Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  He followed the thin legs down past bony shins to ankles and feet that were apparently immovably entrapped in coil after coil of the bright orange rope. He saw immediately that part of the problem was the young man’s footwear. Most of the men he had seen recently wore either flip-flops or trainers. This guy was wearing hiking boots; good solid Timberlands by the look of it. They were old but serviceable. And probably pretty expensive regardless of what part of East Africa the boy had bought them in. Still, in a matter of life and death … He pulled the K1 out of its quick-release sheath and tried to get some purchase on the laces. And the kid all-but kicked him in the face – would have done so if his feet hadn’t been tied down. Richard looked up. The youngster was shaking his head wildly, bubbles exploding from his mouth as he tried to talk the better part of twenty metres under water.

  Have it your way, thought Richard, giving a pantomime nod to show he understood. Those must be some pretty special boots … He snapped the knife back in its sheath and reached for the shears at his belt. Even though they were brand new, razor sharp and expertly wielded by a man who knew ropes and knots, it still took some time to cut the big, bulky boots free. Long before he severed the final bright but obstinate strand, Richard’s dive computer was emitting its alarm again. He didn’t need to look at it to know he was too deep, had stayed too long and was dangerously short of air. But he was a relentlessly ‘cup half full’ character. And the plus side in this situation was that the computer was programmed to time him for a five-minute stop at ten metres and one- to two-minute stops at fifteen and seventeen metres on the way up. However, he doubted Ahmed and he were going to linger over decompression stops. If they were going to get this boy home alive then it would have to be up and out in short order – and sort out the side-effects later.

  And so it proved. The minute the last strand broke, Ahmed simply dumped his dive belt and gave a very positive thumbs up sign. In this instance it meant hit the surface as fast as you can, though the last time Richard himself had used the gesture that forcibly had been on the news that both his children had received first-class honours degrees. He grabbed the young man’s upper arm, just beneath his bony shoulder, ripped the release cord to dump his buckshot weights and powered towards the surface, pacing Ahmed stroke for stroke. As they went up past ten metres they collected Robin, who was waiting there at the dictates of her dive computer and buddy-breathing with her guy. She was using the octopus. And was not, apparently, too disturbed by the grey sharks cruising inquisitively nearby.

  Richard’s dive computer was getting really angry with him by the time his head broke the surface alongside Robin’s, Ahmed’s and the men they had rescued. He looked around, disorientated. Shocked by the brightness. For the sea to the west, towards the African shore, was still on fire, the flames pushed back by that furnace-hot wind blowing westward out of Saudi. The yellow flames illuminated the smashed rear section of what appeared to be an open, metal-hulled fishing boat. What little remained of it was sitting at a crazy angle on the top of the reef spire. But it wasn’t destined to stay there for long by the looks of things – certainly not if the restless, south-running rollers had anything to do with it.

  Beyond the wall of fire, he could just make out the bridge and upper works of a vessel which looked pretty official and military. Coastguards out of Hurgada or El Gouna, as likely as not. And they were not coming any further this way – certainly not until someone put the burning water out. He span clumsily round, pulling Ahmed and their new friend with him. There behind them and blessedly close at hand was the RIB with Mahmood at the throttle, though the twelve-seater was looking a little crowded. Still, not to worry, Richard thought cheerfully. For just behind the RIB was Katerina herself, all lit up like a Christmas tree as Captain Husan brought her gently to the rescue.

  TWO

  Pressure

  Richard’s first thought was I wonder how long it’ll be before decompression sickness hits. He glanced at his dive computer, so disorientated that he was mildly surprised not to see his Rolex. In among all the warning signals flashing there he saw the time. 01:10. Seventy minutes since the dive began. The deepest depth recorded was twenty metres. He had come to the surface in three minutes from that depth whereas the computer would have preferred at least fifteen including decompression stops. The back-lit readout further informed him he had remained at his maximum depth for the better part of a quarter of an hour. Moreover, twenty metres was a maximum depth, five metres deeper than planned. Those were the two most concerning factors – time at the extra depth and the uncontrolled speed of ascent.

  He wondered what that combination would mean with regards to the manufacture of nitrogen in his bloodstream and the possible locations of bubbles of the stuff in his arteriovascular system and heart, in his joints, in his brain and beneath his skin. Only after these thoughts had flashed through his brain did he begin to register his immediate situation. He spat out his regulator and breathed fresh air. Like the unexpected currents, it was surprisingly cold all of a sudden. And blowing out of Africa, seemingly. He raised his right hand – his left was still supporting the rescued youth – and was about to switch off his head lamp when he realized that it made a useful beacon to guide either the RIB or Katerina to their immediate location. He opened his mouth to call to Robin when the situation took a severe turn for the worse.

  Someone started screaming. With a shock that oriented him immediately in the here-and-now, Richard realized that there was someone in the water less than a hundred metres west of him. Someone who had not yet managed to swim over and join the others aboard or around the RIB. Someone who was too late now, for he had been caught up in the wall of fire that the new westerly wind was blowing down on them. A black head, silhouetted against the yellow dancing flame wall, was suddenly ablaze, unsettlingly like the head of a giant match. Ahmed shouted something inarticulate, let go of the rescued youth and struck out with a powerful crawl. He had taken four strokes when the burning head was jerked abruptly beneath the waves. The surface of the water was bright enough to show a sinister swirling. The burning man had not just ducked beneath the surface. Something had pulled him down.

  ‘Sharks!’ shouted Robin. Richard twisted in the water, and there, immediately behind them, its approach masked by the roaring and the confusion, was Mahmood’s RIB. Strong black arms reached down over the inflated gunwale and the safety line looped along the top of it to pluck Robin and her survivor out of the water. Richard pushed the slack body he was supporting forward and it too was pulled aboard, though his Timberlands got tangled in the line.

  Richard swung round, shouting, ‘Ahmed!’

  ‘Here!’ came the sonorous reply, surprisingly close at hand.

  ‘The RIB’s full,’ shouted Robin, her voice unusually high-pitched with strain and worry. ‘Hang on to the safety lines and we’ll tow you to Katerina!’

  As they were side by side in the water, Richard and Ahmed clung on to the same side of the RIB, trusting Mahmood to keep it running straight and true. Robin was squashed between two seemingly comatose young men but was close enough to reach over and put her hand on top of Richard’s. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, her voice brittle but trying for light and breezy. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for sharks.’

  ‘It’s not the sharks I’m worried about,’ said Richard. ‘You just keep an eye out for that bloody great triggerfish!’

  Katerina’s square stern offered two main modes of access. There was a ledge that folded down to sit immediately above the water, backed by a low wall which presented an easy step over on to the after deck. Mahmood nestled the RIB against the lowered ledge and the passengers packed within it climbed out and staggered aboard like a plague of zombies, dead-eyed, exhausted and lost. Most of them limping, a couple of them crawling and at least two being half carried, half dragged. On either side of the ledge there was a ladder. Richard and Ahmed used this to climb aboard, then they sat on the low wall with their feet on the ledge while they discarded their face masks and
fins then began to shrug off their tanks. Robin helped Richard and, once he had secured the RIB, Mahmood helped Ahmed. In a locker by the diving equipment store there were three terry towelling robes. They shrugged these on and used them to dry themselves as best they could.

  Within five minutes, the four of them were pushing their way gently through the men they had pulled out of the sea and climbing up on to the bridge. The slim, slight, dynamic figure of the self-styled Captain Husan was standing at the wheel, uncharacte‌ristically inactive, his hand on the throttles and the helm doing little more than keeping Katerina in position against the twin pressures of wind and tide. And Richard could see why. The wall of flame showed little intention of subsiding.

  The coastguard vessel was on the far side of it and the coastguard captain was calling through the open link on the radio in accented but fluent English: ‘Unless there is a pressing reason for you to return to Sharm, I would prefer you wait here until I can take the men you have retrieved aboard. It would mean less paperwork and fewer complications if they were all processed together at the coastguard base in Hurgada. I will not risk running my vessel through the fire, however, and almost every other course open to me – other than returning to Hurgada – is blocked by reefs. I repeat, therefore, that I require you to wait …’

  ‘That will not be possible, I’m afraid, Captain,’ answered Richard, taking command of the situation. He covered the mic and asked Husan, ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Captain Mohammed,’ answered Husan shortly.

  ‘Captain Mohammed, my name is Richard Mariner and I am in command of this vessel. We have some badly injured survivors here and only limited medical assistance on board. Furthermore, several of our people involved in the rescue are in acute danger of developing decompression sickness within the next thirty to sixty minutes – as indeed are some of the men we have brought aboard. There are two decompression chambers in Sharm and none so far as I know in Hurgada. We are going to Sharm at once, therefore. But we will of course alert the coastguard, police and immigration officials as well as the local hospitals as we approach. Our voyage, such as it is, is already registered with the harbourmaster at Sharm.’

  ‘Very well,’ answered Captain Mohammed after a brief pause. ‘If you have genuine medical emergencies aboard.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain. Speaking as one myself, I must confirm that we need to be in Sharm as soon as humanly possible.’

  ‘Very well, Katerina. I too will be in contact with the authorities in Sharm. I should warn you, however, that the facilities you plan on using are by no means cheap. If you are going to pay for all the treatment you seem to be envisaging, you or your insurers had better have deep pockets. Goodnight and good luck. Over and out.’

  ‘Right, Husan,’ said Richard as he broke contact. ‘Back to Sharm with all possible speed. Mrs Mariner and I will start assessing the injured – unless and until we get hit by decompression sickness ourselves. Mahmood, I suggest you get on to the authorities in Sharm and warn them when we will arrive and what we are bringing in with us. Check the prices, but bottom line is we will pay anything needed. Ahmed and I will need decompression, as will the man we rescued. That alone is the better part of seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour from memory. Use that as a base figure and work from there. And now I think of it, Mrs Mariner will need to join us too, to be on the safe side, along with the man she helped. The third man from the anchor, if he’s aboard, should be OK in terms of the bends – or decompression sickness – because he didn’t breathe any compressed air. But we need to assess who has what other injuries from the wreck itself, and who has suffered chemical burns or toxic ingestion from the fuel that was spilt. There can’t be any burns from the fire, thank heaven, because as far as I know all the people Mahmood took aboard were out of the water before that flare set it alight. No shark bites either, with luck. That’s it for us. Captain Mohammed can work out the rest when he gets his boat and his group of survivors back to the coastguard base in Hurgada. Then he and the authorities in Sharm can get started on the paperwork. When you’ve reported all that could you come down and give us a hand with the wounded?’

  ‘That’s all well and good,’ said Robin as Husan brought Katerina round in a tight loop, reversed her course and began to power due east towards Sharm with the wind at her back. ‘But where are these people from? And where were they going?’

  ‘They’re from East Africa,’ answered Husan. ‘And they’re either going to El Tor on the Sinai, a little north of Sharm, or Alsorah across on the Saudi coast. They’re almost certainly being smuggled.’

  ‘Smuggled?’ echoed Robin. ‘But where on earth to?’

  ‘Tell you what, guys,’ interrupted Richard. ‘This is a conversation we can have while we’re doing elementary triage on the people we just brought aboard.’ As he spoke he was in motion and Robin followed him as he ran down the companionways. ‘If they speak any English or Arabic we might even get some input from them as we work. But from the look of them,’ he added as they stepped on to the aft deck and found themselves the subject of a dozen blank and hopeless stares, ‘if we don’t start helping them soon, the only place they’re going to be smuggled into is the graveyard.’

  Robin nodded. Richard was right. As ships’ captains – still very occasionally exercising command – they tended to keep their First Aid certificates up to speed. Richard in particular kept his up to Accident and Emergency level. When he told Captain Mohammed there was no medical help aboard it had been as close to a bare-faced lie as she had ever heard him come. Especially as Katerina boasted a pretty well-equipped little sickbay, though nothing like the facilities their twelve guests were going to need by the looks of them. Or anything like a decompression chamber.

  But Robin was nothing if not single-minded. As she and Richard went through the rescued men, performing elementary triage, she quizzed Ahmed and Mahmood – when he joined them – and her surprisingly knowledgeable husband about the nuts and bolts of people smuggling in the Middle East. The triage was basic but simple, allowing maximum time to discuss the history, theory and practice as there was little enough to debate about medical matters. But before the conversation or the treatment began, Richard stood for a moment in silent thought as he tightened the white towelling belt of his terry robe and ordered his immediate priorities, planning what they needed to accomplish during the next half hour or so with the same meticulous foresight with which he planned a voyage or an important action. There were twelve men aboard who needed to be dealt with. They were all young men of African descent in varying states of distress and malnutrition, dehydration and sunstroke. Of the twelve, two were comatose. These were the men Richard and Robin had each brought up drowned to within spitting distance of their coffins. They had been carried aboard and laid on the side-benches. They needed to be checked, then moved to the medical facility and checked in greater detail. Two others were in little better shape, having been on the verge of sunstroke before they had been thoroughly doused in petrol, some of which had found its way into their stomachs and lungs; including the third man attached to the anchor – the one who had pulled free first. They were the ones who had crawled aboard and lay collapsed on the deck now, little better than the pair on the benches. Ahmed and Mahmood would have to support or carry these four men below first to await Richard and Robin’s further attention in the sickbay while they continued the first assessment of the others here on deck. The next four were walking wounded – variously cut, battered and bruised from being thrown about in a metal boat that was breaking into a sharp-edged wreck on a coral head as keen as a bundle of razors. Looking more closely at the various wounds, some of which were still bleeding, Richard found himself surprised that the sharks had not attacked earlier and in greater numbers. These men also would have to be dispatched to the sickbay to be washed, disinfected and bandaged – either Richard or Robin could have stitched them up, but he decided to leave something for the hospital doctors to do. Looking around the deck, he was relieved
to see that the last four were drenched on the one hand and dehydrated on the other – an interesting combination like something out of the Ancient Mariner, battered and bruised but neither skin nor bone seemed to have been broken, so they could be safely left on deck to catch their breath and to drink as much of the Hayat bottled water from the chiller as they could stomach.

  Richard bent first over the young man he and Ahmed had released from the anchor. ‘There’s nothing we can do for this poor bloke in the short term. We’ll have to get him decompressed the same as the rest of us, then into hospital. I think I’ll give the guy who’s swallowed petrol some oxygen to help his breathing. But really and truly we need them all down in the sickbay.’

  The sickbay was overwhelmed almost at once. Its two beds were occupied by unconscious bodies and the two chairs beside them contained the men using the oxygen who were varying their breathing through the plastic face masks with sips from big plastic bottles of ice-cold Hayat water. A part-opened pack containing a further dozen bottles stood on the floor between them. Richard and Robin could just about fit in, but the wider they opened the doors to the medicine cupboards and the more equipment they got out, the more cramped it became. A line of four variously wounded men stretched down the corridor, therefore, with Ahmed keeping an eye on them until Richard could start tending to them.

  No sooner had Richard started to clean and bandage the wounded than he found himself thanking heaven he had decided not to stitch them up, because all of a sudden he found he couldn’t move his fingers very well. He actually stopped working on a gashed forearm for an instant and looked at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. He tried to bend his fingers. Winced with pain and stopped. It was as though a crippling case of arthritis had set into the joints of his hands with amazing rapidity. Frowning, he fell silent for the time-being and concentrated on trying to make his recalcitrant and increasingly painful digits do what he needed them to do. It suddenly occurred to him that he should have perhaps got dressed in more than a robe at an earlier stage, while he could still move. As he realized this, Husan’s voice came over the tannoy. ‘We’re there, Captain Mariner. Sharm el-Sheikh marina. And I believe there is a welcome committee waiting for us on the dockside.’