The Leper Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  'Where did you put it, Gallaher?' Nicoli's voice was quiet now, appealing.

  Gallaher grinned like a death's head. 'No hospital, y'know. Hell, how could they? Five Paras went up with me. It's bits of their bones did this.' His hand brushed his pitted cheek. 'Smuggled me south so they did, picking out the shrapnel splinters as we went. And almost enough bone for a whole skeleton.'

  Nicoli shook him gently, trying to bring him back. 'Gallaher!'

  'I was no good, after, o'course. Just the smell of the stuff made me puke. I'd have gone mad with keeping it in here.' He gripped Nicoli suddenly, with bruising force. 'You do see that? I'd have come to pieces with it under my bunk!'

  'Course you would, Gallaher. Anyone would, after that. But where did you put it?'

  'Put it in place and primed it. Jeez, you'd think if they was payin' me good money to see it done, they'd have some idea ...But no ..."Keep it hidden and set it twenty-four hours ahead. Prime it when the signal comes in ...To be safe ..."They know nothing about modern timers! Reliable? Christ! You can set your fuggin' watch by them!' The idea amused him. He giggled helplessly until Nicoli shook him again, then his professional pride reasserted itself. 'And I didn't need any of that fancy stuff they sent across from the States in the old days. I'm an artist! You know what I used? Videos! The timers from a couple of old videos set in tandem. Easy. Accurate. Damn near fool proof. Set 'em to run anything up to sixteen weeks ahead, the way I got 'em rigged. Won't run to sixteen weeks, o' course. They'll run to time. To the very minute. Then boom!' He screamed it at the top of his voice and collapsed back into his bunk giggling helplessly as Kanwar and even Nicoli jumped at the sound.

  Spurred by the shock, Nicoli leaned forward and grabbed the man by his shoulders, pulling him into a sitting position, his face inches from the Irishman's. 'Where did you put it, Gallaher?' he asked, again gently.

  Gallaher continued giggling.

  Nicoli glanced over his shoulder then. 'Wait outside,' he ordered Kanwar. And, from the tone of the First Mate's voice, Kanwar was glad to go.

  It took ten minutes. Kanwar stood well clear of the door, so he never found out what kind of duress the Mate used. But after ten long minutes they came out together, Nicoli's arm firmly round Gallaher, supporting him as though they were friends.

  'Quick!' snapped the First Mate, with uncharacteristic rudeness. 'Take his other side.' Kanwar obeyed at once. And so, three abreast, they proceeded.

  They crushed into the lift and hissed down into the bowels of the great tanker. Kanwar's fear of being discovered by the Captain was at once replaced by the fear of discovery by the equally terrifying Chief Engineer, the tall, taciturn American, C J Martyr. Indeed, rounding a bend in the corridor suddenly, they bumped into two figures so unexpectedly that Kanwar cried out aloud, thinking himself discovered by both of these ogres at once. But it was only two of the Palestinian General Purpose seamen coming off engine-room watch. Kanwar knew them: Ibrahim and Madjiid.

  'You two!' ordered Nicoli at once. 'Come with us.' Obediently, unquestioningly, they fell in behind.

  Kanwar paid them no more attention, all other thoughts wiped from his mind by the sudden realisation of where Gallaher was taking them: the Pump Room.

  The thought had no sooner entered his mind than the great steel bulkhead door was before them.

  'Open it,' ordered Nicoli. When Kanwar hesitated, Ibrahim stepped forward and lifted the great iron handle. Like the door to a bank vault, or a nuclear bunker, the huge steel portal swung wide. All of them hesitated on the thresh­ old, as though they knew what awaited them within.

  The Pump Room was the heart of the supertanker. When the computers in the Cargo Control Room four decks above worked out the optimum loading schedules, every drop of oil aboard, even the bunkerage which fuelled the engine, could be moved through here.

  The room itself was three decks high and was palisaded with pipes around the walls. On the far side from the door ­ way they were now hesitating in, some forty feet distant, a single ladder led rung by rung up to a hatch on the main deck just in front of the bridge. On their right, built out from the pipe-covered wall almost like a stage house in a play, was the fire control room.

  In the fire control room great racks of carbon-dioxide canisters stood attached to the automatic fire-fighting equipment; for a fire here was the most dangerous thing that could possibly happen aboard. At the slightest hint of a spark, the automatic equipment would fill the whole Pump Room with carbon dioxide. This process took only seconds. It was the only way of stopping the whole ship exploding.

  And somewhere in the Pump Room Gallaher had chosen to plant his bomb.

  Nicoli moved first, then the drunken Gallaher, then the reluctant Kanwar in chain reaction. The two GP seamen followed. Ibrahim, last in, closed the door behind him.

  In the harsh white lighting, the room gleamed dead silver like a pathology lab in a hospital. The pipes dominated everything, like massive robot snakes frozen to silence in the midst of some sinister, serpentine orgy.

  At once they were in the middle of the room. 'Where?' snarled Nicoli.

  The bemused Irishman looked around, as though surprised to find himself here. Then his face cleared. Even the habitual drunkenness in it vanished, to be replaced by horror at what his sadistic, whisky-loosened tongue had done.

  'Mary, Mother ...' he began, turning to escape from the place and his folly alike.

  But Nicoli caught him by the arm and swung him back. 'Where is it?'

  'Sod you, Nicoli!' The fear of the explosives replaced by terror of the people who had paid him to place them.

  All the rage in the Greek, held pent through the whole episode so far by his need to get the truth, exploded to the surface. Without a further word, he drove his fist into Gallaher's face and the Irishman hit the deck without ever knowing what had hit him.

  For a second they stood looking down at him. There was no sympathy in their faces. They were a hard crew - except for Kanwar, perhaps - on a hard ship. And Gallaher had never been popular. 'He's in the way there,' said Nicoli coldly. Ibrahim and Majiid took an arm each and dragged him clear, but Nicoli was already looking into that harshly bright forest of pipes. 'Now we'll have to do it the hard way,' he observed.

  It took them nearly an hour, but at last Kanwar's keen eyes saw the tiniest twist of green wire in a junction twenty feet up.

  'There it is!' His excitement was almost boyish until he remembered what he had found.

  Nicoli was at his shoulder at once, the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes deepening as though he was gazing at some far horizon. 'Yes!' His broad hand clapped the Third Mate on the back. 'Well done, boy!'

  'We'll have to get a ladder.' Kanwar was all professionalism at once. He turned even before the First Mate nodded and led Ibrahim and Madjiid to the fire control room.

  The low, stage-set door opened inwards and Kanwar held it wide. The ladder stood, telescoped down, amid the canisters on the back wall. It was the work of a moment to release it.

  The two seamen lifted the ladder up on to their shoulders, turned and took two steps forwards, back towards the door. The ladder was slightly unwieldy. As they moved, the front rose just enough to hit the lintel above the door. It caught some wires there but pulled free easily enough when the two men stepped back again. Ibrahim lowered the front and they stepped safely past Kanwar and out into the Pump Room. Kanwar closed the door and followed them at once. He did not hear the faint sound of wires shorting in the room behind him.

  Within a minute, the ladder was extended and in place. With the other three at the bottom, Nicoli climbed up for a first look at Gallaher's bomb.

  It was surprisingly innocuous; hardly more threatening than a neatly wrapped present, with its gaily coloured wires. Without thinking, Nicoli reached down and touched it. His fingertips no more than brushed it, but that was enough. It settled back into the junction of pipes and wall with a decided Clunk! Nicoli jerked back, turning away. He would have fallen had the ladder n
ot been so firmly held below. But the expected explosion did not come.

  After a mental count of three, Nicoli turned back, pushed his arms through the rungs and hugged the safe steel to his broad chest, waiting for the shock to die. Waiting for his heart to stop racing; waiting for the roaring in his ears to fade.

  But then he realised that the roaring in his ears was nothing to do with shock. It was real.

  Automatically, he looked down. At the foot of the ladder, Kanwar stood, gazing up. On his face was the most frightening expression Nicoli had ever seen. The boy's fists were locked on to the ladder and his whole body, like his fingers, seemed closed in some kind of seizure. His eyes were wide and his mouth stretched open, as though he were drowning. His lips and tongue were blue. He was standing there screaming silently up at his friend and he was dead.

  Nicoli saw all this in the time it took for the first agony to hit his chest like a breaking heart. And in the instant it took him to die, he understood: something had switched on the automatic fire-fighting equipment. Every single atom of oxygen had been driven from the place.

  From everywhere in the Pump Room: including their lungs.

  When the first spasm hit him, he locked on to the ladder and remained where he was, apparently about some business; looking just as much alive as the three other corpses at the ladder's foot.

  The roaring of the automatic fire-fighting equipment continued for five more seconds. Then, as there was no more oxygen left anywhere in the Pump Room, right up to the ceiling, it switched itself off and there was silence.

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