And in this terrible place, Gallaher had been up to his mad mischief.
Nicoli moved first, then the drunken Irishman, then the reluctant Kanwar. The two GP seamen followed. Ibrahim, last in, closed the door behind them.
In the harsh white lighting, the room gleamed dead silver like a pathology lab in a hospital. The pipes dominated everything, like massive robot snakes frozen to silence in the midst of some sinister, serpentine orgy.
At once they were in the middle of the room. “Where?” snarled Nicoli.
The semiconscious Irishman looked around, as though surprised to find himself here. Then his face cleared. Even the habitual drunkenness in it vanished, to be replaced by horror at what his lust-and whiskey-loosened tongue had done.
“Mary, Mother…” he began, turning to escape from the place and his folly alike.
But Nicoli caught him by the arm and swung him back. “Where is it?”
“Sod you, Nicoli! You’ve got the pretty boy. You don’t get no secrets.”
All the rage in the Greek, held pent through the whole episode so far, exploded to the surface. Without a further word, he drove his fist into Gallaher’s face and the Irishman hit the deck without ever knowing what had hit him.
For a second they stood looking down at him. There was no sympathy in their faces. They were a hard crew — except for Kanwar, perhaps — on a hard ship. And Gallaher had never been popular. “He’s in the way there,” observed Nicoli coldly. Ibrahim and Madjiid took an arm each and dragged him clear, but Nicoli was already looking into that harshly gleaming forest of pipes. “Now we’ll have to do it the hard way,” he observed. “You three. Look around for anything out of place. Anything unusual at all.”
It took them nearly an hour, but at last Kanwar’s keen eyes saw the tiniest twist of green wire in a junction of pipes twenty feet up. “There’s something!” he called, his excitement boyish.
Nicoli was at his shoulder at once, the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes deepening as though he were gazing at some far horizon. “Yes!” His broad hand clapped the third mate on the back. “Well done, boy!”
“We’ll have to get a ladder.” Kanwar was all professionalism at once. He turned even before the first mate nodded and led Ibrahim and Madjiid to the Fire Control Room.
The low, stage-set door opened inward and Kanwar held it wide. The ladder stood, telescoped down, amid the canisters on the back wall of the small room. It was the work of a moment to release it.
The two seamen lifted the ladder up onto their shoulders, turned, and took two steps forward, back toward the door. The ladder was slightly unwieldy. As they moved, the front rose just enough to hit the lintel above the door. It momentarily snagged on some wires there, but pulled free easily enough when the two men stepped back again. Ibrahim lowered the front and they stepped safely past Kanwar and out into the Pump Room. Kanwar closed the door and followed them at once. He did not hear the faint sound of wires shorting in the room behind him, the wires that the ladder had caught and so easily — so fatally — twisted.
Within a minute, the ladder was extended and in place. With the other three at the bottom, Nicoli climbed up for a look.
It was surprisingly innocuous; a gray box about one foot square, hardly more threatening than a neatly wrapped present, with its gaily colored wires. Without thinking, Nicoli reached down and touched it. His fingertips no more than brushed it, but that was enough. It fell back into the junction of pipes and wall with a loud clunk! Nicoli jerked back, turning away. He would have fallen had the ladder not been so firmly held below. But nothing happened.
After a mental count of three, Nicoli turned back, pushed his arms through the rungs, and hugged the safe steel to his broad chest, waiting for the shock to die. Waiting for his heart to stop racing; waiting for the roaring in his ears to fade.
But then he realized that the roaring in his ears was nothing to do with shock. It was real.
Automatically, he looked down. At the foot of the ladder, Kanwar stood, gazing up. On his face was the most frightening expression Nicoli had ever seen. The boy’s fists were locked onto the ladder and his whole body, like his fingers, seemed closed in some kind of seizure. His eyes were wide and his mouth stretched open, as though he were drowning. His lips and tongue were blue.
He was standing there screaming silently up at his friend and he was dead.
Nicoli saw all this in the time it took for the first agony to rip through his chest like a breaking heart. And in the instant it took him to die, he understood: something had switched on the automatic firefighting equipment. There must have been a short-out in the wires in the Fire Control Room. Every single atom of oxygen had been driven from the place.
From everywhere in the Pump Room: including their lungs.
He tried to move. He was too late. When the fatal spasm hit him, he locked onto the ladder and remained where he was, frozen in a purposeful attitude; looking just as much alive as Kanwar, Madjiid, and Ibrahim, the three other corpses at the ladder’s foot.
The roaring of the automatic firefighting equipment continued for five more seconds. Then, as there was no more oxygen left anywhere in the Pump Room, right up to the ceiling ninety feet above, it switched itself off. There was only silence and stillness.
CHAPTER TWO
Captain Georg Levkas was an angry man. Even when nothing had happened to enrage him, he still went about life as though in the grip of an overpowering fury. In truth, most of Levkas’s fury was directed against himself for failing to live up to the heady dreams of his youth, but he was far too proud a man to admit this to himself, and so the anger that filled him at all times was poured upon everything around him like molten metal boiling over in a crucible.
He had always been a buccaneer, a blockade runner. As a young man he had learned the sea, smuggling between Europe and Africa. He had carried something of that romantic apprenticeship with him when he had worked his way through his first real set of officers’ papers and beyond; into the glittering world of commercial shipping. Onto his beloved tankers.
But the price. In the end the price had been too high. The price of getting his tanker captain’s papers; the price, now, of keeping them.
At half past midnight local time, July 16, he was standing in the Radio Room yelling at the owner over the radio. The objects of his considerable ire were, at that precise moment, the ship’s electrician, Gallaher, and the chief engineer, the American C. J. Martyr.
It had begun as a routine midnight report that the cargo had been loaded from the Iranian oil terminal that day. The oil was currently — on paper at least — the property of the Abu Oil Company, but it was likely to pass from owner to owner during the voyage according to the vicissitudes of the oil market. Their papers to transport the cargo from the Gulf to the huge refineries in Europoort near Rotterdam in Holland, sailing via the Cape of Good Hope on the standard route were all in order. The report had contained all this information but then it had somehow turned itself into a diatribe against the men the owner had sent aboard — the men Levkas refused to take into his confidence.
Hamstrung by the fact that he could not be absolutely sure who else was listening to the open radio link, and by the knowledge that he could never be explicit if there were the faintest chance he might be overheard, unaware of just how drunk he really was, Levkas was trying to explain that Martyr simply did not fit in with his crew, who otherwise seemed perfect for the business in hand: “…hand picked. All of them. Men I know. Men I can trust. I don’t have to like them. I do not like any of them particularly, except the boy Kanwar and Nicoli, but I know them. I know what they have done and will do. I know nothing of these men Martyr and Gallaher except that I do not trust them.”