The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Richard was never to know the manner of Faure’s death. He did not know at this moment that the brave Frenchman was dead.

  All he knew was that the ship was going down and several of his friends were still aboard. His first thought had been to run up to John on the bridge, but then he remembered that Salah and Fatima were in the engine room and, unless they were paying close attention to the disposition of the ship in the water, her sudden plunge might well take them by surprise.

  After his brief message on the radio, he ran on down. The stairways were all at crazy angles now, and he stumbled and toppled down them trying to get to the engine room. He was running unsteadily along the angle made by a floor and a wall when he heard the first explosion. He was halfway along the corridor leading to the engine control room at the time; it was against his nature to turn back, so he rushed on forward instead.

  *

  The first the three in the engine room really knew about it was when El Jefe fell over. He had been squatting facing dead aft, concentrating as fiercely as the other two on the placing of the charges—they had not quite reached the stage of priming them yet. But then the Spaniard suddenly found himself flat on his back on the engine room floor. It came as such a surprise that he did not at first register the reason for his sudden upset. But then he went absolutely cold. He did not think to say anything to the other two or to report in on the radio. He simply began to roll over and over, trying with limited success to pull himself erect. He knew in his bones what was happening and the more certain he became of it, the quicker he tried to move. His one overwhelming duty was to switch off the main propeller shaft before it was too late. He fell up the steps beside the engine which were now tilting at an almost unclimbable angle. He pulled himself up, climbing with his arms as much as his legs. His mouth was wide as he gulped in the hot, oil-tainted air. He was a strong man, but not a particularly fit man, and he knew it. With each straining step, he regretted the extra servings of paella, the cervezas, the vino tinto. Whether his undoing was due more to food than to alcohol, he was never to know.

  In the final second or two, as the angle of the ship became increasingly acute, Salah grew more worried. He looked up to mention his fears to El Jefe, but the Spaniard was off doing something to the engine. It was obvious that they had very little time left, but then he had almost finished. He paused in his work and signed for Fatima to climb out of the bilge well first, and she smiled a tight smile, glad enough to go. With sinuous grace she pulled herself up and out onto the tilting deck. Salah paused in his work to watch her, thinking how good it would be to spend the rest of his life with her! Fatima looked up to see the figure of the chief spread out like a monkey in a white overall on the steps above the engine. He was trying to reach something. She came to her knees, looking up at him in wonder. And the ship began to scream.

  *

  The downward lurch which the anchor chain had caused as it crushed the life out of Faure tore the propeller up out of the water. The massive system, so carefully balanced to support that great brass rotor as it thrust aside ton after ton of heavy sea water, screamed into overdrive as the three broad blades bit only air. The revolutions, so carefully kept at a hundred, leaped towards a thousand. The shaft designed to meet the torque of keeping the screw rotating in the water, was incapable of meeting the new forces its freedom unleashed. It began to twist out of true at once, bending like dough. It gathered up the man in the bilge well and obliterated him. Then it pulled itself out of the retaining clips which guided it when straight and slammed into the deck. It tore through the thin steel of the deck like a knife blade through eggshell. The engine, trying to come to terms with what the suddenly supple steel was doing, failed utterly and, as El Jefe had warned it might do, it exploded.

  Fatima was hurled backwards across the slippery engine room deck. She had no idea at all that she was screaming. Such was the noise around her that she could not hear herself. The man she admired and trusted, loved and relied on, more than any other in the world had disappeared. It was hard to say even that he had been killed, so total had been the fate that overtook him. He had simply vanished, as though passing to another plane of existence in the blink of an eye. The shaft that had done this to him twisted like the neck of a dragon and slammed down onto the deck on the far side of the well. Water exploded up in a wall through the deck-plates it had destroyed. The sound was as though she were trapped in a wildly ringing bell. The pain in her ears was excruciating.

  On her back in the debris on the engine room floor, she looked up. At the highest point of the stern, the housing into which the shaft had run scant seconds ago tore away as though it were a door being opened by a giant hand outside. The propeller, no longer secured to the ship by anything strong enough to hold it in place, tore itself free and took the housing, and a good deal of Napoli’s stern plates with it.

  Fatima dragged herself away from the horrific sight and scrabbled round onto her knees, looking for a way to escape. She looked up just in time to see the engine immediately beneath El Jefe burst into flame. Like Salah, he must never have known what happened to him. He was gone in an instant. The second shock on top of the first seemed to galvanise her. One last wild glance round revealed that the wall of water which had sprung out of the hole the shaft had made was faltering. It had filled the bilge well and then it had stopped. Through the long, ragged gash she could see the bright surface of the ocean sliding by.

  She tumbled into motion down the slippery slope of the deck just as El Jefe had, but she ran on past the ladder he had climbed—too slowly—up to the engine controls. She made instead for the main companionway which would take her up the forward wall of the engine room, well clear of the blazing engine and out into the passage leading to the main deck. She was lighter, fitter, far more agile than the middle-aged chief engineer had been.

  The slope of the steps was almost impossible to negotiate. She gashed her shins and bruised her hands, running up three flights of steps whose angle was now so great they were like an optical illusion or a drawing by Escher. The engine room companionway steps had no fronts to them—fronts which would by now have become the tops to the steps—and so she found herself running up the last set on the forward edges of the steel slabs, and by this time she was uncertain whether she was running up or down. She was powerfully aware, however, that the temperature of the air she was passing through was spiralling upwards increasingly fast. The engine was belching fire now and screeching like some enraged monster. It was difficult to see how it could stay in one piece for very much longer. And what it would do when the cold Atlantic hit it was something she didn’t want to think about.

  She concentrated on getting out of here and that was all. She had been in tight spots before. She knew that thought could be the enemy of action and that if she thought about Salah, then she would give up and die here. Salah, who had come so near to killing her three short months ago, would not want her to die now.

  She came through the main door into the engine control room at a dead run and smashed straight into the unsteady, white-clothed figure of Richard Mariner. They tumbled backwards together down the slope of the shuddering floor until they ended up in a tangle of limbs in the angle it formed with the wall. ‘They’re dead,’ she yelled before he could even ask. His face went blank. He simply did not believe what she was saying. He stayed, unmoving, looking over her shoulder, expecting to see Salah there. She took him by the shoulders, desperate. ‘Salah’s dead,’ she screamed. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  They crawled to the door and pushed through it into the corridor beyond. Here they picked themselves up and staggered forward in the same manner that Richard traversed it going the other way—one foot on the floor and one on the wall, with the angle between their ankles seeming to point straight down to the seabed two and a half miles below.

  *

  John stood at the wheel, looking dumbstruck down the diminishing length of his deck. Napoli’s destruction had been so cataclysmic, so unexpect
ed, he still could not bring himself to come to terms with it. The explosives had not even been placed and yet the ship seemed to be tearing herself apart all on her own. The wheel had ripped itself out of his hands. The deck beneath his feet throbbed and thundered. There was water rushing up the inside of the hull, tumbling in waterfalls from hold to hold, setting the steel he stood on to throbbing like drumskin. And as the water entered, so it drove the air out. In the places that had once been flotation chambers, living and working areas, the still air was being pushed into winds, into gales, by the movement of the water. The movement of the air added its insistent vibration to the steel structures around it and these transmitted it to John.

  But what was happening as a result of the hull’s increasingly rapid descent into the water was nothing compared to the self-destruction of the engine. Of all the sensations transmitted to the highly sensitive captain, that one was the most urgent, the most insistent, the most worrying. He could hardly bear think what must be happening in the engine room. The noise he received on the open engine room telephone simply told him more vividly what the soles of his feet already knew. But neither sensation told him what he really needed to know: who was alive down there and still relying on him to remain up here? Remaining on the bridge had gone beyond dangerous towards foolish now. The foaming wall of water sweeping up the deck, sportively hurling containers this way and that, would arrive at the bridge front in moments. There was nothing he could do up here—really there had been little for him to do once the helm had torn itself out of his hands as the rudder fell over to one side. But they might be relying on him still and so he had waited. But he would wait no longer. He would not abandon yet; he would check on the engine room first. Salah and Fatima and El Jefe were almost certainly still there or they would have warned him as arranged. And Richard’s cryptic ‘Going down’ told him that his oldest friend was down below too. It was time to go and see if he could help.

  He turned and walked up the hill to the stairwell at the back of the bridge. He felt absolutely in control. Calm, quick-witted, in charge. His concentration on the situation and how he was going to help his friends escape from it was absolute.

  He never noticed that he had left his walkie-talkie on the console by the useless helm.

  The doorway was at an odd angle, of course, and the stairs beyond it were leaning to one side so that the only way to negotiate them was to put his shoulder on the forward—downhill—wall and slide along it while his feet went down the stairs. At the first landing, he had to lower himself down a five-foot drop before he could start again.

  It was four decks down from the bridge to the main deck; he would have to repeat this laborious process at least seven more times, he thought. He didn’t think to consider that he had no time for such a slow method of locomotion. Or, at any rate, he didn’t think about it until he heard the unmistakable roaring of the sea coming in at the front of the bridgehouse, and the whole environment around him began to shudder as it had done last night in the grip of that unbelievable mountain of water.

  ‘She’s going under!’ yelled Richard at the top of his voice. ‘She’s going to take us down!’ He had Fatima by the hand, pulling her up across the landing which would take them up to main-deck level at the aft of the bridgehouse. He had to yell because of the noise. At the bottom—more like a side now—of the stairwell they had just negotiated, the engine was still shrieking frenziedly. After experiencing the movement of the forward hold, Richard was surprised that the engine was still in place; he was half expecting it to sheer its retaining bolts and plunge down through the length of the ship. That would take care of their worries about keeping the cargo together! God! How foolish they had been to try and plan for eventualities like this. What chance had seven people with their piddling explosive charges against the might of the Western Ocean? How had they found the presumption to suppose they could control events? And what a price they were paying for that presumption! The only thing that stopped him slipping into an agony of guilt over the death of his friend was the certainty that he was going to die here too.

  There was a stiff gale blowing past them as they continued to battle upwards, and the motion of the air and the shuddering of the decks and walls they were climbing over—and the rolling thunder coming closer—all told him that the ocean would be foaming up towards them any moment now. All they could do was to keep climbing, no matter what, looking for a way out. And if they found one, to take it and pray Napoli didn’t suck them down after her.

  He was being particularly careful not to think about Robin or their baby now. He was thinking of nothing except Fatima and how they were going to get out of this. With a wrenching effort, he pulled Fatima up after him and turned to face another geometrical puzzle which they would have to negotiate fast.

  *

  The main after companionways in the bridge house of the Napoli all ran port to starboard. Had their slopes run fore and aft, the forward angle of the decks would have made them impossible to negotiate. As John had discovered with his leaps down and as Richard and Fatima were finding with their long reaches up, the landings on these, where the steps turned through one hundred and eighty degrees, were five feet wide and now formed walls instead of floors. They were the only serious obstacles to their dogged progress, however, until they all reached the main deck corridor at the same time. This two-way coincidence immediately became three-way. No sooner had Richard and Fatima slid down across the corridor and John tumbled out of the stairwell behind them, than the Western Ocean arrived.

  The corridor stretched from side to side of the bridgehouse. When the decks were level, the stairwells ran up and down immediately aft of it. Four decks up, another, identical corridor ran from side to side immediately behind the bridge. At each end of the main-deck corridor were huge metal bulkhead doors. These had been left secured wide open by the crew as they abandoned ship. No sooner had the three survivors met in that main deck corridor, than the open doors slid down beneath the surface.

  John’s cry of relief at having found the other two was still echoing in the pandemonium around them when his amazed gaze saw the green water come foaming in through the door he was looking towards. He jerked round. At the other end it was exactly the same: waves of water foamed in through the lower angle of the doorway.

  Until now, John had really had no sensation of Napoli’s movement down through the water. Certainly he had no idea of how fast she was settling. This changed things at once. The surface of the ocean flashed up the length of the door incredibly quickly. One moment the doors were open to the air. The next they were waterfalls of deep green water, foaming in with incredible force. The ocean had closed off all hope of getting out onto the main deck. They could never fight the force of those walls of water. John felt the air being pushed away as the water snatched at his ankles. ‘Back up!’ he screamed. It was the only way to go.

  Whether or not the others heard him over the numbing cacophony of sound there was no mistaking his gestures and there was nothing else to do. They fought through the foaming rapids that the sea water had cast round their knees already. Three together could move up much faster than two. Richard slung John up first. He handed up Fatima and John hauled her the rest of the way, then they both reached back down for the big white gauntleted hands below them. So they raced the foamed water as it came thundering up the stairwell behind them, with terrifying rapidity.

  They were short of breath, the sea was pushing out the last of the air from the place but they could still gasp a conversation. ‘The others?’—John to Fatima.

  ‘Dead!’

  ‘Salah?’ He could not believe it.

  ‘She killed him. She stamped him out. This bitch of a ship. What did they call her? The dockers.’

  ‘A leper ship,’ gasped Richard. That was all they could say. They climbed on up.

  They were stunned and all but overcome by the situation and by the cost in friends’ lives which had been paid to get them here. John could not get out of his mind t
hat his beloved wife was up there somewhere watching him die. Hell of a honeymoon, he thought. Richard and Fatima were both thinking of Salah, insofar as they were thinking of anything other than staying alive. There was no doubt in their minds that they were under the water now and yet they would not stop fighting to get free. What was the alternative? To sit in genteel acquiescence as the passengers of Titanic had? No! Never! These were people who fought every inch of the way. Who never gave in. Who would fight the Western Ocean until it snuffed out every last spark of life from them.

  They came out into the corridor behind the bridge and fell forward again. The differences between this corridor and the other one four decks down were twofold. To begin with, its forward wall was made of glass and overlooked the main bridge and wheelhouse itself. And the huge bulkhead doors at either end of it were closed. There was air here, trapped like them because there was nowhere else for it to go. The doors were watertight. The windows were holding against the water pressure. The metal of the bridgehouse, lovingly welded in the shipyards of Gdansk all those years ago, remained airtight.

  As there was nowhere else for them to go, the three of them had an instant’s leisure to look around. To look downwards, at least. John gazed across his empty wheelhouse and through the straining bridge windows down the length of the main deck almost as though his ship were sailing normally into a dark night. All the light was coming from the surface far above them, like a sunset astern. Ahead, the sea they were sailing for this one last time gathered through a dazzling array of hues, passing from the palest blue, still given a green tint by the distant sunlight, to the deepest indigo. Dead ahead it was night-black, starless and icy, giving off its own aura of utter annihilation. The lightless abyss waited patiently, just beyond Napoli’s bows.