Peter Tonkin
The Coffin Ship
For Cham
Epigraph
Coffin Ship: A ship sent to sea in an unseaworthy condition, destined to sink before the end of its voyage as part of an insurance fraud.
A ship has happenings according to her weird. She shows perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they laid for her.
PART 1
GULF
CHAPTER ONE
11 P.M., Gulf local time, July 15. The Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) Prometheus lay at anchor off Kharg Island and nothing at all seemed wrong.
She lay deep in the black water, fully laden with 250,000 tons of Gulf light crude, like a massive battery waiting to be connected; charged with enough dormant energy to light New York when released. To light New York or destroy Hiroshima. But all that massive energy lay caged in the three cathedral-size tanks, held still by baffles of steel stretching like unfinished walls from side to side, from top to bottom of the huge chambers. Its volatile elements, capable of igniting at the merest spark, lay smothered by the inert gases pumped into the ullage, the gap between the surface of the liquid and the roofs of the tanks.
She lay dark and quiet, lit only by the riding lights denoting Ship at Anchor and the brightness of the illuminated bridge; giving off only the gentle hum of the generators necessary to keep those lights alight. The bulk of her only visible because she blotted out the timeless stars and their reflections in the sea.
Manoj Kanwar, third mate, was standing watch. He should have been on the bridge, not running, terrified, through deserted corridors. But he had to get to Nicoli. That was the most important thing. Nicoli was first mate. He would know what to do. If he didn’t, they were all as good as dead.
The thick soles of his desert boots screamed on the linoleum decking. The rasping of his breath filled the still air. He reached the door of the first mate’s cabin and thundered on it with his fist. Then, scared by all the noise he was making, he knocked once more, quietly.
There was a distant groan as Nicoli came awake. A wash of light over Kanwar’s boots from under the door. Unable to wait any longer, the young Indian turned the handle and all but fell in. Nicoli was on the point of opening the door and so they found themselves standing chest to chest: a short, dusky boy and a tall, bullish Greek with wise blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair.
“It’s Gallaher,” wheezed Kanwar. “He says we’re all dead men.”
“No,” said Nicoli calmly. “We’ll get off all right in the lifeboats when the time comes. I’ve told you. Stick by me.”
“It’s not that,” cried Kanwar in an agony of apprehension. “It’s something else. Something no one else knows about. He said he’d only tell me if I slept with him. It’s something bad, Nicoli. Something he was paid to do in secret.”
Gallaher gazed at the pair of them with his disconcerting eyes. “Of course,” he slurred. “Now would I be telling this lovely boy lies?” He fell back, sprawling, into the captain’s chair on the bridge.
He was a small Irishman, red headed and covered with freckles. His face and arms were terribly marked with scars. So fair were his brows and lashes that his pale eyes looked naked. His once lean body was running to fat. Only when he was totally drunk did his hands stop shaking. He never seemed to sleep in his berth and prowled the ship at night, often settling, as now, in the captain’s chair up here. Nicoli knew nothing of Gallaher, the ship’s electrician, and wanted to know nothing. But he knew the truth when he heard it. And he could just see this strange, sadistic man using what ever he knew to try to seduce the boy.
“Where?” he demanded.
Gallaher leered up at him. A shadow moved the depths of those naked eyes. What was it? Fear. The man was terrified. “They expected me to keep it down in me berth,” said the Irishman. “Sleep with it under me bunk till it was time. Not me! Never again! Not for any amount of money. I’ve been blown up, you know. Under me bunk! I should fuggin’ think so!”
“Where did you put it, Gallaher?” Nicoli’s voice was quiet now, appealing. He suspected all too clearly what “it” might be.
Gallaher grinned like a death’s-head. “I’d have gone mad with keeping it so close.” He gripped Nicoli suddenly, with bruising force. “You do see that? I’d have come to pieces with it under my bunk!”
“’Course you would, Gallaher. I can see that. But where did you put it?”
Gallaher started giggling helplessly. “You’d never guess,” he said. His eyes rolled up in his head.
Nicoli glanced over his shoulder then. “Wait outside,” he ordered Kanwar. And, from the tone of the first mate’s voice, Kanwar was glad to go.
It took ten minutes. Kanwar stood well clear of the door, so he never found out what kind of duress the mate used. But after ten long minutes they came out together, Nicoli’s arm firmly round Gallaher, supporting him as though they were friends.
“Quick!” snapped the first mate, with uncharacteristic rudeness. “Take his other side.” Kanwar obeyed at once. And so, three abreast, they proceeded.
They crushed into the tiny lift and hissed down into the bowels of the great tanker. Kanwar’s fear of being discovered by the captain was at once replaced by the fear of discovery by the equally terrifying chief engineer, the tall, taciturn American, C. J. Martyr. Indeed, rounding a bend in the corridor suddenly, they bumped into two figures so unexpectedly that Kanwar cried out aloud. But it was only two of the Palestinian general purpose seamen coming off engine-room watch. Kanwar knew them: Ibrahim and Madjiid.
“You two!” ordered Nicoli at once. “Come with us.” Obediently, unquestioningly, they fell in behind.
Kanwar paid them no more attention, all other thoughts wiped from his mind by the sudden realization of where Gallaher was taking them: the Pump Room.
The thought had no sooner entered his mind than the great steel bulkhead door was before them.
“Open it,” ordered Nicoli. When Kanwar hesitated, Ibrahim stepped forward and lifted the great iron handle. Like the door to a bank vault, or a nuclear bunker, the huge steel portal swung wide. All of them hesitated on the threshold, as though they feared what awaited them within.
The Pump Room was the heart of the supertanker. When the computers in the Cargo Control Room four decks above worked out the optimum loading schedules, every drop of oil aboard, even the bunkerage that fueled the engine, could be moved through here.
The room itself was three decks high — nearly ninety feet — and was palisaded with silver-colored pipes around the walls. On the far side from the doorway they were now hesitating in, some forty feet inside, a single ladder led rung by rung up to a hatch on the main deck just in front of the bridge. On their right, built out from the pipe-covered wall, almost like a stage house in a play, was the Fire Control Room.
In the Fire Control Room great racks of carbon dioxide canisters stood attached to the automatic firefighting equipment; for a fire here was the most dangerous thing that could possibly happen aboard. At the slightest hint of a spark, the automatic equipment would fill the whole Pump Room with carbon dioxide. This process took the merest seconds. It was the only way of stopping the whole ship from exploding.