Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  Outside in the corridor, it was the work of a moment to resecure the door, then he was off; making his silent way back to his berth.

  He had taken three steps on the stairway when he heard the lift whine into motion. Fear of discovery warred with inquisitiveness in his breast. Inquisitiveness won. He turned and flattened himself against the wall. If he was careful, he could see anyone who exited from the lift at this level. If no one did, it would be easy enough to see from the display at what level they had got in or out.

  Simplicity won. The lift stopped here. The Chief got out. He looked coldly around, then turned. He strode past the end of the stairway without noticing the spy. He walked quite openly down the corridor without realising he was being followed.

  He broke into the library and started sorting through its contents without knowing he was being watched.

  Richard sprang awake out of a deep, dreamless sleep. He was absolutely sure there was someone in his room. He groped for his bedside light, wondering in a panic about the rhythmic surge of sound. Nothing was where it should be.

  This was not his bed!

  Totally disorientated, he swung his feet to the floor. The vibration told him he was at sea, but that only confirmed his suspicion that this was part of a nightmare.

  'Rowena?' He called his dead wife's name as he always did in his nightmares and waited: sometimes she would answer; sometimes not. He took a hesitant step towards where the shadows were thickest, knowing that was where she would be. He took another. And barked his shin against a chair. The pain brought clarity.

  He turned and reached for the light switch unerringly, knowing exactly where it was now that he had his bearings. The cabin flooded with light. It was empty apart from himself, and yet the impression lingered that someone had been close at hand.

  He crossed to the door and opened it. The tiny, dark vestibule was empty. So was his shower on the right. So was his day room straight ahead.

  He had been sleeping fully clothed. He opened the door and looked out into the corridor. It was empty, but it contained a hint of a footstep, a subliminal memory of movement. The silent echo of a softly closed door.

  Thoughtfully, he closed his own door and returned to bed. This time he undressed and got properly beneath the sheets.

  The last thing he did was to check the time. It was 03.00 on the dot.

  Far below, in the Pump Room, Gallaher's video-timer clicked almost silently to 00.00; set not to Gulf Time, but to GMT.

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning, Richard held a lifeboat drill before breakfast. It had been one of Slope's first duties aboard to draw up and publish the lists, and it was one of the Captain's duties to hold a drill before the end of his first twenty-four hours in command.

  It went perfectly satisfactorily, although Richard had hoped to catch one or two slackers and identify potential weaknesses in the running of his ship with the unexpected timing of the exercise. But the only man apparently caught with his trousers down was the Chief. Richard was faintly disappointed in the man. They had taken an instant dislike to each other, but Richard had thought him at least efficient.

  He stood by his lifeboat. The crew was lined up nearby. The cover was off, the davits swung out. He looked at his stop watch. Martyr was two minutes later than everyone else ... Three ...

  The sun beat down out of a hard blue sky. There seemed to have been no dawn, no cool morning - simply an abrupt transition from stuffy darkness to blazing heat some time when no one was looking. There was that faint headwind which bespeaks flat calm - it was Prometheus's movement, not the movement of the air, which made the wind.

  The sea, fifty or so feet below, was like oil; the waves flat and sluggish, disturbed only by the great ship's passage. The horizons were far and golden, concealing Shiraz behind leagues of Iranian desert to the north and Doha to the south. Prometheus was heading east.

  Four minutes.

  Martyr appeared at last, walking briskly, looking as if he would rather have been running. His face, as usual, was absolutely closed but there hung about him a thunderous atmosphere of rage.

  'Good morning, Chief,' said Richard, putting his stopwatch away. 'Time for breakfast, I think.'

  Martyr could have made any excuse: it would have been accepted as a matter of course. But he seemed content to eat his food in silence.

  Richard watched him, thinking of the long-gone days when a Captain could treat a Chief as though he were a junior. No longer. Nowadays Captain and Chief had to work hand in hand - equals, except in the most extreme circumstances. Nowadays, a Captain would never dream of belittling his Chief.

  But what of a Chief apparently intent on belittling himself?

  First that exhibition last night; then this morning.

  Last night ...

  Suddenly it began to make more sense. Richard leaned forward surreptitiously and squinted. The sun bludgeoning through the window fell upon the white cloth of Martyr's sleeve like a magnesium flare. Bright enough to reveal, just above the immaculate cuff, a series of tiny, dimpled pinpricks and a couple of short-cut threads.

  Richard's hard blue gaze switched to the far end of the table. To where Slope and Tsirtos together were rapidly ridding the world of half a dozen eggs and much of a pig. There was about them an air of barely suppressed hilarity which explained almost as much as the marks on Martyr's cuff.

  The Captain sat back in his chair, thin-mouthed. This was not a happy ship, and, for all his attempts to pour oil on troubled waters, the situation was not helped when junior officers sewed up the arms and legs of Chief Engineers' uniforms. A prank which, he strongly suspected, would not go unpunished.

  Which in turn would only escalate the situation.

  But the rest of that day left little room for mischief. They moved further east in that tight arc south of the Jazirehs which guard the Gulf approaches to the Strait of Hormuz. Here, the great 250-mile width of the busy sea lanes is compressed into a mere forty miles before opening out again, into the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea and the magic vastness of the Indian Ocean.

  But all that lay far beyond them at the moment.

  As in the English Channel, the Strait of Hormuz is divided into lanes like a motorway. First Slope, then John Higgins, then Ben Strong guided them through the day into the first stages of this invisible motorway; plotting their position with careful precision, checking to within scant yards on the Sat Nav equipment up above the chart table, growling orders to the seaman at the helm.

  The Engineering Officers took their corresponding watches below.

  Richard, by no means relieved of the burden of fatigue he had carried aboard, filled his morning with paperwork. Not a difficult task. He had forgotten how much everything that happened on board his ship depended on his whim. He had to agree - amend, if he wished - all the menus for the day. The power made him grimly self-mocking: they would all eat baked beans from here to Europoort if he so desired. Oh, the corruption!

  He began to detail a list of the conferences it would be necessary to hold. The ship would have to be carefully maintained as they proceeded south towards the wintry Cape. Only a fool would take a summer-laden tanker around those. dangerous, stormy, sharp-rocked shores if she were in anything other than tip-top condition. Then, as they proceeded back up the west coast of Africa, they would have to repair the ravages of the southern winter. When Prometheus reached Europoort, Richard wanted her to be in better shape than she had been in when he assumed command. So he drew up schedules of maintenance and pencilled in times and dates. He suspected Ben would have drawn up similar lists. They would compare notes later. Now, who should he get to check the paint lockers?

  He made a note to ask the Chief to draw up a corresponding list for engine maintenance, though he suspected it would have been done long ago.

  In the absence of much in the way of videos and books - he had already despatched his own travel reading, CS Forester's The Happy Return, to the officers' lounge in the hope of starting a new library th
ere - he drew up a shortlist for an entertainments committee.

  He made notes of what he wished to say during his noon broadcast and checked with Tsirtos for any interesting pieces of international news. There wasn't even a Test match.

  He gave his noon broadcast.

  And at last he had run out of papers to sign and lists to make and dates to pencil and committees to draw and things to do and so he went up on to the bridge.

  John was busy at the chart table. The Collision Alarm Radar, which observed the position of every ship and obstacle nearby, was set on its lowest calibration and would warn them automatically if anything came too near. A General Purpose seaman stood by the helm - a wheel no larger than the steering wheel of a rally car.

  Jazireh Ye Queys lay off the port beam, a low gold shoulder shrugging aside the ripples of mercuric water. A VLCC inbound slid a few miles south to starboard - perhaps three miles - riding high and looking huge. Richard watched her for an instant before John appeared at his shoulder. 'Captain?'

  Richard turned at once, alerted by something in the Manxman's tone. 'Yes?'

  'Take a look at this, would you?'

  On the chart table lay a litter of papers, rulers, dividers, chinagraph pencils, calculators and a sextant.

  John was an old-fashioned sailor at heart. He had a yacht which he kept in the marina at Peel on the Isle of Man, in an anchorage under that tall, frowning castle - an ocean racer, as if he didn't get enough of the ocean in his line of work. But then, thought Richard indulgently, as he crossed to the chart table, he himself had kept a yacht when he was John's age. The yacht which had started it all: Rebecca.

  On board, John was as modem as anyone. Calm, quiet, executive; perfectly at home with the modem machinery and the high-tech aids. But once in a while, Richard knew, some old sea-dog of an ancestor (a Viking, perhaps, come ravishing after the fair Manx maidens a millennium ago) would peep out of those dark eyes; and you would find those small, calloused hands of his at some task that sailors had been about for centuries past.

  Today he had taken a noon sight of the sun. 'I read it at meridian passage on the dot. Not quite when you started broadcasting. Had Tsirtos check with the World Service pips in case the chronometers were off. Perfect conditions. Perfect sights. Perfect instrument. Never been wrong. Never.' He picked up the instrument lovingly and Richard didn't like the repetition of 'never', suspecting at once where the conversation was leading.

  'So?' he prompted.

  'I've checked my calculations three times now. Even used the calculator.' An admission of deep desperation.

  'But they still disagree with the Satellite Navigation System,' Richard said, giving the Sat Nav its full name, for once.

  John nodded. 'Look,' he said, sweeping aside the litter on the plastic sheet over the chart. There were two black crosses marked, some way apart. 'According to my sights we're here.' He pointed to the northernmost.

  He reached up and pressed the buttons on the Sat Nav. Figures clicked on to the LCD. 'This thing says we're here.' He pointed to the southernmost cross. He looked starboard suddenly. Richard swung round to follow his gaze. The unladen tanker had moved exactly abeam of them, three miles south.

  'If the Sat Nav is to be believed,' said John grimly, 'we've just collided with her.' Then he caught his breath at the enormity of what he had just said - especially to Richard Mariner.

  Richard felt the flesh on his forearms quiver. He took a deep breath. 'Keep checking our position against positions obtained from the islands using radar,' he ordered tightly. 'And warn the others. I'll send Sparks up to see what he can do with it.'

  On the face of it this worked well enough. Tsirtos, the Radio Officer - 'Sparks' - spent the next couple of hours pulling the Sat Nav to pieces, checking, then reassembling it. It was much older than it looked, battered inside, becoming faulty. It took a while to fix. He missed lunch. Without him, Slope was quieter.

  Lunch was all too short. Officers bustled through the meal and departed busily. Only Martyr showed any disposition to linger, and Richard got the impression the Chief wanted to talk to him but didn't know where to start.

  Richard sat, also silent, wondering how to help. But he had been away from the sea too long and had fallen out of the way of ruling a pride of officers.

  In the end, both men remained silent and rose when lunchtime ran out with that unspoken conversation rankling between them and making matters worse.

  Richard went up to his office and began to make more lists and draw up the agenda for the first Captain's conference which he wanted to hold in the morning. But his mind was incessantly dragged away from the matters in hand by nagging, formless worries.

  After an hour, Tsirtos came to report that the Sat Nav was repaired. Like Martyr, he gave the impression that he would have liked to have said more than he did say, and the Captain began to get the measure of him, seeing beneath that curious Mediterranean mixture of shy immaturity and boyish bravado another, more calculating man. As though somewhere in his twenty-six years of life, he had learned to behave young but think old. As though he had learned to live with secrets.

  After he had left, Richard found himself leafing yet again through the report of the accident which had brought him here.

  All at once he noticed something which had escaped his notice before. There was the faintest smear of correction fluid on the page. His interest piqued, he took the page to the window and pressed it against the glass. At first he could see nothing, but then the brightness of the afternoon came to his aid.

  The number of dead found in the Pump Room had been corrected. Martyr had written 10 first; then corrected it to 9.

  Was that significant? Like so much else, it turned around the Chief. Should he get him in here and grill him properly and damn the consequences?

  No. It was too early for that. There had to be another way. He couldn't afford to have the deck and the engine room in two separate camps, suspicious of, and armed against, each other this early in the voyage.

  Driven by abrupt frustration, he shut the book with a loud bang and gazed along the deck. He had been aboard twenty-four hours now. The Gulf had used that time to get under his skin, in spite of all the tightly enclosed world of Prometheus could do to keep it at bay.

  There was an easy chair convenient to the window. He sat in it to watch the sea and think.

  At first, as he woke, he thought something incredibly horrible had happened. Every surface around him seemed to have been rinsed in blood.

  Prometheus seemed to be sailing a sea of blood through a downpour of blood.

  That was what he saw before he understood what he was seeing.

  It was the Shamaal.

  The desert wind had crept up behind them, carrying sand like a plague of locusts deep within it. They were travelling at 15 knots and the wind a little faster. The sandgrains and the supertanker were all but still in relationship with each other. The tiny specs of red sandstone and crystal mica percolated through the air with the balletic grace of snowflakes. The sun, halfway to the horizon, looked like a huge blood orange.

  Abruptly, the deck beneath Richard's feet vibrated to a different beat. He glanced at his watch. 16.30.00 - the second hand sweeping past 12 in the unhesitating progress of a Rolex movement. Ben Strong, on the bridge, had cut the speed.

  16.30.30 A knock at the door.

  'Come!'

  It was Slope, sent down to inform the Captain of the new situation.

  'I'll come up,' he decided, inevitably.

  Even from the bridge, it was difficult to see the fo'c'sle head. The usually clear lines of the deck were already slightly out of focus, the geometric angles cloaked by curves of drifting sand.

  Ben was in charge as Richard entered, standing behind the helmsman's left shoulder, glaring into the murk. John, although off duty only half an hour, hovered over the Collision Alarm Radar. As Richard crossed the threshold, he glanced anxiously across at the Mate's back. 'Sand's giving false echoes on this now, Ben,' he sai
d tensely.

  'What are we, Ben?' asked Richard, crossing to the Captain's chair. With his arrival, some of the tension seemed to leave the situation.

  'Half ahead, making eight knots,' answered Ben, a measure of relief audible in his voice.

  'Come to slow and make five.' Richard stood for a moment by the big black leatherbound chair on the port side of the bridge, then he sat with every appearance of ease.

  'Slow ahead,' acknowledged Ben, his hand moving on the engine-room telegraph. The pounding of the engines slowed further, pulsing to a funereal beat. 'Five it is.'

  The light thickened. Shadows crouched like monsters in corners, under tables. The Sampson posts halfway down the deck became almost invisible. 'Jesus!' said Ben. 'This is impossible. How's the radar?'

  'Murky,' answered John.

  'Start the siren, please,' ordered Richard quietly. Immediately, the lost-soul howl boomed out over the Gulf. The situation was rapidly becoming dangerous. They couldn't see the length of the desk. They couldn't rely on the radar. Only the Channel was busier.

  'Sparks in the radio room?' asked Richard nonchalantly, already certain of the answer.

  'Yes.' Ben.

  'Good.' He could warn local shipping if things got any worse. 'But I think I still want a particularly sharp pair of eyes up forrard. Mr Slope?'

  'Sir?'

  'Take some glasses and a walkie-talkie. Stroll up to the fo'c'sle head, if you'd be so kind. I'll arrange for a member of the crew to relieve you shortly.'

  'Right, sir.' He turned to go.

  For some reason he would never understand, Richard added, 'And keep in touch.'

  'Right-ho, sir,' said Slope cheerfully, and he was gone.

  Richard leaned back against the headrest which, with the swivel foot, made his seat look like a dentist's chair. On a shelf beneath the port windows was his radio telephone. He picked it up and switched it on, ready to receive.