Dead Sea (23 page)

Liberty tensed to let go of Maya and grab Emma, but the Sino-American woman was already on her hands and knees, puking weakly on to the deck. The wind had picked up even further. There were clouds threatening in the distance, and the colour of the ocean had changed to a deeper green. The swells were big enough to be moving both
Flint
and
Un Maru
more wildly. The fenders between the hulls were screaming like souls in torment. ‘Quickly!' gasped Liberty. ‘Let's get aboard
Flint
and away. Emma! Can you walk?'

Answering with actions rather than words, Emma pulled herself to her feet and staggered alongside Liberty and Bella to the side of the derelict wreck. Liberty went over first and turned at once, reaching back and up for Maya's dead weight. Then Emma half fell aboard before Bella stepped more delicately – but no less urgently – over the safety rail and down. Then she too turned and began to untie the rope securing the two working hulls together.

Liberty staggered down into the cockpit and the moment Bella shouted, ‘Free!' she engaged the motor and eased the two vessels apart. With Maya still face down on the deck and Emma on all fours beside her, Liberty brought the motors up to full ahead, looking back fearfully over her shoulder, trusting that the darkening ocean ahead was clear. It was only when Bella joined her in the cockpit, settled into her accustomed place beside the equipment and whispered, with profanity that she had never been heard to use before today, ‘
What the fuck . . .
', that Liberty thought to look down. And saw the laptop screen.

In their rush to get clear they had forgotten the camera. It was still where Maya had dropped it and it was still switched on. The little light gave just enough illumination for them to still make out the corridor at its crazy angle and the openings leading into increasingly shadowed rooms beyond it. The crew's mess and the galley, almost invisible in the darkness.
Un Maru
was moving sufficiently forcefully to make the camera itself rock from side to side, and the combined movement gave the impression that the derelict vessel was in the grip of a terrible storm. The corridor heaved and lurched. The angles of the doorways seemed to reel crazily. For a truly mind-bending moment it seemed that the door into the mess and that into the galley were moving out of synch, at different speeds and attitudes.

And everything in the distant galley seemed to be alive. Cupboard doors flapped, dark veneer exteriors invisible, white laminate interiors catching the light. The last of their contents slid around, from side to side and back and forth, little more than dark shapes coming and going into and out of the darkness as the doors swung to and fro, outlined against the white of the interiors. Until, at last, the cupboard hanging crazily above the dismounted gas stove top fell off completely.

They never knew how or why, but something in that final fall sparked off the gas. The galley exploded into flame. A cloud of yellow brilliance filled the mess, which instantly added to the brightness and the flames. A great ball of fire billowed into the engine room corridor and came rolling along the deckhead above the camera, which recorded its own destruction with shocking faithfulness. A black-streaked yellow cloud rolling forward, contained by the geometric precision of the walls and deckhead above them and seeming to drip flaming streamers into the fume-rich atmosphere immediately outside the diesel-flooded engine room. And then the screen went blank.

L
iberty jammed the motor controls hard forward and looked fearfully back over her shoulder at the all too slowly receding shape of the drifting hulk. A muffled
BOOM!
echoed down the wind. A gout of thick black smoke burst out of the open bridge house and came towards them. Red fire followed. It came flooding out of the bulkhead doors the women had left open. It exploded through the glass and came licking out of the windows. Then with a deafening report, the oil in the flooded engine room went up, the fumes heated to detonation point by the warmth coming through the bulkhead. Liberty hadn't even registered that
Un Maru
possessed a funnel until she saw it rise like a rocket and cartwheel into the water, trailing smoke. And the whole deck of the vessel seemed to tear itself open.

Liberty could almost see the wall of force spreading across the water towards them, like a squall.
Flint
slammed forward as it hit her, digging her bow into the back of a wave and heaving wildly. For a moment, the air was very hot, very noisy, and full of the stenches that had marked the
Un Maru
when she was still alive. But there was no debris. No hard rain of nuts and bolts. No withering shrapnel of glass shards. The blazing hulk refused to sink. It sat there, low in the water, its funnel and bridge house gone and its decks open to the elements, burning, guttering, floating.

‘Now whoever built
that
,' said Liberty wonderingly after a while, ‘should have done some work on the
Titanic
.'

The chuckle Maya gave was the first sign that she was still alive.

One by one they pulled themselves together and began to look to their boat. They stowed the fenders and set the sails. They reported to a distant, whispering radio contact that
Flint
was OK, and her crew were fine. They did not detail their most recent near disaster. Instead, they reported the current state of wind, weather and water. They calculated that they were currently at four five point two degrees north, one four four degrees west, and heading west along their course as agreed towards their rendezvous with
Cheerio
at a mean ten knots under full sail. That there would be no more video footage because their camera had sustained fatal damage. And finally that there was a burning vessel drifting as a serious hazard to shipping, a second or two of longitude east of the position they had just given.

The wind strengthened,
Flint
's mainsail swung out to starboard and their speed picked up a little. The clouds in the east behind them started scudding in low and dark as a squall came chasing them westwards. It was this as much as anything that pulled them out of the lethargy that followed the adrenaline high which had got them through the adventure. They needed to sort out their storm rig, and were lucky that the weather gave them sufficient warning to change their gear before they did so.

They even had time for a hot meal at eight bells, though the traditional marker of noon aboard did not signify the traditional change of watch. Not under their current rotation. It might have given Liberty a chance for a noon sight, had she been minded to double-check the GPS with more old-fashioned methods. But the clouds had closed down and the exercise would have been pointless. So they sat, rigged and ready for foul weather with their speed falling off in the following wind, eating a mess of reconstituted scrambled eggs and baked beans which, by some magic, Bella rendered not only palatable but delicious.

But in the end, the squall never caught up with them. Its southern skirts scattered them with rain and pulled the wind round a point or two, then span away northwards. The wind eased and shifted southwards in the early afternoon and they began to think of running across it, gybing into a course that took them first north of their westerly course and then south again to meet it. It would be hard work, but it would keep their speed up.

The wind's new quarter seemed to bring the weather some further second thoughts with it. Conditions began to moderate towards a clear calm and the swells, never really amounting to all that much, began to settle into their accustomed deep-water set. The girls began to relax once more, and fell to more active yacht-handling. This was a race, after all. And they were still more than four days away from the spot their target was calculated to be at when they met it. About the same distance as
Katapult
by the look of things.

The clouds thinned and the afternoon sun came out, westering on their port bow as they continued their northerly reach. Their wet weather gear came off, replaced by jeans and blouses. The wind stayed steady enough to keep vision clear through the rest of the afternoon, and it seemed to
Flint
's crew that things could only get better from here. Liberty let her ease off a point or two so the hull didn't vibrate so badly.

Then, just after the watch changed at seventeen hundred hours local time, ‘
What's that?
' demanded Bella, who was using the last of her off-watch time to do a little lookout-keeping. The tall Chinese-American was back up on the forepeak with the binoculars once again. ‘Liberty, there's something dead ahead.'

Maya called, ‘Just a minute,' and checked on her instruments, while Liberty looked down from the helm to see what the radar and sonar could make of whatever Bella could see.

‘Well,' announced Maya decidedly. ‘It looks like there's something there. Radar's picking it up but I have no clear picture of what on earth it is. If the kit's to be believed, it goes on forever. If there was anything on the sonar I might be convinced it was an island.'

‘An island?' demanded Liberty. ‘Out here? There's nothing on the chart.'

‘Nothing for miles,' confirmed Maya. ‘And I mean hundreds and hundreds of miles. We're due to hit
Cheerio
long before we hit anything like land
.
'

‘Then what on earth is it?' mused Liberty.

‘If we stay on this course then we'll find out because we're heading straight for it,' called Bella.

‘Well, I hadn't planned to be until we change watches at nineteen hundred hours, then we can run back south all night,' said Liberty, more to herself than to anyone. ‘Maybe get a smooth run. Manage a little sleep.'

‘Well, that's OK,' answered Maya. ‘We'll be close enough for a look-see by nineteen hundred.'

‘But after this morning we'll be pretty bloody careful as we close up with it,' said Liberty feelingly.

The wind continued to let them run north of west along this reach as the sun settled westward. Bella continued to look ahead, but the low brightness began to interfere with her vision and so she came back to the cockpit, then went below to do some more cooking. The watch was due to change at nineteen hundred hours, so they ate curry and rice at eighteen hundred. Maya kept an electronic eye on what they were approaching as she shovelled spoonfuls of the fragrant food into her mouth, but it was not until the last few moments before darkness at eighteen forty-eight that Bella got another opportunity to check with the binoculars.

And the moment she did so, things changed yet again. ‘Liberty!' she called urgently. ‘Come here and look at this! You won't believe it! All of you, come and take a look.'

‘One at a time,' warned Liberty. ‘Emma, take the helm for a moment, please.'

A minute later she was at Bella's shoulder with the mixed-race Chinese-Cheyenne's hair blowing in black strands across her face. She spread her feet a little and leaned her lower belly into the curve of the safety rail on the forecastle head of
Flint
's slim hull. Her hip fitted snugly against Bella's, and the tight line of the forestay with the full-bellied sail behind it separated their feet then rose solidly up behind them, holding the pair of them safely. Spray kicked up to the level of their knees, chuckling beneath the counter like a naughty child and the wind whispered past them.

‘What?' Liberty asked, straining to see ahead. The northern horizon was dark, but oddly not with clouds. The sky was glassily clear and light. It was the sea that was dark. She shaded her eyes and squinted across the glare coming in from the port quarter. The horizon looked strangely uneven, rising in unnaturally square-looking sections. For a moment she wondered whether it could be a fleet of ships beating down on them, with the setting sun gleaming across their tall sides and square bridge houses. Frowning, she took the binoculars from Bella and pushed them to her eyes.

It was all Liberty could do to stop herself from shouting with shock. For what was approaching them was not a fleet. It was a town. Had the sonar given it any undersea foundations, she would have sworn it must be an island with a considerable settlement sitting on top of it. But no. There was no land there. Maya's sonar readings had confirmed that clearly enough. It was all afloat. Something stirred in her memory, something she had read or seen while planning this trip. Something dismissed as being too ridiculous. Too unlikely to be relevant.

‘Bella,' she said. ‘Go back and take the wheel. I want Emma to see this. I really wouldn't have believed it possible . . .'

And yet she could see a house, clear as day. An honest-to-goodness house, with another behind it, a third in the distance. Tall, two-storied, solidly roofed family dwellings. Square windows catching the last of the light. And cars. Half-a-dozen family saloons: Hondas, Nissans, Toyotas, apparently parked haphazardly outside the dwellings. A mass of wood, some of it rising up like fences on a suburban street. It stretched from side to side across the horizon. Liberty tried for a moment or two to calculate the simple size of what she was seeing. Trying to understand it seemed so far beyond anything she was capable of.

‘Mother of God,' she breathed. ‘What the hell is this?'

‘Tohoku,' said Emma, easing into Bella's vacant position at her shoulder. ‘It is the wreckage that the tsunami washed out to sea from Japan after the Tohoku earthquake in 2011. I have heard tell of an island of it floating slowly across the Pacific, but I never thought I'd actually see it. Some day it will reach British Columbia, they say. Maybe Alaska and Washington State in the US. For the moment, it seems, it is here.'

‘Shit,' said Liberty. She looked at the floating island with its cars, fences and houses for another unbelieving moment.

Then she was in action. ‘Stand by to gybe,' she ordered briskly. ‘We're on the southward reach as of now!'