by Peter Tonkin
John swung round, eyes narrow, looking down the length of the ship as though he would be able to see the Tunisian patrol boat in the distance. There was only darkness with a sharp, ugly sea coming out of it. If they moved at once they had a chance. They were only just in Tunisian waters. If they moved now, they would be safely out in Sicilian jurisdiction by the time the vessel reached them. But he had to make the decision immediately. Salah span the starter on the motor and it caught at once. The little craft began tugging at its rope as though eager to be gone. John swung round. Salah looked at him, his long face etched by shadow and varnished with spray. ‘There’s a patrol boat on its way. I have to get Napoli away.’
Salah nodded once and leaned down to adjust the outboard motor. John swung back and looked into the lifeboat where Asha and Fatima were standing, saying goodbye. ‘There’s a patrol boat coming!’ he yelled. ‘They’re threatening to blow us out of the water. They think we’re smugglers, I suppose. But they could well shoot first and ask questions later. I can’t wait any longer. Think what a round through the deck cargo would do. I can’t risk it.’
The sisters gave each other the briefest of hugs and then Fatima was pushing past her brother-in-law. John shoved his hand out and Fatima paused, her own hand half out as though expecting to shake hands in a formal English farewell. But no: John was offering his walkie-talkie. ‘Just in case,’ he yelled. ‘Good luck.’ She took it and was gone.
John leaped aboard the lifeboat and shoved Asha up the Jacob’s ladder. He glanced back as she began to climb, just in time to see the dinghy powering away into the dark. Then he was following her upwards. As soon as he stepped out of the lifeboat he heard the falls creak and as he scrambled upwards, so the little vessel rose up Napoli’s side just beneath him. At the top, Cesar stood, still clutching his walkie-talkie. ‘Niccolo has the con,’ he yelled over the buffeting wind. ‘He said I should come down here.’
‘Tell him to come to five knots,’ yelled back John. ‘Best course for Italian waters.’
Leaving Cesar’s men to secure the lifeboat, the two officers and Asha ran up the deck and took the lift up to the bridge. Coming out of the lift, they rushed across the bridge-deck corridor, John’s eyes already busy, looking through the glass panels which formed the wall behind the wheelhouse itself. But even when he reached Eduardo’s shoulder at the ship’s wheel, he found himself looking not dead ahead but away to the side—towards Tunisia and the invisible dinghy.
Suddenly, in the distance there, a fireworks display began. Lights flashed, rockets soared, Roman candles blazed. And even before Cesar’s walkie-talkie began to rasp with Fatima’s incoming message, John was yelling to Eduardo, ‘Back, turn her back!’ and ringing down on the engine room telegraph for full speed ahead.
The little dinghy was running flat out through the dark, bumping from wave top to wave top in an increasingly dangerous way. Fatima was kneeling in the front. She took the brunt of the icy spray, hurled back by the relentless wind. Salah, crouching in the stern fought to keep her on a northerly heading, exactly into the wind, back along the track they had just taken. The track which should lead them to Napoli if they lived long enough.
The fire was coming in low over their heads now and they could actually hear the whispering hiss of the tracer rounds scything the air above them. The wind brought the sulphurous smell of the burning rounds as they fell into the sea just ahead. The only reason they were still alive was because the rubber sides of their little vessel gave no echo on the Tunisian gunboat’s radar-guided targeting system and the gunners were firing blind.
The dinghy was not absolutely invisible, however, for a great searchlight had caught them in its blinding beam just before the guns opened fire and no matter what Salah did, it held them still, pinned like a moth to the black velvet background of the night. Fatima had known there was a risk they would be shot at from the moment John had relayed Jesus’s message, but she was still shocked by the ferocity of what was going on. Like Salah, she had supposed the coastguards would probably arrest them. And arrest by the Tunisian authorities could well be the answer to all their problems. But there had been no question of it—just that blaze of light which had framed Salah the moment he had stood and waved, then the withering fire. Her mind leaped back to the accusation she had made earlier. Was there someone in the PLO who wanted Salah dead?
She jammed the walkie-talkie to her lips and yelled again, ‘Napoli! We are running due north back along our track.’ She jammed the freezing instrument to her all-but-numb ear. She hardly understood what she heard, but she turned and yelled it to Salah word for word. ‘They say bear right and look for the surf!’ A great wash of icy foam heaved out of the darkness in front of them and almost carried her away.
Salah did not try to work out what the message meant. He simply obeyed it, turning starboard into the shoulder of a wave which threatened to swamp them. He was not thinking about his enemies in the PLO or about why the gunboat was firing on them. He wasn’t thinking about anything except survival. He could see past Fatima into the stormy darkness and his seafarer’s eyes saw more than hers did. The searchlight, coming from behind, showed the mass of steep-sided waves running in towards them. Even the tracer rounds seemed to give off a little more light to help him see, but beyond them, the dark night clamped down again. Salah grimly searched the shadows there, looking for that one steady pattern of starlike brightness which would spell their only chance of salvation: Napoli’s running lights.
But abruptly he saw something else entirely—a change in the wave pattern dead ahead. He remembered the chart John had showed him of this area of the coast, and the last cryptic radio message began to make more sense. He remembered the light patches denoting shallows and the red notes warning of shoals. John must have been careful to drop him just at the edge of one of these and now, running back to starboard of their original course was taking them across the middle of it. The shoal revealed by that breaking surf offered their only real chance of escape. The gunboat was far faster than they and would run them down if the chase went on much longer. But the dinghy had almost no draught while the Tunisian boat probably drew two metres or more. Where Fatima and he could skip over the oncoming obstruction with only the outboard’s propeller at risk, the gunboat would be forced to turn aside.
But it was going to be a rough passage. The surf on the shoal’s back, whipped up by the northerly gale, looked vicious and extremely dangerous. ‘Hang on!’ yelled Salah. Fatima looked round at him, her face etched brightly in the blaze of the searchlight. It was tense but calm and fearless. The skin was white except where shadowed by departing bruises and both her eyes were open. Something stirred deep within Salah then, something he thought had died twenty years ago with his wife.
And they were amidst the surf. What had been a pattern of waves became a wilderness of heaving foam. It was like riding the rapids of a wild river. The dinghy leaped erratically, tossed up by the head one minute and by the stern the next. Fatima seemed to leap into the air. The only parts of her which retained any contact with the dinghy were her hands, closed to fists around the bow rope. Salah crouched, his left hand wedged in a tangle of cordage like a rock in a mare’s nest of branches—so numb was it and so hard were they. His right hand held the outboard’s control lever twisted hard over, throttle as wide as it would go. He had stopped even registering the tracer fire falling around them.
Fatima felt as though she was on the rack. Her body was healing but it was by no means healed. As the boat tossed her up in the air again and again, her wounded muscles tore and it became a matter of some debate as to whether the firey pain or the numbing cold would claim her first. The front of the dinghy slammed up into her face like a canvas-covered inner tube and teeth already loosened by the Mercedes rattled in her head. She realised that the walkie-talkie had gone but could not recall having dropped it.
Darkness closed down on them. Salah risked a swift glance back. The gunboat had swung away at the outer edge of the shoal an
d the searchlight had lost them. Now the long beam was probing away to their left as the boat sped west in search of the shoal’s end. The guns, too, found themselves firing wild and the brightness of the tracer faltered and died. Elated, he swung round and almost screamed. Immediately in front of him was a cliff edge falling away into some immeasurable abyss and just beyond it stood another cliff face reaching upwards to the sky. To his staring eyes, wildly trying to make sense of the shadowy picture he could see, it was as though he had come to the edge of the world and just beyond it was a black wall built between heaven and hell.
The propeller, two scant feet beneath them, struck against rock and sent a shock of agony tearing through him. The front of the dinghy reared up for the last time and the brave little craft leaped out into the dark. For a moment they actually seemed to be flying, with the wind coming from beneath them and nothing but dark air all around them, and the bent propeller screaming out of the water as though they could sail up to the clouds. Then the head slammed down again and they were on a helter-skelter ride down the wave wall at the northern edge of the shoal, hurling forward, wildly out of control, towards the second, iron cliff, dead ahead.
Immediately beyond the northern edge of the shoal, where the wave wall defined the resumption of deep water, Napoli was waiting to pick them up. It had been easy for the officers on the old freighter’s bridge to bring her to the light-show the gunboat was making and in fact, the dinghy had been under the scrutiny of several pairs of binoculars since she turned on to the new heading dictated by John’s radio message. And the moment the gunboat stopped firing, all Napoli’s lights came on so that the black cliff immediately in front of Salah and Fatima abruptly became a staircase to safety.
There was no mucking about with lifeboats this time. John had put the accommodation ladder down. Salah ran the dinghy up against its foot and he and Fatima leaped out. The dinghy sped away before they could even think of securing it, and vanished into the darkness to the west. They stumbled up the metal steps as Napoli turned and began to run north once more. As soon as their heads were at deck level, Cesar hit the retract lever and Asha ran forward with towels. Five minutes later they were on the bridge, wrapped in warm towelling clutching mugs of steaming cocoa. Away to the west on the port quarter, a brief blaze of brightness stained the dark.
John’s hands fell on the shoulders of both Salah and Fatima on either side of him. ‘That was your dinghy,’ he said, loudly against the wind.
Salah went to dry himself off in his cabin and John watched Asha going off with her sister. He followed them, crossing the corridor behind the wheel-house, and ushered them safely into the lift. Then he went back on to the bridge. Niccolo was there already, but Cesar was still in charge. Marco was gone and the first mate was watching the radar. ‘Back in Italian waters and nothing in sight,’ he said quietly.
‘Good. Thank you. Thank you both,’ said John with feeling. Then he remembered Eduardo at the helm. ‘Thank you all.’
‘Capitan!’ Jesus stuck his head out of the radio room and into the bridge. ‘I think you should hear this.’
The radio room was small and cramped but there was space enough for both of them. Jesus had tuned the big FM receiver to the BBC World Service. ‘I picked it up retuning from the Tunisians. I thought you should hear.’
The way Jesus said it made John’s hair stir.
‘…BBC world news at midnight. Today…’
‘Is this it, Jesus?’
‘Si, Capitan.’
‘Stories have been coming in since late last week of renewed disturbances in southern Lebanon. Our reporters have now confirmed that there was in fact an outbreak of violence at a village near the coast which involved an Italian cargo ship. Simon Wheeler reports from the spot…’
‘God! Is that us?’
‘Si, Capitan.’
‘…can confirm that last Friday night the Panamanian registered container ship Napoli was attacked, here, in southern Lebanon. The Napoli, chartered by the firm Disposoco, was loading a combination of chemical and nuclear waste which seems to have been buried in the desert nearby. According to local villagers, the waste has been here for some time. Now, they say, it is in a highly unstable condition. They blame contamination from this waste for the destruction of their farms and for the mutilation of their children, and they claim that the crew of the Napoli also killed several villagers in a gunfight before the ship sailed. There has been no report of the Napoli since she sailed from Limassol harbour in Cyprus on Sunday morning, but she is understood to be heading for Naples, where she is due to discharge her load of toxic waste for disposal in Italy. Now, back to the studio…’
Jesus switched the radio off and there was silence.
13
Niccolo ran on to the bridge, his face as white as spindrift and John knew at once that it had started. Almost in slow motion he turned to Marco and made a gesture. The third mate nodded. His hair was wild, standing up as though the boy had seen a ghost. Niccolo leaped back out through the door and John followed him, hurling down the companionways through the storm.
The deck was awash with spray which slopped from port to starboard and back again as the ship heaved. Together they ran forward, the spray exploding up off each of them as though the men were cliffs, rocks, natural things rising from the sea, anchored safely in beds below.
The crates were shifting wildly, the wrist-thick hawsers seeming to stretch and contract like elastic. The two of them skidded to a halt. Crouching on the pitching steel, they looked beneath the restless containers. The stuff was drizzling out, slow as syrup among the quick water. It was oozing out of black-rimmed, steaming holes. It was settling, to squat smoking on the deck. Then, quicker than the eye could see, it was gone and the water whirled in new patterns on the green metal of the deck, as though running down plugholes.
And when he went down into the dark hold, John looked up and could see through the deck, the holes like stars, letting in the rain and spray. No, that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be like that. But then his eyes, having looked up, looked down. Glowing faintly in the pitching dark, the mocking piles of effluent lay on the bottom. Then, they were gone again. And every star-hole in the deck above was echoed by a fountain of seawater bursting out of the double bottom here below. It was as though the steel was skin which had been stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. The hold began to roll. The water foamed up round his knees as he ran for the ladder as though through treacle. But the hold was tilting. Toppling. It would be over and under long before he made it to the ladder. Choking, he looked round in desperation. The wall of nuclear containers broke like a wave to come thundering down on his head. He felt each block of concrete with its heart of lead crunch down upon him. He felt them squeeze his feet and ankles as flat as a fishtail. He felt them pinch his legs against the deck until his shin bones shattered. He felt them squash his kneecaps through his knees. He felt his hip bones spread and level to the deck and tasted his blood come fountaining up his throat as the black, hot water closed above his head.
And, crushed and drowned and screaming, he jerked awake.
‘Again?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s five nights in a row.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re soaking. I’ll get a towel.’
‘You think Richard Mariner has this trouble?’ He spoke in a croak, his throat was raw.
‘Richard? Why?’ Her voice was distant in the dark as she answered from the shower room.
‘Well, he’s been in enough tight situations. Makes you wonder.’
‘Lean on me.’ She climbed back on the bed behind him, receiving him like a warm pillow.
‘That’s better.’
‘John, you’re as tense as a bow string. Your shoulders are like rock.’
‘It’s the dream.’
‘Is it the same one every night?’
‘God knows. I can’t remember what I was dreaming about just now. I never can. Aaaah!’
‘What is
it?’
‘Cramp in my legs. Ah! No. It’s no good, I’ll have to walk about a bit.’
There was a moment or two of silence in the cabin. The wind thudded suddenly against the porthole. A second later, a big sea echoed the squall by smashing into Napoli’s side. She shuddered, swooped. John staggered a little. Something of the dream returned.
‘Lie down here, I’ll massage you,’ Asha gently invited.
John wearily eased himself face down on to the damp wreckage of the bed. Her strong fingers gripped the great triangle of muscle which joined the back of his neck to the point of his right shoulder, her nails grazing the collarbone at the front. He hissed. The muscle was as tender as the backs of his legs. It was stress. Ever since his youth he had reacted to protracted stress by dreaming and by running in his sleep.
‘Still,’ she soothed quietly, ‘it’s almost over. We’re due at Naples soon.’
‘Lunchtime tomorrow.’ He looked across at the luminous dial of his bedside clock and corrected himself: ‘Today.’
It was six a.m. on Sunday. They were due to enter the port in six hours’ time. But the promise of it didn’t seem to have eased his nightly nightmares.
*
It was thirty hours since they had run from the Tunisian gunboat. A short, restless night’s sleep after the excitement. A long, tense day’s sailing north as the crew’s resentment continued to simmer. Union men or no, they would be on to the dock authorities in Naples as soon as they were off the ship. Strange cargo, snatched from Lebanese villagers at gun-point. Two men dead then. Crossing the eastern Med under the command of a man with no papers, giving succour to terrorists. Picking up a new captain who only took them further into danger: it was like being commanded by Jonah. The fire. The fights. The assault by officers upon crew members. GBH with a chipping hammer. The injuries. The extra work. The extra death. Sailing an untrustworthy vessel with an engine that didn’t work properly into foreign waters. Brushes with gunboats. The terrorists still aboard. The cargo increasingly dangerous. So much so that the Napoli was now the subject of speculation in news broadcasts on the radio—and, for all they knew, the television would be next. No wonder the recruiting agent in Piraeus had been so specific: you hold a union card, then you look for another berth.