The Coffin Ship (12 page)

She vomited as he said her name, folding forward with the wrenching effort, smashing her forehead on the deck. He reached for her, but she could not straighten, her stomach obviously locked in a cramp. As he tried to lift her she vomited again.

He looked desperately over his shoulder. John was still by the Collision Alarm Radar, his own face looking pretty ghastly in the green glow from the dish. “JOHN!” he yelled.

The Manxman had taken two steps when the cramps hit him too. His face twisted, muscles writhing terribly. The angles of his jaw stood out in stark relief. His pipe fell to the floor, its stem bitten right through. Automatically, he tried to catch it and he lost his footing.

During the next minute they all went down, as though this were some kind of virulent plague spreading among them. One moment the bridge was functioning normally, the next they were all in fetal positions, puking helplessly on the floor. Even the helmsman slid down, the tiny wheel slipping from his numb fingers. And the agony hit Richard too, a massive shock that warned of severe damage to the system. From solar plexus to pubis, the muscles of his belly spasmed. Vomit flooded out of his throat, washing into the sensitive passages behind his nose, burning there and blinding him with tears. When he blinked them away, he found himself on the floor beside Robin, just behind the helmsman.

His whole body spasmed again, raising the hurt to the realms of agony, muscles tearing themselves as they wrenched beyond control. And yet they could not be beyond control. His mind, alert even under these
circumstances, knew he must overcome this mutiny in his body and force it to his will or they were lost. And yet even to stand seemed an impossibility. He forced himself half erect, only to throw up and fall down again. Once more—like some simian ancestor in Darwinian theory—he straightened his back and stood erect.

Three steps toward the helm console. Another spasm. He slipped in the mess and crashed forward, landing with his elbows on the icy metal of the console top. There was a microphone here. When the dry heaving had stopped, he bent the metal stalk until the wire mouthpiece touched his lips.

He pressed the button. “Engine Room,” he whispered. He flipped to RECEIVE.

The noise of the answer confirmed his worst fears. But at least it was Martyr’s voice. “Captain? It’s bad down here.”

“Here too. Keep going as best you can.”

He pressed the button again. “Sparks…Tsirtos…”

The sound of helpless puking answered him. It caused his gorge to rise again. He controlled himself, feeling the effort draining him. God! He was weak!

“TSIRTOS!”

“Cap…Captain…”

“Can you radio for help?”

“…Try…”

A hand came onto his shoulder and he actually jumped with the shock. He turned so quickly that his grip on the console slipped and he crashed to the floor again.

It was Robin. She had pulled herself up, obviously with as much grim effort as himself, and she stood now, filthy, agonized, sick unto death. Simply refusing to give in.

Richard rose, inch by inch until they were in a position to collapse against each other. Breathlessly, speaking almost in shorthand, sentences—often words—broken by bouts of heaving, they discussed what they should do.

She must take the helm and try to keep
Prometheus
’s head around into the storm, away from the dangers of the African coast. He must go below and check on the others. Tsirtos must be made to call for help. Anyone with any strength at all must be made ready to act when that help arrived.

In many ways, the most difficult bit was simply making it to the door. The atmosphere on the bridge was so foul now that he had to stop every few steps, find something to cling to, and puke weakly. Once or twice the cramps hit him again and he fell down. It was impossible to bend and check his other officers. He looked down on them with a rigid back as they lay curled on the floor, beyond help at the moment. At the door he looked back, just in time to see Robin fold forward, start to go down, and pull herself erect again, using the helm to support her. He could not express how proud that made him feel.

In the corridor, things were marginally better. Certainly, he could at least breathe without being overcome with nausea. Right from the start, he blessed whoever had retained the old-fashioned strong wooden railings along the corridor walls. Without these to cling to, his progress would have been slow indeed. As it was, he simply leaned upon them and collapsed forward into a staggering half run. This way, as long as his arms could bear him he made progress and, although he was weaker than a sickly child, he hardly fell down at all. The retching got worse, of course, now that his stomach was empty and dry.

The atmosphere in the radio shack set him off again. He found it hard to breathe, such was the twisting and heaving of his stomach and he stood crucified in the doorway, choking and sobbing for breath. Tsirtos was lying on his chest, backside just out of his filthy chair, chin just above his filthy desk, speaking into his radio like a ghost. Every once in a while—Richard stood there long enough to perceive a pattern in it—Sparks’s left hand would depress the RECEIVE button, and Richard would hear a whisper of conversation from the headphones Tsirtos was wearing. Miraculously, the sick man was in communication with somebody. Hope and relief gave Richard added strength, though the simple good luck of the circumstances almost beggared belief. North and west of them, altering course even as they spoke, a mere three hours distant at the top of the green, were two South African oceangoing salvage tugs. If they could get their lines aboard in the relative calm of the storm’s eye, they would take
Prometheus
back to the safety of Durban.

But there would need to be someone in the forecastle head to take the lines aboard.

Three hours. Automatically, Richard looked at his watch. As soon as his hand came away from the door frame, his legs gave out again and he crashed to his knees on the threshold, but he had made the calculation. They would be here at 22.30.

He crawled over to the nearest wall. He pulled himself erect and leaned on the railing once more, gasping as though he had just run a marathon. He was going to have to find himself some help.

The crew’s quarters were as bad as the bridge—was there no one aboard who hadn’t eaten that accursed
soup?—but, just as on the bridge, the strongest were up and about. Salah Malik and Kerem Khalil met him at the door. In the event, although three hours seemed like a long time, they only just made it.

First, the three of them—they didn’t feel like splitting up again—went down to the engine room to try to drum up another recruit or two. They were luckier here. McTavish had been in his bunk when the soup came and had only taken a sip or two before the others became ill. Martyr had used the relatively strong young Scot as a sort of work horse to help and support the rest so that the Engine Room, though it reeked disgustingly like everywhere else, was comparatively orderly. The gaunt American, like the captain, had simply refused to give in, so he was still in charge.

Rice was beginning to come out of it, so Martyr agreed to keep the piratical Welshman and release the one strong man aboard to join the deck party. McTavish himself was less than enthusiastic about going on deck—and who could blame him?—but it had to be done and these were not the circumstances to ask for volunteers. The four of them went off like intrepid paraplegics to get their wet-weather gear.

Their strength did not return miraculously. They did not stop feeling sick; the stomach cramps did not abate. Nothing got easier. But they did what had to be done, inch by inch, little by little; knowing there was no alternative and therefore never pausing to count the cost.

By the time they had got themselves ready it was nearly ten o’clock. There was no real question of checking further on the others; it was enough to ride up a couple more decks than necessary, check with Tsirtos that the tugs were on schedule, then ride back down again in the blessed lift.

They took it for granted that the helm was—at the very least—still in the hands of the indomitable Robin. With luck, they reckoned, some others up there would have pulled themselves together by now as well. And, indeed, it seemed so: for as they exited the port A deck bulkhead doorway into the terrible night, all the deck lights came on.

In out of the massive howling blackness, there still tumbled gigantic seas, rearing out of the shadows, foam-webbed but slick like the backs of incredible monsters. The cloud cover was gone, however, save for a high, light scud; and the moon and stars were out.

Once in a while, at random points all around the compass card, great bolts of lightning would plunge down, defining the inner edges of the storm. On a level that was almost subliminal, below the occasional noises close by, they could hear the insane cacophony of it—like Armageddon all around them; in the distance and coming closer.

From side to side, the storm covered more than a thousand miles. A thousand miles of towering clouds reaching from wave-top to troposphere in unbroken columns of swirling air thirty thousand feet high; a thousand miles of banshee winds gusting to one hundred and fifty miles per hour, a thousand miles of waves whipped up house-high from abyssal trough to mountainous crest.

But at the middle of the circle, at the hub of this madly whirling wheel, there was a disk of calm over one hundred miles across: the eye.

Around the outer edges of the eye the black battlements of cloud rose up. Through them the wild winds raved. Down them jumped the lightnings. Out of their foundations ran the tall, tall seas. But within them there was calm.

Down the center of
Prometheus
’s deck, among the pipes, fifteen feet in the unquiet air, three feet wide with railings four feet high, nine hundred feet long, there was a catwalk. There were eight steep steps up to it from the restless, foam-washed deck. Up these they went, in Indian file, Richard first and McTavish last, all hanging on to the railings for dear life. Although the wind had dropped, and the rain and clouds had gone for the time being, the sea was still running murderously high and the combination of movement and slipperiness was fatally dangerous to their weak legs and uncertain feet. Time and again one or another of them would go forward, back, to one side or the other with bone-shaking force. Elbows and knees had the flesh on them bashed away. Ribs were bruised, welted, cracked. Every few yards someone would turn and retch helplessly down onto the deck.

There was little conversation, however, until they reached the forecastle head. Then Richard said, “If they’re not here in twenty minutes or so, we’d better start back. If the storm closes down again and catches us out here in this condition, we’re dead.”

Nobody had the energy to point out that if they went back without securing the tugs’ lines before the storm hit
Prometheus
again, then everyone aboard was as good as dead anyway.

But as it turned out, they had no real wait at all. The tugs came scudding down from the north almost at once, exploding out of the storm wall and igniting huge halogen searchlights visible for miles.

Time, of course, was relative, especially to the men on the forecastle head. One moment it seemed that the tugs were distant; the next they were all but alongside.
One moment their great searchlights were mere beams shining up from the horizon like a distant antiaircraft battery; the next they were illuminating every nut and bolt nearby and making their faces like eyeless death masks carved in ice.

Lines came aboard. Light lines caught, eventually, secured to the winches and pulled until the towing cables rose like serpents from the sea. And when the fat, strong hawsers writhed up onto the deck, they had to be secured. And so they were. It was impossible, but it was necessary. And so it was done.

But how it was done, no one could ever clearly remember.

There came a time when the lines were secure and the tugs, like tiny horses towing a huge barge, began to turn
Prometheus
’s head.

A time when the men stumbled back up the catwalk and into the warm bridge with the outriders of the returning storm threatening to overwhelm them at each faltering, exhausted step.

There was a time when McTavish returned to the Engine Room and Richard via the shack—where he referred laconic tug captains to the owner—to the bridge. When Salah and Kerem joined Ho and his men, beginning to tidy up.

There came a time, now the storm had returned, when Richard and Robin stood side by side at the helm while intrepid shadows moved behind them, clearing the bridge and taking the stricken down to their bunks.

There came a dream time when the storm was gone and men with broad South African accents teemed out of helicopters on the deck and took over the running of the ship, but still the captain and his third mate would
not leave the helm; nor would the chief leave the Engine Room.

There came a bright, winter-clear morning, brilliant after rain; and out of the heart of the morning came South Africa, and Durban where they could safely rest at last.

Sometimes, when conditions are right, off Cape Agulhas where Africa comes to its southernmost point forming a wedge between the oceans, there is a cliff of water. Ships going west must step down into the Atlantic. It is there because the warm Agulhas current, which sweeps constantly down the east coast, meets at this point the cold Benguela current, spawn of the perpetual West Wind Drift, which flows forever up the west coast to the equator.

At 09.00 Cape time on August 17, ten days later,
Prometheus
crashed forward over the twenty-foot sheer drop, causing even the sure-footed Robin Heritage to stagger.

Richard was seated behind her in the captain’s chair and, inevitably, now, he found himself watching her; what was it they said? devouring her with his eyes. She had her back to him, gazing out over Salah Malik’s shoulder as the Palestinian held the helm. He could see the merest ghost of her reflection in the window, just enough to guess at its expression: that tiny frown of concentration she habitually wore when wrestling with a problem. Her shoulders were squared, her hands clasped behind her. He watched the unconscious play of her long muscles as she rode the movements of the deck.

How well he knew every inch of that supple back. Dreamily, he watched the shoulders move microscopically, hips readjust, buttocks and thighs tense and relax.

He wondered what she was wearing under the starched, razor-creased, tropical kit. Probably the practical, almost unfeminine combination he had first seen while helping her back up the side after the wreck of the felucca. Certainly not the breathtaking confections she had favored in Durban.

In spite of all he had said about observing the proprieties once they got back aboard, he was still hungry for her.

The South Africans have a strained relationship with the huge ships that pass and repass their shores on the Cape run. Forbidden by OPEC embargo from obtaining the oil in their holds, they tend to see instead only the filth they leave behind. Sludge from illegally or carelessly cleaned tanks. Tar from oil dumped overboard by overladen ships in foul weather; slicks seeping from wrecks. It is oil in the only state they do not want it, for it decimates their fiercely protected coastal wildlife and puts at risk some of the most magnificent beaches in the world.

Richard expected the authorities in Durban to be less than polite, therefore. But this could not have been further from the case. They treated the whole crew, but himself, Robin, and the chief in particular, with something between kindness and awe. It robbed him of any real moral force when he came into conflict with them.

He dealt with—was dealt with by—a big, bluff, cheerful man called Jan van der Groot. Such men exist in any organization and are universally successful. Certainly Richard tried every tactic he could think of to
enforce his will over the South African’s and got nowhere. But he was playing from a position of absolute weakness. And van der Groot—“call me Jan, man!”—concealed beneath his bearlike bonhomie a steely resolve which, given the circumstances, could not be overcome. And the area of their disagreement was so small, Richard was soon made to feel positively petty.

Though when he talked it over with Robin he found she had run into the same wall for much the same reason, and van der Groot’s charm had impressed her not at all.

As soon as they arrived in Durban,
Prometheus
was put into a specially prepared quarantine dock and everyone aboard was removed to the Addington Hospital overlooking the harbor for observation. Tests soon established virulent but relatively simple food poisoning; the suspect foodstuffs were destroyed and replaced. A thorough search of the ship at last revealed the final resting place of Hajji Hassan’s bloated corpse. It was removed, and a postmortem held as soon as the relevant officers and crew were well enough to attend. A verdict of accidental death was returned.

As a gesture of respect for the strength of the officers above deck and below, especially that of the chief, the third mate, and the legendary captain, all of whom had remained at their posts, and technically in charge in spite of the distress signal, salvage claims were waived. A local harbor watch was put aboard, awaiting the return of the crew.

In the Addington—and afterward—things were not quite so simple. The deckhands and stewards had a ward each; the officers had rooms. Everything possible was done for their comfort. The doctors and nurses were kindness itself. Patients responded, for the most part
rapidly. Put in his room at dawn on the 7th, Richard was well enough to receive van der Groot on the evening of the 9th and to check himself out on the 10th.

As soon as he was well enough to walk, he went around the others. First he checked on Robin, and he found her in better shape than he was himself, fuming from her first interview with van der Groot. Martyr, too, was on the mend, but some of the others were still in a bad way. Ben was in a coma—not dangerous, apparently, but not too healthy—being fed by a glucose drip. No one was allowed to disturb him. Rice, Napier, and John Higgins were almost as bad. A visit to the crew’s quarters, accompanied this time by the restless Robin, revealed almost the same story. Some were nearly well again; some were still quite ill.

“About half our complement are well enough to go back aboard, Mr. van der Groot,” said Richard firmly on the 9th.

“Call me Jan, man,” boomed van der Groot in answer, with a broad grin.

“Quite. I’d like to get them back aboard as soon as possible, ah…Jan.”

“Impossible, I’m afraid.” The South African lost none of his charm. “We had to put together a slightly unusual package under the circumstances. Immigration were not too happy about letting you all in, my people not too happy about leaving your kaffirs out in the harbor to die. We came to an agreement, therefore. They agreed to let you all in together: we agreed to see you all out together.”

“And that means, precisely?”

“What it says. Like any good crew, it’ll be ‘one for all and all for one.’” He saw Richard’s growing impatience and leaned forward to explain in detail. “As the crew
get better, we take them out of hospital and put them in the Seaman’s Mission down by the docks. As the officers get better, they check out of the Addington and into the Edward Hotel. We have rooms reserved. When the last man is one-hundred-percent fit, we bundle up the whole lot of you and put you back aboard. All at once. Together. Not one at a time. Not in dribs and drabs. All at once. It’s what we agreed. It’s the way it has to be.”

“And in the meantime?”

“You get better. You check into the Edward. You have a couple of days’ holiday.”

And that was that, bar the arguing. Except for the distant formalities of Hajji’s inquest, which seemed to be looking into the death of someone utterly unattached to their current, fairy-tale existence. The practicalities were taken care of without Richard being involved—for all that he tried to be, in every stage of everything that affected the welfare of his crew. The owner, without contacting his captain except via telex, arranged such payment as was necessary; provided funds at the Standard Bank of South Africa for all officers and crew; even for the third mate, though she had in dependent funding of her own.

So, as each officer improved, he moved in Robin’s footsteps down the road to the Edward Hotel on Marine Drive, and into a suite in one of the great hotels. There were no complaints, of course, but Robin, Martyr, and Richard all looked at their surroundings with a great deal of suspicion. During the day, the three of them were together quite a lot; visiting the sick and convalescent, attending the inquest, doing a little sightseeing, wandering, apparently aimlessly, round the docks.

In the evening, however, they split up. Martyr was a lonely man who preferred his own company, spending
most of his evenings writing long letters that never seemed to be answered—as, indeed, he did aboard ship. As the younger officers came out of hospital so they entered into the swing of Durban nightlife, visiting the nightclubs, especially those with the most daring cabarets. Richard and Robin would have been thrown together by circumstances in any case, even had the chemistry not been so potently at work.

Richard arrived at the Edward on the evening of the 10th, a mere twelve hours after Robin had done so. They moved, with the rest of the crew, back aboard
Prometheus
at 18.00 local time on the 14th. The hours in between were like a honeymoon for the two of them.

There was no hesitation, no courtship. These were people who had known each other too long, knowing that in the other lay almost everything they had always wanted. Robin had loved Richard to the exclusion of almost all others for ten years. Richard saw in Robin everything that had attracted him so fiercely to Rowena, plus a certain indefinable extra. An extra made up of a heady combination: Robin’s own strong, open character; the fact that she shared all of his interests and preoccupations; the fact that, subconsciously, subliminally, like a child with a beloved parent, she mimicked him in so many ways. The combination would have been irresistible, even had he felt the slightest inclination to resist.

It was a shock to him to see her at dinner on the 10th, dressed as a woman. The sheer magnificence of her left him breathless, choking like some callow boy on his first date. He had seen her under a bewildering breadth of circumstances during the last weeks; seen her fighting him for the position of third mate with vivid passion, seen her turn humiliation into victory over
Neptune, seen her throw away her life to help what she thought might be a child in danger. Seen her refuse to give in to the greatest extremes of physical discomfort when all around were helpless. But he had never, until she swept like a princess into the restaurant where he and Martyr awaited her, never seen her as a woman.

They were dining in the hotel on that first night, the three of them together for the first and last time. They had put aside their vexation with the cheerfully intransigent van der Groot, put aside their worries about the others—and some of their suspicions about what was really going on here—and were simply dizzy with the joy of being alive; as would be any group of people who had survived what they had survived.

They were waiting for her in the cocktail lounge outside the Mandarin Room, with their table booked for 8.30. Both of them were in Number One whites, having had no chance to arrange civilian clothing, and individually were quite distinguished enough to be turning a few heads themselves as they sat at their ease at a table near the door.

The first they knew of her arrival was a sort of communal intake of breath. A rustle of movement as every head in the place turned. Richard glanced up with the rest and was suddenly unable to inhale.

She stood in the doorway, framed to perfection, accepting the reaction she was causing as of right—as Rowena had—but waiting there not for effect but because she could not see the others in the gloom. She had had twelve hours longer out of hospital than they, and had used some of that time to the greatest possible effect.

The golden curls had been cropped close to her head, giving the effect of a glistening Juliet cap. Around the
long neck, the theme of gold was taken up by a modest chain. Tanned gold too were the naked shoulders and back, the sheer slopes of the breast. And there it stopped, contained in black silk. The dress was by Chanel. It was tulip topped and backless, flowing out from a tight waist in a controlled cascade to the gathers midcalf. It was, like the necklace, simple as only the greatest art can be.

A perfect dress perfectly filled. The raw silk and the gold flesh complemented each other perfectly. Seemed to have been created for each other and probably had been. Richard stood, fighting the most ridiculous desire to applaud, and she saw him. Had she been breathtaking before, now she became incandescent, seeming to light the room as she crossed to him. He stood tall and awaited her, feeling for the first time in many years the cynosure of all eyes. Knowing from experience without a trace of vanity—that couples all around the room were looking at each other and almost nodding. Of course the golden girl was with the dashing, distinguished officer. Such creatures belonged together.

It was a feeling more powerful than the strongest drug.

“Hooks and eyes. At the back. Oh! Quickly!”

He fumbled, clumsy with desire.

They were in each others’ arms at last, in her room simply because it was the nearest, too impatient even to switch on the light. He slid his thumbs between the hot tight silk and the smooth skin, closing the sides of the dress together, twisting them back apart. And her hands were busy too, on his simpler, more accessible buttons.

The slick silk and the crisp cotton slid away miraculously at the same time and each partner paused, reveling
in the sensation of skin on skin; of softness crushed against firmness; of heat building upon heat. They kissed again, crushing each other, terrified to slacken their grip in case the beloved slipped away. Yet slacken their grip they did at last, dominated by more than childish fears.

And later, when they lay in a tangle of bedsheets, she curled against him, his hands lazily exploring her back, learning her by feel in the dark like a blind man, he asked at long last, “Robin, what is all this about? Really?”

“I want you. I want you back. That’s why I came out to
Prometheus.
”

“Only your idea?”

She should have been shocked at the question, he knew: enraged at the implication. But he asked, somehow safe in the knowledge of her.

And she answered. “He’s too proud. And anyway…”

They paused. There was no suspicion between them, no bitterness left. During the last few hours they had also laid Rowena, in the way she would have appreciated most, to rest. It was time for the simple truth, and they both knew it.

And the truth did not seem so very dreadful, after all.

“Oh, Richard! I’m so very worried about him. He won’t tell me—and I can’t find out for sure—but I think there’s something dreadfully wrong. He hasn’t been the same since Rowena died. He seems weaker, somehow; hesitant. But it’s more than that now. He’s been seeing his doctor, usually when I’m at sea and he thinks I won’t find out. He’s had a whole battery of tests and I think he was afraid that he had a brain tumor.”