Captain Rourke

by Helena Newbury

  “Anyway, we did what we could. Stopped a dozen or so attacks. A month went by and we felt...safe, I suppose. I mean, we were a state-of-the-art, armor-plated frigate and they were buzzing around in small boats. I was worried about my men getting shot when they boarded a pirate boat, or someone firing an RPG at us. But none of us ever thought—”

  He closed his eyes. A second later, he sunk his hand into my damp hair and then sighed as if that brought him comfort. “We found out later that a lot of the pirates we’d been catching were financed by one particular warlord. He was pissed at us, and wanted to make a statement. Normally, he wouldn’t have stood a chance but he was a wily bastard.

  He waited until we were refueling. It was night and the sea was rough: I was having trouble just keeping the ship in position. Then we got a distress call from a fishing boat. Engine was out and it was drifting right towards us. I was worried a wave would carry it into us or the refueling boat. I sent people to try to tow it to safety but....” He took a deep breath, pain creasing his brow, and I knew he was there, in his mind. “But suddenly, it fires up its engines and shoots straight into the gap between us and the refueling boat. Right under the fuel lines. The crew bail out and a second later, it explodes.”

  I drew in a shaky breath. My hand gripped his shoulder.

  “The explosion slams right into our frigate, above and below the waterline. I’m on the bridge and the metal wall next to me gets shredded like it’s made of paper. Every light on both ships goes out. But outside, everything lights up orange.” He paused, and when he restarted, the words were strained. “All that fuel, from the refueling ship. Thousands of gallons of diesel are burning, all around us. The sea is on fire.”

  “Everything goes to hell very, very quickly. I know we’re sinking and so is the refueling boat. Normally, we’d abandon ship but there’s fire all around us. Communications are down, all my high-tech screens have gone dark. And the weather’s getting worse: the sea’s trying to smash the two ships into one another which’ll finish us off for good. I have to keep us afloat until help arrives.”

  “So I stand there bawling orders and getting compartments closed. We have to do things the old-fashioned way, sending runners down to the engine room with messages, using torches to signal the refueling ship...Christ, at one point I’m using the stars to try to get us pointing in the right direction. We send up flares, we know there’s a Chinese ship in the area that’ll come, but it’ll take a while. And we’re already listing badly. So bad it sends me stumbling...and that’s when I realize there’s something wrong with my leg.”

  He looked down at it. “I hadn’t felt it until then but when the wall was torn apart, some of the metal went straight into my calf. The deck’s slick with blood and now I’m aware of it, it starts to hurt like fuck. But there are men who are hurt worse so I wrap a bandage round it and get on with it. We’re taking on a lot of water plus there’s a fire burning on one deck. The wind’s gusting and the waves are trying to tip us over. If that happens, there’s nowhere to run: it’s drown or jump off into a sea of burning fuel. So I keep fighting the weather, keep her pointing the right way, until the Chinese arrive.”

  “Someone else could have done it,” I said quietly.

  “It was my ship,” he said. “My men.”

  “How long did it take, before you were rescued?”

  “A few hours, give or take. They cleared the refueling boat first, then us.”

  I looked up at him. “You waited until everyone else was off, didn’t you?”

  “I was the captain,” he said simply. His eyes closed. “We lost eight men. Three more seriously injured.”

  “And your leg?”

  As I watched, he lifted it slightly, then grunted in pain.

  “The muscle was all torn up. Nerve damage, too. If they’d got to it sooner, they might have been able to fix it but...” He shrugged. “At least I can still walk. Some blokes aren’t so lucky.”

  “But there’s nothing they can do about the pain?”

  He shook his head, then looked down at me and gave me that lop-sided smile.

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  He kissed the top of my head and a warm flush went through me but I was still mystified.

  “You,” he said at last. The Scottish accent gave even that simple word warmth. “You, Hannah. When I’m around you...it doesn’t matter.”

  My heart swelled and I bit my lip. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. I couldn’t think of a response so I just cuddled in closer. When I next looked up, I saw that he was looking towards the prow again. “What’s out there?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond.

  I looked more closely at him. He wasn’t looking out at the water at all: he was looking at the point where the rail curved round, right at the prow, the furthest forward you could stand on the boat. I saw the sadness in his eyes and remembered another time I’d seen that look: in McKinley’s, staring at the empty seat.

  My eyes widened. “Edwards?” I asked.

  He blinked, his eyes liquid. “Edwards.”

  51

  Rourke

  “He was my XO,” I told her. “My executive officer. Served with him for years, but he saw sense and got out of the Navy well before I did.”

  I was watching Edwards as I said it. He lounged against the rail at the prow, watching right back.

  “They gave me a medal,” I said. “And a desk job. I told them they could have them both back: I just wanted to be out there on the sea again. But they wouldn’t hear of it. Six months later, I’m going insane. Leg hurts, no matter what I do. Walls of my office feel like they’re closing in. I inhale and all I can smell is copy paper and printer toner. And then I get a phone call from Edwards.”

  It felt strange, telling someone. I’d never told anyone this stuff, hadn’t wanted to and hadn’t thought I’d needed to. But now that the words were spilling out, I could feel a pressure inside me, like I’d lanced a boil and it was releasing its poison. It was her, the amazing woman lying next to me. She wasn’t drawing it out of me: that wouldn’t have worked. She made me want to get it out, when for so many years I’d been burying it deep and wrapping myself around it, using it as a source of anger.

  “Edwards was….” I sighed in exasperation. “He was stupidly loyal. And kind. And... good.” I looked down at Hannah and shook my head. “I was the captain. My job was to lead, and the crew respected me but...they liked him. He was good at...people stuff. I’m not.”

  She looked up at me and our eyes met. “What? You thought I was only a grumpy sod since the leg?” I half-grinned, half-grimaced. “Worse, maybe. And a lot worse since Edwards. But I was never a people person like him. He made a great XO. He was good at talking and he always knew everything: he’d know if the crew were nervous or exhausted or if some guy was starting to lose it. He’d tell me I needed to go easy on some engineer because he’d just got a letter from home saying his dad had died, or that some gun loader was showing the strain and needed to be rotated out for some shore leave. He was...he was always smiling. Everybody liked him. And we were inseparable: we both got grouchy if we were apart. I loved him. Even when he drove me crazy.”

  I looked down at her, trying to see if she understood. I wasn’t sure if I understood myself. It was like Edwards had filled in the bits of my personality I didn’t have: he’d complimented me. Lightened me. I looked into Hannah’s eyes...and she did understand.

  A warmth filled my chest. She understood because she filled in those same parts.

  “He was my friend,” I said. My throat suddenly contracted and I had to stop for a second or I would have choked up. I wasn’t ready for that: why was it happening now, before we even got to the painful part? I took a shuddering breath. “He was my only friend.”

  Hannah slid her hand across my chest and just the touch of her soft skin there eased things. After a moment, I was able to restart. “Anyway,” I muttered. “He called me. Said he was out in the Bahamas, hunti
ng treasure, making good money. Said he had his eye on a boat and he’d found good people we could work with...but they needed a captain.”

  I looked around us: at the night sky, at the softly lapping waves. I took a deep lungful of sea air. “So I came out here. The first day I arrived, I dived into the ocean...and my leg didn’t hurt.” I sighed. “It’s hard to describe what that was like. It was the first time I hadn’t felt pain in six months. I knew, straightaway, that I wasn’t going home.”

  “Edwards and I bided our time. We worked for other people, did any little jobs that came up, but we had a plan. He’d already found Hobbs and we were scouring the Bahamas, tracking down wrecks no one else could find. A couple of months in, we got our big break. We managed to find the wreck of a merchant ship that had been transporting the personal possessions of a rich family who’d moved out here. Everything from mirrors with gold frames to hairbrushes inlaid with silver. Over two hundred items plus a fair amount of coins. It made us enough that we could buy the Fortune’s Hope and hire a crew. We were in business.”

  “Who named her?” Hannah asked.

  I grunted and rolled my eyes, but the memory made me smile. “Edwards came up with it after a few beers. He was very proud of it. He said we were doing this by the seat of our pants, so we better hope good fortune would see us through. And that we sailed in hope of the other sort of fortune.” I shook my head. “I told him it was a bloody stupid name but his mind was made up.”

  “So we sailed. All over the Caribbean but down around Central and South America, too. Even made the passage to Africa and sailed there for a while. But Nassau was always our base, with stops in Havana to see Hobbs and Carla. The sort of people we sailed with...like I told you, we’re not the most respectable. We’re all a bunch of reprobates, in fact. But Edwards and I tried to keep everyone...honorable, if that makes any sense. It was good. Good times.” My stomach lurched. “And then we found the sub.”

  Hannah heard the change in my voice and nestled in closer. Her soft warmth was what made it possible to go on. My muscles had tensed and I realized that, unconsciously, I’d been a half-second away from getting up and stalking away: my instinctual response, when this subject came up.

  Not this time. She had to hear. The poison was coming out and it hurt like hell, but now that she’d helped me open the wound, I had to cleanse it completely.

  “It had been a pet project for years,” I said. “Something we’d talk about, late at night in McKinley’s. Something we’d have long conversations with Hobbs about, when we went to Havana. We collected tiny little scraps of information: old letters, maps...sometimes, just rumors. But then we hit paydirt.”

  I closed my eyes. Instantly, I was there, my light reflecting off metal walls, the water cold around me. I knew that if I opened my eyes, Hannah would still be there and that made it bearable...just.

  “The Nazis had spirited millions in gold out of Germany, during the war,” I said. “Some of it on U-boats. And there was a story that one of those U-boats never made it to its destination. That it had sunk in the Pacific with all that bullion on board. No one knew where, of course. The crew tried to radio their last position but they couldn’t reach their commanders so the sub was lost forever. Except…. The sub’s radio operator cracked under the pressure. Couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped down there, running out of air. So he started radioing on civilian frequencies, begging for help from anyone. The sub’s commander stopped him, but not before a fishing trawler heard him...and wrote down the coordinates. The fishermen wrote them down in a letter to his daughter...and Edwards and I got hold of it.”

  “It was a long way out to sea. So we decided to do a recon mission first, just Edwards and me. We’d dive down, take a look, and if it was real then we’d come back with a crew and any special equipment we needed.”

  I could feel the warm night air bathing my eyelids but, in my mind, it was brilliant sunshine. “The morning we arrived, it was a glorious day. Calm waters, perfect diving weather. We went down, thinking it might take a while to locate it. But—”—I shook my head in wonder—”it was just there. Just lying there on the bottom of the sea, waiting for us.”

  Hannah squeezed my hand. I could feel how much I’d tensed up and tried to relax, but I couldn’t. I was seeing that huge, black cylinder appear before me, its conning tower rising above us. Turn back! I wanted to scream to myself. But it was already far too late.

  “We got in through a hole in the hull,” I told Hannah. “It was dark inside, and I mean pitch black: it was daylight, but there are no windows in a submarine. It was cold, too: the sun couldn’t warm the water that was inside. But we’d brought lights and we’d been in worse places.” I swallowed, remembering. “It wasn’t like the wreck of some old pirate ship. It was only about seventy years old. There were still...bones.”

  Hannah drew in her breath and her hand squeezed mine a little tighter.

  “It can be...tricky, underwater. Especially in the dark. Flashlights reflect off things and you think you see a light in an empty room. Your swimming pushes the water around and a skeleton six feet in front of you suddenly starts to move.” I’d said tricky. What I really meant was creepy as hell. Especially with all the swastikas we kept seeing. “So by the time we get down to the lowest decks, we’re both jumpy. But then we see a whole load of wooden crates. We get one open and….”

  I could see it now. The wooden lid floating up in slow motion. The neatly-packed bars, the gold glinting and shining under our lights. Edward’s face behind his mask as we both looked up in shock.

  “The bars weighed five pounds each. That meant we were looking at something like half a million dollars per bar. Each crate held fifteen and there were eight crates. Sixty million dollars. And it was right there: all we had to do was bring it up.”

  I slowly shook my head, feeling my damp hair rub against the deck. “The plan had been just to check it out and come back with a team. But we hadn’t thought it would be this simple. We’d thought there would be locked doors, or that we’d have to cut our way in through the hull. This was just so...easy. So we picked up a gold bar each: even underwater, they were heavy and we hadn’t brought anything to carry them in. We swam up to the boat and dropped them on the deck and that was it: we were a million pounds richer, just like that. We’d been down less than fifteen minutes.”

  For the first time in a long while, I opened my eyes and looked down at Hannah. I needed her to understand. “We couldn’t leave the rest of it just lying there,” I said wretchedly. “It was….” I trailed off, trying to find the words.

  “It was gold,” she said quietly. And I saw in her eyes that she understood. She remembered the excitement, when we’d found the chest of coins. “It was a fortune.”

  I nodded. “It was a fortune. So we got fresh tanks of air and started figuring out how to get the rest of it up. We decided that we’d ferry it from the hold to the hole in the hull. Once we had all of it there, we could use the winch. We dived down and got to work. We’d brought bags this time and we found we could carry four bars each. Even so, it was going to take fifteen trips back and forth to get all of it.”

  “We planned to stay together for safety. But after all the creepiness of getting in there and then the high of finding the gold...God, we were drunk on it. Grinning like kids.” My breathing was tight and getting tighter. It felt like a snake had coiled around me and was gradually crushing my chest. My words came slower and slower. “I got out of sync with Edwards: he’d still be offloading his gold near the hole and I’d already be halfway back for my next haul. We were almost through—”

  And suddenly that was it. In my mind, I stopped swimming along the dark companionways of the submarine. I knew what would happen when I entered the next room and I couldn’t face it. Not again. I closed my eyes. Opened them again and stared up at the stars. But it didn’t help: it felt like I’d hit an invisible wall. I couldn’t go on. Hannah felt it and pressed her body against mine but it felt as if I w
as feeling her through twenty feet of cold, cold water.

  Then I looked towards the prow and locked eyes with Edwards. And he gave me that nod he always gave me, when something needed to be done.

  “I’m filling my bag with my next load of gold,” I said. “When I hear...I don’t so much hear as feel it. A vibration. A big one. Like the whole submarine has shaken. I wonder if it’s an earthquake—we are in the Pacific. I swim back towards the hole to check and when I get there...everything’s changed.”

  My mouth was suddenly desert dry. “Next to the hole in the hull was a metal walkway. That’s where we’d been stacking the gold. But now it’s gone: the whole thing has torn away from the wall and fallen. And underneath it—” I pressed my lips together. “I could see an arm sticking out. Edwards.”

  Hannah was pressing her cheek against my chest as hard as she could, her arms locked fiercely around me. I smoothed her damp hair. “It was the gold,” I told her. “We never even thought about the weight. When it was all stacked up in one place, on a walkway designed for people….”

  I drew in a deep breath. “I swam down. Edwards was okay, just scared. I’m thinking, Christ, that was lucky. We’ll get him out, both of us go topside and count our blessings, and then we’ll carefully get the gold up. The bars were scattered around a bit, but we could collect them up. Then I try to pull him out...and I can’t. The walkway’s too heavy.”

  “Oh God,” said Hannah. She’d lifted her head to look up into my eyes. She’d figured out how this story ended.

  “I push all the gold off it: I don’t care about the gold, anymore. But the walkway’s thirty feet long and its solid metal. I can’t move it even an inch. Then I think to check my air and I’m down to ten minutes. Edwards is the same.”