panties to stand naked on the shore. Even so, she crinkled her nose. ‘What are you going to spray me with?’ she demanded, beginning to pull her own clothes off as she waded up on to the grainy coral.

  ‘Near as I can figure it, nothing more than essence of chrysanthemum,’ answered Flo shortly. ‘The alternative is ants in your pants. Literally. And ants in your pants just to begin with.’ She looked speakingly at the Polynesian Islander’s luxuriant pubis. ‘You do not want an ants’ nest there, girl! Especially if they start biting. They haven’t started biting, have they?’

  Both women shook their heads.

  ‘There you go! You got something to be thankful for. It’s only by the grace of God that I realized what was going on. Grace of God and personal experience. Now,’ said Flo, shaking the cans. ‘Chrysanthemums. Plants. Where’s the harm?’

  ‘Even so,’ said Akelita. ‘Plants can be dangerous. Look at stinging nettles. Look at poison ivy. I don’t want poison ivy up my . . .’

  ‘Stop negotiating with Akelita,’ ordered Robin. ‘Come over here and spray me head to foot. And don’t spare my blushes. You won’t believe the places I can still feel them crawling in . . .’

  ‘Sparing your blushes didn’t even occur to me,’ Flo assured her. ‘Hold your breath and close your eyes. I’ll start at the top and work my way down . . .’

  Half an hour later, Robin and Akelita were dressed in fresh clothes and their wet togs, also drenched in Rentokill spray, were out on the poop behind the cockpit. They were drying off there because the crew on watch could also watch them – in case anything small and yellow attempted to escape and stow away aboard.

  But to be fair, no one had much leisure to look at drying underwear. Katapult was still in the calm, shallow mid-section of the Johnston Atol
l, behind the surf-wall of the reef, but Robin and her crew were completing a series of complicated exercises designed to test the outriggers and bring maximum pressure to bear on the joint that Flo had just fixed.

  They had all the computer systems switched on so that the central control programmes could monitor and assess the way things were working. Robin was at the helm, therefore, and looking ahead, checking the set of the sails and the stress on the outrigger wings. Flo was crouched over the laptop, assessing the figures scrolling past. Rohini was on the radio, trying to get a strong enough signal to allow a report. And Akelita was keeping as close an eye on the sonar and the depth gauge as possible while the vessel skimmed through the reef-fanged waters.

  Robin was beginning to feel, with some relief, that Katapult seemed to be functioning as well as when they left Tuvalu. Indeed, Robin allowed, she seemed to be functioning as well as she had been the last time Katapult won the gruelling Fastnet race. Back on form with a vengeance, she thought almost fiercely. And it suddenly occurred to her that she really wanted to win this race too.

  Flo’s voice cheerfully called up the figures confirming that everything was at optimum. Rohini’s quieter tones repeated Katapult’s call sign over and over as she tried to report their position, contact Flint and catch up with Cheerio’s current whereabouts. Suddenly she was speaking rapidly, trying to get through her report before she lost contact once again. Robin frowned briefly. The scratchy signal came and went, but the Indian yachtswoman, used to single-handing and the need to pass the maximum information in the minimum time, was able to get sufficient reliable information to update their contact. Then connection faded again before she could get much new information in return.

  Akelita said quietly, ‘Shelving down from three metres to ten dead ahead.’

  ‘Everything seems to be back up to spec,’ Flo reported to Robin, almost the instant that Rohini stopped speaking. ‘Looks like we’re good to go.’

  ‘There’s a good channel straight ahead,’ confirmed Akelita. ‘We don’t even have to alter course to get back on track.’

  ‘OK,’ said Robin at once. ‘Time to leave this tropical paradise. Close down the computers, Flo. Get ready for some sail-handling, girls. Rohini, now you’re off the radio you’re in charge of the sails with Flo. Akelita, can you navigate us back out past the head of the reef then we may need to lay in a bit of a course correction to get us bang on target for the next way point we’re aiming for. Five hundred nautical miles north-east along our proposed course. If memory serves, that’ll be two four degrees north, one six six point five degrees west, somewhere between Hawaii and Midway.’

  Even as she stopped speaking she was automatically calculating how much time it would take them to achieve the next leg, based on the mean speeds they had managed before they hit the whale. And what she hoped to get out of her lively command and her increasingly weary crew once they were back out on the ocean and in the grip of the easterly trade winds.

  They had come in through the reef from the south-west. Now Akelita took them out between the islands on a north-easterly heading, keeping the reef to port. Rohini and Flo set the sails by hand as Robin directed and then came back into the cockpit. Akelita called out the names of the islands as Katapult skimmed past them, beginning to gather speed as the wind took her once again. As soon as the sleek multihull was beyond the end of the runway on Johnston Island itself and out of the malign influence of the humans and the yellow scourge they seemed to have brought with them, Akelita handed the depth gauge, sonar and radar displays over to Rohini and skipped up to the forepeak, calling excitedly over her friend’s sailing directions, shouting out the species of increasingly abundant wildlife they could see.

  They whispered past Sand Island first, the little grey-gold hump on their starboard given further prominence by the columns of seabirds hovering above it like smoke. ‘Petrels and shearwaters,’ Akelita informed them as she lowered the binoculars.

  Akau, on their port side next, was larger, and in any case it was framed against the surf on the reef. There were monk seals sunning themselves on its coral beaches, Akelita observed, and tropicbirds and terns, nesting above and around the sleepy monk seal males and their sleek harems. There were more seals and one or two turtles on the last island, Hikina, and by the time they passed it they were back to racing speed. Nesting on the beaches among the seals and the turtles there were millions of boobies, and the island’s upper reaches were home to majestic red-throated frigate birds that followed them, etched against the hard blue sky like dragons as they passed the end of the reef and swung back on to their course for the next five-hundred-mile leg of their voyage.

  ‘We plan on one more waypoint at French Frigate Shoals then forty-eight hours hard sailing,’ said Robin some hours later, as they sat around the cockpit eating their evening meal. ‘But you know we’ll hit light winds after we pass the next point. We were lucky to get through the doldrums as well as we did, but it’s the horse latitudes next and the winds will fall just as light.’

  ‘Aw, come on, skipper,’ interrupted Flo abrasively. ‘Don’t go getting all “cup half empty” on us.’

  ‘Independently of whatever we find there,’ added Akelita, almost angrily, ‘we’ll still have to try and get to the bottle, even if there’s other rubbish there.’

  ‘Looking at it in a “cup half full” way,’ said Flo bracingly, ‘the more rubbish we hit the better. Except that I want to win this frigging race as much as Akelita does. I want to take that bottle home. Aussies do not like coming second, girls. So, I’m sorry. You’ll just have to suck it up and get ready for victory.’

  ‘Unless we hit light winds as well as a Sargasso of rubbish,’ warned Robin.

  ‘But if we do, then so will Flint,’ countered Rohini, taking sides with Flo and Akelita. ‘She’s about the same distance out but coming in on the opposite course. Whatever we hit from the south-west, she’ll hit from the north-east – and right about the same time, all things being equal.’ She looked around the cockpit, wide-eyed with growing excitement. ‘Looks like we’re set up for a real tight finish.’

  ‘And the bottle’s going to be there?’ asked Robin. ‘Everyone’s still one-hundred-per-cent certain about that?’

  ‘By the look of these projection figures, it’ll be right on the button. And still well afloat. Though God alone knows what else will have washed down around it.’

  ‘A few days hard sailing with a following wind and a bit of luck,’ said Robin. ‘Then we’ll just cruise home to Vancouver. With the winning bottle. We have the supplies. We have the time. We’ll average five knots instead of fifteen on the long runs and hope for a bit of a holiday.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Akelita. ‘Oh, yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘I’d like that too,’ said Flo. ‘But I’d like that and a man one hell of a lot more.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Akelita. ‘I’d like one of those too.’

  ‘At least one,’ emphasized Rohini with a chuckle. A chuckle that spread round the cockpit and turned into proper, full-throated laughter.

  And as Robin contentedly joined in the hilarity, suddenly found herself wondering what her man was up to . . .

  Measures

  ‘Luzon Logging,’ said Nic, frowning. ‘That means Satang Sittart’s involved. That’s bad.’

  ‘He may not be involved directly or personally,’ countered Richard.

  ‘That a risk you want to take?’ demanded Nic. ‘I mean, I was there on Pulau Baya Island when he went down from the topmost step of the three-storey staircase right to the bottom of the river in two seconds flat, weighted down with what looked genuinely like a ton of bricks. I was there when they pulled him out and got the first good look at his ears. Or what little was left of them. You know he blames you and Robin for the damage that was done then and all the agony and humiliation he has been forced to suffer since.’

  ‘I know,’ Richard admitted. ‘But we can’t do anything about that now. And in any case, we don’t know t
hat Sittart is even aware of the situation with the bottle and the yachts, let alone involved in it.’

  Nic gave a brutal laugh. ‘One of his ships is well off course, heading for the graveyard of the Pacific chasing a bottle that might just be worth one-hundred-and-ten-million US dollars. Of course he’s aware of it, Richard. And I’ll bet it’s only a question of time before he gets involved. Personally!’

  ‘OK, but the point I’m making is this: the information Jim Bourne sent me from London Centre about the Dagupan Maru is worrying enough even before we add the professor into the picture.’

  ‘It must have been pretty damn worrying for you to get me up at this ungodly hour . . .’ said Nic with a wry laugh, looking at the black, white-figured face of the Breitling watch that protected the inner side of his left wrist, as though the steady beat of his pulse could help the fabulously expensive mechanism keep time. ‘It’s still not five a.m.!’

  He strode across Richard’s reception room lowering his left hand and raising his right – which held a cup of coffee. There was a half-empty cafètiere of Blue Mountain High Roast on the table beside Richard, lately placed there near his laptop by a young man from room service. Both Richard and Nic were dressed in casual trousers, and open-necked shirts, as befitted the time and the place, if not the serious nature of the meeting. ‘What has Jim sent over?’ the American asked, stopping his pacing and returning to ease his long body on to the sofa beside Richard so that he could see the laptop screen more clearly.

  Richard had scrolled down past the information on the vessel’s hull and engines and the screen was full of information about the captain and his senior officers now. ‘Captain Yamamoto for a start,’ he observed grimly, gesturing at the lines of neat black text and the damning information that they held.

  ‘Oh,’ said Nic grimly as he scanned the bold headlines. ‘That Yamamoto.’

  He lapsed into thoughtful silence and reread the news articles Jim had digested for them. The digest came from several news articles from Manila, Tokyo, Seattle, Hong Kong and London, detailing the notorious incident that so nearly had the captain stripped of his command – and sent to prison. Because it had involved so many deaths. ‘I still can’t figure how he walked away from it . . .’ said Nic after a while. ‘How many kids were on the yacht he ran down? Eight?’