A Thousand Suns (3 page)

Tom’s cheeks turned crimson as Ian stared silently at him.

Overheads settled before shares paid out
. That’s the way it worked. With the net totalled, the outrigger damaged, and the crappiest haul of the season on ice down below, Ian could see a lean fortnight ahead of him, until the Skip was ready to take his boat out again.

Tom realised he’d be best avoiding the bars in Port Lawrence for a while. At least until Ian and Duncan had been out again, and found themselves flush with money once more.

‘If we lose the net we lose the evening haul,’ Ian said bitterly.

‘Leave him be,’ said Jeff, ‘I’ve already spoken to him.’

Ian studied the display carefully, trying to comprehend the three-dimensional shape described by the two-dimensional profile on the screen.

‘Is that a shipwreck, Skip?’

‘Yeah. There’re no rocks out here. This section of the banks is nothing but sixty miles of flat silt. It’s just great I find the one shipwreck out here when my net’s down. Just fucking great.’

Ian continued to study the form on the sounder. It was fifty feet long and pretty flat, peaking at one end with a tall spike.

‘That’s a wreck all right, Skip. Reckon maybe that spike there’s a mast or something?’

Jeff looked closely. ‘Maybe.’

Tom pointed at the screen. ‘It doesn’t look like a ship.’

The other two turned to look at him.

‘I said I don’t think it’s a ship.’

‘Well, I don’t care whether it’s a ship, the body of Moby Dick or the lost city of Atlantis, the damn thing’s got my net and it’s going to chew it up pretty good before I get it back.’

Tom’s cheeks continued to burn under their withering gaze. But he knew that wasn’t the profile of a boat. It was obvious if you looked at it right.

‘So,’ said Jeff tiredly, the force of his anger spent leaving him feeling only exhausted resignation, ‘given that this is the seabed we’re looking at, if it’s not a ship, what the hell do you think it is?’

‘It’s a plane,’ said Tom with a voice he’d hoped would sound certain and confident, but in fact came out as little more than a whisper.

Chapter 1

The Assignment

Chris Roland adjusted the arrangement of photographs on the table in the conference room. He had spent last night in his hotel room at the Marriott reviewing the contact sheets and from this he had carefully picked out several dozen of the most striking images. He’d developed and printed them in the en-suite bathroom through the early hours of this morning.

He was exhausted.

He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the glass partition walls that separated the conference room from the rest of
News Fortnite
’s open-plan office. A tall and gaunt apparition stared back at him, his weather-tanned forehead at odds with the fish-belly white of his recently shaved chin and topped off with a marine buzz cut. Chris shook his head and smiled. He looked like the top half of his head had been zapped by a ray gun.

His coarse brown hair had grown long, and he’d developed a full beard while on the last assignment, a wildlife shoot on the island of South Georgia. He’d begun to look like one of those hairy geeks they wheel out from time to time to talk about the good old pioneering days of the computer industry. Guys who looked like they could do with a little help-me-out cash but whose handful of gratis Apple or Microsoft shares are worth billions.

After clearing immigration at JFK, he’d headed for a barber, yearning to feel the smoothness of his chin once more and lose the dead weight of his long, greasy hair tied up carelessly in a ponytail.

As the interminably itchy and aggravating facial hair was whisked away by the barber, Chris had been shocked by how thin his face had become. The last few months of existing on a basic hi-sugar diet and spending all day long in the freezing winds of the South Atlantic seemed to have robbed his face of any spare fat. He knew if his mother could have seen him then, she’d have scolded him for not eating properly.

Chris’s focus extended beyond his reflection in the glass towards a trim, silver-haired woman moving swiftly. He watched her weave her slight frame across the open-plan floor of the Features Section through a labyrinth of shoulder-high partitions towards the conference room. She was moving quickly and purposefully towards him, not a woman you’d ever want to risk keeping waiting, he fancied. Clearly she was running late with her own strictly imposed schedule. Chris had time enough to hurriedly straighten a couple of the pictures before Elaine Swisson, the deputy editor of
News Fortnite
, pushed open the door to the conference room and entered.

‘Hey, Chris, how’s my favourite little cockney urchin doing?’ she said with a no-nonsense Brooklyn accent.

Chris had once described Elaine to a friend by asking him to visualise Susan Sarandon’s older, more aggressive sister. He wasn’t sure whether the actress even had an older sister, but if she did, Elaine should be her.

But that was perhaps a little unkind. Sure, he’d seen her chew out a member of her staff here at the magazine once before, and she had a reputation for being an incredibly harsh negotiator with his agency, but for Chris, she seemed to find a warmer centre, inside the sharp edges of her business persona.

‘I’m fine, a little tired . . . but otherwise fine,’ Chris answered.

‘Yeah?’ She appraised him. ‘You look a lot like shit. Bad flight back?’

‘It was okay. It didn’t crash, which is always a good thing.’

Elaine smiled. ‘Cute. How was South Georgia?’

Chris could quite happily never go there again. Cold, wet and rough. It really hadn’t been one of his better assignments. ‘Weather wasn’t particularly great,’ he answered flatly.

‘Oh, surely no worse than an English summer?’

Chris smiled. She wasn’t exactly the world’s most ardent Anglophile. Elaine had spent several years in London working for a sister publication. As far as Chris had worked out, the only thing she’d liked about her time in the city was the money she was being paid to tolerate it. There were many things over there that she casually described as ‘second-rate’ or ‘third-world’ to the irritation of her English colleagues, such as the ineffectual London Underground, the blandness of pub grub, the appalling cost of living and, of course, the miserable bloody weather, moans that any self-respecting Brit would happily indulge with her, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was American and quite happy to go on to say how much better things were back home.

Chris had first met her while he was tentatively starting out on his freelance career after five years of relatively secure employment for
MetroLife
, one of the seedier, freebie-tabloids in the capital. After delivering promptly on a couple of assignments, she had begun requesting him by name through the agency Chris had signed up with. After she had returned to New York, he still found she was specifically requesting him and putting a decent amount of work his way, despite having any number of good photographers on her doorstep to choose from.

Somehow she had managed to erase from her mind the fact that he was one of those wet-fart Limeys. It had probably helped that he’d moved away from the east end of London, used a New York-based agency and worked on watering down his estuary accent a little.

Or maybe she just wasn’t as anti-Brit as she made out.

Elaine smiled warmly at him.

Or maybe she just wants to mother me.

Chris hadn’t failed to notice he tended to bring that instinct out in the older women he worked with.

‘It’s good to see you again, Chris. Shall we take a look-see? ’

She leaned over the conference table and studied the spread of pictures. There were images of a whaling station abandoned in the 1920s. Fantastic images, some in black and white, some in colour but desaturated and monochromatic. Images of beached whaling ships, their plate metal hulls rusted, exposing ribcages of corroded steel. Images of the station itself, interiors such as the dormitory huts and the canteen, complete with tin plates and cutlery laid out on a communal table ready for a meal that was never to take place.

Nature, it seemed, had wasted little time in commandeering the station, and eighty years of undisturbed invasion had produced stunning compositions of lichen-covered toilet seats and beds and whale-rendering equipment playing host to communities of terns and puffins.

Some in colour, some in black and white, but all of them beautiful. Elaine made no comment until she had viewed all the images on the table.

‘These are stunning, Chris . . . absolutely remarkable.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I think we can easily syndicate these. I can think of three other periodicals off the top of my head that will take ’em. They’re gorgeous.’

‘Thanks. It was a pretty good assignment,’ he said, momentarily forgetting the cold, miserable discomfort on the island.

Elaine looked up from the photos. ‘Tired?’

‘I am a bit. It was a long flight yesterday, and then I was up late working on these.’

‘You need a break?’

‘I’d love a break. But then I guess the assignment you’re going to tell me about would have to go to some other young, hungry freelancer who might just do a better job.’

She laughed. ‘That’s how we like you guys, paranoid and competitive.’

‘Yeah, well, I guess we can’t afford not to be.’

‘So, you sure you’re ready for another?’

‘I just need a couple of good nights’ sleep, a few warm baths and I’ll be good to go.’

‘Okay, well, the good news is it’s not the other side of the world this time, it’s local.’

‘And the bad news?’

‘The bad news is . . . it’s another cold one.’ Elaine stuck out her bottom lip in sympathy. ‘I’m sorry it’s not a photo-story in Florida or LA, but, if it’s any consolation, I think this one could be a reputation-maker for you. You want to hear about it?’

Chris nodded.

‘We tend to comb through local newspapers for our human-interest stories, which is how we came across this one. It was in the
Trenton Herald
, which is a local rag that serves Newport and a few towns up the Rhode Island coast. There’s a small seaside town, Port Lawrence. No big deal, a few thousand people, a couple of diners and a few seasonal attractions. They’ve got a small commercial fishing fleet that still operates out of the town. It’s the real Amityville deal, old shutterboard huts, quiet inbred locals who view the rest of the world as outsiders, fishing nets strung across cobbled streets . . . you get the idea? Anyway, one of their trawlers snagged its nets on a wreck some five miles out from the coastline -’

‘Wreck? Are we talking an underwater shoot?’

She nodded. ‘Why? . . . are you not keen on that?’

He’d done underwater before, several times, but always within the luxury of warmer latitudes. After his spell on South Georgia, throwing himself into the bitter cold of the Atlantic, albeit insulated within a dry suit, simply didn’t appeal to him right now.

Pass up this job, and they could easily find someone else.

Chris winced at the thought.

‘No, underwater is fine. Go on.’

‘Good. Anyway, so one of these trawlers snagged its nets on a wreck. Turns out it was a plane. A big one.’

Chris’s interest was piqued.

‘Yup. Oh, we’re not talking missing commercial air-liners or private Lear jets or anything.’

‘No?’ Chris tried to contain his disappointment.

‘No, it’s better than that; a World War Two bomber. One of our B-something-or-others, you know? The big ones we used to flatten the Rhineland with. Some local propeller-head expert on wartime planes identified it from an item of debris they pulled up in the net.’

‘Has anyone been down yet to look it over?’

‘You’re thinking “anyone” as in, any other news mag? No, I don’t think so. It’s not a big story. Some wartime plane goes down due to bad weather or some component malfunction. It’s not like we’ve found the remains of the
Marie Celeste
or anything. I think we’ve got this story to ourselves for now.’

‘That’s good to know. How intact is it?’

‘They reckon it’s in one big glorious piece. I think this is going to make one hell of a compelling photo-story. I want to go with a kind of “time capsule” slant on it.’ Elaine’s eyes widened like an excited child’s as she visualised the spread within the covers of
News Fortnite
.

‘The cold waters will have preserved it quite well, I’d imagine,’ added Chris.

‘Exactly! If you can get some pictures that make the plane look as if it dropped out of the sky last week, that’ll be the angle. You know? “The plane time forgot!” kinda deal. You know what I mean?’

Chris nodded.

‘Focus on the small things, Chris, the little things. I don’t know, the navigator’s box of Lucky Strikes, the pilot’s picture of his sweetheart . . . the . . . ah shit, you know what I’m after, you’re the photographer.’

Chris was glad she’d noticed. He smiled at her. ‘So when would you want me to head out and do this?’

‘Well now, there’s no real sell-by date on this story. If it’s waited fifty years to be discovered it can hang on a little longer for its moment of fame. But all the same, I’d like to think we could get some pictures in for next month’s issue. We’ve got a pretty weak line-up for that one . . . needs a bit of juice.’

Chris weighed things up. Frankly he could well do with a week up on the blocks, get some serious down time. Despite catching the wave of Elaine’s enthusiasm and surfing the momentary buzz of excitement, he was really beginning to feel like he needed some R&R.

‘What if . . . what if I got out there by next week? Would that be soon enough?’

Elaine stroked her chin. ‘If you think you can deliver before our next issue, that’s fine by me. I can’t afford it to miss, though. That issue really needs this story, or we risk losing subscribers.’

She looked at Chris with the eyes of a worried mother. ‘You need some time to catch up on your sleep? Enjoy a few comforts?’

‘Yup, something like that. And anyway, I’ll probably need to source some equipment for deep sea -’

‘Oh, it’s not that deep. The article says the plane’s sitting under only seventy-five feet of water. I’m no diver, but that doesn’t sound too far down. Is that deep, Chris?’

‘Deep enough that I think I’ll need to make some calls. Reinforced camera casings, dry suits and cold-water diving equipment and some other stuff. It’ll take a few days to organise that anyway, but I could be on my way up there, say, middle of next week?’

‘You sure? I imagined you were thinking of taking two or three weeks out of the loop.’

I was, goddammit.

‘No, of course not. A few days should see me right,’ said Chris with a chirpy ‘I-can-take-anything’ smile.

‘Great. Well I’m glad you can say yes to this one, Chris, I really am. You’ve got a good eye for visual poetry. I think you’re going to come back with some great images. Maybe some of the best you’ve ever done.’

‘Yup. It sounds good.’

She draped an arm around his narrow shoulders. ‘Excellent! Listen, go back to your hotel and get some zeds. Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll sort out the details and expenses. Okay?’

Chris nodded, finally aware that he had been a straight thirty-two hours without a moment’s sleep. She led him from the conference room onto the noisy open office floor, and patted him gently on the arm.

Chris was uncomfortably aware that a few heads were turning their way.

Christ, I hope they don’t think I’m her bit of sugar.

She winked at him. ‘I want you in bed, okay? Get some rest, you look like death warmed up.’

Chris winced, knowing that those members of her staff with the keenest hearing had only heard the first part of that sentence.