by Peter Tonkin
John pursed his lips. ‘If I swung her well to the south while we were rounding Sicily at Cap Boeo,’ he said slowly, ‘we could just brush the exclusion zone and drop you off in a dinghy within twenty miles of Cap Bon. Would you be all right in Tunisia?’
Salah was surprised. That could well be the answer. And here he had been thinking that John was wrapped up in his own problems.
‘Come across to the chart,’ John continued. ‘I can show you what I mean.’
They were halfway across the bridge when the scream came up the deck to them. John swung round, just in time to see the figure falling from the second furthest crane. He tensed himself automatically for the thump of it hitting the deck but it vanished through the green steel and he just had time to wonder whether this was some weird kind of mirage when the dead sound came after all—though the scream continued to linger after it.
The pair of them hit the door out to the companionway side by side and it was not until they were halfway down the second flight that John remembered about his knees. But they seemed to be holding up. Once on the deck, they ran along the outside track beside the piles of containers. John suddenly realised how much they looked like giant coffins. Frantically he tried to remember whose team was working on the cranes. Was it Marco’s or Niccolo’s? Please God, let it not be Niccolo.
Marco was standing at the top of the open hatch looking down into the night-black hold. He was white as a sheet and shaking. Beside him, Eduardo, one of the work crew, was supporting a near-fainting Gina.
‘Where is the first mate?’ gasped John, winded by his run. Marco looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Niccolo?’ snarled John.
The third officer shook his head and pointed downwards past the hatch. John felt his stomach twist. The whole afternoon swam before his eyes. He walked forward and looked down.
In a square of brightness on the floor of the hold, Niccolo was kneeling by a crewman. The body was spread out on the solid steel and a great splatter of blood reached out from it away into the shadows as though the body had exploded on impact.
Niccolo looked up.
‘Who is it?’ asked John, his voice surprisingly firm in his own ears.
‘It is Lazar,’ called Niccolo.
12
They sailed out of the summery spell that night, as though they were leaving the good weather behind with the bosun’s soul. Lazar’s death cast a deepening gloom across the ship in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that nobody much had liked him. To the extent that the accident had any good side, it was in the way it brought John and Niccolo even closer together. John knew what to do well enough. He remembered all too vividly the procedures Richard Mariner had followed in situations identical to this on his ships, beginning with the first Prometheus. Not the great flagship of the Heritage Mariner fleet, currently being refitted after the depredations of terrorists, but the older, original Prometheus, a battered old tanker destined to sink with all her crew aboard, including Richard, Robin and John himself. Salah Malik had been aboard that Prometheus as well, John remembered with a shock. He might make a useful witness, and he would pick up on any errors of commission and omission during the inquiry. The inquiry had to be thorough and correct, and above all quick.
As soon as Asha had established officially that the wreck of the man, strangely flattened by the impact with the steel, was indeed dead, the body was taken to the infirmary and John called an inquiry with a speed and decision that impressed even the crew. He set up a three-man tribunal consisting of himself, the first mate and Salah, with El Jefe on hand to translate as necessary, for there had been Spanish engineers working with Niccolo in the hold. In his day room, John interviewed everyone who was anywhere near the site of the accident. Marco had been in charge of the team up the crane. He gave their names and explained that something had made him feel faint. He had been sitting on the deck chatting to Gina when it happened, he said, and neither of them had seen anything. Bernadotte had been up on the gantry, effectively under Lazar’s direction in Marco’s temporary absence. As fate would have it, Lazar had just sent Eduardo down to the deck for more paint. Bernadotte, therefore, had been the only one to see anything, and even he, he admitted, had not been paying much attention until the scream—which was Gina’s—began. Lazar had been standing by the crane operator’s cab, giving orders, when he had slipped. No one had been standing anywhere near him. Perhaps the sun had blinded him. Bernadotte shrugged his massive shoulders. Cesar had checked the spot and found a large area of grease with a long footmark in it at the point where Lazar had fallen. There had been nothing else to see.
Niccolo had nothing to add about the beginning of the incident. He had been working with a team of electricians on the light system in the hold. At the sound of the scream he had turned, looking up. The angle of the sun had dazzled him and he had seen only the vaguest outline of the crane, so he could not bear out Bernadotte’s story that Lazar had been alone. Then, falling out of the glare had come Lazar, waving his arms as though trying to grasp the insubstantial air around him. He had landed face down. He had seemed to bounce. He had made no other movement. A light drizzle had persisted for a moment, warmer than the air.
That was that, really. It was written up punctiliously, signed where necessary, entered into the logs and accident report books. And all the while Napoli pushed westwards after the sunset into the night.
After the others left, John called Eduardo back. The crewman had impressed him. Eduardo was unusual, almost remarkable among the men aboard. He was the crew’s equivalent of Niccolo in that he did not fit into the third-class mould of his fellows. He had Cesar’s whippet-like strength, his face all sharp angles and dazzling blue eyes. He was quietly intelligent and he spoke English. He had been a cadet with an ill-fated shipping company, working up to his first set of lieutenant’s papers when the company had gone out of business, effectively throwing him on the beach. He had no savings, no professional insurance and no standing. His family were poor and could not support him. He had taken work as a crewman until he could find another trainee officer berth. It was not such an unusual situation for young men to find themselves in, under the current depressing circumstances in the shipping world. John was tempted to make him acting fourth officer, or at least use him to replace Lazar. In the future, maybe; in the meantime, he sent him off. But he decided to keep a close eye on the young sailor.
*
During the next two days they proceeded under lowering skies, through a cooler wind freshening from the north-west. As they turned towards that heading, their progress began to slow even more and the steepening chop brought out the worst in the lightly laden ship so that she pitched and corkscrewed with increasing restlessness and every now and then one of the crew would be found pausing by the containers on the deck, listening for the percussion of clashing drums. It was a tribute to Niccolo’s care in loading them that no one heard a thing.
This made little difference, however, to the darkening mood of the crew. The air-conditioning had been fixed, but now they needed some heat and the heating began to falter. It was an ancient twin-duct system which may even have been part of the original Polish fittings, and not even El Jefe could track down the reason why the cooled air was not reheated on demand. The quality of the food began to falter too.
After all, the chef explained, there had been some damage from the fire, not only to the fittings but also to the stores. Smoked bacon and smoked ham were all very well but did the men want smoked pasta? Smoked potatoes? Bread made with interestingly grey smoked flour?
At least the rain held off, though as far as the crew were concerned this just meant that Niccolo could keep them at deck work. The new motion of the ship combined with too vivid memories of Lazar’s accident made work on the cranes particularly unpopular, so much so that Niccolo and Marco swapped duties. Niccolo, grimly, forced the unwilling men aloft. Marco hung on the ladders just below the rim of the hatches, secured there by ropes, watching the engineers trying to discover th
e fault in the holds’ lighting system. It was an uncomfortable place to be, and particularly nauseating when the ship began to ride the chop, but at least he felt safely removed from the sinister grey containers squatting so massively on the double bottom.
As they proceeded towards the Strait of Sicily, the shipping around them became thicker and the watchkeepers actually began to earn their pay; but then the traffic began to thin again because the bulk of it ran north, through the Strait of Malta, while Napoli took the southward passage, nearer the African coast. They ran almost due west again after they had passed Malta. They came south of Linosa and did not turn off the westerly heading until they hit the old 100-fathom line, now marked as the 200-metre contour on their nautical chart. They followed this almost due north as the evening closed to night on the second day after Lazar’s death. There was tension on the bridge now as well as in the crew’s quarters, for Napoli was going deeper into Tunisian waters with every revolution of her propeller, and she had no business there at all.
Marco came on to the bridge at 20.00 hours as usual and was surprised to find John there with Niccolo. As he signed on, he was further surprised to see the chief steward arrive with a plate of sandwiches and four cups of soup. He gave one each to the senior navigating officers, another to the helmsman, and carried the last through into the radio room where Jesus was monitoring the airwaves as closely as the helmsman was watching the sea. Marco went across and checked the heading; made a bit of a show of doing all the things an officer taking over the watch was supposed to do. He wanted to be punctilious in all things when the captain was present. And, although he knew well enough that he and Niccolo were not here to test him in any way, he suspected that their eyes would be on him while there was nothing else of importance for them to look at.
Because they were running north, the sun was setting on their port quarter and, although the cloud cover was thick overhead, it thinned a little in that direction. A glow lit up the western sky; not a red glow, such as might give sailors delight and hope for the morning, but a silvery glow as though the sky had become molten pewter. Against this, the mountains behind the coast loomed up, more than twenty miles away but standing black against the lower sky like a mirage. Here the two lines of the Atlas Mountains joined, thrusting into Cap Bon as though reaching out to Sicily. Here was a landfall known not to cunning Ulysses, but to Aeneas, bound for Rome via Carthage, which had stood on the north shore of the bay whose southern arm was Cap Bon.
‘We’ll lose the light in a minute,’ observed John quietly. Already the shadows of those mountains seemed to be reaching out to them across the dull steel of the water. The chop was still a rough confusion, made more vicious by the way the wind was being twisted by the coasts and by the action of the cooling desert stretching for more than two thousand miles due south of them. The confusion of waves attained a pattern for a moment, however, as every surface facing the port bow of the ship, and the eyes of the watching men, became coal black.
Then it was dark. ‘Watch your radar,’ said John at once, and Marco, without a second thought, crouched across the green bowl. There was nothing to see but the dark loom of the cape.
The outside door opened and Salah brought a jumble of sound in with him. A confusion of sea thunder and the roar of a rising wind. ‘Watch your helm, Eduardo,’ ordered John quietly. ‘I don’t want to be blown ashore. There are dangerous shallows and flats for miles all along this coast.’
‘What’s the plan?’ asked Salah.
John led him over to the chart table and the two of them pored over the chart itself. Salah’s eyes narrowed as he took in the pattern of dangerous shallows between Napoli and the land.
‘I’m going to get as close to civilisation as I can and drop the pair of you off. You’d better use the dinghy. I’ll report it lost in the bad weather and hope the crew stay quiet.’
‘When?’
‘Near midnight, I expect. You have plenty of time to get ready. I’m certainly not going to drop you this far out. You wouldn’t stand a chance of getting twenty miles to shore.’
‘But if we get in much closer, God knows what you will hit or trigger off.’
‘I know. What I want to do is get up nearer the point of the cape. That should find us a bit of wind shadow and give you a better chance of getting ashore. Nabeul is out of the question, but you should be able to reach Kelibia, and get a lift to Tunis from there, even without identity papers. Your face should be well enough known in Tunisia, after all.’
Tunis was the headquarters of the PLO. Salah had once been famous there. John was right: he would be familiar to most Tunisians. ‘I’ll go and tell Fatima,’ he said. When he went out, the noise spoke of a wind freshening quickly from the north. An on-shore wind, born of the fact that the desert had not yet lost all its heat. It would moderate later; might even turn before dawn as the sand became icy and the water remained relatively warm.
At midnight, when Cesar came on watch, they had still not found the wind shadow behind the point of Cap Bon, though on the radar under Marco’s dazzled eyes, the dark outline of the outland was swinging west into greenness at last. Cesar looked round the dimly lit bridge with no expression of surprise on his lean, sallow face. He had known they would be there: the crew was agog with speculation as to what was going on, and why Eduardo had been called up to take the helm. The dapper little man checked their position and heading before signing the log. Frowning, he looked up. ‘You’ll have to make a decision soon, Captain,’ he observed.
‘I know, Cesar,’ said John.
Salah, Fatima and Asha crowded on to the bridge then as well. John looked across at his battered sister-in-law and the tall Palestinian beside her. ‘We can’t wait any longer,’ he told them. ‘I’ll turn Napoli side on to the wind and drop you in her lee. Even then, we’d better put a lifeboat down and help you launch the dinghy out of that. It’ll take longer and tie us down a bit, but it’ll be safer.’ Fatima’s bruises were mending quickly now—but she still moved stiffly and he didn’t want to run the risk that she might fall into the water. He turned to his officers, giving the necessary orders. The helmsman swung Napoli’s head due west and John rang down for dead slow on the engine. ‘Keep watching the radar,’ he ordered Marco. ‘Cesar, you have her. I’ll take a portable radio down with me. I want to know the instant anything stirs.’
Outside, the wind began to buffet them at once; they had to grasp the rails of the companionways quite firmly. They climbed down the port side so that as Napoli’s head came round, the wind was slowly blocked out by the superstructure, but this benefit was somewhat undermined by the fact that the ship began to roll in an increasingly vicious manner.
On the main deck, Niccolo and John took hold of the falls of Number Three lifeboat and held tight as the others freed it from its retaining clips and swung it out on its davits. At once the heavy little vessel picked up the motion of the ship. Out and in it swung with such force that the two on the falls could only hold it because the blocks had been rigged as pulleys, allowing them to lower the pitching weight of it as though they were four times as strong as they were.
As they did this, Salah held a line trying to keep the boat by the rails long enough for the two women to get the cover off. But his line was not rigged through a pulley and he got the full effect of its weight every time the Napoli leaned away from him. Nevertheless, it was done in short order, and within ten minutes the lifeboat was sitting on the water, banging against the container ship’s black side. Niccolo tied off his fall and ran to get the inflatable life raft. As soon as he had brought it back, he pitched it over the side, keeping tight hold on the line tied to it, and let it inflate itself in the water.
John, meanwhile, had put the Jacob’s ladder in place and guided Salah down it. Then Fatima was over the side, and the process paused for a moment as John passed their kit to her and she passed it down to Salah. Niccolo ran back down the last few feet of deck, pulling the inflated life raft into position behind the lifeboat. Salah
put down the last piece of luggage and leaned back to secure the two small craft together. Then he stepped across into the rubber dinghy and Fatima began to pass the kit to him.
John clambered down the ladder into the lifeboat as quickly as he could. The dinghy’s outboard was in the after locker of the lifeboat. He pulled it out and carried it carefully across into the pitching little shell of black rubber. Lowering it into the water, he caught his breath—how cold it was! His fingers went numb almost at once, making it more difficult for him to secure the outboard properly. And even that was not the end of the process. In the near dark, with numb hands, beginning to shake with the chill of the wind which was blasting round the end of the ship with vicious force, he had to pour the fuel into the outboard.
He had just positioned the funnel to his satisfaction, when the portable radio rasped. He hesitated. Should he stop what he was doing and check what the trouble was? Yes. That would be the safest thing. In any case, Salah was finished with the baggage now, and could take over. He yelled an order and handed over the petrol can. Then the handset was pressed to his numb ear. He thumbed SEND. ‘Yes?’
‘Marco says there’s something fast coming round the Cap.’
‘Boat? Plane? Helicopter?’
‘Boat. Fast boat.’
‘ETA?’
‘What?’
‘When will it get here?’
‘Marco, quando arriva?’
A mumble of reply.
‘Capitano? He thinks maybe un quatro d’ora.’ The strain was beginning to affect Cesar’s careful, considered English. Even as John thought this, there came a sudden rush of sound over the radio and Cesar was back. ‘Capitano, Jesus is in contact with the vessel. He does not understand Tunisian and they speak little French but he thinks they are threatening to sink us. They are heavily armed. He thinks they will try and sink us.’