And the Deep Blue Sea (22 page)

It was the small storeroom, he thought, where they’d stitched Mayr into the burial sack, and he remembered the wooden door on the two horses where the “body” had lain. That would be perfect. He didn’t remember Krasicki until they’d shot inside the doorway and there on the same platform was the canvas mummy in its familiar, grisly shape. He saw Karen shudder, and they were turning to run back out when he caught sight of the bolt of canvas on the deck. They leaped over, and stood on it, conscious only of the relief of getting off the burning steel.

There was the sound of a shot somewhere above them. They exchanged an uneasy glance, but said nothing. Then just above their heads there were footsteps, a great many of them. Goddard oriented himself with relation to the rest of the midships structure. The men would be going forward along the port side of the crew’s deck. They were still passing. Were they fleeing the fire? The smoke was growing worse. His throat and nostrils burned with it, and he was seized with a fit of coughing. The temperature must be more than a hundred and twenty degrees. Sweat ran into his eyes. The footsteps ceased, and there was silence except for the rushing sound of the fire.

“They were going forward,” Karen said. “Do you suppose it has started to spread?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But let’s get out of this trap while we can make it to the ladder. If we can.”

He motioned for her to wait while he leaped to the door and hopped from one foot to another as he looked down the passageway to his right. The ladder was half obscured by smoke now, and for half the distance this way the paint on the steel deck plates was bubbling. It would stick to their feet and take the skin off. He turned back to Karen.

“Let me have the canvas,” he said. “Sit there for a minute.” He gestured to the door supporting Krasicki’s body in its burial sack. She perched on the edge of it and lifted her feet. He grabbed up the bolt of cloth and leaped back into the passageway. Holding one end, he threw it toward the ladder. It unrolled to within a few feet of it.

He ran down the strip and kicked the remainder of the bolt. He could feel his feet blistering as he bounded the remaining distance and leaped to the ladder treads. He could see no one above him. “All right,” he called softly. Karen emerged and ran toward the ladder. He watched to see she made it all right, and went on up.

There was no one in the passageway, and no sound except that of the rain and the roaring and crackling noises of the fire. That was odd. She came up behind him. They looked at each other, puzzled. They could duck into the hospital, which was just forward of them, but the silence worried him. The doorway opening onto the after end of the deck was less than six feet from them, but nobody had passed it, and there were no footsteps or voices from the men fighting the fire. He gestured for her to stay where she was, tiptoed over to it, and peered out. There was nobody fighting the fire. There was nobody in sight at all.

He beckoned, and she slipped up beside him in the doorway. The fire roared on unchecked from number three hatch, flames and boiling black smoke blowing off to starboard now in the wind, and they could feel the searing waves of heat on their faces. The steel hatch coaming glowed a dull red, and the deck all around gave off waves of steam as the rain lashed across it and vaporized on contact. At each corner of the deck up here, next to the ladders, was an abandoned fire hose, no water at all coming from the nozzles.

“If they’d abandoned ship,” Karen said, “they’d have gone up. They were going forward.”

They wheeled and ran along the deserted passageway. The rooms and fo’c’sles were all empty. At the forward end, beyond the thwartships passage, were two messrooms. They were empty too, but there were portholes along the forward bulkhead. They hurried into the second one and around the long single table. Slipping up to separate portholes, they peered out cautiously, and saw at once why nobody was fighting the fire.

The forward well-deck below them was full of men standing in the blown curtains of rain. They were staring aft in the attitudes of animals at bay, some up at the bridge and others apparently at someone or something on this deck and just off to the right of where they were. It was the whole crew, Goddard thought. At a rapid glance he picked out Barset, Mr. Pargoras, Svedberg, the second mate, Gutierrez, two of the engineers, several of the sailors he knew by sight, and even two of the black gang who must be on watch now, wearing singlets and sweat rags.

Karen had moved around with the left side of her face against the bulkhead, peering out as far to the right as she could. She stepped back, looked at Goddard, and stabbed a ringer in that direction. He looked. Otto was standing just beyond them where he could cover both ladders, an automatic rifle propped on the rail in front of him.

He beckoned to Karen, and they slipped back out into the passage. Just as they emerged they heard a noise somewhere on the starboard side as though somebody had dropped a pail. There was an instant of silence, and then a groan. Goddard slipped on to the corner, and peered down the starboard passageway. Ahead of him was an open cleaning-gear locker. Sprawled on his side in front of it was a man clad only in dungarees and slides, near his head the empty pail he had apparently dislodged from a shelf while trying to pull himself erect. Goddard beckoned to Karen and ran back to him. He knelt and turned him on his back.

It was Koenig, the AB who’d given him the sport shirt. He had apparently been shot through the chest. Blood was all over his rib cage and abdomen, and on the deck, and more bubbled from his nostrils and trickled from the corner of his mouth. Karen winced and closed her eyes for an instant, but she picked up his legs while Goddard caught him by the shoulders and they got him into a lower bunk in the fo’c’s’le next door. Goddard turned his head and propped it on a pillow so he wouldn’t strangle, cursing silently because there was nothing else he could do. Even a surgical team couldn’t save him without several liters of blood. He’d lost too much, and was slipping into shock.

Goddard knelt beside him. “Who did it?” he asked.

“The bos’n.” Koenig started to choke. Goddard turned him back on his side and snatched at part of the blue bedspread to wipe the blood from his mouth. He took a gasping breath. “I tried to hide—in the locker. To get behind him—get the gun. I knew what they were going to do.”

“What?” Goddard asked.

Koenig gave no indication he had heard. His eyes closed, but he went on with his halting speech. He’d overheard Mayr and Lind speaking in German while the others were fighting the fire.

“I am German,” he said, with another fight for breath. “Mayr was telling Lind what to do. Stop the fire pump—let her burn. Get a cutting torch from the engine room—wreck all the lifeboats except one. Send an SOS—with a phony position. Spivak—oiler—” Koenig’s voice stopped.

“What about Spivak?” Goddard asked.

“In the engine room—opening the sea intakes.”

Goddard looked up at Karen. “Thirty men,” she whispered. “Who could do it?”

“Koenig.” Goddard leaned close to him. “Koenig, can you hear me? You say Mayr was giving the orders. Was it military? You know—as if he were Lind’s superior officer?”

“No.” Koenig’s voice was barely audible. “It was worse. He is Lind’s father.”

That answered a lot of things, Goddard thought, including Karen’s question: Who could do it? Blood would tell. And it didn’t matter in the slightest how much, or whose.

Koenig’s eyes opened wide for an instant as though he were watching something terrible he was powerless to escape. Did you see it coming for you in those last few minutes, Goddard wondered, even when you were in shock? He was trying to speak again, but his voice was only a whisper, and Goddard had to lean down almost to his lips to hear.

“Oh, God. Another one.”

T
HE ONLY THING THEY HAD
going for them, Goddard thought, was that Lind didn’t know they were aboard. That wasn’t much, considering the time margin they were operating with. In a half hour, or perhaps less, the fire was going to spread into the shelter deck and come roaring up through the whole midships house. The engine room was being flooded, and while he didn’t know how fast it came in, you would reach a point of no return as soon as you could no longer get at the valves to stop it, and the pumps and the boiler fireboxes were flooded.

Koenig was still fighting for life, his breathing a series of rattling gasps it was awful to hear and which couldn’t go on for more than a few minutes longer. They didn’t want to leave him, but he was already unconscious, and time was flying past them. Goddard nodded to Karen, and they went out and hurried aft along the passageway.

She shuddered once, and drew a hand across her face. Then she asked, “What can we do?”

“I want one of those guns,” he said. His voice was calm, but when she looked around at him she saw in his eyes that same feral yearning they’d had there in Madeleine Lennox’ cabin before he went for Rafferty.

“One gun? Against six of them?” she asked.

They had reached the doorway opening onto the after deck. Opposite it was one of the steel doors into the engine room casing. He motioned for silence, stepped over, and quietly pulled it open a few inches. He peered in at the catwalks around the great mass of the main engine and the tracery of steel ladders leading down to the floor plates thirty feet below. On a grating halfway down where he could watch all the ladders was a man with a handgun shoved into the waistband of his dungarees. That would be Spivak, standing guard over the opened sea intakes. There was no way to reach him except down the ladders right in front of him. Scratch that one.

He looked down again. With the
Leander
’s slow roll, a wave of water several inches deep was sweeping across the floor plates. It was already out of the bilges. He softly closed the door, and as he turned he saw the smoke swirling up around the ladder from the shelter deck where he and Karen had emerged a few minutes ago. It was coming at them from both directions.

He was thinking swiftly. The others? Lind, Mayr, the bos’n, and Karl would be on the boat deck, all armed, and only two of them, at most, busy cutting the bottoms out of the other three boats with the torch. Simple suicide. Lind alone, unarmed, could probably kill him with his bare hands. Otto? With a steel bulkhead behind him and fifty feet of open deck on each side, he was impregnable. And unless he was removed, they were all finished.

“What could you do with a gun?” she asked again. “Against all six of them?”

“Kill Otto,” he said.

She understood what he meant. They had to get the crew back here. Even if he could get into the engine room, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to shut off the sea intakes or start the fire pump, to say nothing of the fact he wouldn’t recognize either of them if he fell over them.

“But as soon as they realize what Lind’s doing,” she protested, “Otto won’t be able to keep them there.”

He could until it was too late, Goddard thought, but there wasn’t time to explain. They knew already. Of the thirty, Otto could stop only the first six or eight, but who was going to be in the first six or eight? Until he emptied his clip, nobody would get to the top of either of those ladders. That also meant the second wave had to climb over a ladder full of wounded men, with Lind and Mayr shooting straight down on top of them from the bridge.

Sparks!
He was the only one who’d be alone and where there was a chance to reach him. He grabbed Karen by the arm and ran her down the passage to the door of the hospital. “Wait here,” he said. “Bolt the door, and don’t open it until you know it’s me.”

“Where are you going?”

“The radio shack. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

He went up the inside companionway on the run, trying to visualize where the wireless room would be. The cage for the antenna lead-in was on the starboard side of the boat deck near the bridge, so it should be forward in the starboard passageway. He emerged into the thwartships passage of the officers’ deck and turned right, going softly now, and listening. As he turned the corner, he heard a noise ahead of him, but it wasn’t a radio receiver or the staccato chirping of continental morse; it sounded like a wrecking crew at work, metallic crashings and a splintering of glass.

It was coming from the second door in front of him. He eased up to it and peered in. The radio console with its main, emergency, and high-frequency transmitters, its receivers, and its desk and typewriter stand, was in the middle of the room, facing the door. Sparks had all three transmitters tilted out in the servicing position with their circuits and components exposed, and was standing with his back to the door, using a fire ax to reduce them to electronic hash.

Lind never missed a bet, Goddard thought. He should have realized a mind like that would never overlook even the possibility there might be another qualified operator aboard. He sighed, stepped softly up behind the Latin on bare feet, and slugged him over a kidney. Sparks slumped in agony, and dropped the ax. Goddard twisted an arm behind his back and ran him across the room into the steel bulkhead. His knees buckled. Goddard flipped him over onto his back even as he was collapsing, and he lay looking up, dazed but still conscious, the dark eyes eloquent with hatred. Kneeling beside him, Goddard patted his pockets. They were empty.

“I want a gun,” he said.

“
La madre
.”

“Where is it?” Goddard leaned back and could just reach the head of the dropped fire ax. He set the pointed side of it on Sparks’ throat. “Why not tell me now? When this goes through your voice box, you’ll have to point.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“I guess I should have told you,” Goddard said. “I’m short of time.” He began to press on the ax.

“If I had a gun, I’d be glad to give it to you.”

“Sure, I know. And where.”

“Listen. If you’ll take that thing out of my throat, maybe I can tell you so you’ll believe me. I hate you. I hate your guts. I hate all of you arrogant pigs. But if I had a gun and thought you could stop that murdering
cabrón,
I’d give it to you.”