by Peter Tonkin
It was at this point he smelt burning. His own hair stirred. He opened his eyes but could see nothing. He reached up to the release of her seatbelt, calling, ‘Asha, I’m bringing her out but I think I can smell burning. Can you see anything?’
He heard her move at once and the sound made him immediately aware of another, sinister sound, something between crackling and a rustling. It was a sound he recognised: an electric current shorting out.
When he pulled the release, she fell into his arms just at the exact moment he heard Asha calling, ‘John! The car’s on fire!’
Then her words were drowned in Alf’s bellow of, ‘Captain! It’s burning! Get out of there!’
‘I’ve almost got her!’ he called back, steeling himself against panic so that he would move her carefully and gently. His head slid out from under the door now, his arms still reaching in, positioning the girl so that she would follow the path his body had already cleared. As he did so, there came a quiet explosion and there was flickering light close by on the right.
‘Captain! Get out! For God’s sake, it’s going to blow up! Doctor!’
And Asha was there beside him, between him and the terrifying brightness, kneeling at his right hand to help guide the girl’s inert body out into safety. Full of fear for Asha more than for himself, he twisted over on to his knees and caught at the girl’s right arm. Together, side by side, they shuffled back at feverish pace as the brightness grew rapidly and spread like a sinister dawn. ‘Alf, let go of the rope. Move the man back,’ called John the instant that black tangle of wires round the girl’s ankles was dragged into the light. Then the three of them were pulling the two bodies back with all the speed that care for their condition would allow. Flames flowed around the inverted car in little rivers, following the streams of leaked petrol. They joined into a lake below the dangling wreckage and suddenly the whole lot went up. But by the time it did so, the five of them were just clear.
It was after midnight when the first ambulance got through. John and Asha had used their now useless honeymoon clothes to make makeshift beds for the man and woman from the Porsche and Alf had told and retold the story of the rescue to onlookers attracted by the column of flames which had once been a sports car. But then, after the sightseers drifted away back to their own jammed cars, the three of them sat quietly and Alf lit a cigarette. They chatted inconsequentially and Asha nursed her patients. Oddly enough, it was not until after the two from the Porsche had gone in the ambulance, the necessary formalities had been completed and the snarl-up was clearing that Alf thought to ask, ‘Where were you going, then? On your honeymoon, I mean?’
‘Hawaii.’
‘Oh, John, how clever! I’ve always wanted…’ But then she remembered.
‘Wish I could drive the pair of you there,’ supplied Alf. ‘But I can’t, so that’s that. Where do you want to go now? Anywhere in London and this is on me. I’ve never seen anything like you two in my life.’
John had been thinking about this. ‘Back to Heritage House,’ he said. ‘The executive flat there will be empty. We can use that for the rest of tonight and sort ourselves out in the morning.’
*
The moment they walked through the doors into Heritage Mariner’s great London headquarters, the security guard came up to them. ‘Could you go upstairs to the Crewfinders offices at once, please?’ he said.
And the strain in his voice was echoed as soon as they got there by Audrey calling from the twenty-four-hour emergency desk, ‘Captain Higgins. Doctor. Thank God you’re here. We’ve been getting urgent signals all night from the freighter Napoli. Salah Malik and Fatima are aboard and something’s badly wrong. They need a master and a ship’s doctor most urgently. They’ll be off Cyprus in eighteen hours and they must have someone then. We can’t find Sir William or Captain Mariner and someone has to get out there at once…’
6
‘Your attention, your attention please, this is the captain speaking…’
The familiar words dragged John back up out of an exhausted doze. Disorientated for a moment as he came to full wakefulness, he supposed he had nodded off in a comfortable chair on one of Richard Mariner’s ships. But a wave of vertigo soon told him otherwise.
He loved flying, always had; but this trip hadn’t been much fun so far. Asha was not too good a traveller even at her best. Now she was exhausted and refractory. He glanced at her and could not tell whether she was sleeping or sulking. They still had not been alone together since they took their wedding vows. During the hours of delay at Gatwick, he had tried to sell her the idea that what they were embarking upon was a romantic cruise across the wine-dark Mediterranean. He found he was a bad liar. All his enthusiasm could not mask his half of the disappointment they both felt at losing out on their real honeymoon.
And things were going from bad to worse.
‘We will be landing at Larnaca in five to ten minutes. Arrangements have been made to take you all to Nicosia as soon as possible.’ A ragged cheer went up. It served to relieve most of the tension that had crept into the passenger cabin with the worsening weather conditions outside.
John looked out of the rain-streaked porthole at his left shoulder more to hide his frustration than to study the view, which was one of dirty-laundry cloud in any case. As a captain he was used to making decisions, taking control, getting things done. He just didn’t want to have to sort out another problem today. But he would have to sort out this one. The cloud cover was snatched away with breath-taking suddenness. The waters of the Mediterranean swept by beneath, sluggish and slate-grey, ruffled by a sudden downpour. They were probably still heading east, or north of east, he thought, into the teeth of quite a breeze by the feel of things. The plane jumped and dropped, then seemed to stand still in the air. They would turn soon and come in low across Akrotiri Bay, over the docks at Limassol. That was where they would get a boat out to Napoli. She might even be somewhere under the airliner’s current flight path, somewhere on Akrotiri Bay, Larnaca Bay, or the choppy seas beyond. He and Asha would have to find a way of getting out of the airline’s clutches, with their baggage, or they would be dragged all the way up to Nicosia with the rest of the passengers only to have to turn and come all the way back down here again.
‘I don’t even know whether I need to speak Greek or Turkish down here!’
‘English will do,’ said Asha quietly. ‘You’re almost in the colonies here, remember. Empire hath its privileges.’
He hadn’t realised he had spoken aloud. He must be even more tired than he had supposed. ‘Did I wake you?’ he asked solicitously.
‘No, darling. I was just dozing.’
The cabin tilted as they started to turn. Asha strained across him to look through the thick perspex of the porthole. He was suddenly aware of her musky perfume and the soft sensation of her breasts against his chest. He could feel the heat of her almost as though her fine silk and his thin cotton were not there at all.
Get a grip, Higgins, he thought.
‘So much for Homer,’ she observed, mournfully. He had actually used the poet’s phrase, ‘the wine-dark sea’, when describing it to her.
‘That was the Aegean anyway,’ he said. ‘And three thousand years ago.’
Certainly, Homer’s romantic description could hardly have been further from the prosaic sight beneath them. A grey bay swept past, the dull water increasingly close to the plane’s belly—apparently dangerously close.
Then a dazzle of lights on a promontory gave a sense of perspective. They were still quite high after all. And as he realised this, he recognised the land. The promontory had been Cape Gata; the lights the NATO base at Akrotiri where the old RAF camp had been. Now they were sweeping across Akrotiri Bay itself and a bustle of thoroughly twentieth-century shipping was revealed clustered around the Limassol docks and coming and going across the bay—ferries, smaller pleasure craft seeking a safe haven from the north-easterly, one or two larger freighters further out. He looked at them closely. Was one
of them Napoli? He hoped not; they looked tired, beaten. One of them was even ugly, though he always sought beauty in women and in ships. But this aged hull had nothing about it but functional ugliness, weariness, defeat. There were four skeletal gantries before the bridge, stretching in line down the deck, ropes hanging as though they were gibbets on an execution dock; and a heavy gallows behind the bridgehouse finished the effect. He saw her for an instant only as she flashed by below him; nowhere near long enough for him to make out her name or anything else about her. But the sight of her stayed in his mind as they came on down. Let it not be her, he thought to himself. Please God, let it not be her. But no, he decided an instant later; this ship was riding too high. Napoli was supposed to be fully laden, she would never be riding that high.
The sea came nearer and nearer as the plane settled down on its final approach over Cape Kiti towards Larnaca’s runway. The water folded like soiled grey silk, and heaved. There was no lack of perspective now; they really were this close. He could see branches of dark weed on the backs of the waves. He could see the individual bubbles in the spume. He could no longer distinguish what on the window was rain and what was spray. Of all the airports in the world, Gibraltar was his least favourite with its runway actually running out into the sea, invisible to the passengers until after they had apparently landed on the waves. Larnaca he disliked almost as much from this angle. He had no desire at all to land on the sea, as they seemed to be doing now.
‘I hear Kai Tak is worse,’ said Asha conversationally. ‘You approach it down a steep valley, brushing the mountainsides with your wings.’
‘No. I like this less than Kai Tak. And Gibraltar less than—’
The plane seemed to give a bound and the sea was chopped away by a scimitar of land, bladed with beach, made bright as day by a sudden dazzling flash.
The rumble of rubber on runway was echoed instantly by reverse thrust powerful enough to drown—almost—the last ragged cheer and the first snarl of thunder.
‘Well,’ Asha said philosophically, ‘at least we’re down safe and sound. That’s a good start. Let’s set our watches forward and pretend we’re on holiday from now.’
The holiday started at 20.00 local time on a raw, stormy November night. By 21.00 all the baggage was off the plane and by 21.30 it was clear that their luggage was simply not there. The tour guide stayed and tried to help, in spite of the fact that they were not with her party, and the rest of the passengers, waiting on the Nicosia coach out in the thundery rain, became increasingly restless. But there was really nothing anyone could do, and, as Asha pointed out, looking on the bright side, most of their best holiday gear was lying blood-stained beside the M25 anyway. They had even seen it on their way back to Gatwick for the ten o’clock flight this morning.
‘And what with the French flight controllers’ industrial action and the delays and everything,’ she concluded, ‘it’s a wonder they got us through to the right place.’
‘Yes,’ John agreed. ‘No use worrying any more. If we hang around here much longer we won’t be able to get a taxi down to Limassol docks.’ His voice was deep, calm and reassuring, but he was just about ready to scream. The tour guide smiled understandingly and went, leaving them stranded and alone.
That same reasonable calm, no matter how thin, soothed the feathers of a defensive airline rep who gave them the forms to fill in to try for a trace on the cases. Then John made a phone call to his personal insurance panic number to assure them that the cash and the plastic were safe, but that the luggage was gone. ‘They’ll sort it out,’ he said, putting an arm round Asha’s drooping shoulders. ‘They’ll find it and have it waiting for us wherever we come to port. They might even get it out to Napoli herself. They’ve done that sort of thing in the past.’
In the back of the taxi, hurtling along the dual carriageway under the frowning walls of Larnaca Fort, they made a list of what they would need to buy in the shops and chandleries of the port.
Even at half past ten on a wet Saturday night this late in the season, Limassol was lively. They took energy from the dogged cheerfulness of the holidaymakers in their T-shirts, shorts and see-through rainwear, and went after the necessities on their list. Within the hour they had, if not everything they needed, at least as much as they were going to get. John hailed another taxi and asked to be taken to the Port Office. Limassol was a busy port, the only legal way in and out of southern Cyprus. The Port Office was open. Yes, Napoli was out in the roadstead. Naturally they would be pleased to contact her at once. Of course they had a cup of tea for two people who looked as if they had had a long day.
‘You couldn’t imagine the half of it,’ said Asha feelingly.
‘Well, what with one thing and another, we shouldn’t keep the Immigration or the Customs officers too busy,’ said John brightly.
In the event it was well after midnight before they got down to the quayside where Napoli’s cutter was waiting for them, chafing restlessly against a heavy rope at the foot of a steep, slippery set of steps. None of the crewmen aboard seemed to speak or understand much English, but they knew the name of their ship so that one word served well enough. The rain had stopped by now and the cloud cover was being torn apart by the wind to reveal a few pale stars and, occasionally, a low, mean moon. Akrotiri Bay looked huge as they pulled away from the docks, for it was shallow, and opened wide to the sea; there was nothing beyond it until Tripoli one hundred and fifty miles east or Port Said two hundred and fifty miles south.
Soon the cutter started to pitch uncomfortably through waves made steep-sided by the contrary wind. There was no way to keep out of the stinging, icy spray. Asha’s stomach started to rebel at once. She was nauseous already from strain and fatigue, and had eaten nothing except an airline lunch since her one slice of wedding cake thirty-six hours ago. John held her fiercely. He was in the grip of that formless rage again. What a start to a marriage! Maybe they were just being handed all the bad luck for the first few years in the first few hours. He fervently hoped so. He couldn’t bear to think of it going on like this for very much longer.
Asha started to heave. That was all they needed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he bellowed. ‘Nelson always—’
‘Napoli,’ shouted the coxswain.
John looked ahead, vainly trying to make out the shape of his new command. All he could see were her riding lights. Asha tore herself away and leaned out over the gunwale, retching helplessly.
There were three men apart from the coxswain at the helm of the cutter and they were all looking steadfastly forward. John followed their gaze again as the coxswain repeated, ‘Napoli.’
As he did so, the moon emerged from behind a cloud. A murky, bronze light flashed across the bay, casting into sickly relief the execution dock of cranes and that high, sinister gallows behind the bridge. It couldn’t be true! He actually closed his eyes and looked again like a child confronted with a ghost. But there was no mistake.
She was broadside on to the low moon, seeming to tower out of the water above the little pitching cutter. The darkness claimed her again almost at once, but her image remained in John’s stunned mind with all the aching clarity of an old sepia photograph, this time with more than enough detail for him to see the name Napoli clearly written on her forepeak.
7
There was a simple Jacob’s ladder down Napoli’s dark flank with rope sides and flat wooden rungs. The ship was by no means sitting still in the water and the rungs were wet with rain and spray, but the crewmen held the ladder firmly enough and supported them both on to it while keeping the cutter as still as possible. Asha managed it without too much trouble. Nevertheless it was a longish scramble with plenty of scope for more disaster so John followed her up as closely as he could. He was not best pleased when he arrived on deck to see a long and much safer hydraulic accommodation ladder lying snugly retracted in its retaining clips. He was gruff with the square-bodied first mate waiting to greet him. With hardly a word to the man, he turned and strode across the
deck towards the bridgehouse, his arm solicitously around Asha’s bowed shoulders. His first impression was of an elderly, battered, badly maintained rust bucket with too much cargo piled on her deck and not enough ballast or cargo below to hold her as steady as he would have liked. And of a first officer untidily dressed with uncombed hair. Was he also unshaven or just shadowed in the wan moonlight?
Stepping through the great iron-framed bulkhead doorway into the main corridor of the main bridgehouse deck, they were overcome with shrieks of welcome and surprise. Suddenly, there were the ‘absent friends’ mentioned in their wedding toast a mere thirty-six hours earlier. While John and Asha knew who would be waiting, it was immediately clear that Fatima and Salah had not known who was coming.
‘Asha! Darling!’ The sisters swept each other into a tearful embrace, which was broken again at once while Asha looked more closely in Fatima’s face. Then the two of them bustled away, leaving John feeling excluded and suddenly a little lonely.
‘John!’ Salah sounded surprised. ‘I thought Richard would come himself.’
‘Couldn’t find him in time. He must be gone for the weekend. The wedding was yesterday afternoon—Friday. He might not show up again until Monday, day after tomorrow. I thought this was urgent. I can see why you needed a doctor. Is the need for a captain equally pressing?’
‘It is. But not so urgent that you should cancel your honeymoon!’
‘Don’t give it a thought. Our honeymoon was cancelled for us long before we started out for this place.’ Belatedly, perhaps, John stuck his hand out and Salah shook it.
The first mate came in at that moment. ‘Cutter stowed away, Captain,’ he said in laboured English. ‘The men say you had no suitcases.’
‘Thank you, Mr…’
‘Niccolo.’ He did not offer to shake hands. His fists were full of Asha’s plastic bags.
‘Thank you, Mr Niccolo. I will see you in the captain’s cabin in ten minutes. We will not be leaving until the morning. Just a harbour watch for tonight. If you’ve sea watches, you may dismiss them.’ Niccolo nodded and was off. For such a solid-looking man, John observed, he moved extremely quietly. He drew his hand down his stubbled chin, looking around. Salah stood silently.