A Thousand Suns (4 page)

Chapter 2

The Coast Road

The late-afternoon sun shone through the silver birches lining the coastal route and cast a steady procession of hazy beams across the road. Alternate strips of light and shadow dappled the windscreen of the Cherokee, and Chris found himself squinting from the intermittent and distracting glare.

He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and slipped them on.

‘Giving you a headache?’ asked Mark, sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

Mark Costas was a good diving instructor. He’d known Chris back when he’d trained him for a PADI certificate. Like the best of teachers, he easily inspired trust from his pupils, and that was mainly because of the calm, unflappable demeanour of the man. His darkly tanned face, framed with a lush black beard and topped with a Yankees baseball cap, was a picture of measured ease.

Along this part of the coastline there were a number of small villages perched on the seafront. Quite a few of them seemed to service small fishing vessels of one sort or another, and many of these were beach-launched, from trailers reversed into the water, and retrieved in the same way. Once upon a time most of the boats along this stretch of coast were part of an industry; now the vast majority were used for sports fishing.

On the right of the road it was becoming cluttered with the detritus of generations of nautical activity - abandoned, weatherworn wooden hulls riding high on grass-topped dunes shored up with wooden pallets, and an endless mélange of crates and washed-up freight spillage garnished the roadside. They passed through a village that consisted of no more than an old boat yard, three houses, and a gas station-cum-diner, an isolated sign of habitation amidst a rolling montage of coastal wilderness.

‘It looks like something out of a Stephen King novel,’ said Mark in a rumbling, deep voice.

‘I know, beautiful isn’t it? I could live in a place like this.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Chris drove in silence. It really was magnificent, inspiring and solitary. His recent sojourn in the southern Atlantic wilderness had changed him. After so many months being alone out there, he’d found the aggressive noise and haste of New York a little overpowering. He frequently had found himself back in his hotel room relishing the comparative peace and quiet, happy to have the echoing wail of police sirens and the harsh rattle of urban noise muted to nothing more than a subdued rumble seeping through the double-glazed window.

New York these days felt like a town under siege. Every subway train and bus station was manned with cops checking IDs. Having olive skin, or even just having a dark beard, seemed to invite suspicious inspection from every passer-by.

It wasn’t just New York. London was the same. Cities twinned by their paranoia, waiting for the next big bang.

Chris shook his head; it was becoming an ugly world, one waiting, spoiling for a fight. Those months away from it all, away from people, photographing terns and penguins, that had been a refreshing antidote. But on coming back from his months of solitude, the whole Muslim- Christian hate thing seemed to have gotten worse. The news seemed to be fuelled by this alone these days.

He felt old. He certainly couldn’t face doing another ‘hot’ assignment. A year ago he’d done some work in northern Iraq for
News Fortnite
, documenting the appalling and bloody tit-for-tat killings between the Kurds and the Sunnis that was still going on even now, years after the second Gulf war. A few years ago he might have been able to dispassionately shut out the worst of it on this kind of field job, but that last one had finally got to him.

From now on, he would be happy to stay away from the hazardous stop-and-drop assignments like that. It was going to have to be terns and penguins, or he was going to have to find a new way to earn a living. The world was becoming too ugly a thing to study through his viewfinder.

‘So how long are you planning on staying out here?’ asked Mark, disturbing Chris’s woolgathering.

‘I don’t think we’ll need to be too long here. I can probably do the shoot in one dive if the water’s clear and we have a good day for the weather.’

‘The water here’s pretty cold this time of year. I’d say not far off zero degrees down below. It’ll have to be a short dive, no more than thirty minutes tops. You think you can get all that you want in that time, Chris?’

‘Well, if not, then we can do a second dive, I suppose.’

‘It’s been a while since we did any together. How are you with diving on wrecks? How many have you done?’

‘Only one . . . that time with you in Florida. When was that? Two . . . three years ago?’

Mark looked a little unhappy. ‘Okay, so tonight we’ll go over the safety rules again. It seems like you could probably do with a refresher course. It’s a dangerous type of diving, especially with all the added complications of a cold-water environment. But then you know all this, don’t you?’

‘That’s why I hired you, mate. So you can do all the worrying and fussing.’

The last of the evening’s light was fading quickly as they entered Port Lawrence and parked up near the wharf.

It was a small fishing town, with a population of five and a half thousand. On Fridays and Wednesdays it pulled in people from all over the county for the market, and in the summer, townies came from as far away as Boston and New York to enjoy the odd long weekend of provincial charm. Outside of the vacation seasons and market days, it was a ghost town.

There was plenty of space to park along the wharf, and Chris rolled the Cherokee up beside several delivery trucks facing the wharf’s edge. He looked out of the windscreen at the row of trawlers tied up like horses outside a saloon bar.

Most of them were stripped down and tarped up for the winter. They would sit like that, not earning money for their owners for only a couple of months, the worst of the gale season, and be out on the sea again by the end of January.

The bigger boats headed out Nova Scotia way, towards the Grand Banks for trips that lasted four to six weeks. They were fifty- and sixty-foot Sword boats with crews of up to seven, which could sometimes bring in nearly sixteen tons of catch. They were mostly owned by cartels of investors, their skippers and crews on retainers and smaller shares.

The few smaller boats lined up were mostly independent operators that fished nearer home, boats that were owned or part-owned by their skippers and trawled only a few miles out from the coast, up and down the silt banks for only four or five days at a time. They couldn’t afford two months tied up, and fished pretty much all year round.

Chris and Mark climbed out and surveyed the boats.

‘I told you,’ said Mark. ‘You should have chartered from somewhere else. There’s no way we’re going to find a suitable boat down here.’

‘Yeah, looks like you might be right,’ Chris sighed reluctantly. He had gambled on finding a motor launch or a leisure boat. The place was a tourist town as well as a fishing port, after all.

It was going to have to be one of the smaller fishing boats. Halfway along the wharf he could see a single light mounted on the pilothouse of one of them.

‘There, that would do us. And it looks like someone’s home.’

Mark followed his gaze. ‘It’s a trawler, Chris, not some leisure cruiser. You’ll be lucky if they’ll take you out.’

‘I’m sure the rustling of a little dosh will help some.’

‘Dosh?’ asked Mark. ‘Money, right?’

Chris nodded.

Mark looked quizzically at him. ‘Just how much money do you get paid for this kind of assignment anyway?’

Chris smiled. ‘Enough, and then some . . . shall we go and charter us a trawler, then?’ He headed across the diesel-stained concrete of the wharf towards the solitary light without waiting for an answer.

Mark watched him go. ‘Enough and then some, eh?’ he muttered, and then he found himself grinding his teeth. Chris could be an annoyingly cocky punk sometimes.

‘Come on, mate,’ Chris called back.

Chris approached the trawler’s stern. ‘What time do you make it?’

Mark pushed up a sleeve, revealing a Rolex nesting in a luxuriant bed of dark forearm hair. ‘Seven-thirty.’

Chris leaned over and rapped his knuckles against the hull. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ he shouted. They heard some movement from inside the boat.

‘Jeeeez, Chris! You know how rude that is?’ Mark said.

‘What? . . . knocking on the boat? It’s not as if it’s got a doorbell.’

‘She’s a “she” not an “it”. All sea-going vessels are “shes”, okay? You don’t want to get the owner pissed before you start your shmoozing, huh?’

They heard the clunk of a bolt sliding, and a crack of light appeared on the foredeck as a hatch lifted a few inches. They could just make out the shine of a balding head framed by a thatch of grey whiskers.

‘Yes?’

Chris absent-mindedly swung the torch on him.

‘Hey! Get that goddamn thing out of my eyes!’

‘Sorry,’ he said sheepishly. He flicked it off.

‘Whad’ya want?’

‘Hi, we’re looking to hire a boat for a day, maybe two days. Yours looks like it won’t sink if we untie it.’

Chris’s laugh quickly died in his throat as the old man stared at him in silence.

Mark shook his head in the dark.
Not the best start, Chris ol’ buddy
.

The old man scowled and finally said something. ‘Are you Canadian? ’Cause if you are, you can get the fuck away from my boat.’

‘What? No! I’m English . . . I just -’

‘Shine that torch of yours on yourself, so I can see you.’

Chris fumbled with the switch, and then turned it on himself and Mark.

The man studied them for a few seconds. ‘Yeah, you look English,’ he said, pushing the hatch fully open and pulling himself with surprising agility out onto the foredeck.

Chris turned back to Mark. ‘I
look
English? How the hell is an Englishman meant to look?’ he muttered.

‘You lack American cool,’ Mark smirked.

‘You boys want to hire this boat for a couple of days?’ the old man interrupted, scratching his chin.

They both nodded.

‘Of course we’ll pay top dollar,’ added Chris.

‘You’d have to. This is a workin’ boat. If she’s busy takin’ you boys out on a pleasure cruise, then she ain’t workin’, and that’s gonna cost.’

Chris nodded gravely. ‘I understand.’

The old man looked them over again. ‘This’ll be about the wreck out there, won’t it?’

‘The plane wreck, yeah,’ Chris admitted reluctantly. He had hoped the story would still be relatively unknown, but, it seemed, Port Lawrence was a small town.

‘So . . . you boys don’t look like tourists. Where you from?’

Chris pulled out a business card and handed it to the old man. ‘I work for a magazine. I want to photograph the plane. I’m doing a story on it. The name’s Chris by the way.’ He gestured at Mark. ‘This guy’s Mark. He’s a diving instructor and he’s here to hold my hand when we go underwater.’

For a moment he wasn’t sure whether the old man was going to take that literally.

The old man appeared mildly impressed with the press card. ‘What magazine? Not the
Enquirer
, I hope. I can’t stand that kind of rubbish.’

‘God, no! . . . I work for
News Fortnite
, it’s a bit like the
National Geo
—’

The old man snapped his fingers. ‘I know it. I got some of those.’ He looked at Chris for the first time with an expression one step up from contempt. ‘Do the pictures, huh?’

‘Some of them.’

‘Good pictures in the
Fortnite
.’

‘Thanks.’

‘The name’s Will by the way.’

Mark and Chris nodded. ‘Hi, Will.’

The old man studied Chris silently. The tall, thin English guy with the toothbrush hair seemed good for easy money. His type always seemed to have it. His boat,
Mona Lisa
, was booked in to Winston Macies Marine to have her refrigeration storage units overhauled soon for the first time in nearly ten years and that would take a week or more and cost a small fortune. He could really do with some extra greenbacks to cover that.

‘So?’ said Chris.

Will donned an expression of painful reluctance. ‘Well, now. On the subject of hirin’. The
Lisa
here is a fishin’ vessel see . . . shrimps, herring, some cod when we can find it. That’s what we catch round here. We go out in the mornin’ and return late. Sometimes we’ll stay out overnight. I can’t take you out tomorrow, because I got men who work on this boat for the share they get on the sale of the catch. So they can’t afford to miss a day’s work. If you want to hire this boat . . . it’s gonna have to be at night.’

Chris turned to Mark and spoke quietly. ‘At night, are we okay with that?’

‘No difference really. It’s virtually night seventy-five feet down anyway. The question is, are you going to be comfortable with doing that?’

Chris took a long look up and down the wharf. There really wasn’t a great deal of choice in the matter.

‘Sure. If you’re happy it’s okay and safe, I guess I am. You’re the pro here,’ he replied.

‘You sure you don’t want to look around? Maybe go find a proper chartering agency?’ asked Mark.

‘Hmmm, that’s going to cost a shit load more dosh.’

‘Yes. Your call, Chris.’

Will watched the two men talking quietly. He decided they needed a little extra nudge.

‘You’ll find it’s the same with any of the other workin’ boats in this area . . . ’cept I’m ready to sail.’

He smiled for the first time and added, ‘
And
I can give you the full ten-cents tour. A little local history, a few stories, eh?’

‘Okay. How much?’

‘Five hundred dollars should just about cover it.’

‘Five hundred!’

‘You gonna’ tell me how much you’re gettin’ paid to take them pictures? I bet it’s a lot more ’an five hundred. That’s the price . . . an’ if I hear back from some other skipper that they offered you cheaper, well, more fool them.’

Chris looked up and down the wharf. There really was only Will’s boat that looked good to go.