Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ said Emma grimly. ‘Radio’s offline again. The rest of the safety stuff’s not much use either with all of this crap packed around us.’

  ‘Not that we know how to contact the professor at the moment anyhow,’ added Bella brightly.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of him,’ said Liberty. ‘I was thinking of Dad or Richard. Someone who can do something about this . . .’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’ demanded Emma trenchantly. ‘Isn’t that why we’re all out here at the stinking shithouse end of nowhere?’

  ‘I guess,’ allowed Liberty. ‘But I didn’t really think that all this would be here too!’ And as if to emphasize her words, Flint’s starboard quarter rammed into a big orange buoy like an American football quarterback hitting his opposite number.

  ‘Think it does get much thicker than this?’ demanded Bella suddenly sounding nervous.

  ‘Hey!’ came Maya’s irate bellow from below. ‘What the f— Did we just collide with? Isn’t anyone on watch, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Oh, great!’ whispered Emma. ‘Now we’ve woken the Wicked Witch of the West.’

  ‘And her Witchiness is pissed!’ added Bella. ‘I hope you have your ruby slippers, Dorothy, or it’s flying monkey time for you!’

  Maya staggered up and pushed Liberty aside. ‘What in hell’s name?’ she started. Then she stopped dead, staring around, goggle-eyed. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she said. ‘What’s that smell?’

  And the answer hit both Emma and Liberty at the same time. It was the same smell that had nearly gassed the girls in the engine room of the ghost ship Un Maru.

  Shoals

  It was not until Katapult reached French Frigate Shoals that Robin and her crew understood just how much damage the collision with the humpback whale had actually caused.

  It was one of the multihull’s most advanced features that the sensors for her sonar alarm system were located in the bows of the outriggers and the receiver in the central hull. This allowed 3D mapping of the submarine terrain over which they sailed. But its accuracy depended on the precise emission of the sonar pulses in the first place. The further out of phase they went, the more inaccurate the system would become.

  Flo’s focus on repairing the hinge – not to mention Robin and Akelita’s adventure of the yellow crazy ants on Johnston Island – simply overwhelmed anything she might have done to check any further internal damage which could have resulted from the impact. Not that she could have done much, to be fair, without getting Katapult right up out of the water in any case. To make matters worse, the sonar worked well enough on the exit from Johnston Atoll to put their minds at rest and then was not really required for the deep-water run up to the shoals. Consequently there was no need to test or question its accuracy until Katapult’s pre-planned route brought her racing across the wind to the next way station on her carefully deliberated course.

  By the grace of God they arrived at French Frigate Shoals with the dawn and the sun rising out of a calm sea into a cloudless sky polished by the steady trade wind, and framing the tower of La Perouse dead ahead so spectacularly that they could not miss it. The basalt islet, remnant of the solid heart of the long-dead volcano whose coral-covered caldera curved behind it, appeared with the sun dead ahead, and Rohini who held the watch sitting on the cabin roof, called back to Robin at the wheel, ‘I see it! Robin, you should take a look at this, it looks exactly like an old-fashioned frigate under full sail! You’d think we were running down on the Flying Dutchman himself!’

  ‘If you can see La Perouse,’ Robin called back to her, ‘then the shoal is lying right across our course. You should be able to see East Island behind La Perouse soon, then Bare Island just behind that.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the image of the shoal she had seen on Google Earth as she was planning this leg of the voyage. It looked disturbingly like a foetus lying on its side in the ocean, with a large head under the bigger islelets to the north and a long spine curling south. But she could not bring herself to describe it in these terms. ‘If I remember the pilot correctly,’ she called instead, ‘there’s about fifteen nautical miles of reefs and shoals on a north-south curve between Shark Island in the north and Disappearing Island in the south. If you think of it as Robin Hood’s bow, La Perouse is where the feather of his arrow would be. And where the arrow’s pointed is right where we’re headed. Arrow straight and arrow fast, with any luck.’

  ‘That’s very romantic,’ said Akelita, popping her head up out of the cabin. ‘But who the heck is Robin Hood?’

  ‘I’ve spent enough time teaching you seamanship, girl,’ teased Robin. ‘Don’t get me started on culture as well! Come here and check the sonar. The bloke who named this place – le Compte de La Perouse – nearly lost both his French frigates here, you know.’

  ‘You taught me seamanship!’ cried Akelita, theatrically outraged. ‘There is nothing I don’t know about the sea!’

  Robin changed course as Katapult came up to the black tower of La Perouse. She swung on to a more northerly heading but she found that her route across the rolling ocean was limited by the trade wind streaming down towards them. It had swung to the north-west in the night and the further northward Robin pointed Katapult’s three bows, the more she found herself coming close to the eye of the wind, and even Katapult could not sail directly into a north-westerly trade wind. She stayed on the more easterly tack, therefore, aiming her command at the northern outreach of the reef that lay across their path. Planning to skim across the head of the gigantic foetus lying just beneath the surface in her imagination. Hopefully without damaging her command: without waking the sleeping blue baby. ‘Keep an eye on that sonar,’ she said to Akelita round a mouthful of their last breakfast bacon. ‘I’m going to have to run through the northerly shoals south of Shark Island and come out between Trig Island and Tern Island where the airport is.’

  ‘What!’ laughed Akelita. ‘Another airport in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Like Johnston,’ Robin answered. ‘It’s just an island with a landing strip taking up almost the whole of it. Unmanned. Emergencies only. But this one hasn’t been a nuclear test site, missile launch pad or a dumping ground for chemical weapons and whatnot.’

  ‘Even so, I don’t want to go anywhere near it!’ Akelita announced with a shudder. ‘There might be ants!’

  The wind picked up, pushing Katapult ever faster into the curving wall of shoals. The fact that Robin was holding her sleek vessel as close to the eye as she dared, set up even more tension between the wind pressure and the tall sails, driving the multihull ever more swiftly forward. Her starboard outrigger began to porpoise in and out of the surface. Cross-waves, born of the westerly edge of the trade, spread across the usually placid shallows ahead. The still-low sun glanced dazzlingly off the restless ridges, concealing the few white horses that were beginning to spring up as the weather crept relentlessly up the Beaufort scale.

  The glittering combination of gleaming sun and dancing water hid from Rohini the upthrusting coral shoals Akelita’s damaged sonar was reading as lying several metres deeper than they actually were.

  It was Flo who saw the danger as she came up to wash the breakfast things. It had been their practice to put their consumable waste over the side. Everything else stayed aboard. But crusts, rind and bacon fat would only add to the welfare of the sea and the creatures within it by their reckoning, so over the side they went. And after she dumped them, Flo leaned down to push the unbreakable plastic plate into the surface of the water racing past Katapult’s central hull, aiming to give it a bit of a scrub. And as she did so, she saw a coral head race past, seemingly just beneath the surface. She paused, frowned, looked again, all too well aware of the tricks refraction can play with anyone looking into the water. But no. Another heave of reef sped by, covered in a fine scalp of green and yellow weed, alive with tiny jewel-bright fish. It wasn’t an optical illusion: the top of the shoal was only inches beneath their speeding kee
l. If they had been in Flint, with the centreboard down they’d have been wrecked already.

  ‘Akelita!’ bellowed Flo. ‘We’re about to run aground. Where’s the sonar?’

  ‘I’m on it!’ answered Akelita. ‘It says we have three metres clearance all round!’

  ‘Three centimetres maybe! Robin. Watch out! There’s something badly wrong here!’

  Robin and Flo had sailed together for a good long time. They trusted each other without question or hesitation. On the Australian’s first call, therefore, Robin put Katapult’s helm hard over, loosened the main sheet and snatched the wind out of her sails. The boom swung dangerously this way and that but the crew had rehearsed the manoeuvre often enough to keep their heads low and hang on tight until the wild motion slowed. Stopped. The way came off her surprisingly swiftly and in a matter of moments she was idling, rocking a little lumpily in the chop, with her loose sails thundering angrily and her rigging whimpering in the wind. Robin tightened the main sheet enough to stop the boom swinging, but not enough to fill the sails again.

  ‘All right,’ she ordered crisply. ‘Check it out!’

  Rohini and Akelita joined Flo at the sides, looking anxiously down into the limpid water. And their eyes immediately told them the bitter truth. The sonar had been lying all along. It was something akin to a miracle that they were still afloat.

  ‘What does the GPS say?’ asked Robin. ‘Maybe we can trust that!’

  Akelita came back into the cockpit. ‘Two three point eight five degrees north by one six six point two seven degrees west,’ she answered.

  ‘That’s as near to the middle of nowhere as you can get I guess,’ called Flo. ‘We can’t stay here, Robin.’

  ‘Damn right. We’ll motor out along the course I’d planned – or as near as we can.’

  ‘How’ll we manage that?’ demanded Akelta.

  ‘The old-fashioned way,’ Robin answered brutally. ‘Life jackets and lifelines on please, ladies, and get ready for a hard day’s work!’

  Akalita went astride the bow of the starboard outrigger and Rohini went astride the port one. They each carried a boathook the better part of two metres in length. Flo went on the forepeak of the central hull with a weighted line knotted every boathook length, which was as close as they could come to fathoms. While the three of them were getting into position, Robin engaged the power and the computer so she could furl the restless sails. Then she engaged the motor and began to ease the restless vessel forward across the choppy water. Flo threw the weighted line forward and gathered it back in, testing the depth as the bright cord came vertical, while the two outriders sat ready to fend off any coral heads that came too close for comfort.

  ‘By the Mark, Twain!’ sang out Flo cheerfully.

  ‘Thank you very much, Samuel Longhorn Clements,’ called back Robin, relieved to find her crew still so chirpy. ‘Do you actually mean that we have two fathoms clearance?’

  Flo answered in the affirmative and threw the plumb again.

  ‘Let’s just hope reports of her demise remain a little premature,’ added Rohini. ‘Though if she has nearly four metres beneath her, I have to say I have a damn sight less than one beneath me. Coral head coming up! Hard a’starboard!’

  And so, very much in the manner of Broussole and Astrolabe, the frigates commanded by Jean Francois de Galaup, Comte de la Perouse, who felt his way across these very waters while Robin’s ancestors were celebrating Guy Fawkes day in 1786, Katapult proceeded through the shoals, guided by soundings that reminded the intrepid skipper of the Hornblower and Aubrey novels she had read with so much pleasure in her youth, shared so enthusiastically with her darling Richard and read to her children in turn.

  By nightfall, Trig Island was a shadowy lump low on Katapult’s starboard and Tern Island’s square end and higher runway stood above and behind the port, framed against the sunset as La Perouse had been against the dawn. They hadn’t stopped for a midday break and they didn’t plan to try reporting in until they were clear of the shoal. Because if they weren’t out of here by dark, then they really were in serious trouble.

  Dead ahead was an intermittent wall of breakers hushing smoothly over the coral-fanged curve of ancient drowned volcanic caldera rim. Robin glanced down at the GPS. The break in the disturbing wall of foam was dead ahead at two two point eight eight degrees north, one six six point two six degrees west. But, of course, what lay between the piles of surf standing like snowdrifts on her right hand and her left was an inrushing current of hard green water that seemed intent on either pushing her back or forcing her to one side or the other. And as she pushed the throttles smoothly forward, yelling, ‘Watch out, Akelita! Keep your eyes peeled and your boathook ready, Rohini!’ She prayed that the smooth green gap was wide enough to let her command out into the deep water once again.

  ‘You’ve got three fathoms under the keel,’ yelled Flo. ‘Keep her steady and straight ahead.’

  ‘You’ve three meters at the side here,’ called Akelita. ‘Though it’s hard to be sure because of the foam. It feels like it’s piled up high above my head. And it’s starting to come down on me.’

  ‘Here too,’ bellowed Rohini, her voice beginning to get lost beneath the roaring of the surf, the hissing of the current and the throbbing of the motor pushing Katapult relentlessly forward.

  Feeling as though Katapult must actually be sailing uphill over the inrushing heave of clear green water, Robin gunned the motor to the maximum and threw the intrepid little vessel towards the open water. Looking straight ahead and holding the wheel steady by an almost superhuman effort, she thrust Katapult into the narrow gap. Both of the outriggers vanished beneath the avalanches of foam tumbling inwards from the piles of breakers riding up over the reef-topped rim. Even Flo at the forepeak of the main hull seemed to vanish into spray. The walls of white water came rushing up towards Robin with a seemingly majestic inevitability, and yet she found she only just had time to slam the cover over the cabin back hard against the washboards before she too was seemingly caught beneath a waterfall of foam, then Katapult was through. The roaring was coming from behind her. Her boat was rushing downhill. There was sun on the back of her streaming head. She blinked the salt foam out of her eyes and looked for her three friends. And they were all there, miraculously still in place. Clinging on for dear life. But there. Safe.

  ‘Rohini? Are you all right?’ called Robin.

  ‘Fine,’ answered the Indian yachtswoman. ‘But promise me we’re never going to do anything like that again.’

  ‘I promise!’ answered Robin feelingly. ‘Come inboard as quickly as you can.’

  As Akelita and Rohini obeyed, both still miraculously possessed of their boathooks, Flo paused for one last instant. Cast her lead and let it run. And run and run and run between her fingers. ‘No bottom on this line,’ she called at last. ‘Looks like we’re safely through.’

  ‘We’ll tidy up, dry off and report in – if we can raise a signal,’ Robin decided. ‘Then we’ll have something really special for dinner. Akelita, what’ve we got?’

  ‘We have the last of the frozen Chinese curry from the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel,’ answered Akelita. ‘That was really special. To me at least, because it reminds me of Tuvalu and home.’

  And something about the answer made Robin think of Richard; probably the fact that it was in the upstairs room in the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel where she had last slept with him.

  But thinking of Richard suddenly seemed to cloud the otherwise sunny relief at having brought her command and her crew safely through the shoals and back out into the deep ocean once again. And being under way again, with sails up and sheets taut, skimming across a steady trade wind as the sun set behind the rim of the watery world astern. And, as it turned out, nothing about the contact she made after dinner on a clear and steady radio signal served to put her worried mind at rest.

  For neither Richard nor Nic Greenbaum was available.

  Neither, in fact, had been in contact for a couple of days – a
pparently since Jim Bourne at London Centre had sent them a whole lot of information, to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Tokyo, about a ship called the Dagupan Maru.

  Mess

  ‘But what shall we do?’ demanded Dr Aika Rei, and not for the first time. ‘If we do not lead them to the bottle and give them the ticket they will hurt us – and I do mean hurt us – or kill us. Or both.’

  ‘And if we do, then they will still kill us,’ answered Reona Tanaka, terrified, glancing round their cabin, half convinced it must be wired for sound. Still unaware that the bedroom was also wired for video.

  ‘They will kill you,’ spat Aika Rei, making death sound like the easy option. ‘They have other plans for me!’ She shuddered.

  ‘But surely he will help us. He is an educated man, he must be . . .’

  ‘Who?’ Her face was blank. Uncomprehending. ‘Who do you suppose will help us?’

  ‘This professor they say is coming aboard. Professor Sittart.’

  ‘As far as I know, he is their leader,’ she hissed. ‘He’s more likely to hold the gun that kills you. Or to hold my clothes while his men . . .’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous! Things like that do not happen in real life!’

  ‘But I overheard them talking about it!’ she shouted.

  ‘Well, all I can say is that you must have misunderstood what you heard. Or overheard.’ His face was white. He looked desperately around the cabin.

  Aika Rei’s expression told him all too clearly what she thought of that suggestion. And of his fear.

  So he tried another tack. ‘The captain seems a civilized person,’ he whispered forcefully. ‘Perhaps we should try talking to him.’

  But she shook her head again, frowning. ‘He must be either as corrupt as his crew – or so stupid that he does not understand what’s going on. In either case he will be of no help to us – and going to him may well just make things worse.’