Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  The second possibility abruptly became the most likely: a pungent stench of petrol fumes suddenly brought tears to his eyes. He did not see the tall Palestinian, his face a mask of hate and understanding, move. He fought for breath, blinking the tears away, keeping a close watch on them as they all fell back. But then the stench began to fade and he could breathe again.

  Mariner was still talking. 'Look, why don't you just hand it over to me and we'll talk the whole thing through?'

  Demetrios gave a bark of laughter, almost a choke. The fumes had got into his lungs. Lucky the air was clearing of them at last. He was beginning to feel light-headed. 'What do you expect? A great confession? Repentance? Forget it!'

  'Now, look ...'

  'What you don't know now, you'll never know!' he spat. And he pressed the button.

  Two things happened at once. Both were so absolutely unexpected that they almost overcame him. He was struck with stunning force in the chest and behind the knees in an apparently brilliantly concerted action.

  The rest of them flinched and looked away automatically when the broad left thumb stabbed down on the remote control. Richard did not, so he saw what really happened. He had been concentrating so hard on keeping the mad man's attention while Malik and Martyr crept round behind him that Demetrios's action came as no real surprise. What resulted from it surprised him, though.

  Demetrios pressed the wrong button. Just as Malik hurled forward to take him in a wild rugby tackle, the Owner pressed the button which tripped a part of the bomb he did not even know existed: a small, powerful electromagnet designed to hold the device hard against any metal surface. The bomb slammed into his chest, attracted by the nearest metal - the toggle and zipper of the wetsuit. The blow from in front and the tackle from behind knocked Demetrios back. Flat on his back. His shoulders missed the Palestinian's horizontal body and slammed down on to the metal of the tank cap itself. And the damaged metal sheered. Before even Richard could move - and his reactions had been honed to superhuman speed - the ragged disc of metal had tilted and vanished, taking with it the two men and the bomb down into the gas-filled ullage.

  They all, automatically, took a step forward. Martyr was already at the edge, half hanging over the black hole, for he had thrown himself forward an instant after Salah. To the others as much as to him, Richard called: 'Don't breathe! It's deadly!'

  But none of them - certainly not the canny Chief - really needed reminding. They all knew the sequence which Demetrios did not. It was ingrained into every tanker man - and woman - there. The sequence of hydrocarbon-gas poisoning. Twenty seconds - at the most three quarters of a minute - can render the fittest man unconscious. Four minutes after that, unless oxygen is administered, serious brain damage starts; one minute more brings death. The first and only sign is a strong smell of hydrocarbon gas, which soon fades - not because the gas has gone, but because it has destroyed the nerves in the nose.

  Demetrios had smelt the gas as soon as he stepped on to the leaking tank cap. By the time he started falling, with Salah wrapped around him and the bomb still clinging to him, he was only semi-conscious. And, instinctively, because he was unable to think clearly, he did the most obvious thing. He took a deep breath to clear his head. His body went into spasm. His lungs automatically emptied themselves. His right hand clasped the bomb to his breast - where the gentlest movement would have freed its grasp on the zipper - and his left closed spasmodically on the remote. This time his thumb hit the DETONATE button, just as his body hit the scum-thick surface of the water, twenty feet down.

  As soon as he felt the body he was holding curl into that rigid foetal position, Salah knew Demetrios was dead. Levkas's 'American', the man who had killed his beloved son, was dead. There was nothing else he could do now, one way or the other, so he let go and fell free, holding his breath and praying feverishly. It was absolutely dark down here. There was no possibility of seeing anything at all. The water and the distant walls were all tar-covered. They would soak up light. Even a torch beam would vanish down here.

  He had perhaps a thousandth of a second to complete these thoughts before the surface of the cargo exploded against him with unexpected violence. The icy liquid seemed to suck him down. He began to struggle at once, fighting automatically to regain the surface, though he knew he was unlikely to do so, and even if he did, all that awaited him there was a minute or two's pointless struggle to hold his breath followed by a choking death like the Owner's at the hands of the deadly gas.

  His only real hope was the knowledge that somewhere nearby, oil-covered, slippery and probably useless, a set of steps led up from the bottom of the tank to the tank-top itself and safety.

  Martyr. straightened at once and, turning towards Richard, swung his leg over the side of the tank-top. 'Wait!' barked the Captain. The Chief obeyed. From twenty feet down came the double splash of two bodies hitting the filthy liquid.

  Richard was speaking urgently into his R/T. 'John! We need some breathing equipment down here. Now!'

  Robin rushed past him, holding the rope which Demetrios had used to hide his hands. She glanced at him. He nodded. He had been waiting for this, not for the breathing gear. If they waited for that before Martyr went after him, Salah wouldn't stand a chance.

  Martyr found the top step of the ladder and stood on it while Robin knotted the rope expertly around his waist. Then she went back to where Kerem, Ho and some of the others had tight hold of it. The big American hesitated no longer. Shining his torch into the pit at his feet, he started down.

  Richard, keeping the channel to John open, started moving back towards the bridge. Oxygen mask or Drager compressed air gear, it didn't matter to him: as soon as anything arrived, he was going to put it on and go down into the tank himself. If the tank, if anything, still existed.

  One of John's men, no longer needed on the bridge wing now, hit the emergency siren. The 'scream of it boomed out into the night, warning Europoort of the danger.

  On the tenth step down, Martyr slipped. The rope snapped taut and he swung there, still twelve feet above the surface of the cargo. He had his torch secured to his wrist with the loop at its end, so he did not drop it. Instead he hung there, watching amazedly as the wild beam flashed away into nothingness, showing him the great flooded black cavern he was descending into. The roof of the tank stretched away above him, darker than any stormy sky. The surface of the liquid spread below him like a basalt ocean. All he had for comfort was that puny glimmer of light. All he had for support was that treacherous, invisible, thread-thin stair. He swung until it hit him solidly in the face, then he grasped it, and carried on down.

  Five seconds later, the black sludge of the surface was sucking at his legs like a live thing and there was nothing to be seen but the immense, still, tarry crust of it.

  Until, suddenly, a bright light spread through the water, shining up through the black crust in a breathtaking array of emeralds, sapphires and indigos. All the cargo seemed to have lit up by magic, as though, beneath the thick, floating scum of tar, a sunrise was shining through the sea. And silhouetted against the brightness, surprisingly close at hand, almost indistinguishable from the black scum around it, was the shape of a man. Without another thought, Martyr hurled himself bodily forward.

  Then, incredibly, it all erupted into a gross black fountain, sweeping him under too.

  John came panting out of the bridge-house carrying a heavy white Drager pack. Richard took it at once and started to strap it on. 'Get some oxygen cylinders too,' he ordered, gesturing at the nearest stewards to go and help. 'And more rope.' Then he was turning back, tightening the buckles and slipping on the face mask.

  As he went past Robin, their hands touched, apparently by accident. That was all. No time for words now. Nor any need for them. He was going down: she was in charge on deck now.

  He had just stepped on to the first rung down when the black geyser thundered up past him.

  Demetrios's bomb operated with a built-in fifteen second delay
. He had hit the button during his death spasm as he hit the thick surface. The bomb, clutched to him by his dead hand, was heavy. His lungs were empty. During the next fifteen seconds he sank thirty feet. Then the bomb, still sinking rapidly, detonated. It generated very little in the way of blast, but an enormous amount of heat. While the 70,000 tons of ice-cold Cape seawater with which it was surrounded safely soaked up a considerable share of that heat, there was still enough generated during the next incandescent seconds to set up a violent upward current. A mixture of hot water and rapidly expanding gases.

  But the hot water had to travel up the best part of forty feet to the surface, and through every one of those feet it was mixed with more cold water, so that the geyser it caused in the end, though it rose twenty-five feet at its apex, straight up out of the tank-top itself, was never more than tepid; never anywhere near hot enough to set the gases alight.

  The explosion never came.

  Richard was thrown forward against the edge of the tank-top and almost chopped in half by the force of the thick, black fountain, but he held on to the rope as the filth from the tank cascaded up and over him. A moment later, it sucked him back with astonishing force, and only his own iron grip - and the unshakable strength of the team on the other end - saved him from tumbling backwards down into the tank.

  When it was all relatively calm, a moment or two later, he pulled himself out and turned to look down. The tank was absolutely dark again. Only the mess all over his clothes, the Drager gear and the deck stood as proof that the incredible had happened. He ran a hand over his goggles and it came away filmed with oil scum - and something else: of all things, a piece of ribbon.

  Then a perfectly black head thrust up over the rim, and almost at once a second appeared.

  Richard was there immediately, helping them out. Robin was by his side, frowning slightly as she always did when her mind was racing, holding her breath just in case. John joined them almost at once and they rushed Salah and Martyr away from the deadly hole, down towards the safety of the bridge. Richard and John pulled one slack figure each, and Robin walked hunched up between them, feeding oxygen into their filthy mouths.

  As soon as they were sure the air was safe, they stopped and began to use artificial respiration properly, adding to their ministrations with more and more oxygen, until first one, then the other, coughed and started to breathe normally.

  Only then did Richard remove the Drager gear and officially take charge again. 'Better take these two to the sickbay,' he ordered John, First Officer and Medic now.

  John gestured to Ho and they were surrounded by stewards at once.

  But Martyr had one word more. He sat up with a shudder.

  'Sickbay be damned, Richard,' he said. 'Get me to a shower.’

  He reached up and wiped the filth from his Captain's face, then wiped a matching handful from his own. 'Oil!' he cried. 'God, how I hate the lousy stuff!'

  They were still laughing when Bill Heritage came dashing out on to the deck.

  'What's all this?' he called urgently as he ran up to them. Robin joined him, slipping an arm round him as the laughing men quietened.

  'What's going on?' he asked again.

  Richard, looking down, answered quietly, 'Just receiving a final message from the Owner, Bill. That's all.'

  And he handed over the battered, burned piece of ribbon on which three words were just legible.

  BANG, it said, YOU'RE DEAD.

  Afterword

  When I started writing this story, the Salem incident was still in the news. Shorn of its incredible complexities of bluff, double-bluff, 'paper' companies and in-fighting, the story seems to have gone like this. Late in 1979, the tanker Salem loaded 193,000 tons of oil in the Gulf and accepted charter to transport this cargo to Europoort. Soon after leaving the Gulf, she fell silent and effectively disappeared. Early in 1980, at about the time Salem should have been there, a tanker name Lema sailed into Durban and sold her cargo before disappearing into the South Atlantic. No tanker named Lema was registered anywhere at that time, though the name is similar to others which were. Salem remained out of touch. On 17th January, Salem reappeared off Senegal, in terrible trouble, racked with explosions and sinking rapidly. Rescuers picked up her crew from well-stocked lifeboats. The crew were all in possession of clothes, books, drinks, cigarettes and personal possessions of all kinds. But, they maintained, the emergency had been so sudden and severe that no one had had time to save any of the ship's official records. Salem sank into one of the deepest trenches in the Atlantic. No major oil-slick ever marked her grave. Investigations established the likelihood that Salem and Lema were the same ship. The conclusions seem obvious - but they have never been absolutely proven, to my knowledge, in any court of law. Anyone wishing to study the case further should read Barbara Conway's The Piracy Business (Hamlyn, London, 1981).

  I received a lot of help in constructing this 'fantasy' based on the 'facts' above. Much of it came from BP. I would like to thank particularly Alan Peaford, Editor of BP Fleet News, who arranged for me to talk to several senior tanker captains, who arranged for early drafts of the typescript to be checked by them for accuracy, and who arranged for me to visit Europoort and go aboard BP's tankers there. I would like to thank the captains, officers and crews of the tankers who aided me in this long endeavour. Most of what is accurate in this story is due to them. All that is inaccurate is due to me.

  Apart from on-the-ground (so to speak) research, I also worked widely in libraries, and used everything I could from a lifelong obsession with the sea, sea-lore and sea stories. Specifically, I acknowledge a debt to H M Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle (Duckworth, London, 1912), Christopher Buckley's Steaming to Bamboola (Collins, London, 1982) and, like anyone who has written anything about tankers in the last decade, to Noel Mostert's towering Supership (Macmillan, London, 1974).

  On a more personal level, I must thank Jean Flack who has been tireless in her efforts to get me to write a better book and so has improved this one beyond measure. I must also thank Jack Iandoli, who took time off writing film scripts to help me get this story straight. I must thank the Headmaster, staff and students (past and present) of Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' school, from Tony Harding who helped at the beginning to Debbie Curran who advised at the end. I must also thank Jonathan Baker for the benefits of his experiences in the Baltic Exchange, Matthew Kolakowski for his advice on design and reproduction and especially Peter Cooper for his tireless help and support in getting The Coffin Ship on to disc and off again, time after time, Thanks, Pete; and good luck to you and Carol in the States.

  Peter Tonkin,

  Ste Maxime & London

  THE PIRATE SHIP

  PETER TONKIN

  © Peter Tonkin 2015

  First published in 1995 by Headline.

  This edition published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.

  For Cham, Guy and Mark and in memory of my father, Wing Commander FA Tonkin, OBE, C.Eng., FRAeS, RAF 1919-1994.

  PIRATE SHIP: A vessel employed in piracy or manned by pirates. First used 1600 — Oxford English Dictionary

  PIRACY: Attacks by vessels by armed thieves in the South China Seas have been reported in 1982, 1987 and 1988. These attacks are usually made from fast motor boats approaching from astern. Laden vessels with low freeboard are particularly vulnerable — China Sea pilot, fourth edition 1978. Revised 1991. Admiralty Charts and Publications

  The South China Sea is the worst in the world for maritime robbing and hijack. Since 1992 the international maritime bureau … has logged over 120 pirate attacks in South East Asian waters, where there is a tradition of piracy centuries old — Focus Magazine, November 1993.

  ONE — Sulu

  O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done,

  The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

  While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring �
�

  Walt Whitman. Oh Captain! My Captain!

  Chapter One

  When he judged that they had come far enough south, Huuk raised his right hand from the stock of his AK74 assault rifle and extended his arm straight up above his head in the agreed signal to the other boats. At once they all swung due west and he lowered his hand again. The old gun lay across the low pulpit in which Huuk was standing like a slight, slim figurehead and it vibrated against the teak rail as the motors rumbled up towards full throttle. The long magazine curled out over the still waters of the South China Sea and the warm, oiled mechanism of the chamber pushed back gently and reassuringly into the pit of his stomach like the muzzle of a pet animal.

  Unconsciously, for he was concentrating absolutely upon his lookout, Huuk took a deep breath and held the cool, damp, shadowy air in the depths of his lungs until his ribs began to hurt. The action of breathing in pulled the thick wool of his balaclava into his mouth and he tutted mentally at the anxiety which had made him put it on too early. Left-handed, he pulled the rough wool up over his short nose and high forehead until it sat on the top of his skull like a cap. Only then did he breathe out, stroking the stock of the gun with his right hand as though it were a good-luck charm. Behind him, his five-man crew sat silently, all of them, like him, cradling their weapons and keeping keen watch. Away on either hand, slightly astern in an arrowhead formation, two more launches kept pace, each of them also packed with well-armed men on the lookout.

  They were running in under the last of the night, skimming west as though racing the first great beams of dawn light down the rolling curve of the earth. Already there was enough brightness to cast shadows dead ahead onto the silvery surface of the sea and colour was bleeding into the scene with insidious inevitability.