Dead Sea (15 page)

Emma looked up at the name and glanced back towards Liberty with a smile. ‘
Un
,' she called, straightening. ‘Her name is
Un.
It means
Luck.
Also it is the name of one of the temple dogs that guard the entrance to a Japanese Shinto shrine.'

‘
Luck
,' called back Liberty. ‘But what
kind
of luck, Emma? Good or bad?

‘Well,' called back Maya decisively, ‘let's get aboard and see, shall we?'

I
t felt strange to Liberty at once that
Flint
's deck was level and the vessel was no longer rushing down the wind. As Maya and Emma pulled themselves up and aboard the
Un Maru
, an eerie moment descended. Other sensations threatened to overwhelm her in that intensely strange instant. The stuck-pig squeal of the fenders squashed between the vessels' sides. The banshee whine of the wind in the rigging and in the deck rails that Emma and Maya were clambering over. The thud of the following sea beneath
Flint
's solid counter. The way the deck shivered. How the tortured fenders squealed again, even more loudly.

‘My God!' said Emma over the two-way, her voice loud enough to make both Bella and Liberty jump. ‘You should
smell
this!' and the strange second was gone.

The wind backed suddenly as Emma spoke and Liberty could indeed smell
Un Maru
for an intense but blessedly brief instant The Japanese vessel's peculiar odour was an adenoid-searing amalgam of rust, diesel, sweat, sickness and rotting fish. No sooner did Liberty feel her stomach heave in response to the deeply offensive stench than it was gone, and the fresh, clean easterly wind was back.

The laptop screen came alive. Liberty's concentration on the unsteady picture was so intense that she seemed to be aboard with Emma and Maya. The green lawn of the deck heaved before her, raised into sickening molehills of rust and mess. Then the picture swung upwards. Above and before her were lines of rigging, red, brown and yellow with rust, sagging off the horizontal, bowed and bellied away from the vertical. Except that, about eight feet up there were straight lines running fore and aft from bridge house to forepeak a yard or so in from the port and starboard safety rails. These were supported by a couple of light gantries like tall, slim goalmouths for a soccer match. Under the nearest, stood a white-painted, red-streaked box that looked as though it contained hatch controls. Immediately aft of it, in the middle of the deck, an open hatch gaped, square and black.

‘Anybody aboard?' bellowed Maya, making Liberty and Bella jump.

‘And answer came there none,' observed Emma. ‘Where shall we start?'

‘I guess we should start in the bridge house,' suggested Maya, talking to Emma, but broadcasting her thoughts over the two-way.

‘Yeah,' agreed Emma. ‘Get ready to hold your breath, girl.'

‘And take care,' ordered Liberty.

The camera's picture swung towards the bridge house, showing that the green non-slip deck coating stopped well before the rusty white wall. Emma's square shoulder and short ponytail lurched into view as she took the lead. A moment later they were at the starboard side. A deck door, which opened slowly beneath Emma's most forceful shove, screaming so loudly it made more shouting unnecessary, allowing sunlight to stream some way at least into the corridor immediately behind it. The camera jiggled as Maya stepped over the raised section and then wavered further as she reset the brightness.

Even after the banshee scream of the door she bellowed again, ‘Hello, the ship? Is there anyone aboard? Emma, can you shout in Japanese?'

‘
Ohayou gozaimasu
,' shouted Emma, even more loudly than Maya had. ‘
Otetsudai shimashouka
? It means
good morning, can I help you?
Will that do? I'm from Sacramento, not Sapporo.'

‘That's fine,' said Maya. ‘And it was loud enough to wake the dead in any language. Let's get moving.'

Emma switched on her torch and led the way to a companionway that Liberty reckoned must lead upwards to the bridge and downwards to the accommodation, storage and engineering sections. ‘Up,' said Maya.

‘Away from the stench,' agreed Emma, going partway to explaining her companion's terse monosyllable.

The battered, blistered steps led up between scuffed and black-scraped walls with dangerously unsecure banisters, round one blank-walled turn and immediately into the command bridge.

‘Uh-oh,' said Emma as she stepped first through the command bridge door, ‘looks like we're by no means the first people to come aboard lately.'

Under the blistering brightness of the early morning sun, it was obvious at once that Emma was right. All of the control and navigation equipment had either been pirated, ripped free and left strewn on the deck or smashed to pieces in situ.

‘Looks like we won't find much comms equipment,' growled Maya as she followed Emma's shoulder into the looted hollow of the radio room. There was a chart room next door, where all the charts and pilots were scattered: lying ripped, broken-backed and torn to pieces on the battered table and the littered deck.

The camera showed the women's progress back through the wreckage and down the companionway to the A deck corridor. Then Emma's torch led them downwards. The foot of the companionway opened into a communal area whose benches were clearly designed to also serve as bunks, whose central table doubled as work table and refectory board and all of whose cupboards gaped, their contents burst and scattered everywhere with an abandon that might have embarrassed a Vandal.

‘Now this,' said Maya grimly, ‘is what I call the crew's
mess
!'

A short corridor led forward from the wrecked crew's quarters past the foot of the companionway to a pair of smaller rooms on either hand, and what looked in the torchlight like a galley straight ahead. One room on the starboard was completely untouched. Immediately inside the doorway sat two temple dogs. The strangeness tempted the women to step in silently.

‘
A
,' whispered Emma as the picture showed a pug face with its mouth open. ‘And
Un
,' as the camera showed its closed-mouth twin. Beyond these stood a wooden shrine gate leading inwards. Somehow it did not look strange or out of place here in a cabin aboard a drifting hulk.

‘It is the
Torii
,' said Emma. ‘The temple gateway. Step through it into the spirit world.' She did. Maya, with the camera, followed.

There was a bowl full of clean-looking water with ladles beside it. Freshly folded towels. Further in, there was a small bamboo-sided collection box miraculously untouched, a table against the inmost wall with a box of bamboo sticks, some luck charts and some wooden tablets.

‘It is a Shinto shrine,' said Emma, her voice low and reverent. She gestured at the tablets on the table. ‘
Ema
, with pictures of the divine steed. A
Shuzu
,' she said, touching a decorated stick topped with a little bell. ‘If we ring it, the gods will know we wish to speak with them. And an
Omamori,
' she picked up a talisman like the tablets with their vivid horses. ‘It will bring good luck.'

‘We should take that,' said Maya forthrightly. ‘You never know when we'll need a little luck.'

Then they turned and walked out of the place. Opposite it was the ship's head. The briefest glance in here sufficed to show that it too remained undisturbed – though for very different reasons.

Then there was a small galley, everything in it ravished and scattered like the store cupboards in the crew's mess. The deck awash with cooking oil, rice, flour, noodles, broken eggs and rotting fish scattered everywhere. Cupboards gaping, doors off hinges, the cupboards themselves half off the walls; the simple gas-fuelled range torn off its fittings, sitting at a crazy angle, the gas bottle beneath it reeling drunkenly, only held erect by the metal hose connecting it to the burner, like a pirate hanged in chains.

The left-hand wall of the wrecked galley contained a door that gaped half open. Placing their feet with extreme care amid the slippery mess on the floor, Emma and Maya crossed to this and stepped through into another short corridor leading forward. At the end of this there was a more substantial door and it didn't take much for Liberty to work out that this was the coffer dam immediately beneath the forward wall of the bridge house that separated the propulsion and living areas from the main cargo area.

Emma pulled the bulkhead door back and stepped over the raised section into the vessel's main hold. It was a sizeable area, lit not only by the horizontal beams of the torches but also by a vertical column of white light which seemed to explode in and down through the square hatch left open in the deck above. The hold was empty, its distant walls a rotting shell seemingly supported by rust-red metal ribs.

‘You cannot . . .' choked Maya. ‘You cannot imagine the stench in this place.'

‘OK,' said Liberty. ‘You'd better get out before you suffocate, I guess.'

‘We don't need to see any more, do we?' asked Maya quietly, depressed by the destruction all around them as they picked their way back through the galley. ‘There's no one here. Nothing more to see.'

‘Better just check aft,' said Liberty. ‘Take a quick look in the engine room.'

‘OK,' agreed Maya grudgingly. ‘But I don't see that we should film any more of it.' And the laptop screen went blank.

‘Just walking through the mess of the mess again,' came Maya's voice over the two-way. ‘The passage behind leads between a couple of doors. Opening into . . . cabins. Captain's and engineer's, I guess. Trashed, same as everything else. Bunks smashed. Bedding scattered. Mattresses gutted – if you can call these things mattresses. Back into the corridor . . . Leading back and down a short companionway to an internal bulkhead door. Opening inwards . . .'

Abruptly the laptop screen lit up again. Maya's camera followed a pair of torch beams in a slow pan round an engine room. The engine and all the ancillary equipment seemed to be almost floating in a great dark sea that came most of the way up its rusty, battered sides and stretched away into the cavernous shadows, apparently coming halfway up the engine room walls.

‘Is the surface of the water really black?' asked Liberty. ‘Or is that a trick of the light?'

‘It's black,' gasped Maya.

‘Because it's oil,' choked Emma.

‘The
fumes
 . . .' Maya coughed.

‘You'd better get out,' ordered Liberty. An engine room flooded with fuel oil had to be a very dangerous place indeed. Even in a powerless, abandoned ghost ship. Stories she had heard from the Mariners and their children whirled in the half-remembered recesses of her memory. Of supertanker holds exploding during cleaning because the static generated by too-powerful hoses set off the lethally explosive gases. Fumes ignited by the spark from the fibre of a nylon shirt.

Were Maya and Emma wearing or carrying anything that might set the volatile atmosphere ablaze? Did they have anything on or near them that might cause static? Anything powerful enough to generate a spark? The torches? The camera? The two-way radios?

At the very least, she remembered, her flesh going cold at the thought, the gas given off by fuel oil could be dangerously poisonous. ‘Hurry,' she urged. ‘Switch off the camera and get out fast. And close the door behind you.'

‘Emma,' said Maya's voice distantly on the two-way. ‘Emma . . .'

The picture on the laptop screen swung wildly through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to show the corridor reaching back. Then the square receding lines of the perspective seemed to spin and tumble as the camera fell to the deck.

R
obin sprang awake. She looked around, blinking, all her senses on the alert. Something had just happened. Something bad. She looked at her watch. Just after six a.m. It would soon be dawn. She had been asleep for two hours.

It was Day A on the watch rotation. At the end of Day B, at four a.m. this morning, she had crept sleepily down into her bunk having relinquished the wheel to Flo Weary. Everything had been plain sailing then. They had enjoyed four days of a steady westerly trade wind that had driven them forward at the better part of thirty-five knots tacking across it in the traditional sawtooth pattern along their north-easterly course from Tuvalu past cursed Howland Island, heading for the vastness north of Hawaii and their rendezvous with Tanaka's bottle.

It was the kind of a run that
Katapult
seemed to love best of all. But, as with each of those last four days, there had been little to do except to perform the occasional tack. There had been nothing to see, no one to talk to except for their crew mates and the occasional wider contacts. And nothing registering on the radar or sonar except for the occasional reef.

But now there was something wrong.

‘
Robin!
' Flo Weary's voice echoed down from the green-grey glimmer of the communications area, and Robin registered that Flo had called her an instant earlier, just as she was jarred awake. ‘Robin! Did you feel that?'

‘What?' asked Robin, rolling out on to the deck of
Katapult
's main crew cabin and pulling herself as close to upright as she dared. The deck leaned a little – a little more than she expected, in fact. She paused, one hand against the solid column of the leaning mast, feeling the power of the wind on the sails pushing the mast over against the buoyancy of the starboard outrigger. But the deck was unexpectedly steep. The outrigger wasn't sitting right.

Thank God she had crawled slovenly into bed fully dressed.

‘We hit something,' called Flo loudly enough to make Robin's watch-mate Rohini stir but not wake. It usually took something really major to wake the Indian round-the-world yachtswoman.