by Peter Tonkin
Two days in the fog had been frustrating, occasionally almost frightening, but in the end simply a waste of time. With little or no idea where they were heading, they kept only rudimentary logs, though some time during each watch the watch officer made some kind of observation on the state of sea, weather, anything else of interest; and added a guess as to where they were and which way they were pointing. There was a surprising lack of tension, even though it was plain to all that they were in the middle of something mysterious, murderous. Richard made sure that they talked the situation through - though he kept his own suspicions quiet - and they concluded with the rueful cheerfulness of people who have been the victims of a practical joke that the saboteur must only have wanted them out of communication for a while: not out of the way permanently. They had plenty of food and water - all untouched. They were in busy sea lanes and not too far from land. They were cocooned by the fog - it was like being wrapped in cotton wool. Apart from the boredom, it might almost have been a holiday. A lark. There was no real sense of danger at all.
The third day changed all that. The sun slid up out of the water into a strange hazy shadow line which in the tropics appears at the foot of the sky on clear dawns and sunsets. Moments later, it was filling the sky with a disproportionate amount of glare and both Ben and Rice found themselves steering towards it with their eyes shut, so fierce was the brightness ahead.
The simple change in the weather was enough to alter the tenor of life in the boats, just as Richard had feared it would. As the sun went higher, so the horizons withdrew all around. The wider the horizons became, the smaller the boats seemed. Their total fragility, riding on the back of the Atlantic as though it were some fierce but sleepy monster, was brought home to everybody in an overwhelming rush as they woke. They had grown used to seeing the ocean from a great distance, tamed by the size of the tanker. Now they were face to face with it. All too aware of its unimaginable force; its overwhelming capacity for violence. Even its simple depth became a source of fearful wonder. They sat in silence looking over the side. The ocean floor lay some three thousand fathoms, eighteen thousand feet, two thirds of the height of Everest, beneath them.
With visibility so good, there was no need for the boats to remain tied together, so the line was slipped and Robin's boat came up alongside Richard's. They both took the next watch and sat, side by side, separated by as little water as possible, watching their men with increasing concern. John was in his element, of course. Ben was fine. Rice and McTavish weren't too happy. Malik and Ho were hard at work trying to keep some spirit in their men. While blanketed in fog, they had tried all the singing, storytelling, jokes and games they knew, and now everyone was being required to recall anything new, or to recount the favourites. Under other circumstances it might have been an interesting cross-cultural exercise, but not now. Now everyone watched listlessly as the great swells came out of the west behind them, seesawing them rhythmically, but seeming to push them no nearer to land. Even the stewards had given up betting on which of each series would be biggest.
The fishing contest seemed a stroke of genius. It galvanised them as soon as Richard suggested it. As the lines were being prepared, a babble of excitement spread between the boats. The stewards arranged a dazzling array of wagers. The steadier Palestinians joined in, many of them the offspring of generations of fishermen. McTavish glowed, having fished the Clyde estuary from Largs to Ardrossan as a boy. Ben looked down his nose at them like a schoolmaster with an unruly form, but he took a line. Then, thinking that no one was looking, he took another and tied them both together, doubling the length and the number of hooks. John became adjudicator, though he was taking part himself. Watch officers, it was decided, should remain aloof. Such tinned meat as they had would have to do for bait. The lines were readied and, on John's signal, dropped. A concentrated silence descended. The boats moved apart slightly. They had to. With more than twenty lines out, the risk of a massive tangle was high. The contest began.
The day was hot and bright. The sun might have been overpowering, but the steady south wind which had blown away the fog remained surprisingly cool. The boats rose and fell easily on the shoulders of the great waves. The water was limpidly clear, though once in a while the tell-tale rainbow effect would blemish the glassy surface, showing where oil had been spilt. Every now and then they would see small black globules of tar. The first man to pull in his line, certain that his bait must have fallen off, found his hands covered in sticky black lines.
One of the stewards caught the first fish, a small tuna. He made much of the effort required to pull it in, drawing out the performance skilfully, convincing the others that he had caught something big. Taking it off the hook for him, John said to them all, 'Remember. If you hook into anything really big, just let your line go.' He said it without thinking, and it was a wise thing to say; but it reawoke that very element which Richard had been most hard put to quieten: the nervousness they all felt at the simple size of the ocean. As the morning wore on, the sea moderated and the waves became smaller, though they continued to roll silently by, like the backs of huge fish. With their attention on their lines, they all became intensely aware that they had entered one of the great currents of the deep, at the point when the Canary Current swings west to become the North Equatorial Current. It jerked and pulled at the lines like a live thing. One moment they would all stretch away to port then for no reason they would be pulled to starboard, kicking and twisting as the strength of the water grasped them. The lines plunged down out of sight, though the water remained so clear that it seemed the seabed should have been easily visible, and there was no way of telling what was at the bait. Even John became depressed, unconsciously suffering from agoraphobia and an overwhelming sense of his own frailty. Suddenly a particularly vicious cross-current tore at the lines and there was pandemonium in the bow of Robin's boat. One of the stewards, convinced the current was the jaws of some monster clamped around his line, had let go of his tackle with a cry of fear. 'He say it just pull an' pull,' yelled Ho to the adjudicator. 'He say he couldn't hold on no more.'
'It was just the current,' John called back bracingly.
'Maybe yes. Maybe no. You look out all same.'
Ben gazed dreamily into the limpid water. The effort of holding the long line had proved too arduous for him some time ago and so he had just tied it to the boat's side and was sitting with one finger on the bright, braided nylon line, daydreaming contentedly.
Noon came and went. There was no change of watch. Some of Ho's stewards desultorily set about preparing lunch. It would be baked beans. The meat-content of this particular meal was being offered to the fish.
'Hey,' called Ben suddenly, 'I've got a bite!' He knelt up on his seat, leaning over the side like an excited boy, pulling in his catch hand over hand. Lunch forgotten, the men in Richard's boat strained round to see.
The line stretched straight down in the still water, jerking and jumping as the still invisible fish fought every inch of the way. After a few minutes he came to the knot which joined the two lines and wrapped the heavy-duty nylon round his hand for a breather.
'There it is,' shouted someone excitedly. Vague at first, but becoming clearer as it swam up, trailing the line behind it, came a large tuna, its blue and silver flanks flashing. 'Twenty, twenty-five pounds,' said John knowledgeably. 'We'll have a job getting that one aboard.'
'What's that?' Robin's voice came sharply over the water. She had pulled closer so that her men could see Ben's tuna come aboard too. She was leaning over the side, looking down. 'There ...No ...But there was something.' She looked across at Richard. 'Something big.'
'It's bleeding a bit,' said Ben cheerfully. 'You probably just saw the blood.'
'Better get it up quickly, then,' snapped Richard. But he was too late.
'There!' called Robin urgently. She said more, but her words were drowned out in the pandemonium.
Ben, the line still wrapped around his hand, was slammed against the thwart.
His arm stretched out, a taut extension of the humming, spitting line. He looked down unbelievingly. The tuna was gone. In its place, a mere sixty feet away, firmly attached by the tangle of line to his right hand, was a hammerhead shark. Not a monster, by any means, but a powerful, deadly fifteen footer. The line angled out of the corner of its mouth, stretching up behind the protuberance housing its left eye. It didn't seem to know that it had been caught. Yet. One more beat of its majestic tail was enough, though. The flat, alien head turned. Even as Richard leaned forward to cut the line, the hammerhead turned back and began to circle inquisitively around the two frail boats.
After a few minutes it was joined by another, a twelve foot tiger this time. Then another ...
Chapter Nineteen
The danger of the element they were now so close to could not have been brought home more clearly to the dejected crew. Above the surface, everyday normality. Below it, scant inches of wood and fibreglass away was horror and death. This was no more akin to the stuff which comes out of taps than is a tabby to a tiger. As if to emphasise the lesson, the dangerous school followed them, cruising in menacing circles around them, every now and then brushing against side or keel with a sound like distant thunder.
And so the rest of the day passed, with Richard and Robin sitting together with the thinnest possible strip of water between them, the only contented people there. At sunset, the watches changed. Ben, recovered from his shock, came back to relieve Richard; McTavish came back to relieve Robin, and Richard stood up so that he could move down his boat towards her, the need to be near her almost unbearably strong in him.
Because he was standing up, the only one doing so at that moment, and because he was looking away from the sunset into the crystal calm of the gathering night, he saw her first, surprisingly close at hand, her upperworks painted blood-red by the rays of the setting sun. He knew her at once, although he could not see name. There could not be two like her. No other would present all those black windows, lacking the glass to reflect the sun. No other would have that great scar up the middle of her bridge. He knew her as a parent knows its child, by something deeper than sight.
She had crept up to catch them unawares, because the watch had been watching the sharks or each other and not the horizons, and because she was moving in silence like a ghost, like the Flying Dutchman sailing north. Drifting without her engines. Safe, with the fire out.
Robin rose and followed his gaze the second she realised he had frozen where he stood. So it was she who had whispered, horror-struck, 'Look!'
One by one, it seemed, they turned, and an awed whisper went through them like a breeze through dried grass. They watched in scarce-believing silence, each a prey to myriad conflicting emotions, as Prometheus, back from the dead, drifted down on them.
All of a sudden, Richard, for all his misgivings, was possessed of a fierce joy; an immense feeling of the goodness of life filled every fibre of his lean, hard body. It was one of those moments which come to men and women when they know without a shadow of a doubt that what faces them, no matter how daunting, is the task which they above all others were put upon earth to complete.
Still standing, he began to speak, his ringing tones dragging their eyes back from the silent ship to their shining Captain, outlined in fire by the setting sun, as he began to articulate the conclusions he had come to during the lost days adrift. 'At least one person here doesn't want us to go back aboard: the person who sees Prometheus as what she was always meant to be - a coffin ship. A worthless hulk brought cheaply up to scratch so that she can be lost at sea as part of an insurance fraud. There is someone among us, perhaps more than one person, who knows she cannot be allowed to come safe to port in Rotterdam; who knows she was supposed to sink, in a storm off the Cape; in a fire off Senegal.
'They are scared to go back aboard, not because they know how hard she will be to handle in the condition they've reduced her to. Not because they know how dangerous it will be trying to get her up the Channel as she is, even if we can get anything aboard her working again. Not because they know we'll be completely cut off from the outside world until we pass close enough to another ship to flash a message across on a signal lamp.
'No! They are scared to go back aboard because they know how many have died already to get this bloody business this far, and the thing still isn't finished. The tale isn't told. And, beyond that, I believe that at least one of us sitting here is responsible for a mass-poisoning and perhaps God knows how many murders, before and in that explosion. Someone so ruthless, I have doubts of their sanity. Someone who will at all costs be trying to stop us getting home. And I believe that behind this person, behind the whole sickening mess, stands the Owner, Kostas Demetrios. Nothing else makes sense.
'I believe all this, but I can prove none of it until I bring my ship into safe harbour. And I will bring her home, to expose the fraud. I will bring her home to catch that murderer. I will bring her home for my father-in-law whose oil fills her holds and who stands to lose everything if I do not. I will bring her home for us, who have been cheated, tricked, lied to and killed to make a rich man richer. And I will bring her home for herself, because she is not a worthless hulk but a great lady: perhaps the greatest I have ever sailed aboard and I will not let her die.
'So I'm giving the murderous spy in our midst fair warning. I'm taking my Prometheus home come hell or high water. The only way you'll stop me is to kill me too.'
Robin, still on her feet in her boat beside him, added dryly, 'And me.' Her narrowed eyes raked the boat and a shark's back rumbled against the keel. Then Ben was up, and John and all the rest of them, crazily carried away, cheering once more until the boats began to rock dangerously and they had to sit down.
When the cheering died, Richard sat at his helm once more and led them past the lazily cruising sharks, back towards Prometheus.
As they drew closer, however, their buoyant confidence began to diminish under her icy air of desolation. It was all too easy to see the ghosts of their dead friends and enemies in the shadows gathered behind her shattered windows. It was hard not to hear them whisper in the lapping wavelets against the black precipices of her leeward side or in the thunder of surf as the occasional roller broke against the iron cliff of her windward side. The rapidly gathering dark brought with it a chill after the clear, hot day; a chill which seemed to emanate from her, making her strange to them and eerily forbidding.
Quietly, a little nervously, they came down her leeward side, under the accommodation ladder folded level with the deck almost fifty feet sheer above their heads. They snugged the heads of their boats at the exact point where Richard had held his sixty hours earlier, waiting for the last search party to come off, down the rope ladder.
But the ladder was gone.
They continued around, to the windward side of the silent, forbidding hulk. But that too was empty - there was no other way to scale her sheer sides.
Richard watched the pale afterglow of sunset, deep in thought. This was going to be even more difficult than he had anticipated. He had assumed the ladder would still be in place and had planned to send the engineering officers up it to restart the generators so that the accommodation ladder could be lowered for the rest of them. They would have to use the accommodation ladder somewhere in the scheme because they would never get the wounded up otherwise. It had been all very well helping them down rope ladders in the emergency of the fire when there had been no alternative - and when several had fallen into the water anyway; but expecting them to climb one now - even had there been one - with the hungry sharks waiting for one wrong move, was simply out of the question.
It looked as though he was going to have to come up with some alternative. And fast.
More to keep them occupied than because he thought they had missed anything on the first circuit, he moved the lifeboat forward and began another circuit of the ship.
The air of desolation had been depressing when they first approached her. Now it was overpowering.
The last light of the brief tropical evening gleamed on her upper bridge works. All the rest was fast-thickening gloom in almost shuddering silence they rounded her stem, innocent now of bow-wave as she drifted without headway on the grey-black sea. They went wide enough to look up the full length of her just as the last light left her, leaving the scarred bridge grey as a corpse's face.
The crystal beauty of the night, star-bright in the east already, only served to make her look worse by comparison, and the lightest breeze, blowing over them towards Africa, suddenly brought the charnel stench of her, an overpowering amalgam of burned steel and blown flesh. One of the stewards leaned shakily over the side and began to vomit. The others were muttering nervously, overcome by her unexpected hostility. The air of tension became almost palpable.
So that several of them actually cried out with shock when, just at the very moment they were passing underneath it, the accommodation ladder jumped noisily into motion and, apparently under its own sinister volition, hissed out and down to meet them.
Chapter Twenty
Martyr woke into the most horribly potent of his nightmare memories. So exact was the reconstruction of circumstances that for a moment he was absolutely convinced that his memories of the last years were but a dream, and he really was coming round in the darkness of that iron-sided warehouse baking under the relentless Florida sun, while several million dollars' worth of cocaine blazed away at the far end; blazed away, or trickled through the floorboards to become inextricably mixed in with the fine white sand. The smell of hot metal. The stench of dead men. The pain racking him. The knowledge that death was far too close for comfort. These were all the same.
But the pain was in the wrong place. The roaring in Florida had been the surf more than the fire. And the sound of the surf had been broken by the screaming of police sirens and by the quiet, broken sobbing of his daughter.