The Coffin Ship (17 page)

Nobody except the sedated got much sleep that night. Martyr’s job of cleaning had been rudimentary. There was still much that needed immediate attention even before the bridge could be properly manned or the great engine restarted.

Of course, Richard’s dream of bringing the great ship to port in better condition than when she sailed had necessarily gone by the board, but there was some tidying and painting that had to be done. All the windows needed boarding or replacing. Electrical light was needed at any price, and it returned to the bridge-house little by little. Only the places that needed to be used regularly were illuminated, as and when necessary, for light bulbs were now few, because, as Martyr had observed, all those in the blast area had been broken. The radio shack was sealed and left in darkness, finally, because there was no way of fixing the ruin in there.

Martyr and his team, shaken to a man by the sight of his face, but warily silent and apparently incurious, had the engine started before first light next day, so the new dawn found
Prometheus
under her own power, sailing determinedly north, back onto her old course.

All the navigating equipment had survived except the suspect Sat Nav, so John brought up his beloved sextant
to replace it, and, because the chronometers also seemed undamaged, this was quite good enough.

Richard sprang awake and automatically looked at his watch. 07.30. Last half hour of John’s watch. Half an hour until Robin took over. He looked down at the golden crown of her sleeping head lying lightly on his chest. The emotion that swept over him as he looked at her was so poignant it made him feel like a boy again, stunned by the beauty of a world that could contain so much happiness; so much excitement. For the last few days he had lived on a plateau of contentment above any he had ever known, knowing that she shared it with him.

They lay, fully clothed, on the bunk they had collapsed on the night before. Her arms and legs wound round him, clutching him to her. He smiled and returned her gentle embrace for a few moments, luxuriating in the feel of her, then he softly disentangled himself and rose. As he put his feet on the floor, something chimed quietly: a tray with cups and saucers, sugar and reconstituted milk. And a thermos of teak-dark tea. Richard smiled. Ho’s one concession to the emergency was the thermos—he would not wake his captain at 06.30 anymore; nor would he let his captain’s tea go cold while he slept. He opened it and poured himself a cup, then left it uncorked by the head of the bunk, knowing the warm fragrance of the hot tea would waken Robin more effectively than anything except the emergency siren.

With his cup in his hand, he crossed to the vacant windowframe to look down across the scarred deck, through the balmy morning toward his distant goal. If they had maintained course and speed through the night—and if
they had not, he would have been informed—they should be north of Cancer by now. The Canaries and the Azores beckoned temptingly: they still had not sighted another ship. They were still in enforced radio silence. There was, creeping over the men, a sort of fantastic suspicion that something unimaginable had happened to the rest of humanity, some unannounced holocaust that had left them alone in all the world. Like the Flying Dutchman, whose waters they had so recently crossed. But Richard was not going to stop at any of the islands unless he absolutely had to. He was going to take her home. If they limped into some safe harbor on the way, they would simply be taken off and flown home, leaving the massive, impersonal machinery of the investigation to work itself out distantly from them while they were occupied with other things. Like getting on with the rest of their lives. There was a temptation, but Richard could not entertain it. He could not allow the resolution of all this to come about through the workings of others: men and women who had not earned the right, as his crew had, to lay bare the whole truth of the matter.

No. The only thing that could have made him turn aside now was if their rudimentary medical facilities began to fail, putting the lives of the wounded at risk. But, as he had observed in the lifeboat more than three days ago, the men were either dead or only lightly wounded. There was no one who needed hospitalization. The worst hurt was Nihil, among Ho’s men, who had lost part of a finger. And that only served to make his endless playing of that strange flute even more weird and haunting. The others only needed burial, and they would wait.

He frowned, still gazing out into the still, clear morning, his thoughts taking a darker turn.

“Penny for them…” she whispered at his shoulder,
so close she made him jump. She took another silent step forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, crushing herself to him.

“You’re due on watch in fifteen minutes, Number Three,” he said.

She screwed up her nose. “Just time for a shower, then.”

They showered together, not having time to turn it into a game; Richard, in any case, too preoccupied to answer her playful advances. They came out together also and quickly changed into clean, white uniforms. Twelve Toes and his team had performed little short of miracles getting the ship’s laundry back in service. And, since Durban, there had always been a complete change of clothes for each of them left, apparently by accident, in the other’s quarters. The bomb and the abandonment had not changed that.

There had been enough glass in the ship’s stores to replace the bridge windows. Everyone else had to put up with ply or board unless, like Richard, they were willing to risk inclement weather and leave their windows uncovered for the moment. So, with windows in and blast-damage covered if not corrected, the bridge seemed normal as they stepped into it side by side ten minutes later, as though the explosion had never happened. Until, that is, they walked forward far enough to see the crater on the deck.

John Higgins was sitting, worn out, in the captain’s chair. His pipe had fallen into his lap. When the rest of them had collapsed, exhausted, at four this morning, it had only been time for him to take over his watch. He was certainly due for some sleep now, and, emergencies aside, he would sleep until Pour Out.

Richard had reinstated the ship’s routine at once, as
though nothing untoward was going on. He would make his noon report as usual later, having calculated their position himself with John’s sextant, and without the international news that Tsirtos used to supply, but still religiously including the bearing of Mecca for the Moslems. They might be working all the hours that God—or Allah—might send, trying to repair the damage caused by their strange, invisible enemy, but the daily routines punctuated their efforts with the calm accuracy of a Swiss watch. The facade of normality was enormously important. It gave them an added strength. So the watches changed like clockwork, with Martyr replacing Napier below, and all the meals were served as normal. They were only an hour behind GMT now, and would not come back onto it until they were entering the Channel Approaches in a little less than five days’ time. With luck, they would sight the Lizard at dawn on September 9.

Richard walked forward and put his hand on John’s shoulder. The second officer jumped into full wakefulness and looked up. “We’ve got her now, John. Robin’s watch. You get to bed.”

“I think we came pretty close to another vessel last night. Strong echo on the radar. Couldn’t raise her with the signal lamp, though I thought I could see her lights. Watch must have been asleep.”

Richard looked down at the tired man with infinite respect. In spite of everything, the watch on
Prometheus
had been anything but sleepy. He glanced at Robin. She was just signing onto the log. “Logged at 04.45,” she confirmed. “Echo’s course due south. Closest three miles. Should have seen a signal lamp: conditions clear enough.”

Richard nodded. They might find it difficult to raise a
passing ship with the lamp. So many ships relied solely on their radios now. But then,
Prometheus
would strike passersby as unusually silent; worthy of closer attention. It should be possible to attract someone’s attention to that flashing point of light. And most ships’ officers still understood Morse code.

Richard called them into his dayroom and they stood like guilty schoolboys at the headmaster’s desk: “Twelve Toes” Ho, Salah Malik, C. J. Martyr. It was the middle of Robin’s watch, the first opportunity Richard had had since returning aboard to reconstruct the sabotage and voice his opinions.

The other three knew why they were here. They were wary but, surprisingly, thought Richard, there was no real hostility in the air. And this fact seemed significant to him.

“The bomb wasn’t part of the original plan, was it?” he said. “Or if it was, then none of you knew about it.”

They watched him in guarded silence. He went on, calmly. “That’s the only way I can see to make sense of this. You all agreed, with the others, to abandon and scuttle
Prometheus
off the coast of Senegal so that Demetrios could put in a huge insurance claim. It was supposed to be easy and safe: nobody hurt. But Demetrios decided to do things his way and he put a bomb on board.”

“He’s put more aboard than that,” grated Martyr, his voice slurred by his swollen lips. “There’s someone else aboard, a Crewfinders man, whose job is to do what the bomb failed to do.” He gestured at his face. “No matter who gets in the way.”

Richard nodded silently. Then his ice-cold gaze switched to Salah and Ho. “You both agreed to abandon,
like the original officers. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and suppose you both must have reckoned you would get all your men off safely. But Demetrios and his sidekick have taken this simple fraud and made it murder.”

Salah’s square shoulders slumped. “It is as you say, Captain. It is as you said in the lifeboat. We were going to abandon. Levkas or one of his officers was going to scuttle her and lead us in the lifeboats to Dakar. It was all agreed. But these men have changed all that. We must find them now and kill them for what they have done!”

“Twelve Toes” made a sound deep in his throat to signify agreement.

Richard’s hand slammed down onto his desktop. “Not on my ship, you don’t! You tell your men I want watches kept in case the owner’s friend tries anything more, but that is all. I want no searching, no detecting, no revenge. I want to take this ship and her crew back home exactly as they are.
Is that clear?
”

All three men nodded.

“Right. Malik. Ho. Back to your duties.” The two of them left. “Mr. Martyr,” Richard continued, “sit down please.”

Martyr sat.

Richard leaned forward, elbows on the desk, steepling his forearms up to interlaced fingers. “I propose to spend the next few hours interviewing everyone aboard to try to reconstruct what happened that night for the Accident Report Book,” he said. “But that presents me with something of a problem because two crimes—at the least—happened. There was an attempt to sabotage my command and there was an attempt to murder you. I think the same person is involved in both of these crimes.”

“A Crewfinders man,” repeated the chief.

“Not a seaman or a steward?”

“Stewards are all too small. Could have been a seaman—but I’d say only Malik and Khalil are big enough.”

Richard nodded. “But both of them were with teams of men right throughout the night. They couldn’t have slipped away. So it has to be one of my men.”

Martyr shrugged.

Richard continued, “I need to know how you fit into this, Chief, if I’m going to make sense of it, make sure that justice gets done.”

And Martyr leaned forward and told him. “I’m a long-service man. Twenty years in the American merchant marine. Good years. Happy. Had a wife. A daughter—Christine. Beautiful girl. The apple of my eye. But then it all went sour. Sailor’s nightmare. While I was away at sea, my wife found someone new. We divorced. She got custody of my girl. I got visiting rights whenever I had shore leave. I came home one time and Christine was gone. Just plain gone. Vanished. My wife and her new husband put up a reward but they heard nothing. I jumped ship—a chief engineer jumping ship like a cadet—and I went to look. I found her in New York. On drugs. Working as a prostitute. Making videos—like that one Tsirtos put on—to support her habit. I took her back. The little pusher who was pimping for her tried to stop me. I killed him.

“She’s in detox now. Getting better. But it costs. You know, Mariner, it
costs!
Every cent I earn goes to help my girl. But I don’t earn that much now, on the beach with a federal warrant out on me. Or I didn’t till I met Demetrios…”

He paused. Richard watched him silently.

“All I had to do was get the ship around the Cape. Nurse that clapped-out old motor along then look the other way while they scuttled her. There’s a circuit—I’ll show you—opens all the sea-cocks at once. One flick of the switch and she’s gone.”

“You willing to say all this at a court of inquiry?”

“No way. No way at all. I’ll help you get home, but that is all I’ll do. I’ve got scores to settle and I’ll do that my own way. But I won’t stand up in court: if I go to jail, who’ll watch over my Christine?”

After Martyr had gone, Mariner lapsed into a brown study. What was due to happen to
Prometheus
’s hull was only part of the problem: what was due to happen to her cargo was important too. And the extension of that problem led to very murky waters indeed.

If the oil had been taken off at Durban without his knowledge then Bill Heritage might be in the clear. But if the oil was still aboard, still part of the fraud, then it looked as if the owner of the oil had to be a party to the fraud as well. If only he felt able to run the risk of looking in the tanks. The loading programs on the computers probably held a clue, but they were unavailable until the computers themselves were fixed—if they ever could be. And even the most cursory examination had already revealed that all the tank tops down as far as the Sampson posts were damaged by the blast. Should he get a team of seamen and a huge dipstick and run the risk of opening the forward tank to see what it contained? It was tempting. But in the end he decided to wait because to do so, to run the very great risk of opening the tank at sea on a damaged ship whose safety systems seemed to be working but were—to put it mildly—unreliable, would solve little and might force him to take action he would rather avoid.