The Coffin Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  He hurled himself forward wildly into the waiting arms of Salah and Kerem. “Get me rope!” he yelled.

  “On its way,” yelled Salah in reply. “I counted three still on the other side.”

  “That’s right. We’ll set up near the walkway. Those pipes are all that’re holding her.” They stumbled across the deck, reeling like landsmen as the stern section began to ride the waves with the beginnings of freedom, like a normal ship.

  The rope arrived at the same time they did, carried by Bill Heritage himself. Pausing only to clap the grand old man on a yellow-coated shoulder, Richard led them up one of the midship companionways to the walkway amid the flexing hawser of pipes. It was like some terrifying fairground ride, half remembered from his youth: as he and Salah stood side by side while Bill and Kerem secured the ropes around their waists then belayed safely behind them, they watched the narrow path they were to walk twisting and writhing like a live thing. Steel was flexing with more and more freedom; beginning to steam in places where the cold rain hit. Wood bent like a bow, sparking and splintering. The halves of the ship ground together like toothless jaws, moving with wilder and wilder motion.

  She had never had a real keel like a lesser vessel, so you could hardly say her back was broken. She had been constructed simply of great U-shaped sections—six in all—welded together. The bow and stern sections had been added later. Within these sections, the tanks had been placed, discrete and solid with huge double walls at their ends. And the join between the third and fourth U-shaped sections, currently breaking open, mercifully coincided with the double wall between the two main midship tanks. Both bow and stern remained, for the meantime, watertight; and there was little or no leakage of oil.

  —Or of South African water, thought Richard grimly. Even now, dying like this, Prometheus was keeping her secrets safe. Like a battered child protecting its parents with silence.

  A blow on his shoulder broke the train of thought. The rope round his waist was secure. He shambled forward onto the snaking, roller-coaster walkway.

  At once he was glad of his heavy gloves. He had to keep tight hold of the railings, and the mahogany—not the most flexible of woods—was quilled with splinters already. He was glad, too, of his thick-soled boots, for the metal beneath them was hot—and getting hotter—as he moved through the steam over the yawning, snapping chasm in his ship.

  Wildly in the blinding bluster he searched below for the bright wet-weather gear of the officers on the dead deck. At first he could see nothing, but then the storm relented and he began to see glimpses of furtive movement.

  There was a bizarre game of hide-and-seek going on down there. What in blazes was happening? Didn’t they realize the danger they were in? He could have screamed with frustration. And, at the very thought, one wild figure hurled up a companionway immediately in front of him.

  “BEN!” he bellowed.

  Ben whirled to confront him and Richard staggered back. The expression on his godson’s face was beyond belief. Their eyes locked. Ben stopped and suddenly pulled something from his pocket. It was a gun.

  Then Martyr and Robin came up as well, one from either side, erupting out of the shadows to hurl themselves at him. But he was too quick for them, dancing nimbly back toward the bow, still holding the gun.

  Richard was jolted out of his momentary inactivity as Salah hurled bodily past him and tackled Martyr round the waist, lifting him clear of the catwalk to drag him back. Instantly he dived forward himself, lying along the wooden handrail, belly down, to grab Robin. The rope jerked him back onto his feet and his shoulders popped, crushing her to his chest. Staggering backward on the wild, hot steel, he lost his footing and sat. She sat in his lap.

  The wind stopped.

  There was a second of calm. Just long enough for Ben to dance forward again, to tower over them, the gun held firmly, familiarly, in both hands. He froze, his face a mask of confusion, the gun wavering between them.

  Ben’s mind was a whirl of bloodlust, but he had a bewildering choice of targets. He was going to kill Richard because he was responsible for Ben’s father’s death. He was going to kill Martyr for interfering in his plans. And he was going to kill anyone else who knew what he had done. Starting with the girl.

  He pointed it at Robin first, therefore, snarled, “Good-bye!” and pulled the trigger.

  The instant Ben said, “Good-bye” and pressed the trigger, the greatest of the storm’s rogue waves hit Prometheus’s bow exactly from the side.

  The concussion, like a right hook to a boxer’s jaw, threw the whole bow section to starboard, against the steady pressure of the ship’s turn to port, and it sheared the pipes already weakened by the movements of the two sections.

  Prometheus broke in two.

  Ben suddenly found himself flat on his back, completely ignorant of whether he had killed Robin or not. He felt as though he were attached to the wooden walkway; riveted to it: an invisible force was pressing him down so that he couldn’t make the slightest movement. Couldn’t even breathe. The breath was crushed out of him in a long, wheezing scream. As he realized the whole earthlike solidity beneath him was spinning, wheeling. That was why he couldn’t move—he was pressed into place by the unimaginable forces hurling the forward half of Prometheus to destruction.

  He had time to think, Noooooooooo…

  Richard and Salah, each clasping their human bundle, were thrown up and back as the companionway fell beneath them like an elevator going down. Richard’s consciousness snapped shut on the overpowering need to crush Robin to him, the need to wrap his legs as well as his arms around her, as they tumbled vertiginously. Then the rope slammed taut, winding him, while the pull of her falling body came perilously close to breaking his grip. Something slick but solid, whirling madly, crashed into him: Salah, still holding Martyr—just.

  Enormous power, mostly liquid, surged over him, bringing his broken attempts at catching his breath right to the edge of drowning. Robin wriggled against him, vivid as an eel, and her arms closed around his neck, then her face was close to his, filthy, icy, running. And she was kissing him, fiercely alive. They clung to each other, held to the great stem section by the terrifyingly thin ropes, tiny bundles of life dangling against that sheer steel wall like mountaineers hanging helpless, high on a storm-lashed precipice.

  The force of the storm wave tore the forward section clear, opening it on the broken hinge of the starboard safety rail. It tore loose at once, already sinking, and the great column of spray born of the massive wave joined the first arterial gush from the severed pipes in a thick, freezing Niagara down the naked steel wall that now served the aft section as a blunt bow.

  Salah Malik’s team, steadied by the massive calm of Kerem Khalil and Sir William Heritage, did not flinch. Even in this most terrifying of nightmares, they hung for dear life onto the bucking, straining ropes.

  They saw the air convulse with the concussion of the impact. They saw the whole vista of the deck before them twist and tilt. They saw four figures thrown back and one thrown forward toward the doomed bow. They saw the column of water rise like the hugest of breakers against the forecastle, boiling up, fanning up, exploding up over the side as the forces twisting the very air around them tossed them about in an awesome silence, like toys.

  And when at last their vision cleared, all there was to see was the torn pipe ends cascading sludgy filth, the wildly twisting lines plummeting sheer from the splintered end of the catwalk, and wall after wall of black, foam-webbed water charging in toward them, breaking over something that looked for a moment like a slick black reef before it rolled over and under and was gone.

  Then, for the first time in her history, slowly to begin with, like a child learning, what was left of Prometheus began to pitch, riding over the great storm seas like ships have done over all seas, down from the dawn of time.

  —SAFE HAVEN—

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  They towed her into Europoort after sunset three days later, on Se
ptember 13. There was a fine drizzle and a high overcast that threatened to bring the night in early, but still, it seemed, half of Rotterdam, Vlaardingen, and Schiedam were there to see her in.

  First came the three tugs out of the massive shadows of the gathering dark; the great hawsers, familiar from countless TV and newspaper pictures, stretched up to the crippled giant, which even the smallest television screen had somehow been unable to dwarf. Then, like a bulk of blackness itself, storm-choppy seas thundering against the flat ram of the bow as though against a cliff, she slid into the outwash of the harbor lights. Even cut almost in half as she was, she seemed so big; even broken, she looked so solid. And there was about her still such horrendous potential for disaster.

  But verdammt! said the onlookers one to another, what a crew must there be aboard to bring her safe to port! And as she detached herself from the rain-misted gloom, and, above the sheer wall of her broken bow the scarred wreck of her upper works appeared, first one or two and then all of them began to cheer and cheer.

  As the evening wore on, and the lengthy business of positioning Prometheus safely in an anchorage as far from the rest of the shipping as possible, stretched out, so the crowds began to drift away. Only one or two diehards remained, and they were cleared out of the dock complex itself by the courteous but insistent security guards; and they had to content themselves with crossing to the headland opposite and watching from the hillside there.

  By midnight, when Prometheus was at last in place and the tugs had cast off and sailed away, the rain had cleared and a thin mist was beginning to shroud the anchorage. Even the most intrepid of the boat watchers called it a day once the clammy tendrils began to infest the air; so at last, with his digital watch reading 00.20 local time, on the headland overlooking the anchorage, Kostas Demetrios found himself alone.

  All he had to do now was to prime the bomb in his camera carryall and get it aboard the ship.

  The original plan had come to him almost fully fledged when he was watching the six o’clock news one evening nearly a year ago. There had been an item on the OPEC embargo of oil to South Africa and he had said to himself, in derision, “But how can they enforce that? Jesus! They can’t even police it! Anyone can just sail right in…”

  And that had been where it started.

  All he needed was a tanker, enough money to fit it and run it for a few months. And a cargo of oil—which didn’t even have to belong to him, for heaven’s sake! And a crew willing to sail into Durban and sell the oil illegally.

  But then what? He couldn’t bring the ship home. Not with empty tanks. No. The ship would have to sink so that no one would ever know. Which meant there would be insurance to collect on the ship…And on the cargo, because no one must ever suspect she was empty when she went down.

  So: Stage One, buy, fit, insure, and crew a supertanker. He was a shipping man. He could do that.

  Stage Two, contact the South Africans and agree to prices, dates, points of delivery.

  Stage Three, deliver the oil and accept payment.

  Stage Four, use some of the South African money to buy the now non ex is tent cargo on the international spot market. A buoyant market where prices were climbing dizzily.

  Stage Five, scuttle the ship.

  Stage Six, collect the insurance on his ship and his cargo—worth so much more on the day it was lost than on the day it was purchased.

  And that would be that. He would have made the change. No longer would he be just a shipping man. He would be an oil man who owned his own ships.

  He was awed by the simple glory of it. Why weren’t people doing this all the time? All you needed were some contacts. A little capital. But you could only do it once. And you would have to do it right: there could be no question of illegal practices to stop the insurance payments. No question of people snooping around uninvited—another good reason to buy the “cargo,” just before she sank, himself…

  Well, he could sort all that out later. First, he needed a supertanker.

  Pulling it all back together after the disaster in the Pump Room had been oddly exhilarating. He was by no means addicted to danger but he was the sort of man who enjoyed pressure, and the fact that he managed to save the situation within forty-eight hours finally added to his overall sense of achievement. And it vindicated his decision to put Martyr aboard, knowing he could count on that strange, desperate man in ways he could count on no one else aboard. The only real professional there, doing a professional job, as Demetrios had known he would. The only one not motivated by simple greed. And, Demetrios knew, he had been lucky to have that one strong—very Strong—contact in Crewfinders. But the speed with which he had acted, with his back to the wall, simply added, in the end, to the sense of elation he felt on that afternoon after the Lutine Bell was rung, in that brief time of contentment before it all blew up in his face.

  They phoned him at midnight—it must have been the early hours in London—to tell him the good news: Prometheus was coming home after all, and he realized that if she did so, he was ruined. Lost, the supertanker was worth millions; afloat, she would cost millions—there would be salvage to pay, docking charges, lawyers’ fees. And of course, the authorities would find out what was really in her cargo tanks. If she was lost, he was made. If she survived, he was ruined. Completely. Utterly.

  Now here he was in Rotterdam himself, out of alternatives, with Gallaher’s second bomb. The backup he would have delivered in Durban had not things been changed so drastically. Simply blowing a hole in Prometheus wasn’t going to be any good, he calculated coldly. He had to blow her to hell and gone. He had to manufacture such a holocaust that no one would think to ask what had been in her cargo tanks.

  Salah Malik stood by the wheel as the tugs brought them into Europoort. His arms were so stiff and his bandaged finger so sore, that a lengthy turn at the wheel was almost too much to ask. But his usual replacement, Kerem Khalil, was in scarcely better shape. A series of lesser seamen had stood by the rally-size helm throughout the last forty-eight hours, after John Higgins had overseen the bringing aboard of the lines from the Dutch tugs sent out when it became obvious that what was left of the ship was not going to sink. But Salah and Kerem had been there to bring her into port.

  Martyr had been unconscious when they brought him up. Salah’s shoulders had almost been dislocated by the weight of the big American under the waterfall that had descended on them as they dangled at the end of the rope immediately after Prometheus broke in two. After the first full weight of it, Salah’s grip had begun to slip, his whole hand suddenly on fire. Some vagary of the massive physical laws that held them in their grasp upended them and twisted them around. Martyr’s head had smashed into the unforgiving metal wall behind them with the full weight of two bodies, knocking him out at once.

  The dead weight, especially under these circumstances, would have been too much for most men. Indeed, had he been holding any other man, even Salah’s strength might have faltered. Above the sickening, choking sensation as he all but drowned in the oily deluge, he could feel the muscles of his arms and torso tearing apart. He held the clumsy, slippery bundle of Martyr’s inert body grimly, each second making him more certain that it was all a waste of time, effort, and agony. A few more moments and the chief would slip out of his crippled arms. His right hand gripped his left wrist with bruising force, but the joints in this steely circle at elbow and shoulder were slowly being pulled apart. Salah shook his head to clear his eyes and spat to clear his mouth. Then he ground his teeth together. The wings of his shoulder blades seemed to be tearing away from the muscles of his back. The whole of his torso was burning now, as though he had been severely scalded from neck to waist.

  For the last time he kicked away from the black steel wall that swung toward him like an avalanche time and again. The strange forces that had been tossing the two of them around like a feather relaxed for an instant. Salah swung upright. A pause in the torrent allowed him respite to glance upward, and what he saw there
gave him the one more ounce of strength he needed.

  Kerem Khalil, tied into a makeshift rope sling, was abseiling down the iron precipice toward them.

  Kostas Demetrios sat beneath the gentle dewfall, watching the quiet ship and wondering how best to go about destroying her.

  Prometheus had to be totally destroyed—no matter what the risks to her crew, the anchorage, himself. Only an explosion followed by a massive fire would solve his problems. But he was no suicide. Nor any kind of a fool. He had no intention of being caught in the explosion if he could help it.

  They had put her in the outermost of the docks, with only the headland Demetrios was crouching on separating her from the restless sea. If he followed the headland back the way he had come all those hours earlier with the Dutch sightseers, he would return to the high dock gates. Security was too tight for him there. Only by revealing himself as the owner would he get through, and even then they would probably search him—especially at this time of night. And even if they did not discover the bomb, they would certainly escort him onto the ship and then he would fall into the same trap he had almost fallen into earlier, on the dock. The slightest gesture on his part would have got him aboard. But that would have landed him with the massive salvage bill. And put him straight into the hands of the crew.