by Peter Tonkin
It was only at this point that she began to regret the adventure.
'For a parrot?' Richard could hardly believe it. 'She went down after a parrot?'
'It sounded like a child.' Kerem was insistent: the Third Mate had not been foolhardy.
Neither of them was standing still during this exchange. While the rest of the team were holding the rope safely, the Captain and the young Palestinian were trying to put together enough of a line to lower some help. They rapidly tied several shorter pieces of rope together, testing the knots with vicious wrenches to ensure they were secure. In their skilled hands, it was the work of a few moments.
As soon as the second line was ready, Richard began tying it round his waist. There was no alternative to going himself. Ben was below somewhere. John was on the bridge. There was no time to get either down here. Robin seemed safe enough for the moment, but there was no time to hang around practising theoretical leadership. In any case, it never even occurred to Richard that he should send someone younger, less senior, more expendable. He had never been the sort of captain - or person - who put his dignity first. If it was dirty, if it was dangerous, Richard had always led from the front; he saw no reason to change now.
And the fact that it was Robin suddenly made an unexpectedly powerful difference.
As soon as the rope was tied, Richard looped it around the rail twice so that it effectively went through a pulley, making it easier for Kerem to lower him unaided. Even so, Kerem looped the far end round his own waist, glancing up as he did so: if you go, I go. Richard had time to nod once, in curt recognition of the gesture, then he stepped over the rail and, leaning back against the tension of the rope, began to walk backwards down the side.
Things went wrong at once. The tumblehome was angled more acutely than it seemed, effectively giving an overhang. The metal was too wet and slippery for the grip even of his desert boots. What ought to have been a careful, controlled descent became an undignified scramble. But at least - by the skin of his teeth - he did not fall. And that was really all that counted.
Twenty feet down, the side was perfectly vertical again, though even more spray-covered and slippery. He took the opportunity to slow his descent and to check below. Robin didn't even seem to have noticed that he was coming. She was flat against the side of the ship facing out, looking steadfastly towards distant Madagascar. He need not pause to look down again: he could judge how close he was getting to her by the angle of the rope stretching, almost straight, between her shoulder and the forepeak. He looked back up. High in the hard blue sky, vivid even at this distance, the parrot which had caused all this was heading for the massive, distant island.
He eased the rope around his waist and called up as loudly as he could. The rope lurched into motion once more.
After a few more minutes, he could feel the spray from the bow-wave on his bare legs and Robin's rope, straight as an iron bar, was angling down close by. He yelled again and his progress stopped. He turned carefully, and there she was, a matter of feet below him, at that instant looking up to see where the noise had come from. Their eyes met and she smiled. The smile of a perfectly happy woman.
'Kerem!' He was in motion.
Five seconds later, at the. top of his lungs, 'Kerem!' again.
He stood astride her and leaned inwards to take her gently under the arms. Her face twisted at once and he saw the danger posed by the bo'sun's chair. But there was little time to consider alternatives. He slid his hands round between her back and the cold side of the tanker, gathering her to him in a gentle bear-hug. At once the rope round his own waist cut more deeply. No help for that either.
As soon as her feet were clear of the water, the weight of her rope pulled them left, nearly upsetting Richard's precarious balance. But the men on the deck understood the change in tension. A head was thrust briefly into silhouette over the edge of the deck and the bo'sun's chair fell free. Richard and Robin swung back, his feet skipping and dancing over the metal, trying to keep their purchase. The strain on his arms intensified. The rope bit deeper at his waist. He took the first step on the long walk home.
There were willing hands enough to lift them in over the rail. John had remained on watch on the bridge, but he had got hold of Ben who had arrived on the fo'c'sle head too late to do anything other than to heave with the rest. In that psychic way he seemed to have, Chief Steward Ho had heard too, and, having high regard both for his round-eyed Captain and the barbarian woman, he too had hastened here, collecting on the way a strangely silent Salah Malik.
In the final analysis, their presence was the most germane. As Richard and Robin sank to the deck, side by side, water spewed out of Robin's sea-filled shirt, and in it, the smallest of the flying fish which had bombarded her earlier. They all stood looking at it. Haji's winnings had gone back into the pot. The fish was worth $200.
Robin pulled herself up. Her shoulder hurt, but she would survive. And she was determined to get back on duty as soon as possible. She looked at them all standing watching the flying fish dance.
'Salah,' she said firmly, 'you'd better share the winnings from this one round the team, 'cause I'll be damned if I'm going to get you another one.'
Kerem and the others carried her back down the deck shoulder high. Richard and Salah followed a little further behind, side by side. After a few steps, Richard asked quietly, 'Haji?'
Salah hesitated, unused to lying. But he needed time to work this out. He and 'Twelve-toes' Ho knew well enough what the first plan was likely to have been and had been content to wait and see what Mariner and the new officer complement were up to. But - as they, like everyone else, remained ignorant of Gallaher's bomb- nothing so far had smelt of murder. This put things in an entirely new light. He needed time. 'No sign,' he said at last.
Chapter Fourteen
After the adventure of the felucca, Prometheus proceeded west of south and the first few days of August passed in a deceptive, haunted calm while they sailed under Capricorn and out of the Mozambique Channel. This eerie calm was almost entirely due to the disappearance of Haji Hassan. The true cause of his death and the manner of his dying remained a mystery; his body lay undiscovered. Richard interviewed anyone who had anything to say, formed his own conclusions and filled in the logs and the Accident Reports accordingly. After that, it seemed, he was gone for good. Yet he left something of himself behind. Something more even than Levkas's doomed crew. Perhaps because they had all known him; perhaps because none of them had liked him much; whatever the reason, it was he, the crew said, who was always there, just beyond the edge of your vision. Just behind you. It was his breath which stirred the hair on your neck when you paused in the flat bright corridors in the night to listen to the haunting music one of Ho's men played on a mysterious Eastern pipe.
But, beyond this, the haunted calm was deceptive because on board there were plots and currents under the busy surface which boded no good at all. And because, far to the east and south, a weather system was building, the first of the storms which would come close to destroying them all.
***
Robin had had every intention of returning to duty before the end of her first watch, but Ben had gone soft on her and filled her so full of painkillers before he dared try to sew up the small wound on her scalp caused by the felucca's rail that he knocked her out for nearly a day and kept her in bed for several more.
Richard took her watches, and this was no bad thing. While on the one hand it tied him down - he had to be on the bridge at certain times - it also brought him out of his Captain s solitude and dumped him right back in the swing of things. With the action forced upon him, he was happier at once. Nor was this a quiet time for anyone else. There was painting to be done; all sorts of maintenance to be completed before they reached the Cape in less than a week's time. And, while South Africa is as near the Equator as Florida, nevertheless it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and rough weather could be expected.
The working day stretched from dawn to
dusk and then beyond. Suddenly it became the rule rather than the exception for small groups of men to appear and disappear at odd times, and to demand food when everyone else had just eaten or were still fasting. The entertainments committee disbanded itself, without having entertained anyone. The true brains of the ship moved from the bridge - and the engine room - to the galley. This was the time that 'Twelve toes' Ho and his men came into their own. No demand was too great; no requirement too unreasonable. As the machine of the crew - above deck and below - ran more and more rapidly, they poured the oil of their service on all the working parts. No matter who left what berth in however much of a mess when called away on some errand, it was all neat and tidy on his return. No matter what nameless accident with what filthy part of the engine, there were always clean, freshly pressed overalls available. Ho even set up an elementary watch system so that there would be someone in the galley at all times.
But at midnight, local time on 4th August, there was no steward there at all. Which made it all too easy for the tall figure in white overalls, the same individual who had let Haji Hassan die, to put the poison in the food.
He came into the galley with the plan formed in his mind, hesitant about only the final touches. Aware that he was unlikely to remain undisturbed for long, he paused, enjoying the tension. He did not want what he was doing to take immediate effect but he needed it to become active at a certain time, in a particular place. Under predetermined conditions.
Yes! That was it! What did you consume under one set of circumstances that you tended to avoid under others? Ho had even mentioned something!
He smiled and went to work.
The storm came whirling out of the east two days later.
They had been trimming the edge of a seasonal high ever since they had left the Mozambique Channel and the barometer had been standing at 1025 for days, with wide skies and quiet seas to show for it. On the afternoon of the 5th it began to rise rapidly. By sunset it stood at 1037 and John was shaking his head while everybody else was perspiring in the sort of heat they should have left in the Gulf.
'I don't like the look at this at all,' observed Ben when he relieved Robin at midnight.
'What can we do?' shrugged the Third Mate - she could shrug now with no discomfort to her shoulder, and was back on her first late watch. 'I'd keep my eyes open, though.'
'That's sensible,' Ben agreed. 'Only wise thing to do.'
But his tone was distant.
Robin didn't need to ask why. He was checking her records. She waited. 'Back down to 1025 millibars,' he observed.
'Yup.' She shrugged again, wearily, and went to bed.
By four, the barometric pressure stood at 1020. John noted the fact in the log. He and Ben did not talk of the other matter. The Mate went to bed.
By dawn later that morning, the 6th, the Manxman was on the port bridge wing looking narrow-eyed into the heart of the pressure system which was all that lay between them and Australasia. The glass was falling fast. The sky was still blue, but its cerulean face was marked with high streaks of cloud and the distant horizon was dark.
When Richard came onto the bridge at 07.15, John was still out there. Richard went out and stood at his side, following his gaze.
After a while, John said: ' "Mackerel skies and mares' tails Make tall ships wear short sails.'' There's a nasty one coming.'
'The glass is at 990,' observed the Captain. 'Of course there's a nasty one coming.'
During the next twelve hours, they altered course a point or two south, letting the coast of Africa fall away west on their starboard, giving themselves more searoom. When the monster hit, they were at 30 south, 40 east, five hundred miles off Durban.
They had more warning than the falling glass and the darkening sky. They had more substantial danger signs than the increasingly agitated surface of the ocean and the hot, vicious gusting of the wind. Tsirtos started picking up distress signals as soon as the thing reached its full force to the east of them. Small ships and then large ones began reporting wind strengths off the Beaufort scale, mountainous seas and devastatingly destructive electrics. They started asking for help, but nobody, it seemed, was too keen on going in to get them out. As the day wore on, some of them started falling silent. Tsirtos's mood went dark, then foul, like the weather. After the briefest communication with the desperate men, he felt as though he were losing personal friends to the storm.
But soon enough he had worries of his own.
The first he knew about their own position was an unexpected lurch which he felt even in the shack, as though Prometheus had hit an impediment solid enough to stop her for an instant. Everything loose in the little room seemed to spring forward. Some of it hit the wall in front. Most of it fell to the floor. Tsirtos looked blearily around. He had been concentrating so hard on his messages he had lost all track of time. It was 19.14: an apt enough hour for war with the elements to be declared.
The great lurch was repeated, as though this were the smallest of trawlers and not the largest of tankers. Tsirtos switched off and started up to the bridge.
As soon as he stepped out of the shack, he heard the wind, although it took him a moment to realise that it was the wind. It sounded like a rolling explosion in the near distance accompanied by the music of a mad orchestra. Over the artillery-barrage bass, a thousand different notes and tones rose and fell as the air tore at every individual strut, line, nut and bolt with that concentrated fury which only the greatest disturbances are capable of showing. Quite simply, the wind was trying to tear the superstructure off. Even in the long corridors behind battened bulkhead doors, the air was mobile, whispering into draughts and breezes. Moving curtains, setting pictures a-swinging, making carpets and even lino seem to ripple and lift. Setting everything a-tapping restlessly. Slamming doors suddenly, as though moved by sympathy for its wild cousin outside.
Tsirtos had thought it was impossible for a supertanker to pitch. The hulls of such ships, he knew, were too long for even the broadest wave formation to place the stem on a crest and the stern in a trough. Supertankers, he had been told, were supposed to ride smoothly on the backs of several waves at once. But no one seemed to have explained this to the storm. Prometheus seemed to be pitching like a cockleshell. Tossing. Rolling. Performing complexes of motion totally at the mercy of wind and water, as though there were no one at the helm or in the engine room at all. For a wild moment in that wind-haunted corridor, Tsirtos was convinced they had abandoned ship without telling him at all.
He reached the bridge at an unsteady run. It was bedlam. While the storm had seemed distant enough in the passages below, here it was pressed up against the windows fighting madly to get in at them.
The twilight's last gleaming smeared the bellies of the low, scudding clouds with blood. From the near horizon, dark grey curtains of torrential rain hung in devastating series, torn from top to bottom continuously by great jagged forks of lightning. The sea, in sympathy, was a crystal grey - like a leaden gemstone - but the spume torn from the backs of the maelstrom waves was red. Even as Tsirtos, frozen in the doorway, watched, bow-waves like the runoff in a giant's slaughterhouse exploded into the air. The long hull faltered in her motion once again. A cascade of detritus flew on to the floor and slid forward. A tidal wave seethed back along the deck and exploded at the foot of the super structure with such force that a wall of it rose to block the clearview in front of the helmsman's narrow eyes. The sound was incredible.
Within seconds Tsirtos had seen all he wanted to see. 'I'll be in the shack,' he bellowed at Ben Strong's back. Ben raised a hand to show that he had heard, but he had his own preoccupations. 'Still at 983,' he yelled to the Captain who was sitting comfortably in his big black chair on the port side of the bridge. 'I think it's slowing.'
The Captain raised a hand: he had heard.
There was something indefinably calm about him. No danger could approach too nearly while he took his confident ease in that chair. Tsirtos took comfort from this and went b
ack below.
Half an hour after that, Ho brought the soup.
'Hey,' said Tsirtos happily to the chief steward, 'Thick Vegetable soup: now I know we're in winter waters!' He toasted the inscrutable Chinese. 'First of the voyage,' he cried.
Half an hour after he drained the last drop of it, he started to vomit helplessly.
It was one of the worst storms Richard had seen, but there was really nothing in it to cause him more than a moment's worry. He was in a well-found, well-prepared ship. Only if the cargo had been incorrectly loaded; only if the tanks had been so inexpertly balanced as to put an unacceptable strain on Prometheus's long hull, was there anything to fear. And if that had been the case, she would have broken up long ago. He knew his godson well enough to have no doubts at all on that score. The wind could howl until it blew the world awry; the seas could become more mountainous than the Himalayas: they would not overwhelm his command. Nothing outside could seriously threaten the supertanker.
Ho appeared at his shoulder bearing a large tray well stocked with brimming mugs of soup: the stock his chief steward had been saving for just such a night as tonight. He took one of them, amused to note that not a drop had been spilt on the long trip up from the galley.
Ho crossed next to Robin, then to Ben and John. 'Some of this going below?' asked Richard, knowing the answer would be in the affirmative: the engineers were just as much under the chief steward's wing as were the deck officers. ' "Pity poor sailors on a night like this." ' He raised his mug, quoting the old toast to John, who grinned and toasted back. John was close, by the Collision Alarm Radar, the only one close enough to hear him above the cacophony of wind and sea.
This was still John's watch, though he would technically be relieved by Robin soon. But they were all on the bridge, of course, each doing a vital job, working as a well-trained team under the eagle eye of their Captain, the only one of them apparently idle. In the engine room it would be the same. Each engineering officer with his set task and particular responsibility, and Martyr overseeing, making sure each vital task was done well. Ready and able to do any task himself if necessary, yet at the moment probably doing nothing.