Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  By the time the phone he hated so much began to ring, he had washed his hands and moved his laptop to the Wi-Fi-enabled desk. As the phone rang, so a red button flashed. He pressed it and so discovered that the phone did have a speaker facility not unlike his cell and he pressed it without raising the handset after all. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It is reception, Professor. There is a lady here. She says you are expecting her.’ The voice was distant and tinny. He could only just make out the words. The phone was not really efficient enough for his requirements.

  ‘I am!’ he shouted, overcompensating. ‘Tell her to come up at once.’

  Sittart, angered by the business with the phone and piqued by her unflappable behaviour so far, chose to test Nanaka Oda a little further by opening the door wide on her first firm knock. He stepped forward almost threateningly as he did so, filling the door frame so that she was confronted with him suddenly and at unexpectedly close quarters. They had never met. As far as he knew she had seen no pictures of him. Yet she did not flinch at the sudden confrontation.

  Their eyes met, almost on a level. And hers did not flicker at the sight of his lean face, his high cheekbones, his hawkbeak nose, his shark-thin mouth, his long dark eyes or the square black boxes clamped over his ruined ears, as the air hostess’s had done. She was exactly like her ID picture on his cell phone. Round-faced but with a determined set to her mouth and chin. Dark hair, dyed to keep any grey at bay. Incongruous button nose. Dark eyes with a steady, almost calculating gaze. She smelt of perspiration but her breath smelt of mints as his smelt of the Parma Violet lozenges he liked to suck. A square woman one size too big for her clothes, but who wore them tightly zipped and buttoned anyway. Very different to the sort of woman he usually dealt with. Or the sort of pretty, vulnerable creature that filled his darker fantasies.

  ‘Nanaka Oda,’ she introduced herself, and tensed her body to bow but then she stopped, realizing that she would head-butt him if she did so.

  He stepped back. ‘Come in,’ he ordered.

  Again, she did not hesitate. She marched straight past him and crossed to the coffee table, then turned to face him as he closed the door and leaned back against it for a moment, eyes and mind busy.

  He considered her for a moment longer in silence. Although they had never met, he knew all about her. He did not employ – even clandestinely – anyone with whose secrets he was not intimately familiar. Such knowledge was just another aspect of the power he liked to exercise over others. He knew she was single. That she lived out in Fuchu and commuted in and out on the Keio Line – of which Luzon Logging was a shareholder. But not under that name.

  A couple of years ago, aged forty, she had withdrawn from the lonely hearts circle through which she had hoped to find a husband. The competition from slim and pretty young executive rivals had become too fierce. She consoled herself nowadays with Western films of a romantic nature and chocolate, which was why her clothes didn’t fit well any longer. And, in spite of the reasonable wage she earned, she couldn’t afford new ones in the larger sizes she really needed.

  She had fallen into Luzon Logging’s clutches in her late thirties five years ago when a last desperate attempt at matrimony with a much younger man had merely led to an unwanted pregnancy and an expensive abortion which the child’s father was too busy getting out of the affair to pay for. The failure of the relationship had turned out to be lucky for her. The fleeing lover had been involved in a hit-and-run car accident and would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his days. A particularly bitter irony because he – and, briefly, she – had been involved in the illegal drifting craze down on the Tokyo docks. According to the professor’s sources, she had been a promising drifter – while he had been a rising star. There was a potent question on her secret Luzon Logging file as to whether she had been at the wheel of the car that had hit him and then run into anonymity.

  Such matters would be broached later, Sittart decided; and he could be certain of the fact. One of his many accomplishments was that he had the ability to control conversations with uncanny precision. ‘We have much to discuss,’ he stated, speaking too loudly and with a snarl in his tone as usual. ‘But I am hungry. You will order food first and we will talk while we eat.’ It did not occur to him to ask if she was hungry or whether this arrangement suited her.

  ‘As you wish,’ she answered equably.

  He picked up the room service folder and gestured at the telephone handset.

  Another man might have said, ‘The tempura vegetables are particularly good here . . .’ as a way of explaining his choices; of negotiating an expression of her thoughts. Sittart never even thought of such irrelevancies. He glanced up to ensure she was holding the handset ready and he barked a series of staccato phrases at her, which she repeated to room service. Twenty minutes later they were in the private dining room with a selection of meat and fish karaage, tempura vegatables, tonkatsu pork, gyoza potsticker dumplings and fried yaki udon steaming on the table between them. The professor picked up the short, sharp Japanese chopsticks, moved his choice of the food on to his plate, Western style, and began to eat. She sat with her hands in her lap and watched him until he glanced at her and ordered, ‘Eat!’

  Then, while they consumed the food, they began to talk.

  Two hours later, Nanaka Oda was sitting in a black Toyota Corolla AE86 without number plates, tapping the throttle gently. In her mind she was five years back in time, in a top-flight drifting car, hopped up to the max on adrenaline and ready for action. The Toyota was sitting invisibly with its lights off on the rain-slick roadway just along from the pierside bar called Rage. Had she turned off the motor, wound down the window and listened carefully, she would have heard the distant snarl of her erstwhile lover’s friends, drifting down on the docks.

  But Nanaka Oda had better things to do.

  Beside her, on the front passenger seat lay the untraceable mobile the professor had given her, with which she had contacted the same number she had called from her office three days earlier to warn Richard Mariner about the mysterious death of the too-talkative pilot. Something she had done on the professor’s orders. An act calculated to win a little trust from the foreign giant. Just enough to make him take a risk and agree to meet her in the hope of getting a little more information.

  Unknown to the too-trusting Englishman, the professor had also supplied the taxi to bring him here – the Keio Line was by no means the only transport system in which Luzon Logging had a stake. As agreed, the taxi stopped a little way back from the bar, under the flare of a street light. Two unmistakable figures climbed out of the back, paid, and began to hurry forward.

  Nanaka Oda was in action at once. Her black Toyota, lights out, as invisible in the night-time downpour as Professor Sittart had been in the shadows behind the curtain in his room, reared forward. The hunting roar of its motor masked by the relentless drumming of the rain. The ruthless woman, reliving the ecstatic moment of revenge against her faithless lover, span the wheel as the car leaped onward, sending the black wall of its side drifting up on to the pavement, leaping high over the unexpectedly substantial kerb, where the two tall figures were suddenly diving sideways and away.

  Too late, she thought, contentedly, far too late, my dear.

  And the rear of the car connected with a most satisfying double thud.

  Debris

  Soon after the debris from the Japanese earthquake sank below the northern horizon the wind swung round towards the west and gathered force. Liberty was forced to tack Flint across a choppy and increasingly restless ocean that began to run against them up through force six of the Beaufort scale towards full gale force seven with a sea state to match. It was very different sailing to what they had experienced at first where they had just given up and run before the wind down past Portland towards San Francisco.

  This time the weather was clear, the sky a hard, dark cobalt all day, as though it was made of polished blue steel. The sea gathered itself in long corrugations, pushed
relentlessly towards them by the hot, strong wind. White-topped, steep-sided walls of green water that would have been acceptable – at a stretch – if they could have met them head-on. But the only way of making the progress they so keenly desired was to cross the increasingly powerful near-gale in huge sawtooth tacks, which meant they mostly met the onrushing waves on the port or starboard quarter. The white tops exploded against them, over them, making the whole hull shudder as they spewed across Flint’s foredeck and hissed up to the cabin like serpents. Every now and then, while she butted grimly on, green water swamped in from the poop and only the straining wall of washboards kept the insides anything like dry. But with the increasingly weary women running up and down to change tack a couple of times each watch, it was never really anything like dry in actual fact.

  Therefore, as Flint shouldered through the water, so she performed almost all of the movements that naval architects call the six degrees of freedom. She surged forward and occasionally backward; she swayed from side to side, she heaved up and down while she heeled this way and that under the wind. She pitched and she yawed with an enthusiasm that made standing difficult, sitting uncomfortable, sleep next to impossible, and staying in a bunk or hammock nothing more than a dream. It was lucky no one felt like eating because cooking was out of the question, and any food or drink choked down came straight back up again.

  But the wind eased back to force five in the night. The sea calmed and by the end of the next day’s sailing, they were pushing through force-three weather, smacking over wavelets that hardly stirred Flint’s hull out of the gentle forward motion Liberty’s expert sail-handling was forcing out of an eight-knot westerly breeze. The sun beat down all afternoon and by the change of watch at seventeen hundred hours all their clothes and gear were dry enough to gather off the decks and stow away.

  It was a Day B rotation so Liberty and Maya were on watch while Emma and Bella cleared away and broke open the food locker. As the sun settled westerly on the starboard quarter, Liberty held the con while Maya sat on the cabin roof with their binoculars round her neck and the four of them feasted on canned beef stew, canned mixed vegetables and pasta, followed by canned peaches and condensed milk, followed by coffee and more condensed milk.

  At eighteen hundred, Maya tried to raise a signal on their communications equipment but nothing was coming through. The red dots on the computer screen were moving according to programming and predictions now – they hadn’t been updated live for some time. After a while, she gave up with a shrug. Later, in the quiet of the darkness, cutting across that warm, steady westerly under a low, full moon and a jewel box full of massive tropical stars, she tried to raise a signal once again. This time she was more successful. She made her regular report and asked for news in return. Katapult had reported in recently as well; she was past French Frigate Shoals – by the skin of her teeth, apparently – and running steadily up to meet them. Even as the report came through, the red dots on the laptop screen reset themselves, jumping forward to show that both the yachts and the bottle they were racing towards had made better than predicted progress. Unaccountably, another dot appeared, flickering on and off almost like a warning light, seemingly coming down from the north. No one Maya talked to had any idea what that was. A marker of some kind that Captain Mariner had added to the display while he and Mr Greenbaum were in Tokyo.

  ‘Ask them about Dad,’ demanded Liberty. ‘He’s been out of contact for longer than usual. It’s not like him.’

  But there was seemingly nothing new to report in that quarter. And the signal dwindled away after a few more minutes in any case. ‘That’s strange,’ said the sharp-eared Maya unthinkingly. ‘They sounded almost shifty there. D’you think there’s something they’re not telling us?’

  ‘Probably just fallout from the fact that the professor’s gone off somewhere,’ said Liberty. ‘Like they told us, what, nearly a week ago now. That has to have put some kind of spanner in the works.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maya uncertainly. ‘That’s what it’ll be, I guess.’

  They fell silent then and talked little more, both of them prey to suspicions of their own. The moon was still up when they changed the watch at four a.m., moved on to a southward tack as they did so, and the whole thing was completed almost as easily as it would have been by daylight.

  The good thing about holding the watch through to this hour was that the berths were still warm, thought Liberty drowsily as she settled down twenty minutes later into the berth she shared turnabout with Emma. Her head was on a pillow which could double as a life preserver that still smelt faintly of Emma’s favourite perfume. Her right ear was near the inner curve of the starboard quarter only a couple of inches away from the North Pacific, separated from the enormity of water by the moulded, strengthened polystyrene skin of the hull. And, where there had been a restless reeling thunder of surf only forty-eight hours earlier, now there was a restful hissing chuckle.

  And, suddenly, distantly, hauntingly, the lost and lonely keening of whalesong echoing up out of untold depths below.

  But as she fell into an exhausted sleep, she still found herself wondering about her father.

  When she woke in the morning, she found she had far more immediate things to worry about.

  It was the tapping that woke her. It inserted itself into a disturbingly vivid dream of some wild half-remembered New England heathland like the ghost of Cathy in Wuthering Heights rapping insistently on the window. She sprang awake, sea-wise enough to remember not to sit up. Tap, tap, tap, went the sound straight out of her dream, immediately beside her head on the outer wall of the hull. She looked at her watch, an Omega Seamaster her dad had bought her years ago. Eight forty-five a.m. Four hours’ sleep was enough to be going on with, she thought, and rolled out. Still a little groggy, she walked along the deck of the dark cabin towards the brightness coming down from the open cockpit. Then, still half asleep, she climbed the steps up into the morning.

  It was the smell she noticed first. A strange, half foreign, half familiar odour. Oily and yet not oil. Rancid, and yet too chemical to be rotting. A stink she associated somehow with coasts, with bays and harbours; yet lacking the metallic tang which told of rusty hulls and anchor chain. Still, something she associated with anchorages, not oceans. It was a smell she had never come across this far out; yet there was an immediacy about it. And even as she fought to get a mental handle on it, she thrust her head out into the daylight.

  Emma was standing, grimly, at the wheel while Bella was sitting on the cabin roof. ‘What is it?’ asked Liberty as she clambered up and out. ‘Something’s not right.’

  ‘Take a look for yourself,’ advised Emma shortly.

  Liberty pulled herself right up out of the cockpit to stand beside her crewmate at the con. The next thing she noticed after the tapping and the smell was the fact that the wind had fallen light. Maybe force two on the Beaufort Scale. Flint was only making way because Emma was as accomplished a yachtswoman as Liberty herself, and was still able to catch the light airs in Flint’s tall sails with almost magical efficiency.

  Liberty’s gaze fell from the full belly of the main sail to the immediate prospect of the waters through which her command was making her steady way. And her face closed into a frown of horrified disbelief. For Flint was sailing through a sea of increasingly solid garbage. The surface of the ocean was all but hidden by a layer of plastic. There were bottles of every size, shape and colour – though the colours were faded to a disturbingly garish range of pastels. Most of them were clear but clouding and encrusted with marine life forms of every sort from weeds to barnacles. It was these, she reckoned, that had been tapping on the counter just beside her head as Flint surged steadily through them like an icebreaker through ice floes. There were commercial fishing floats and buoys the size of big balloons, most of them originally Day-Glo orange but yellowing and whitening now. Plastic bins and barrels of every size, most of them round, but a few she could see that were square-sided too. Between the
larger pieces of plastic debris there was scattered a mass of smashed and broken, rotting and disintegrating matter, all of it still the unnaturally bright hues that marked it as man-made rather than natural. It was only when she looked over the side and gazed straight down that she saw any actual water. And when she stood up beside Bella and looked into the distance straight ahead along their course, the whole of the ocean seemed to be one impenetrable Sargasso Sea of decomposing plastic rubbish.

  ‘I thought it wasn’t like this,’ she said at last, stunned. ‘I mean I know the Garbage Patch exists in some form. But I thought like Dad and Richard said that it was in nurdles and particles suspended in the current. There isn’t supposed to be a Sargasso of the stuff! Christ, it looks as though it gets almost thick enough to stop us dead ahead.’

  ‘Let’s hope that’s just an optical illusion,’ said Bella practically. ‘It couldn’t really get that solid, surely!’

  ‘Hasn’t slowed us any so far,’ added Maya. ‘And we’ve been sailing through it since before dawn.’

  ‘Jesus!’ gasped Liberty. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not the size of Texas like they say,’ answered Bella. ‘Or we’ll never find the professor’s bottle.’

  ‘The professor!’ shouted Liberty. ‘That must be it! His theory must be even more accurate than he thought. Perhaps the currents have speeded up enough to get all the debris spewing out of China, Japan and Western America here in double-quick time. My God! We have to tell somebody about this!’