The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Fucked,’ came the distant reply.

  John had kept the torch and the Geiger counter switched on all the way down, each hanging by a wrist loop from a forearm, each giving off light, neither of them giving off any sound. John echoed his first mate’s last word and turned, allowing both the torch and the Geiger counter to fall into his fists. The torch was powerful and he followed its broad beam into the middle of the hold. As he approached the pile of great grey concrete blocks, he kept checking the counter, but the needle stayed in the green and the occasional quiet click set his mind at rest. This was just as well, for what he could see was not designed to do the same. Whatever the chemicals on deck were in—drums or barrels, he assumed—they were all neatly stowed in the containers. That was not the case down here. The nuclear waste was exactly as it had been when it was lifted out of the desert. The great pile of grey blocks in this hold—identical to the contents of the other holds, according to Niccolo—looked like part of some antique ruin. Part of an Egyptian temple, perhaps. A pile of giant building blocks square enough to fit together in mock walls dusted with sand and standing on a miniature desert. John almost expected to see a fallen statue beside them, the Sphynx, or a gargantuan mask of Rameses. He was forcefully put in mind of Shelley’s Ozymandias and he found himself shivering and muttering, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair…’

  He walked round the ruin looking up at it from every angle and checking on the Geiger counter. Satisfied at last, he began to look round the hold more generally. There was nothing else inside it. That explained why the ship was riding so high, he thought. While he was down here—not somewhere he proposed to come back to too often—he decided he would check the hold walls in more detail. He didn’t trust Napoli. She was too old and battered.

  There was nothing to see until he reached the end of the hold. Between this hold and the next nearer the bridge, the middle hold, there was a double wall. In the centre of it at floor level was a massive door designed to allow passage between the holds. It towered before John now, almost on the same scale as the blocks behind him. But it was not the scale of it that held his attention; it was what had been done to it. At some time, and very recently by the look of it, the door had been closed, bolted, secured and then welded shut. John reached out and touched it, thoughtlessly letting the Geiger counter drop to swing on its wrist loop. ‘No way of opening this!’ he said to himself.

  He stood there for some moments deep in thought, with the short hairs at the back of his neck prickling uncomfortably. At last he shook his head and started back. All the way across the hold and back up the ladder to the deck, he wondered who it was aboard who was so frightened of the cargo in the holds that they had gone to such lengths to prevent those sinister grey blocks moving directly from one hold to the next.

  8

  Because they were near her head anyway, John sent Niccolo down to the fo’c’sle to get the anchors up. Then he walked smartly back along the deck and ran up the companionways mounting the outside of the bridgehouse until he came on to the bridge itself from the outside. The brisk walk and the exercise of running up four flights of steps in the clear, bracing morning air had put him in a much more positive frame of mind. But his mood began to darken again when he stepped in off the port bridge wing. The bridge itself was empty. John checked his watch, looked at the digital chronometer above the wheel. They both agreed: ten past eight. The deck watches should have started ten minutes ago. The third officer and the bridge crew should have been standing by since then. His mouth set in a thin, disapproving line, John crossed to the engine room telegraph. Beside it was a microphone. He snapped it to the setting he assumed would contact the engineers direct. He was right. When he said, ‘Engine control room?’ the machine answered at once.

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  ‘Are the diesels warmed up and ready?’

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  ‘I will be giving the order to make way as soon as the anchors are up. Ten minutes at most.’

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  ‘I’m relieved someone down there understands English.’

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  John broke the connection. His nostrils flared. His lips, already set thin, disappeared altogether. The muscles of his jaw tightened.

  And that was the face young Marco Farnese, third officer, saw as he entered the bridge at a leisurely pace, finishing a croissant as he came. He was a big, blond boy from Bari, easy-going and a bit dim. He knew trouble when he saw it, however, and reacted like lightning. The last morsel of his breakfast went out through the door with enough force to carry it clear of the bridge wing. The bridge crew behind him were inundated with a flood of orders couched in stinging terms. John recognised the tone and the results if not the Italian invectives. Within thirty seconds the wheel was in the hands of the helmsman, the sailing radar was on and under close scrutiny, and Marco himself was making up the log as though he had been here since eight on the dot.

  John decided to let it go this once.

  On the port side of the bridge, sitting on a slightly raised section just abaft of the bridge wing door, was a comfortable chair. It was covered in black imitation leather and had a deep bucket seat, a broad, padded back and overstuffed arms. It was the watchkeeper’s chair. John crossed to it and picked up the handset lying on its seat. He switched to SEND.

  ‘Niccolo?’

  ‘Here, Captain.’

  ‘You may proceed.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  John put the handset back in the rack where it clearly belonged and crossed to the microphone by the helm.

  ‘Engine room?’

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  ‘Make ready. Anchors coming up now.’

  ‘Si, Capitan.’

  Well, he thought, whether they understood his English or not, there would be no mistaking the directions relayed on the engine room telegraph in five minutes’ time.

  He crossed to the comfortable chair again, then turned and walked straight back from it towards the rear of the bridge. There was a door here, the exact balance to the chart room door on the starboard side. He pushed it and stood in the threshold of a small room, half within and half on the bridge. A small, wiry Spaniard with thinning black hair and narrow brown eyes sat there. He was in full uniform, neat and dapper. John remembered his name because it had seemed appropriate in a vaguely sacrilegious way. This was Jesus the radio officer.

  ‘Get me the Port Office first, please, Sparks. Then I will need to talk to the owners.’

  Jesus nodded silently and made connection through the short wave, handing a telephone handset to John.

  ‘Limassol?’ The voice emerged through a hiss of static.

  ‘This is Napoli, call sign Delta, Delta, Delta. We will be underway in five minutes, outbound for Naples. We are far out in the Roads and do not need a pilot.’

  ‘Thank you, Delta, Delta, Delta. There are no standing orders in force at the moment. I have just been speaking to your radio officer. He has all the current frequencies and call signs. Good luck, Napoli; safe journey home.’

  John broke the connection and turned to Jesus to ask about the owners, when the radio handset in its rack above the chair squawked. John crossed to it at once, but he knew from the feel of the deck beneath his feet what Niccolo was going to say.

  ‘Anchors up, Captain.’

  ‘Good. Report to me here, please.’

  He crossed to the engine room telegraph and pushed the handle over and back until the display read SLOW ASTERN. He paused there for an instant until he felt the metal beneath his feet begin to throb to a new, purposeful vibration. The distant land began to move, swinging away to their right.

  ‘You know where we’re going,’ he said to Third Officer Farnese. ‘Lay in a course.’ Muddy eyes regarded him earnestly with not one ounce of understanding. John crossed to the chart and pointed. ‘Naples,’ he said. ‘A Napoli!’
r />   Comprehension dawned.

  The door to the starboard bridge wing opened and Niccolo entered in time to hear the end of this exchange. John was suddenly extremely glad to see his square, competent bulk. ‘Please check that Mr Farnese has actually understood my order, Niccolo. I want a word with the owners. Then I would like a list of everyone aboard who speaks any English.’

  The name of Napoli’s owners, CZP, was not familiar to John. He suspected that their Cayman and Zurich offices were there for tax purposes and the actual work was done in Palermo, but as long as CZP had the money to pay the crew’s wages and supply and maintain their ships, they could have offices on the moon for all he cared.

  CZP was responsible for the upkeep of the hull and the hire of the crew. Disposoco owned the cargo and paid the owners to transport it, and from that money came the funds to run the ship. CZP was also responsible for paying Crewfinders in London for the new captain, until such time as they could find another captain of their own. Crewfinders guaranteed John’s pay. It was Sunday today. First thing tomorrow, Crewfinders would be on to CZP to complete their contract. They might replace John, but this seemed unlikely. It was less than a week’s cruise past Crete, round Sicily and up to Naples, all things being equal.

  Having reported in at some length to a slow, deliberate, Italian-speaking clerk in the owners’ office in Palermo, John handed the handset back to Jesus and returned to the bridge proper wearing a frown. True, it was Sunday, but he was surprised that no one senior at CZP had been available to speak to him. That boded badly for the way they were likely to conduct their business. But then again, there was still no sign of anyone senior at Crewfinders either, and that was unheard of!

  Cape Gata was sweeping past on their starboard now, the NATO base at Akrotiri coming into view. John checked the line of their course on the chart and then crossed to where he could see the heading on the display in front of the helmsman. A little south of west. Perfect. ‘You may enter that heading into the automatic steering system, Mr Farnese, and the helmsman may stand down to other duties.’

  As soon as he began talking, an irritating, mumbling echo started and he swung round, frowning, like a schoolteacher interrupted in class. Of course, it was Niccolo, translating.

  John crossed to the watchkeeper’s chair and sat, deep in thought, while Marco Farnese carried out his instructions. Niccolo looked across at his new captain as soon as the third officer was clear what to do. ‘I could get some engineers and fix the ladder now, Captain,’ he said quietly. ‘Or do you want the list of men who speak English?’

  ‘Later, thank you, Niccolo.’ John looked down at his watch. Eight thirty-five. They would just be serving breakfast for the off-watch crew and the passengers. This was going to make him extremely unpopular—with Asha, quite apart from anybody else: ‘Sound “Abandon Ship”, please.’

  *

  John called a halt to the shambolic lifeboat drill half an hour later, just after Gina Fittipaldi had escaped death by inches when the forward fall on Number One lifeboat snapped and all but dropped five tons of wood and metal on her head.

  Napoli had four big lifeboats as well as the cutter and some smaller survival equipment. Everyone aboard had a place assigned in one of them. It was Niccolo’s responsibility to see that each person aboard knew their place, and it had been Captain Fittipaldi’s responsibility to hold drill regularly, to ensure that everything went smoothly in an emergency. Within minutes of the first alarm signal it became obvious that this was the first lifeboat drill most of the crew had ever experienced. Instead of making their way quickly and calmly to their assigned posts, most of Napoli’s complement ran around in panic, blocking up important passageways by standing in groups to ask what was happening or pausing by noticeboards to try and discover what they should be doing. John’s estimate that breakfast would be underway was correct, but many of the off-watch officers and crew had not even got themselves out of bed yet, or were still in the head or the shower. Gina Fittipaldi was among the latter and John first made the acquaintance of his late predecessor’s daughter as she ran in a blind panic and a very small bath towel along the C deck corridor towards the stairs. At the moment they collided, Asha came out of the captain’s cabin. ‘Take her,’ snapped John at once. ‘She’s in our lifeboat.’

  ‘I know,’ answered his wife calmly. ‘So are Fatima and Salah. Is this a drill, John?’

  ‘No. It’s a sodding disaster,’ he snapped.

  This estimate was perhaps a little unkind. Most of the crew went to their assigned stations and thence to the lifeboats. Eventually. But what should have taken seconds took minutes instead. And the minutes began to stretch out. John and Niccolo, both increasingly angry, chivvied the men along and timed their reactions on stopwatches. They double-checked who was where on Niccolo’s lists; the only men missing were the watch on the bridge. John stood between boats One and Two on the starboard while Niccolo stood by Three and Four on the port.

  ‘Well,’ bellowed the mate in Italian to the milling crowd of sailors and engineers, stewards and scientists, ‘What have you got to do next, deadheads? The sea is licking at your bloody feet!’

  His voice carried easily across the deck to the crews of the lifeboats on the starboard. Jesus the radio officer, who was in the captain’s lifeboat, and Cesar, second mate, leaped forward as one man to pull the solid craft out of its retaining clips and swing the davits round. The lifeboat swayed out over the blue water like a huge swing, the blocks creaking and falls protesting. Before the two officers could steady her with the inboard lines, a huge crewman, with a battered boxer’s face and copper crew-cut hair, reached forward to free the forward fall. ‘Belay…’ began John automatically, but his stentorian bellow meant nothing to the man. The rope came free of the cleat and the crewman took the sudden strain badly. Hemp stripped through the palms of his leg-of-mutton fists as the lifeboat swung in towards the people waiting to board her. Cesar saw what was happening and threw himself on the rope at the same time as John did. The movement of the lifeboat’s head was brought up sharp. Then, incredibly, the three men were tumbling backwards again as the rope simply snapped. John was hurled back against the bridgehouse wall and he watched in helpless horror as the sharp, metal-sheathed prow of the lifeboat fell towards Gina Fittipaldi like the blade of a guillotine.

  It stopped at the last second, perhaps an inch above her skull, and there was Salah holding the last foot of the broken rope safely belayed round the ship’s rail.

  Silence. Even Niccolo’s men on the other side were still, aware that something terrible was going on.

  John took a deep, shuddering breath, fighting to control the rage in his chest. Gina looked up at the boat swinging in, then out, brushing her wet hair, whispering past with the sound of a headsman’s axe. She screamed. A massive, terrifying sound, echoing and re-echoing off the steel. Asha swung her round and gathered her into a strong embrace, drowning the sound with the shoulder of her bathrobe. Fatima joined the huddle until Gina’s tears ceased.

  Suddenly Niccolo was there, his face white and his fists huge and John had had enough. ‘That’s it!’ he snapped. His eyes met Niccolo’s and held them until he knew the mate was paying attention again. ‘Dismiss!’ He swung round to Salah, ‘Thanks…’

  ‘It’s OK—I didn’t want to lose Fatima’s nurse…’

  Everyone began to troop dejectedly away except for Cesar and the huge seaman who made the rope safe and started pulling the lifeboat back inboard.

  John and his first mate stood face to face. Niccolo was a head taller, half again as broad of shoulder, at least three stone heavier and none of it fat, but he seemed almost insignificant under the weight of John Higgins’s fury. ‘That was the biggest, stupidest, f—’

  ‘FUEGO! FUEGO! AYUDA RAPIDO! FUEGO!’

  The cry was accompanied by a smell of burning so that even if neither of them had understood Spanish, the panic call would still have made immediate sense. Niccolo set off at a dead run with John close behind.
There were only two sets of Spaniards aboard: the engineers working for El Jefe and the stewards working for the chef. The engineers hadn’t had time to get back to their stations yet, so this call had to be coming from a steward.

  The galley was at main deck level behind the dining saloons. There were doors into it from the outside deck as well as from the bridgehouse. One of the outer doors stood wide, belching smoke, and a small group of stewards stood outside calling for help.

  ‘Where’s the chef?’ asked John, but the blank looks prompted him to use his rusty Spanish at once. ‘Donde esta…’

  ‘Alli!’ They pointed in behind the belching smoke.

  Once again his eyes met those of the first mate. Niccolo gave one of those minuscule, almost invisible shrugs which can mean so much and which brand a man as a Neapolitan. The slightest stirring of his shoulders disposed of the pathetic group of men on the deck; perhaps of the whole Spanish nation.

  Side by side, they rolled through the door, trying to keep as low as possible. Immediately inside the door was the first galley storeroom. Floor to ceiling it had shelves crammed with sacks, bags, boxes and tins, none of which was alight. On the floor was a crate of bottles and John lifted one out as they crawled past. It was a bottle of Perrier. Pulling his handkerchief from his pocket, he smashed the top off the bottle on the next doorframe and wet the bundle of cotton before jamming it over his nose and mouth. He glanced across at Niccolo in time to see him pull his shirtfront out. John drenched his stomach for him and the mate used the wet cloth to filter out the fumes.

  The next room was the dry goods store. Smoked meat—well smoked, thought John wryly—hung from hooks above. Sacks of flour, rice and potatoes stood on the floor. Nothing here was burning either. And that could only mean one thing. The galley itself was on fire.

  The first thing John saw in the galley was the chef. The plump little Frenchman was face-down on the floor, apparently unconscious. Above him stood his cooking range and it was instantly clear that he had realised the range was on fire and had come in here to turn it off. John crawled across to him and rolled him over. The cherubic face was grey-streaked with soot, the cheeks livid with incipient asphyxiation. Both his hands seemed to be burned also. John glanced up to see that the power switches to the hotplates, blackened and melting, were in the OFF position. John took hold of one arm and began to drag the man back the way he had just come. At the door he met Salah and Cesar and handed the body over to them. As he did so, Niccolo loomed out of the smoke with a fire extinguisher in each hand. His shirt was comically bunched over his shoulders and lower face, displaying a hirsute but muscular torso. John reached back to knot his handkerchief in place over his lower face and then took one of the fire extinguishers.