by Peter Tonkin
As the news came through that there would be no day work, Asha’s sick queue melted away. The crew began to pack up their kit and, having established what action Bernadotte would take the moment his feet touched the concrete of the Stazione Marittima, they began to discuss what they would do when they got ashore themselves. An air of grudging excitement began to enter the atmosphere of the crew’s quarters. Not so much like a school looking forward to the holidays as a group of prisoners wrongfully convicted but finishing their sentence soon.
*
In the suddenly deserted surgery, the two sisters sat side by side. Gina had departed with the last of the men but Fatima had shown no real desire to move. Asha tidied up a bit then sat beside her twin, knowing Fatima wanted to confide.
Theirs was a strange relationship, put under added strain during the last few days. Almost psychically close since infancy, they had been pulled apart and clashed together wildly during the last few years, and fate had put secrets between them without any emotional distance to make the secrets easier to bear. It was agony to both of them that there were things Fatima could not tell—but her secrets were Salah’s secrets and she could not easily divulge them to anyone.
‘He’s up there on the radio again,’ Fatima began quietly, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘But there’s no one for him to talk to. Not in Beirut. Not in Tunis. Not even Tewfik al Ashrawi will talk to him. He’s been thrown out of the club, made a pariah, and I don’t know what we will do.’
Asha sat silently, waiting for more. She wondered how much of this she should tell John—though John had known Salah for ten years and should be able to see the situation clearly enough. He might not know about Tewfik al Ashrawi, though. Perhaps she had better mention him, for the name was familiar: it belonged to a senior PLO spokesman.
‘When he came out of Beirut in August to help Richard Mariner and the others rescue Prometheus, he moved without permission and he upset many people, though I think he was already isolated, even then. And his absence allowed his enemies to undermine his position.’
Fatima paused. Part of the reason that this was so difficult for her lay in the fact that Asha and John had been aboard Prometheus and Fatima herself had been involved with the terrorists who had kidnapped them. It was against Fatima and her friends that Salah had been forced to move. That was why he had shot her—to prevent her from shooting him.
She took a great breath. ‘He is a religious man in a secular organisation. He has come to think that the Palestinians should negotiate with the Jews. He works for the PLO in Beirut and yet he mistrusts the Hizbollah, advises against strengthening links with them and says they should give back the western hostages. He has flown in the face of Arafat himself and spoken out against Saddam Husain. As far as I know, Arafat is in Baghdad at this very moment linking the PLO cause to the Iranian position and Salah is the one man who advised him not to go. And the result of all this is that Salah gets sent to some Lebanese backwater to oversee something that anyone could have taken care of. He is attacked by local villagers and PLO representatives. He is trapped aboard this filthy tub, cut off and helpless. And Tunisian coastguards open fire the moment they see him. And, Asha, he was wearing the very keffiyeh that Arafat gave him. Wearing it in the style that Arafat taught him—folded to represent the map of Palestine. They must have seen that. They must have known who he was. And yet they still opened fire.’
‘You say you don’t know what to do; but what would you like to do?’
‘I’d like to make him give up. Now, while we have a chance of survival. I’d like us to go ashore in Naples with the rest of you and give ourselves up to the police.’
John, too, was thinking about what he would do when he got ashore. He was sitting in the watchkeeper’s chair on the bridge. He had a lot of making up to Asha to do. They ought to be lazing on a Hawaiian beach, just beginning their second week of honeymoon. Her marriage to him so far could hardly have been less idyllic. Exhausted, tight in the grip of that depression which comes from stress and results in sleeplessness, more exhaustion, greater stress still, he felt almost self-pitying. But then a wave of love for her swept over him. She had been so strong. So understanding. He had never relied upon anyone before, except, perhaps, Richard Mariner. To tell the truth, he had been worried about relying on her. But in every test she rang true. He could not believe how lucky he had been to meet her. How lucky he had been to engage her interest. Certainly, looking coldly at himself, there was precious little about him to catch any woman’s eye, let alone Asha’s.
Lord, he had wanted it to be so perfect for her. And just look at the mess they were involved in instead. Still, with any luck, Disposoco or the owners CZP would have a new captain waiting to relieve him this afternoon. Someone trained in overseeing the unloading of dangerous waste. Perhaps they would let Niccolo do it: he had got the stuff aboard ably enough.
The electric ‘bells’ sounded on the bridge chronometer: time to change watch. John stirred. His first thought was, good, now Cesar can bring her in. Even though this was Sunday, Naples was bound to be busy and he didn’t want his third officer blundering about the port with or without a pilot. But where was the port? Where was Italy? The outlook was the same view of tossing waves and flying spume that had been there since day had broken.
‘Niccolo, what can you see on the radar?’
‘We’re just coming up into the bay now, Captain. Capri is perhaps a mile off the starboard. Jesus should be talking to the port authority any minute.’
John got up out of the bridge chair and walked back towards the radio shack. ‘Any traffic?’ he asked Niccolo as he passed him
‘Nothing close to us. It’s very quiet.’
‘Good.’
‘Very quiet. You think there could be anything wrong, Captain?’
It was not an unusual concern for sailors: long out of contact, as they had been for a while, homecoming mariners often thought things might have gone badly wrong in their absence. Wars, plagues, Martians; anything seemed possible.
‘No, Niccolo. I’m sure there’s nothing—’
‘Capitan!’ Jesus stuck his neat, dark head out of the shack. ‘The port authority wants to speak to you.’
‘There, you see, Niccolo? Everything’s fine. The anchor will be down in half an hour. An hour at most.’
In the shack, John took a VHF handset and gestured for Jesus to take another: the radio officer could make notes while he talked. ‘Captain, Napoli. Hello, Naples port authority. Hello, Naples.’
‘Capitano, you must turn to a heading due east of your present heading. You must proceed on that heading for ten miles and then you must anchor at map reference 40.38N; 14.22E.’
John was hardly paying attention. So sure had he been that the port authority were just going to go through the formalities of pilot pick-up, port-official rendezvous, discharge point, unloading bay, that he was completely taken aback by the urgent instruction.
‘Say again, Naples.’
As the orders were repeated, John automatically plotted the manoeuvre on the chart of Naples Bay he carried in his head. They wanted him to anchor on the edge of a shallow submarine shelf below Sorrento. They didn’t want him in the port at all.
‘Acknowledged, Naples. May I ask why you are queuing us up outside the port? Are there no unloading bays available? How long will we have to wait before we can come ashore?’
‘There is a lighter waiting for you at the point where you must anchor.’
‘A lighter! Our cargo is far too dangerous to unload into a lighter in this weather, Naples.’
‘It is an oiling lighter, Napoli, carrying supplies and representatives from your owners and charterers. You will not be allowed to enter the port of Naples, Napoli.’
‘Say again?’ John simply could not believe what he was hearing. It simply could not be true. He looked at Jesus and the expression on the radio operator’s face confirmed it before the distant voice on the VHF spoke again: ‘I am sorry, Napoli. The port of Naples
is closed to you. Every port in Italy is closed to you.’
*
Sorrento was out of the worst of the wind, but the swell was still coming south across the bay. There was a line of foam defining the outer edge of the ledge and John put Napoli in the first calm inside this and had the anchors dropped. As they were moving into position, a large lighting vessel detached itself from the grey crags of the coast and began to steam purposefully out towards them. There had been nothing to do on the way over here so John had called the chef up to the bridge almost the instant he had come out of the radio shack. ‘We will be anchoring off Sorrento in an hour. There will be a lighter coming out to us, but nothing much for the men to do. I will dismiss them down to lunch at one. And make it a good lunch.’
The chef was an independent-minded Gascon. He took direct orders from no one, and, in his day, he had left a good few captains choking on his barbed ripostes. On this occasion, he took a close look at his captain’s expression. ‘D’accord,’ he said and was gone. He might almost have saluted, had he known how.
Marco looked across at Cesar, his eyes round with wonder. Cesar’s face was like stone, so the amiable third officer glanced at Niccolo, his humorous expression saying, ‘What’s got into the chef?’ But then he met Niccolo’s eyes and looked back at the captain again, his open countenance folding into a worried frown. He had never seen an expression like this upon the quiet Englishman’s face.
‘What is it, Captain?’ asked Niccolo.
‘They’ve closed the port. They’ve shut us out.’
‘Shut us out of Naples?’ Niccolo was aghast.
‘Shut us out of Italy!’
The oiling lighter Parthenope nudged up alongside Napoli at one thirty local time. The accommodation ladder was down but there was no one on the deck to take a rope. Only the first officer waited to welcome aboard the three people who climbed up out of her. They walked down the gusty deck and clambered unbidden up the outside companionways to the bridge. They entered the silent bridge in a little flurry of wind and noise that emphasised the silence in the long, bright room. A silence made all the more striking by the presence of so many people. The captain was here, with his other navigating officers. The chief engineer was here. The radio officer. The leader of the scientists. A tall man in the battle fatigues of a Palestinian freedom fighter. Three women: the other freedom fighter, the doctor who was also the present captain’s wife, the late captain’s daughter. Ten pairs of eyes whose expressions were uniformly hostile.
One of the new arrivals was a small ball of a man, red of face and thin of hair with a narrow black moustache exactly bisecting the distance between his button nose and his cupid’s-bow lips. The other man was taller, but stooping, self-effacing, ground down. There were dark bags below his lugubrious eyes, making them look like black stones at the hearts of pale prunes. The third visitor was a woman.
The small man bounced forward, brushing the pudgy fingers of his right hand to and fro across his moustache. ‘Captain…ah…Higgins. I am Michaelangelo Verdi of CZP, the owners of Napoli.’ He thrust his hand out vaguely towards the heart of the phalanx of officers before him. No one moved to take it, perhaps because the gleam of gold rings was outshone by the glistening moisture on the digits. The little man danced back, gesturing vaguely behind him. ‘This is Signor Nero from Disposoco.’ The tall man moved forward. His prune-puffed eyes looked at Salah for a second. He fell back. His hands were shaking.
‘I had expected to talk to the captain in his day room.’ Silence. Stillness. Verdi’s rubicund face gathered into a frown. Clearly he was not used to being treated like this. ‘I had expected to find a team of men ready to oil up the ship. You do not have very much time. You must turn round and get underway as soon as possible.’
‘Where to?’
Verdi’s eyes zeroed in on the speaker. It was the captain: he had known it would be. ‘To England, Captain. To your home. They dispose of such things as your cargo there. You sail with the tide for Liverpool.’
John’s lips twitched. The tide in this area ran to a foot on a bad day.
But it was no laughing matter. Liverpool was the better part of three thousand sea miles away: twelve days’ sailing at the speeds El Jefe’s diesel was capable of. In this kind of weather—and there was no improvement promised—across the Bay of Biscay, the prospect was grim indeed. There was a brief murmur as the news was translated. The atmosphere of hostility intensified. Verdi wiped his moustache again. ‘We have no choice,’ he persisted. ‘The ports of Italy are closed. Only England will accept the cargo.’
‘Only England has the capability of disposing of it safely,’ intervened Nero. His voice was deep and slow where Verdi’s was light. His prune eyes studied the floor as he spoke, avoiding contact with everybody else’s gaze.
‘Oh,’ said Fatima, her voice deceptively quiet, ‘I thought it could be disposed of almost anywhere. Lebanon. Nigeria. South America. Anywhere a little more death might go unnoticed!’
The tall Italian jumped, twitched, fell back. The woman said nothing though her keen gaze seemed to take in everything.
Verdi leapt into the breach. ‘Only in England can it be disposed of safely,’ he reiterated. ‘They have facilities—’
‘This is getting us nowhere.’ John was in motion, coming towards the visitors as he spoke, the others falling in behind. ‘You’ll have to discuss your ideas with the crew. They only signed on for Naples. They’ll probably be getting off here anyway no matter what you say.’
‘No.’ Verdi’s sharp monosyllable brought them all to a standstill.
‘That’s not what they think.’ John’s voice held a distinct warning.
‘Then they are mistaken. They signed on for the port of delivery. The contracts do not specify what port.’
‘They were told it would be Naples.’
‘Told. Ah. But nowhere does it say. Even were they union men…’ Verdi gave a Neapolitan shrug. They were not, of course, union men. They were not getting out of these contracts. They were not getting off Napoli. They were hardly close enough to shore to risk jumping ship. And if they did, they would have no papers, no pay, no berth, no comeback, no hope of finding another job. John glanced round the bridge. The expressions on the faces of his officers told their own story. Only Gina would be going ashore here. Gina and the dead men. Perhaps Lazar had been the lucky one after all.
They all crowded into the crew’s dining saloon, and if the hostility on the bridge had been intense, it was nothing to the atmosphere that greeted them here. Forewarned of his reception by the officers, Verdi launched into voluble Italian at once. Down here, Nero seemed to have more confidence and he stood beside his colleague, adding silent stature to his arguments. Only the third figure, the woman, remained aloof. The fact that he did not understand a word unsettled John; he edged out of the room as Verdi’s speech was greeted with a stunned silence followed by a howl of outrage from Bernadotte.
In the corridor, Asha joined him and they stood together for a moment as though eavesdropping on the furore beyond the door. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
The weight of it ground down on him like whatever it was weighing Nero’s bowed shoulders. He longed to say, ‘I’m going to phone Richard at once and get us off this rust bucket.’ He could, of course. They had signed no contract with CZP’s shark-agent in Piraeus. They were nothing to do with Disposoco. But in fact they were as completely trapped as anyone else aboard. John spoke to Richard Mariner every night, but neither Heritage Mariner nor the PLO seemed capable of solving the Palestinian problem. Asha would never leave Fatima and Salah in the lurch. And John could no more desert his command or his men, quite apart from his wife. ‘I’m going to take her to Liverpool, of course,’ he said gruffly. ‘You want to come?’
She swept him into her arms and for reasons he could not perfectly fathom, she tried to crush the life out of him.
The pandemonium in the crew’s dining saloon rose and fell as the door opened and closed. Th
e honeymooners sprang apart. John swung round to see who had come out. It was the third of the visitors. The woman. She stood a robust five foot eight. She had brown hair and intelligent blue eyes. There was a power about her, an authority. She gave the impression of being a person used to getting things done. She thrust out her hand to John. ‘Captain Higgins?’ she said. Her voice came as a shock to him. It was deep, forceful. American.
He took her hand automatically and was again surprised: she had an extremely firm grip.
‘Captain Higgins, Mr Verdi just got through telling your crew that he wants me aboard this ship for the good of his company’s reputation and that he’s not taking no for an answer from anyone. And I guess that includes you. So, if you’re taking this mess to Liverpool, then I’m coming with you,’ she said. ‘My name is Ann Cable. I work for Greenpeace.’
14
The formalities of unloading Gina and the dead men were complicated only by the late Captain’s filing system, which refused to disgorge Lazar’s papers. At last Verdi shrugged, ‘He doesn’t need them. We go. You go.’
It took them two days to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea but at least the wind moderated and the air cleared so that they came past Cagliari on a bright, calm evening.
John asked Niccolo, who was on watch, to take her off the automatic helm and drift her to the north of her programmed course. They were heading south of west and the sun was setting swiftly on their starboard quarter. The western edge of the sky was clear and the orb of the great star swam down slowly into view, blood-red and seemingly flattened by some quirk of the crystalline air. Great beams struck across the bellies of the high cirrus overcast, turning a mackerel sky to bright smoked salmon. Asha, who was standing beside John’s chair, caught her breath. Her hand stole out to rest on his shoulder. He pulled himself erect as though her touch had electrified him. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ve something to show you.’
He led her past the radio room and out of the port side of the bridge. The air was cool with just the faintest intimation of the winter currently reaching down Europe towards the Mediterranean basin. It was late arriving here, as if it had become dammed up behind the north-facing slopes of the Alps.