The Coffin Ship (21 page)

The door to Ben’s office slammed wide and Martyr was standing there. Robin looked at him narrowly. She was not really surprised. “Is this it?” she asked quietly. “Is this what you have been searching for?” She held up the empty picture frame and he understood its meaning as readily as she had done: wherever he was now, what ever he was up to, Ben had no intention of ever coming back here.

“Strong…” he whispered. “Where is he?”

“On the bridge five minutes ago. But it looks as though he’s not going to stay there.”

“Right.” He swung round, heading for the door. Then he stopped. “No. Wait.” He turned back. “He’s got to make sure we sink. He can’t leave it to chance. He’s got to be sure, but how?”

“Tell you what I’d do,” said Robin thoughtfully, “I’d move the cargo so that she breaks up. Easy enough to do. Hell, we need all those machines and years of training to stop it happening in the first place.”

“That’s it!” he agreed. “It has to be!”

“Right. Tell you what: I’ve got to get the radio from my father. It’s what I came down for. You take this to the captain. I’ll get the radio and come to the bridge with it. And I’ll get my father to check the Cargo Control Room.”

She caught Martyr’s questioning look. “Computers,” she snapped. “He loves them. They’re like toys to him. If anyone can find…”

The American nodded.

She was away at once.

Robin made no hesitation outside Richard’s cabin this time, but crossed to her father’s quarters at a flat run. She thundered on the door until light washed over her feet, then burst impulsively in. Sir William was standing, clear-eyed but tousle-haired at the side of his bunk. He had been sleeping in his shirtsleeves and as his daughter entered he turned, running his thumbs up under his braces. “Well?” he snapped, none too pleased with being woken.

Once she might have hesitated, cowed by his obvious displeasure. No longer. “Quine’s radio doesn’t work properly,” she responded coolly. “The captain wants to borrow yours.”

“Of course. But I turned it off hours ago because of atmospheric interference.”

She crossed to it as he was saying this. She nodded once, tight-mouthed, picked it up, and turned back.

Then she did pause, for the first time, suddenly struck by the thought that she might well be sending him into unacceptable danger. He was shoeless, and something about his bright Argyll socks made her feel poignantly protective toward him. But she had a responsibility to all the rest of them as well. And he would do a better job than anybody else aboard. So: “Look…” she began. As quickly and accurately as she could—given that some of it at least was guesswork—she explained what she and Martyr had learned. And what she wanted him to do.

Within moments of her first word he was seated on
his bunk, reaching for his shoes. By the time she was finished he was laced up and ready to go.

They parted at the lift. He stepped in, to sink two decks. She ran on to the stairs and bounded up them. Running onto the bridge, she had handed Sir William’s little radio to Quine before she noticed something was wrong. John was there alone. There were no other officers in sight.

No sign of Richard or Martyr. Or of Ben.

She went cold.

John was at the helmsman’s left shoulder. She strode quickly across to him. “John!” She had to yell to make herself heard. “Where are the others?”

“Captain’s on the starboard bridge wing.”

“But Martyr? Ben Strong?”

“Martyr’s in the engine room if I know him. Ben bashed his head open and went below, what? ten minutes ago?”

“Oh God.”

“Robin? Robin, where are you…Number Three! Christ!”

But she was gone.

Sir William pushed the door of the Cargo Control Room open and very nearly panicked. He found himself confronted with a solid wall of smoke. He unconsciously echoed John Higgins three decks above. “Christ!” he muttered, hit the lights, and plunged in.

There was no sound of flames, merely a telltale hissing. Nor was there any real sensation of heat; just the smoke: McTavish’s wires were shorting out again, though William Heritage did not know this.

Sir William paused in the center of the room. His eyes were watering and, for all that he was holding his breath,
the acrid smoke caught at his throat. Forcing himself not to cough, he looked around, all too aware that his time was severely limited. But at the center of the room, the smoke seemed thinner and the light as it flickered on revealed the seat of the fire—a thinning column of smoke oozing oilily from behind a blistered, twisted tin panel. Sir William kicked it twice, ruining some of Lobb and Company’s finest work, and it fell back to reveal a black mare’s nest of burned wires.

McTavish had left a red can of electrical-safe fire-fighting foam on the nearest work surface and Bill used this to kill the last pungent clouds.

His breath ran out then but instead of going out toward the open door, he crossed to the rattling sheet of board that was trying to wrench itself out of the blast-twisted windowframe. It came away surprisingly easily and the storm wind burst in, blasting the smoke away.

And bringing William Heritage almost face to face with a tall, yellow-clad figure who turned away before the old man could be certain who it was, to vanish down the deck.

The storm hit Ben with full force the moment he stepped out of the A deck door. The solid ram of the wind blasted him back against the ravaged iron of the upper works. A sheet of water, solid as ice, slid along the deck beneath his feet, almost sweeping them away. He turned and was suddenly blinded by a bright light. He turned again, his back to the brightness, and staggered away from the bridge house, feeling acutely the loss of his chance to summon up some reserves of energy and fortitude. But he had to pause almost at once, fortuitously, in the first shadow; then, leaning forward into the brunt of the wind, placing his feet carefully as though planting them and willing
them to grow safe roots into the throbbing deck, he began to walk down the length of the ship.

It never occurred to him that the brightness meant that he had been spotted. It seemed unlikely that anyone from the bridge would see him, though he was dressed in the bright wet-weather gear they had broken out before turning to run for France. The bridge windows, plain glass without the benefit of clearview, would hide most of the deck under a vertical sheet of water. He had no intention, however, of using the raised catwalk above the pipes running down the center of the deck. No. He would sneak down among the shadows of the manifolds and tank caps here at deck level, and hope the hell he wasn’t washed overboard. Danger of one sort saving him from the far greater danger of exposure.

That was the one thing he really dreaded. He was one of nature’s natural spies. Under the bland surface he presented to the world he could hide anything. Even this. But the surface was important to him. He enjoyed the respect of his peers. He needed to have standing in his community. He lived in an expensive little Surrey village where rich ex-Londoners played at being countryfolk. He kept his accounts at local stores. He was a church warden and attended services every Sunday when at home; following prayer with a drink or two at the local pub and an occasional slog with a bat on the village green for the village cricket team. Soon there would be a quiet, patient, biddable, preferably rich wife. A captaincy. Children. He had it all mapped out. But it all required money. And that had been too slow in coming. Until he met Kostas Demetrios in a casino one night.

These were the thoughts that occupied his mind as
his body fought its way down the deck. Perforce they occupied only part of it. The rest of his consciousness was trying to deal with the physical sensations of the storm. The effect of it was intensified by the darkness. There was no sense of scale, as there had been off Durban. There was simply an unremitting personal attack, as though the wind hated him and was trying to wrestle him to the deck where the rain and spray could drown him. It had fingers that grasped any loose piece of clothing. It had arms that wrapped around him, trying to lift him and throw him. It had legs that thrust against his legs, trying to trip him—and all too often succeeding. It had fists that pummeled his face armed with knuckledusters of hail, until he couldn’t feel his cheekbones and his slitted eyes seemed as bruised and swollen as his nose. He fought it as it fought him, unrelentingly. And so he proceeded down the deck.

His preoccupation nearly tricked him. The howl of the wind from the south broke and sobbed. He charged forward without thinking. As soon as he was in the open another squall—a rogue, from the east—hit his shoulder like a heavy tackle and sent him sliding, sprawling across the deck.

The steel beneath his face was slick with inches of running water, the surface of it varnish-bright, like something preserved under glass. But as he slid over a section of it, the smooth water began to behave strangely, forming ripples, like a miniature mill race, for no apparent reason. Ben was too stunned to notice. He pulled himself erect and staggered on down the deck. The glassy water behind his boot heels rippled again along a line running from port to starboard right across the ship. Then the ripple was lost as the south wind returned with the rain.

It was the first sign that
Prometheus
was beginning to come apart.

Robin reached the Cargo Control Room door at a dead run, choking as her gasps for breath let some of the dissipating fumes into her lungs. She hung in the doorway as though crucified, watching her father turn from the empty, roaring windowframe.

“There’s someone out there!” he yelled.

She nodded, her mind running at frantic speed. Unlike her father she saw all too clearly the meaning of the smoke. The only reason for the wires to short out was if the computer was filling them with electrical impulses, trying to give orders to the pumps.

She endeavored, with every nerve in her body from the soles of her feet to her blood-thundering ears, to sense whether the pumps were obeying. It was hopeless. She could sense nothing beyond the storm.

At once she was in action again. She crossed to the VDU and snapped it on. It lit up. That was very bad.

She tapped in the lading schedules. Worse and worse. Her father was at her shoulder, his face as pale and pinched as her own. The four blue eyes scanned schedule after schedule. Under each neat, safe plan for the disposition of the cargo flashed one red word:

They read that same word ten times.

“What next?” she asked herself rather than him, concentrating so fiercely that she had all but forgotten his presence.

“Keep going.”

She had no alternative. She knew the machine only
had ten preset lading schedules, but she pressed eleven anyway.

And up it came, good as gold. She went cold at the sight. The diagram of their ship with that sinister red box midships: the tank all the cargo should have been destined for.

And under it, the blessed words:

They were hugging each other, still laughing with relief, when Martyr appeared in the doorway.

“He’s gone out onto the deck,” the American yelled.

Robin turned toward the chief and saw the desperation in his eyes. Crisply, she answered, “Then let’s get him.”

And for the first time in their brief acquaintance, she saw C. J. Martyr smile.

The storm took hold of them just as it had taken hold of Ben. It buffeted them together, however, and they gave each other strength. Four legs moved faster than two under these circumstances, and they fell over less often. Like Ben they avoided the catwalk: to catch him they would have to follow in his footsteps. At this intensity, the storm would hide anything but the most massive deck feature from forty feet up: the first mate would be able to move easily unobserved unless they were much closer than that. It would take luck even to find him. But one positive factor was obvious to both of them: he was heading toward the forecastle head.

That being said, locating him on
Prometheus
’s vast deck on a night like to night was likely to be a lengthy, dangerous process, if it could be done at all. But Ben
clearly had a plan or he would not be out here now. If…

If…thought Robin. She could hardly believe that it was Ben. Less than twenty minutes ago she had been thinking of the first officer as fundamentally harmless. Now here she was, bound by the massive power of the wind to the one man she had suspected most of all, looking for this “harmless” man, trying to prove his guilt.

The night closed its fist around them, crushing them together. It was as though the wind had ceased its movement but attained solidity, muffling them. The rest of the storm seemed to recede. Even the ship became distant. All that really existed was the huge, water-filled, choking power all around them. It carried them forward for ten feet before it released them, dazed and disoriented, onto the forward section of the deck.

So they, like Ben scant yards before them, failed to notice the widening cracks in the deck.

Richard could feel it, though. Nothing definite. Nothing he could put his finger on. Nothing even in his conscious mind, yet. He felt the movement of his ship beginning to change beneath his wide-spaced feet and he reacted to it viscerally.

He stood by the helmsman, hands clenched behind his back, glaring out through the semiopaque glass that was all the storm left to him. John stood at the Collision Alarm Radar. There were watches out on the bridge wings and forecastle head armed with night glasses and hand-held radios. He was seriously thinking of sending someone else to the forecastle head. But he was two officers short, and there was something he couldn’t quite
pin down making him grind his teeth together hard enough to cramp the muscles in his jaw.

Robin saw him first, crouching on the edge of a shadow—head, arms, and legs in darkness; shoulders and back bright—on the port side, just short of the forecastle head. Speech was impossible so she beat upon Martyr’s arm and pointed. He followed her gaze and broke into a shambling run. She went with him.