Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  At this speed, never varying, day in day out, they had steamed on a course a little south of east until they had 'turned the corner' out of the Gulf of Oman, into the monsoon and across Cancer; a degree or two east of south across the Arabian Sea, east of the Red Sea approaches and past Socotra.

  They were proceeding west of south, swinging towards southwest proper, preparing to pass down the inner arc of the Seychelles, the Amirantes, and Providence Island, to the Comoros and the Mozambique Channel approaches. They should reach the Comoros in eighty-four hours' time - midday on the 29th.

  Now they were at the Equator: 0 of latitude, 56 east longitude, at the heart of the Indian Ocean.

  Richard lay on his bunk fully clothed and wide awake. His shoulders were propped against the wall, feeling the easy movement of his great ship through the long ocean swells. Such was the size of her hull that Prometheus did not ride the water as a smaller ship might have done, pitching as the waves passed beneath her; but she had her own special movement and it was familiar to him now.

  The last six days had laid the ghosts of the Gulf to rest. The mysteries which had seemed so important then were in their proper place at last. Occasionally they nagged at the edge of his mind, like an unsolved crossword clue, but they remained secondary, a long way behind the efficient running of his ship.

  And Prometheus herself seemed different. He supposed he should have expected teething troubles, and thought now he had overreacted to them. For the deep blue waters of the Indian Ocean seemed to have brought out the best in her. Her mysterious, unsettling little ways had gone - he looked for some wood to touch, overcome with uncharacteristic superstition at the thought - and she showed her true colours at last. She was a strong, pleasant, reliable ship.

  Worked by a strong, reliable, for the most part pleasant crew. Oh, Martyr might have been more approachable; Ben less of a bully at times; Napier less of a hard man at all times; but by and large they were fine. And Robin seemed to have pulled them together. At times she seemed their mascot, almost their pet. They took endless delight in teasing her, being gruff, avuncular, patronising; indulging her, teaching her, testing her.

  It was not a situation she enjoyed. She was her own woman, a fully trained, flawlessly competent officer. She deserved a great deal more respect than most of them tended to give her. But they had both known that this would be the case at first before he had agreed to take her on. And she was behaving perfectly under the added strain, slowly earning the respect of the most deeply entrenched male chauvinists among them. As he had never doubted that she would.

  At first she had put on an act, becoming a wide-eyed innocent with an inexhaustible fund of energy and an open, inquiring, apparently guileless nature. Trained in the dour rigours of the North Sea, on tankers a fraction of Prometheus's size, she made a game of the simple joy it was giving her to be on her first Cape run. She treated the whole thing as an enormous lark; a huge adventure. This ebullient enthusiasm, showered on one and all, had proved a perfect buffer. And a necessary one, keeping her at a distance from them during the long days sailing these vast blue waters, sun-filled and monsoon-cooled; and during the black velvet nights with their mother-of-pearl moons and extravagant, gemstone stars.

  Only occasionally, when they were together not as Captain and Third Mate, but as Master and Owner of the oil, did she put the mask away with him and show how much it was costing to perform the role.

  He worried about her, and wondered if that were patronising. He was tempted to protect her a little, too aware that the others were watching them like a teacher with a favourite pupil. On the surface, the tip of the iceberg, his relationship with her was the same as everyone else's, and turned around her efficiency as an officer and member of the crew. For the others, her sex made her an unknown quantity in a situation where unknown quantities were dangerous. It was the old story: their lives might depend upon her. They had to know how reliable she was under pressure. With a man, rightly or wrongly, they would take so much for granted. With a woman they would not. He found it distasteful, as did some of the others. But they could not protect her and nor should he.

  They would have been foolish to try. She wanted no protection; required no special treatment. She was perfectly capable of handling them, individually or all at once. However they chose to test her, she would pass. On their terms, perhaps: on her own terms, certainly.

  And below and abaft the bridge where he lay, she was undergoing her first real test - the ageless maritime ritual of the Crossing of the Line.

  A great roar of 'Guilty!' greeted the completion of the charges.

  'Guilty as charged!' thundered a single voice. 'Remove the first prisoner for execution. Uncover the second prisoner.'

  Suddenly, Robin stood blinking in the brightness. Unbelievingly, she looked around Prometheus's after deck. The security lighting revealed half a dozen weirdly dressed figures etched against absolute blackness of the vast night. Beside them stood a jerry-built swimming pool made with a wooden frame and canvas sides, some six feet deep. Besides that, a raised platform with a table on it.

  The GP seaman called Khalil was the only other person aboard who had never crossed the line. Having been charged, he was now being led, in chains, up towards the table. As he neared it, a huge figure, bizarrely dressed to resemble a cook, rose up to meet him, flourishing a massive meat axe.

  Struggling silently, Khalil was laid on the table. The axe rose and fell, apparently splitting him open. The cook reached down and pulled free string after string of raw sausages. The spectators howled their approval. The victim was swept off the table and hurled into the pool.

  The two nymphs holding Robin's arms were in motion at once, hurrying her round the end of the pool into the presence of Neptune himself. He sat on a throne of shells, cascading water from his great gold crown whenever he moved. Everything about him gleamed green - his trident, his curling beard, his flowing, seaweed robes. The nymphs forced her to her knees. At least she wasn't in chains like poor Khalil whom she could hear trying to get out of the pool behind her.

  'Who dares enter my watery kingdom?' boomed the same mannered voice which had just sentenced Khalil.

  'Robin Heritage, Third Officer, Prometheus,' cried her escorts.

  'With what is she charged?'

  Another, more sinister, figure appeared beside the vivid god. Someone dressed as a lawyer. Wigged and masked like the rest.

  'With being a woman!'

  Raucous chorus of approval.

  'With being aboard a man's ship ... With doing aboard a man's ship a man's job ...With doing it almost as well as the average man might do it ... With robbing, therefore, the average man of his job ... And so being guilty of the current levels of unemployment in the British Empire and of the collapse of the Western World!'

  'Guilty!' they chorused.

  'Guilty as charged,' yelled Neptune. 'Remove the prisoner for execution!'

  Robin was unceremoniously dumped in an empty chair which was immediately lifted on to the platform where the cook's table had been. Before she could react in any way, a shaving brush the size of a mop was thrust into her face, spreading stiff, green, stinking foam everywhere from shoulders to ears. In a moment she was ready. Gasping for breath, she opened her eyes only to be confronted with a fish-man wielding a cut-throat razor as long as her arm. The blade was metal, and sharp enough to scrape away a little skin as she was shaved to the gleeful shouts of Neptune and his cohorts.

  After a few moments this too was over and she was lifted bodily from the chair. She saw Neptune rise to tower above her.

  'One!' he shouted. She was swung like a hammock between two of them.

  'Two!' The whole chorus as she went back, and ...

  'Three!'

  As she sailed through the air, she twisted and landed badly. As soon as the water closed over her, she curled her body so her shoulders hit the bottom with a considerable bump. At once, she wedged her hand into a wrinkle in the canvas of the pool's skin and waited. />
  The trick worked even better than she had dared hope.

  After no more than a minute, Neptune himself came floundering to her rescue.

  As soon as he plunged into the pool she was in motion, and before he knew what was going on, the sea-king's heroic gesture was undone.

  She rose out of the water in the far corner to throw his robes on to the deck, the scissors skittering away across the metal. Then, lithe as a seal, she was out herself, turning to sit on the corner of the pool looking in; her uniform transparent, but beneath it her best bikini.

  Neptune, on the other hand, was wearing only his mask and wig.

  There was a moment of stunned silence then two of the nymphs had torn off their masks and were cheering: John Higgins and Andrew McTavish. And all the rest joined in. Gentle hands grabbed her from behind and carried her shoulder high to the bar, singing, 'For she's a jolly good fellow.'

  When they were gone, Richard stepped out of the shadows with the towel Robin wasn't going to need after all.

  He climbed up on to the scaffold and looked down. Ben had taken off the Neptune headdress and was standing, calculating what his shaken dignity would allow him to do.

  'Warned you, Number One,' said Richard.

  Ben looked up and grinned ruefully. 'She fooled me all along the line,' he admitted. 'She's quite a girl. An officer but no gentleman!'

  Richard gave a bark of laughter and threw him down the towel.

  Haji Hassan laughed quietly to himself, uncertain whether he was more pleased with the humiliation of his friend Kerem Khalil, with the attempted humiliation of the unbeliever woman or with her unexpected revenge upon the unbeliever Mate whom he did not like. Whatever. It had been a memorable evening. One worthy of a little celebration.

  Haji was the last to have any hashish hidden aboard. The austere Salah Malik disapproved, and, while his attitude was not shared by all the seamen, his word was law. With all but Haji. He would allow himself one swift indulgence, then he would retire happily to the uncomfortable berth with the others.

  He had decided to hide his tiny cache in the Pump Room while helping the Chief remove the corpses of the last lot of officers. None of the others was likely to come here unaccompanied after such an occurrence. Even Haji, who was not in the slightest superstitious, found the atmosphere of the place oppressive. Especially this evening, for some reason. He hurried in, crossed to the fire control room and brought out the little silver packet from behind the sinister black canisters as fast as possible. The air around him seemed peopled with unnatural shadows. It seemed full of scarcely heard whisperings. Every now and then his heart would flutter as though something were just behind him, trying to steal his breath.

  None of this was quite as imaginary as it seemed. In spite of the checks after the accident, in spite of daily maintenance, several of the cylinders had slow leaks. The air up to Haji's knees was heavy with carbon dioxide. When he left the door open, as now, it cascaded into the corridor and wound along the floor, sinking into guttering and runnels, seeping down into the bowels of the ship and collecting in pockets where the air-conditioning could not reach, just as both Levkas and Martyr had feared it would; silent, invisible, odourless, deadly.

  Still laughing quietly to himself, Haji closed the Pump Room door and began to creep down the corridor towards his place of secret indulgence in the last of the engineering decks, far below. He had gone less than ten feet when Malik called his name.

  Salah Malik stood, watching the man with distaste. At first he had seemed an excellent seaman, worthy of the pilgrim's title his parents had given him as a name, Haji: man who has visited Mecca; but it had soon become clear that this was an illusion created by the fact that he always worked in a team with Kerem Khalil, who was seaman enough for both of them. 'Go to the engine room, Haji,' he ordered now. 'You are late for your watch.'

  This was not true, but Haji went anyway, muttering viciously, unaware that Malik had just saved his life.

  Chapter Eleven

  The last evening in July found Robin hanging over the port bow of the supertanker, twenty feet below deck level, suspended from the fo'c'sle in a bo'sun's chair. In spite of the curve of the tanker's stem, she was close enough to inspect the suspect area a foot or two in front of her. Kerem Khalil had reported it when he was repainting the ship's name earlier in the afternoon. Robin had come down to inspect it: as was her duty and her pleasure. Behind her, on the darkening horizon, lay the purple mountaintops of Madagascar, dark as thunderheads. Around her lay the massive beauty of the nightfall, making even this routine inspection almost unbearably pleasurable.

  Kicking against the suspect plates, she pushed herself out like a child on a swing, feeling the bustle of life around her - something Prometheus normally managed to keep at a distance. A cormorant passed low overhead, having just launched itself from a Sampson post. The big black birds used Prometheus as an island, to the cheerful resignation of the seamen they kept swabbing day in and day out. Above the lonely cormorant, varying from specks to individual crosses, the gulls wheeled all the way up into the crystal sky. And if she twisted to look down into the equally clear, smooth sea, she knew she would see a school of dolphins playing in the great bow-wave whose roaring filled her ears to the exclusion of all other sounds except the occasional keening of a low gull and the song of the wind in the ropes by her head. A warm, gentle south wind had blown into their faces now unvaryingly for days; ever since they had pulled in towards the coast of Africa. This time of year there was a wind which seemed to blow from the Cape to the Gulf with hardly a break, following along the line of the coast; and even in midwinter at the Cape, the wind was rarely anything but warm. In Durban it might be as cool as 60°F now. Here it was 75°.

  Her reverie was broken by a muffled thump which made her jump as something hit the metal by her head and fell flapping into her lap. She had caught it with automatic revulsion and was just about to hurl it away when she stopped, realising what it was. It was a flying fish. Holding tightly on to it now, she looked down over her shoulder just in time to see the whole shoal break surface and skim along the side of the ship, glittering like a golden rainbow, pursued by dolphins or a passing shark. As abruptly as they had appeared a foot or two above the swells, they were gone, sides glinting deeper and deeper until they vanished.

  She swung back, looking up towards the tumblehome above, calculating whether or not she could lob the fish up and over the side. Probably not. It twisted in her hands again and she nearly dropped it so she thumped its head against the plank she was sitting on and it lay still, stunned. Impulsively, she unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt and stuffed it down to lie cold against her belly, held up by the waistband of her shorts.

  They were a good team, the men on the fo'c'sle, deserving her loyalty as unstintingly as they gave theirs. She reached up and pulled the warning line. At once Salah Malik's head was thrust into silhouette against the darkening sky. She waved. He nodded. Vanished. A moment later she began to rise. After a few feet, she began to walk up the metal.

  By the time she reached the top, the fish was no longer waving its bright tail from her cleavage - that would have been no fun - it was thrust into the waistband of her shorts at the back. As she stepped aboard it gave a wriggle and she gasped as though she had been pinched, but no one seemed to notice. In an instant, the fish was out of her clothing and sailing through the air to land at their feet. There was a moment of stunned disbelief, then they all pounced, except for Salah, who turned to look at her. With a howl of glee, Haji Hassan straightened, holding the thing aloft. Robin sighed mentally. It was always the way. The one who hadn't earned it always got it.

  The stewards had started the pot, of course, inveterate gamblers to a man; but the seamen had joined in cheerfully, half expecting their money back in Rotterdam, for who had ever heard of a flying fish jumping nearly forty feet on to a supertanker's deck? But there it was, right in front of them, and consequently worth over $200.

  Haji was not
popular, but such good fortune could not fail to lead to celebration. He and the fish were swept into the air and the team bore them off raucously, looking for 'Twelve-toes' Ho who was holding the purse.

  Salah looked at Robin. Did she want the bo'sun's chair dismantled and stowed? Should he call them back? She shook her head. The Mate would want to check her findings. They might as well leave it up for him. He nodded, understanding more even than she suspected, and turned to follow his men.

  After a moment, Robin followed too, feeling, in the aftermath of her elation, slightly depressed. No; it was not just after the elation. It was the thought of talking to Strong. Of handling his thinly veiled hostility, his nitpicking, double-checking, sexist, petty desire for revenge. She had come across men who found themselves incapable of seeing women as their equals - plenty of them - but, she realised, there had always been some sort of a buffer before. Now there was not. At the moment it was her and the Mate, head to head.

  But, to be fair, it wasn't all simple sexism on his part: she couldn't think of many women who would be too charmed at having every stitch of their clothing stolen in front of thirty people, either.

  But only John was on the bridge. 'What happened down there?' he asked cheerfully, nodding forward. 'They going to chuck that lazy beggar Haji overboard at last?'

  'Found a flying fish.'

  'On the fo'c'sle head? That's not a fish, that's Superman.' He looked at her suspiciously. 'You spoil that lot.'

  'They're worth it.'

  'Up to you. Anything wrong?'

  'Everything's fine as far as I can see.'

  'Then it's fine.'

  'Better check with the Mate.'

  'Look, Robin,' John turned to her, 'don't let him get you down. He's a picky sod, but nice enough. He'd be giving any junior a bit of a rough ride now, and you ...'

  'Bring out the worst in him?'