Dead Sea (27 page)

Therefore, as
Flint
shouldered through the water, so she performed almost all of the movements that naval architects call the six degrees of freedom. She
surged
forward and occasionally backward; she
swayed
from side to side, she
heaved
up and down while she
heeled
this way and that under the wind. She
pitched
and she
yawed
with an enthusiasm that made standing difficult, sitting uncomfortable, sleep next to impossible, and staying in a bunk or hammock nothing more than a dream. It was lucky no one felt like eating because cooking was out of the question, and any food or drink choked down came straight back up again.

But the wind eased back to force five in the night. The sea calmed and by the end of the next day's sailing, they were pushing through force-three weather, smacking over wavelets that hardly stirred
Flint
's hull out of the gentle forward motion Liberty's expert sail-handling was forcing out of an eight-knot westerly breeze. The sun beat down all afternoon and by the change of watch at seventeen hundred hours all their clothes and gear were dry enough to gather off the decks and stow away.

It was a Day B rotation so Liberty and Maya were on watch while Emma and Bella cleared away and broke open the food locker. As the sun settled westerly on the starboard quarter, Liberty held the con while Maya sat on the cabin roof with their binoculars round her neck and the four of them feasted on canned beef stew, canned mixed vegetables and pasta, followed by canned peaches and condensed milk, followed by coffee and more condensed milk.

At eighteen hundred, Maya tried to raise a signal on their communications equipment but nothing was coming through. The red dots on the computer screen were moving according to programming and predictions now – they hadn't been updated live for some time. After a while, she gave up with a shrug. Later, in the quiet of the darkness, cutting across that warm, steady westerly under a low, full moon and a jewel box full of massive tropical stars, she tried to raise a signal once again. This time she was more successful. She made her regular report and asked for news in return.
Katapult
had reported in recently as well; she was past French Frigate Shoals – by the skin of her teeth, apparently – and running steadily up to meet them. Even as the report came through, the red dots on the laptop screen reset themselves, jumping forward to show that both the yachts and the bottle they were racing towards had made better than predicted progress. Unaccountably, another dot appeared, flickering on and off almost like a warning light, seemingly coming down from the north. No one Maya talked to had any idea what that was. A marker of some kind that Captain Mariner had added to the display while he and Mr Greenbaum were in Tokyo.

‘Ask them about Dad,' demanded Liberty. ‘He's been out of contact for longer than usual. It's not like him.'

But there was seemingly nothing new to report in that quarter. And the signal dwindled away after a few more minutes in any case. ‘That's strange,' said the sharp-eared Maya unthinkingly. ‘They sounded almost shifty there. D'you think there's something they're not telling us?'

‘Probably just fallout from the fact that the professor's gone off somewhere,' said Liberty. ‘Like they told us, what, nearly a week ago now. That has to have put some kind of spanner in the works.'

‘Yes,' said Maya uncertainly. ‘That's what it'll be, I guess.'

They fell silent then and talked little more, both of them prey to suspicions of their own. The moon was still up when they changed the watch at four a.m., moved on to a southward tack as they did so, and the whole thing was completed almost as easily as it would have been by daylight.

The good thing about holding the watch through to this hour was that the berths were still warm, thought Liberty drowsily as she settled down twenty minutes later into the berth she shared turnabout with Emma. Her head was on a pillow which could double as a life preserver that still smelt faintly of Emma's favourite perfume. Her right ear was near the inner curve of the starboard quarter only a couple of inches away from the North Pacific, separated from the enormity of water by the moulded, strengthened polystyrene skin of the hull. And, where there had been a restless reeling thunder of surf only forty-eight hours earlier, now there was a restful hissing chuckle.

And, suddenly, distantly, hauntingly, the lost and lonely keening of whalesong echoing up out of untold depths below.

But as she fell into an exhausted sleep, she still found herself wondering about her father.

When she woke in the morning, she found she had far more immediate things to worry about.

It was the tapping that woke her. It inserted itself into a disturbingly vivid dream of some wild half-remembered New England heathland like the ghost of Cathy in
Wuthering
Heights
rapping insistently on the window. She sprang awake, sea-wise enough to remember not to sit up.
Tap
,
tap
,
tap
, went the sound straight out of her dream, immediately beside her head on the outer wall of the hull. She looked at her watch, an Omega Seamaster her dad had bought her years ago. Eight forty-five a.m. Four hours' sleep was enough to be going on with, she thought, and rolled out. Still a little groggy, she walked along the deck of the dark cabin towards the brightness coming down from the open cockpit. Then, still half asleep, she climbed the steps up into the morning.

It was the smell she noticed first. A strange, half foreign, half familiar odour. Oily and yet not oil. Rancid, and yet too chemical to be rotting. A stink she associated somehow with coasts, with bays and harbours; yet lacking the metallic tang which told of rusty hulls and anchor chain. Still, something she associated with anchorages, not oceans. It was a smell she had never come across this far out; yet there was an immediacy about it. And even as she fought to get a mental handle on it, she thrust her head out into the daylight.

Emma was standing, grimly, at the wheel while Bella was sitting on the cabin roof. ‘What is it?' asked Liberty as she clambered up and out. ‘Something's not right.'

‘Take a look for yourself,' advised Emma shortly.

Liberty pulled herself right up out of the cockpit to stand beside her crewmate at the con. The next thing she noticed after the tapping and the smell was the fact that the wind had fallen light. Maybe force two on the Beaufort Scale.
Flint
was only making way because Emma was as accomplished a yachtswoman as Liberty herself, and was still able to catch the light airs in
Flint
's tall sails with almost magical efficiency.

Liberty's gaze fell from the full belly of the main sail to the immediate prospect of the waters through which her command was making her steady way. And her face closed into a frown of horrified disbelief. For
Flint
was sailing through a sea of increasingly solid garbage. The surface of the ocean was all but hidden by a layer of plastic. There were bottles of every size, shape and colour – though the colours were faded to a disturbingly garish range of pastels. Most of them were clear but clouding and encrusted with marine life forms of every sort from weeds to barnacles. It was these, she reckoned, that had been tapping on the counter just beside her head as
Flint
surged steadily through them like an icebreaker through ice floes. There were commercial fishing floats and buoys the size of big balloons, most of them originally Day-Glo orange but yellowing and whitening now. Plastic bins and barrels of every size, most of them round, but a few she could see that were square-sided too. Between the larger pieces of plastic debris there was scattered a mass of smashed and broken, rotting and disintegrating matter, all of it still the unnaturally bright hues that marked it as man-made rather than natural. It was only when she looked over the side and gazed straight down that she saw any actual water. And when she stood up beside Bella and looked into the distance straight ahead along their course, the whole of the ocean seemed to be one impenetrable Sargasso Sea of decomposing plastic rubbish.

‘I thought it wasn't like this,' she said at last, stunned. ‘I mean I know the Garbage Patch exists in some form. But I thought like Dad and Richard said that it was in nurdles and particles suspended in the current. There isn't supposed to be a Sargasso of the stuff! Christ, it looks as though it gets almost thick enough to stop us dead ahead.'

‘Let's hope that's just an optical illusion,' said Bella practically. ‘It couldn't really get that solid, surely!'

‘Hasn't slowed us any so far,' added Maya. ‘And we've been sailing through it since before dawn.'

‘Jesus!' gasped Liberty. ‘How big is it?'

‘Let's hope it's not the size of Texas like they say,' answered Bella. ‘Or we'll never find the professor's bottle.'

‘The professor!' shouted Liberty. ‘That must be it! His theory must be even more accurate than he thought. Perhaps the currents have speeded up enough to get all the debris spewing out of China, Japan and Western America here in double-quick time. My God! We have to tell somebody about this!'

‘Chance'd be a fine thing,' said Emma grimly. ‘Radio's offline again. The rest of the safety stuff's not much use either with all of this crap packed around us.'

‘Not that we know how to contact the professor at the moment anyhow,' added Bella brightly.

‘I wasn't thinking of him,' said Liberty. ‘I was thinking of Dad or Richard. Someone who can do something about this . . .'

‘Isn't that what we're doing?' demanded Emma trenchantly. ‘Isn't that why we're all out here at the stinking shithouse end of nowhere?'

‘I guess,' allowed Liberty. ‘But I didn't really think that all
this
would be here too!' And as if to emphasize her words,
Flint
's starboard quarter rammed into a big orange buoy like an American football quarterback hitting his opposite number.

‘Think it does get much thicker than this?' demanded Bella suddenly sounding nervous.

‘
Hey!
' came Maya's irate bellow from below. ‘What the f— Did we just collide with? Isn't anyone on
watch
, for Christ's sake?'

‘Oh, great!' whispered Emma. ‘Now we've woken the Wicked Witch of the West.'

‘And her Witchiness is
pissed
!' added Bella. ‘I hope you have your ruby slippers, Dorothy, or it's flying monkey time for you!'

Maya staggered up and pushed Liberty aside. ‘What in hell's name?' she started. Then she stopped dead, staring around, goggle-eyed. ‘Jesus Christ!' she said. ‘What's that
smell
?'

And the answer hit both Emma and Liberty at the same time. It was the same smell that had nearly gassed the girls in the engine room of the ghost ship
Un Maru
.

I
t was not until
Katapult
reached French Frigate Shoals that Robin and her crew understood just how much damage the collision with the humpback whale had actually caused.

It was one of the multihull's most advanced features that the sensors for her sonar alarm system were located in the bows of the outriggers and the receiver in the central hull. This allowed 3D mapping of the submarine terrain over which they sailed. But its accuracy depended on the precise emission of the sonar pulses in the first place. The further out of phase they went, the more inaccurate the system would become.

Flo's focus on repairing the hinge – not to mention Robin and Akelita's adventure of the yellow crazy ants on Johnston Island – simply overwhelmed anything she might have done to check any further internal damage which could have resulted from the impact. Not that she could have done much, to be fair, without getting
Katapult
right up out of the water in any case. To make matters worse, the sonar worked well enough on the exit from Johnston Atoll to put their minds at rest and then was not really required for the deep-water run up to the shoals. Consequently there was no need to test or question its accuracy until
Katapult
's pre-planned route brought her racing across the wind to the next way station on her carefully deliberated course.

By the grace of God they arrived at French Frigate Shoals with the dawn and the sun rising out of a calm sea into a cloudless sky polished by the steady trade wind, and framing the tower of La Perouse dead ahead so spectacularly that they could not miss it. The basalt islet, remnant of the solid heart of the long-dead volcano whose coral-covered caldera curved behind it, appeared with the sun dead ahead, and Rohini who held the watch sitting on the cabin roof, called back to Robin at the wheel, ‘I see it! Robin, you should take a look at this, it looks exactly like an old-fashioned frigate under full sail! You'd think we were running down on the Flying Dutchman himself!'

‘If you can see La Perouse,' Robin called back to her, ‘then the shoal is lying right across our course. You should be able to see East Island behind La Perouse soon, then Bare Island just behind that.' She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the image of the shoal she had seen on Google Earth as she was planning this leg of the voyage. It looked disturbingly like a foetus lying on its side in the ocean, with a large head under the bigger islelets to the north and a long spine curling south. But she could not bring herself to describe it in these terms. ‘If I remember the pilot correctly,' she called instead, ‘there's about fifteen nautical miles of reefs and shoals on a north-south curve between Shark Island in the north and Disappearing Island in the south. If you think of it as Robin Hood's bow, La Perouse is where the feather of his arrow would be. And where the arrow's pointed is right where we're headed. Arrow straight and arrow fast, with any luck.'

‘That's very romantic,' said Akelita, popping her head up out of the cabin. ‘But who the heck is Robin Hood?'