by Peter Tonkin
'You said it!'
'Bring out the worst in whom?' demanded Ben, coming onto the bridge at that moment. 'Number Three, why is your team running riot below when there's still work to be done forrard?'
'Looking for you, Number One. Thought you might like to double-check. Looks all right to me, though.'
'Then I'm sure it is all right. Get your lot up and get that lot stowed.' He turned to go. John glanced at her behind his back: told you so.
He turned back. 'No, leave it,' he ordered inevitably. 'I'd better check it all for myself.'
'Have you seen the Little Mistress?' asked Haji of Salah Malik some time later. 'I would like to share my good fortune with her.' He had made up the nickname for Robin himself when one of his more intelligent colleagues explained to him that there was a pun in English on the word Mate.
Salah eyed him with even more disfavour than usual. 'The Third Mate is a better officer than you have a right to expect,' he said severely. 'She is a better seaman than you will ever be and is superior to you in every conceivable way. I do not like to hear the wise insulted by the foolish, although I know it is the way of the world.'
Haji stalked off in high outrage at that. But he did not stay in a bad mood for long. He would attend to the Little Mistress soon. For the present, he was a fortunate man. And what do such men do? They celebrate. Now he knew for certain where the old woman Malik was, he would smoke the hashish he had been forced to smuggle back into the Pump Room after Malik had caught him the last time.
It was the work of only a few moments to liberate the little packet' from behind the black cylinders and to slip out of the haunted Pump Room, then he was scurrying down and down to the secret hiding place where he could indulge his vice leisurely.
As he descended, the pounding of the engine grew louder. The air grew warmer, out of reach of the air-conditioning, and more redolent of oil from the engine room. Haji liked it down here. The deeper he went, the more things shrank to an acceptable scale until, in the farthest depths of the great ship's bowels, he arrived at a tiny alcove. It was too small to be a room. It was deep and dark, though not pitch dark, and warm. The walls were covered in pipes. The engine throbbed like a heart.
Haji sat contentedly on the floor and slowly rolled himself a joint. He regretted the loss of his pipe - Malik had found that and confiscated it as though the seaman were a child - but this way was better than no way.
His fingers were clumsy but he persisted dreamily, his mind drifting from Malik to the Little Mistress ...
The cigarette was rolled by now, but he was having trouble with the matches. Were they damp? He could not get them to light. At last he tried three together and was rewarded with a small blue flame. He held it close and puffed hard. A trace of the drugged smoke filtered into his lungs. He took the matches away, holding them high as he drew on the joint again. His mind still on Robin, he glanced up, surprised to see that the matches were burning more brightly now.
That he saw it was the merest chance, given how preoccupied the last few thoughts of his short life were; but see it he did. It was the end of a torch, wedged among the pipes. He pulled it out. It came free easily, and was followed by a cascade of books and magazines. Haji's first inclination was to look round quickly. Someone else knew of his little place. It was not as secret as he had thought. But then he turned back, switched on the torch and looked more closely at what he had found. They were from the stock in the officers' library. Haji knew about them- the whole crew did - but he had seen none of them so far.
Truly, this was his lucky day!
He began to leaf through them, marvelling at what people would do to each other and allow to be done to themselves, in front of a camera.
One particular magazine he slipped into his shirt because the model - who was doing the most obscene things Haji had ever seen - reminded him of Robin. At least, she had short blonde hair. He would sell the rest among the more broad-minded of his shipmates. This one he would keep for himself. And every time the Little Mistress gave him an order, he would think of the pictures and laugh.
He turned back to the rest of the bundle and reached down to gather them to him but, for some reason he could not understand, the deck came up and hit him in the face. He thought about getting up, especially as he seemed to have broken his nose, and it was becoming difficult to breathe - but in the end, it was simply too much trouble.
Someone found him about five minutes later. Haji saw the boots and the legs as though in a dream. The figure saw the desperate flickering of Haji's eyelids. It knelt, and gently lifted Haji's head. Then it gathered the magazines and books into a bundle and moved them away, one-handed. The other hand replaced Haji's head upon the floor. Then the books, the magazines, the boots, the legs and the torch were gone. Desperately, Haji willed himself to move. But he could not.
Then he thought, this is all a dream, and he tried to wake up. But he could not.
The figure which had taken away the magazines watched the distant body twitching to its final stillness, knowing this was a mistake, but unable to look away.
I should have just left him and gone, the figure thought, but that would have been impossible. He had never seen anyone really die and the suffocation of poor Haji was fascinating.
When utter stillness claimed the distant corpse, the figure turned away into the quiet brightness of a small corridor. I did that. Where did the thought come from?
I caused that. I could have saved him but I didn't. I couldn't. I let him die. I made him die. I killed him. The thought was tremendously - what? - exciting. Yes, exciting. Exciting.
I killed him, thought the figure again, hurrying from one secret place to another. I murdered him ...
Chapter Twelve
'Think they'll ever find the little twit?'
'Nope. I think he went overboard. Probably got drunk celebrating his win and fell into the ocean.'
'Didn't think Malik let them drink. Anyway, they're Muslims.'
'Think that'd stop Hassan?'
'Probably not.'
It wasn't much of an epitaph, but it was almost all Haji got.
Ben and John were standing on the bridge at 07.30 next morning, chatting idly about last night's excitement as they watched Robin lead her depleted team down to the fo'c'sle head. The bo'sun's chair was still rigged there because Ben hadn't had time to stow it between his cursory examination of the suspect area and the sudden first search for the missing man.
The second, more exhaustive search was going on at the moment, under the leadership of Salah Malik; with young McTavish notionally in charge, because they were in the engineering sections, and going on down.
It was a glorious morning. The sky was high and brilliant, the sea translucently clear. The wind had shifted east of south and carried in each gentle gust a tantalising complex of spicy scents born of Madagascar.
Robin walked down the deck with a youthful spring in her step, tired after last night's taxing searches but uplifted by the beauty of the day; utterly unaware of how close to death she was.
The chair itself was like a child's swing: a short plank of wood served as a seat; another plank, a few feet above it, held the ropes far enough apart to allow one occupant, lashed safely, to sit on the lower one. Above the top plank, the two ropes supporting the seat became one, rising through a pulley. The pulley was raised six feet above the deck and angled out over the side by a carefully anchored tripod made of metal bars.
The equipment and its arrangement were to be found on any ship. Its use was the merest routine.
Robin was not even supposed to be using it this morning. She was simply supposed to be stowing it away. But what she saw as she came on to the fo'c'sle head changed all that instantly.
It was a ship. A felucca, with tall castles fore and aft; with what once must have been a proud mast bearing a gullwinged sail now snapped off short and gone over the side. She was not small. From stem to stern she must have measured all of forty feet, and every inch the timeless ves
sel of the type that had carried Sinbad the Sailor on his exploits across these magic waters. Nor was she a weak or ill-found vessel. That was obvious from the fact that her hull was still in one piece, wedged across the tanker's bow like that.
Robin stood on Prometheus's prow and looked down upon her, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. The others clustered round her, silently, also struck with awe.
The two ships must have collided some time during the night. After midnight, the fo'c'sle head watch had been searching for Haji Hassan with the rest. Such was the size of the supertanker that the shock of impact had gone unnoticed. The felucca's lights, had she been carrying any, had gone unseen. The cries of her crew, had she been manned, had gone unheard. She had simply ridden up on to the bow-wave above the great torpedo-shaped protrusion at the base of the bow, and hit it at its thinnest part.
And there, in spite of the width of the fo'c'sle, of the bluntness of the upper bow; in spite of the weight of the felucca herself sitting well clear of the water, there she remained: wedged across Prometheus's bows like a tiny cross on a huge capital T.
Looking straight down from her present position, Robin could see where the tanker had chopped into the little ship, crushing her planking out to either side exactly amidships on the starboard side, cutting in almost as far as the broken mast. Cracks, some of them ragged and wide, stretched left and right, almost from stem to stern, showing here and there a glimpse of what lay below. Everything on the felucca was still and silent, except for the hollow thud of the swells against her bottom.
Robin looked across at Kerem Khalil. 'You ever seen anything like this?'
The Palestinian shook his head.
'The rest of you?'
'I heard of something like this,' said one. Some of the others nodded. Robin found herself doing the same. They had all heard that it was possible. That it had happened before. None of them had ever seen it. Until now.
They stood, looking down at it for a few more seconds. Stories like this were once in a lifetime. They didn't want to share this one yet.
Then the screaming started.
Again they did nothing, looking askance at each other, knowing that what they could hear was some kind of illusion. Had to be some kind of illusion. There could be no crew left aboard. There could be no one left aboard. Unless some youngster was there, too badly hurt to join the rest. Unless it was not a crew member, but someone else. A slave, perhaps; for the felucca must have been up to no good, running dark and silent in the night.
Robin thumped the rail once, hard, as she had thumped Angus El Kebir's desk once so long ago, and was in action. 'Swing the chair round here. I'm going down.'
Kerem was about to argue, but he asked himself - as Salah Malik would have done - would I argue with the Mate? The answer was no. He saw no reason, therefore, to argue with the woman. She was perfectly competent.
And the screaming was that of a child.
'What's that woman up to now?' asked Ben testily, looking down the length of the deck from the bridge.
'Checking your work, perhaps,' John needled cheerfully.
'Damn cheek. She'd better hurry, though. She's due to relieve you in twenty minutes.'
'I don't mind.'
'I do. I'll have this run like a proper ship. Women or no women.'
Kerem looked down at the woman walking across the felucca's deck, every bone in his body shrieking danger. He wished Salah was here. He glanced back at the bridge with an overwhelming feeling of frustrated impotence. There were four of the team now, instead of six. Himself and three others. He must keep an eye on the Third Mate. The other three must hold the rope. When the felucca went, they would have to pull her up at once, or she was dead.
He had no walkie-talkie and there was no one he could send for help.
Down here the noise was almost overwhelming. The drumroll of the bow-wave sounded continuously against her keel. Each separate boom! of a larger wave was followed by a cacophony of screeches and groans as planks and pegs strained to tear apart. It was a wonder the child's screams could be heard above it all.
Yet there it was again: a plaintive, terrified howl. But where was it coming from?
Robin went down as though she were kneeling on broken glass. 'Hello?' she called. Abruptly, the screaming ceased. 'Hello?' Louder. She knew the child wouldn't understand English, of course. But at least it would know there was someone near. She paused. Silence. 'Where are you?'
Silence.
She remained where she was half kneeling, and looked very carefully around the deck. Both the fore- and aftercastles were big enough to hold a child, and yet it seemed to her that the cries had come from straight ahead. Immediately in front of the stump of the mast there was an open hatchway. She crouched on all fours, like a cat. Inch by inch, she began to crawl forward. Every now, and then a wave slightly larger than the rest would explode against the bottom of the wreck, causing it to lift, causing great splinters of wood to spring free against Prometheus's stem and fall rattling like dry bones into the sea, causing the hulk to scream even more loudly than the child. When this happened, Robin would freeze, watching her shadow on the deck, watching the drops of sweat mark the dry planks beneath her as they cascaded off her face. As they landed, increasingly frequently they would roll forward and down, away from her as the slope of the deck increased.
I'm going to die here, she thought. I'm going to bloody well die ... I'm going to sodding well die ... I'm going to ... As she moved, so her language become fouler. And the hatchway came closer.
At the lip of the hatchway, she was faced with a dilemma. Should she keep the chair on as she went down? The obvious answer seemed to be yes, and yet, if the felucca went while she was below and she was still tied in, she could all too easily be tom to pieces. On the other hand, if she untied herself, then went with the felucca, she would be just another Man Overboard.
And, of course, the rope would make it more difficult to reach the child if anything did go wrong.
It was that more than anything which decided her.
Salah Malik hated it down here. It was hot and cramped. The engines beat like a giant heart. It was like being a child again, in the womb. His tall, angular body was bent almost double as he followed the yellow torch-beam into the farthest bowels of the ship. Far behind him, young McTavish was leading the others back towards the engine room, and Salah would rather have been with them; but a sense of the fitness of things - the sort of feeling which makes men and women dig in the wreckage of fallen buildings long after the hope has gone - kept him looking in the most unlikely places.
So it was he who found Haji Hassan, curled beside his dead matches with his dead hashish cigarette hanging from the corner of his dead mouth.
As soon as he knelt, Salah had difficulty breathing. He would have realised what was happening and reacted swiftly even had he not been warned by the look on the corpse's face; by the dead cigarette and matches.
Yet, even as he caught his breath, something made him pause. Something made him check once, to be certain. He turned the body over. It was cold and stiff. There was no pulse at wrist or throat. He was dead, then.
Salah eased the curled corpse back into the position in which he had found it. As he did so, something slid out from under the seaman's shirt: a magazine. Salah took it. He had never liked Hassan, but he would wish on no man the disgrace of being found with such filth.
Halfway back down the cramped corridor, he looked at the magazine again, something tugging in his mind. It was the face of the girl bound to the bed. She had short blonde hair. She reminded him of somebody. He could see the resemblance to the Third Mate, but it was more than that. There was a deeper similarity - and to someone else ...
A step or two further on, he froze. He realised who she reminded him of. And he began to fear that Haji had not merely died by accident. The thought chilled him. Filled him with suspicion.
But what to do about it? What to do?
'What is she doing?' cried one of
the others to Khalil as soon as he felt the rope slackening in his hands.
'She's taking the chair off. I think she's going below ...' Kerem turned and deliberately started signalling to the bridge.
'Sir!' The helmsman noticed Kerem's signal first. He couldn't make out quite what the tiny figure was doing, however, because the forepeak was nearly three hundred yards away.
John had some trouble making out what was going on too, until he went out on to the bridge wing and used his binoculars. Then, at full magnification, it became obvious that something was wrong.
He walked briskly back on to the bridge proper, mentally cursing Ben for having disappeared. He picked up the internal phone and dialled the Captain's number.
With the wooden seat firmly wedged under her left arm, Robin crept gingerly down the ladder from the hatchway. The noise down here was incredible, the stench damn near unbearable, the sense of danger absolutely overpowering. The felucca was quite simply - but, thankfully, quite slowly - coming to pieces under her feet. On her right, sloping away at an increasing angle, was the single belowdeck area, with the foot of the mast rising immediately ahead at a crazy tilt.
On her left, incredibly close at hand, was the huge, blunt metal blade of Prometheus's bow. It rose through the crushed and splintered wood almost as though it had always been there. And yet, at the same time, it was an obscene intrusion, horribly out of place. Robin felt as though she were inside Mr Borden's skull, just after Lizzie had delivered the first whack, looking out at the axe-head.
'Hello!'
Gripping the seat with bruising force, she stepped off the bottom rung, on to the deck itself.
There was an explosion of sound and movement immediately behind her, from under the ladder itself. This was so unexpected that she jumped forward, swinging on the rope and gasping with shock. The rope slackened at once, dumping her unceremoniously on her bottom. She sat still, looking up.