He first became convinced that there were ghosts following him at 03.27 on the morning of the 19th, just as he found the life raft hidden on the forecastle head. He had risen sometime earlier, determined to make a thorough examination of the deck, starting with the forecastle head. It was dangerous, he knew, to go wandering around out there in the dark with too large a torch — he would be seen by the officer of the watch. He took the smallest of lights, therefore, secure in the knowledge that there was no watch in the forecastle head to night and that the light he was carrying was unlikely to cast its beam ten feet, let alone a thousand, when he switched it on.
There was no question of his creeping down the catwalk. That was far too risky. Instead he slipped out of the starboard side door of A deck and tiptoed stealthily forward, guided between the various obstacles by the light of the stars and a nail-paring moon. It was a sultry night. They were north of Walvis Bay at that time, though well out, and heading back into the heat. There was a faint, salt-smelling wind, just enough to whisper over any obstacle or irregularity. The Benguela current pushed them over the Walvis Ridge and the great long Cape swells rose higher, became busier against the hull. There was an air of stealthy activity about the ship that only became apparent when one left the antiseptic confines of the bridge. Though from the bridge, carried magically to him by the whispering wind, came the haunting music one of the stewards played nightly on some strange Oriental flute.
The infinitely distant music, the ghostly bustle, insinuated themselves into his subconscious as he crept along the deck; of such things, perhaps, are hauntings made — if of nothing more. Certainly by the time he reached the faint moon shadow of the Sampson post halfway down the deck, Tsirtos was beginning to suspect that he was not alone. Under the uncertain starlight, the deck stretched vastly away. The safety of the bridge was already distant; the lights already dim. The night gathered itself around him.
Of course, he had been used from childhood to the vagaries of the dark, raised in a Peloponnesian village south of Neapolis, overlooking Kíthera and Crete, which, even when he left to go to sea had still to be connected to any electricity supply. But this night was different from the sage-scented, cicada-singing nights of his childhood. This night smelled of salt and oil and cooling iron. There was nothing in it but the whispering of the wind, the chuckling of the sea, that lone flute like a lost soul crying. There were no familiar hillsides, bush-clothed and precipitous; only the geometric, unnatural planes of the pipe-divided deck. The farther out he went, the more the steel claimed him, having a sort of spirit of its own: cold, inhuman, overpowering.
Conscious of none of this, he crept forward, his way illuminated only by the heavens, and that light shadowed now and then by the faintest trace of high scud.
The forecastle head was more lonely than he could ever have imagined, a great metal blade coming to its blunt point far from the rest of the ship, seemingly; far, far from the rest of humanity. Under only the sibilant wind and the faint, shrouded sky, like the last man at the most distant end of the world, a sort of rapture overcame him; like the rapture of the deep, of high places and great spaces. The sort of rapture that kills.
It crept up on him, however, for he was at first preoccupied with his search. On the forecastle head itself there was a maze of heavy equipment. The massive winches, one each side, which raised and lowered the anchors. The great posts, in pairs, to which the tow ropes had been connected on the way in to Durban, all sorts of equipment which, as radio officer, Tsirtos was rarely if ever called to deal with. But someone else was, regularly. That was the problem. Who would be stupid enough to hide something in or near a regularly used piece of equipment? If anything had been hidden in the winches, for instance, would it not have been discovered or destroyed when the South African tugs’ hawsers were being winched aboard? Where else was there out here in this terrible place? Increasingly nervously, he switched on his torch and flashed it around. And its weak beam fell upon the spare anchor.
Prometheus had two anchors ready to be deployed, hanging from the massive hawse holes athwart the bow. Like most great ships, she had a third, for emergencies, in case one of the others was lost. And it was kept out here, fastened securely to the deck. Tsirtos crossed to it at once, certainty flooding through him. Certainty well placed. Wedged under the anchor, well out of sight of all but the most prying eyes, was a large black canvas bag. Tsirtos pulled it out and opened it. Inside was a deflated rubber life raft, packed tight. On top of this was a box the size of a small hamper. It was locked, but the lock was weak. Inside the box was a radio, a neatly packed bundle of emergency rations, survival equipment, fresh-water distillation equipment, and a handgun. Tsirtos was tempted to take the gun, but thought better of it in the end. He would only have to find another hiding place for it, and he was not confident of finding one as good as this. Well, if the person who had hidden this were still aboard, he would have to move very fast indeed to beat Tsirtos down here when the crunch came. And if it belonged to one of the dead men, Tsirtos was sure he would not begrudge it.
He began to pack it away, still thinking about those dead men, unconsciously soaking up the atmosphere of the vast night around him. He could not begin to understand the forces within and without that held him as helplessly as Robin had been held by the bow wave against the side of the ship. Unable to comprehend the dark wonder of what was really happening to him, he translated what he was feeling into a superstition he could more readily accept.
On the vastness of the forecastle head he suddenly turned, breathless. “Nicoli?” he whispered.
But Nicoli did not answer, preferring to tease him with the almost-silence.
“NICOLI!” he screamed.
Nicoli, ghostly, chuckled in the darkness with a voice like water on steel. And mad Gallaher was there in the shadows as he rose.
Tsirtos flashed the torch around increasingly wildly, not caring who might see it from the bridge. But they hid from him, Nicoli, Gallaher, Kanwar, and the others, lurking at the edges of shadows, always in the corners of his eyes. Their dead voices murmured just behind him; their dead fingers touched his neck. He suddenly realized just how far he was away from the light: how absolutely alone he was way out here in the dark.
Covered with sweat, fighting the shakes, using his torch to light every inch of the way and lucky to be overlooked by Ben Strong on watch, he stumbled all the agonizing, terrifying distance back into the brightness of the empty bridge where the accusatory murmurs lay just beneath the grumble of the generators.
In his cabin, he began to recover; and as he did so, he began to make his plan. No matter what the cost, he had to get to that life raft first, as soon as Prometheus began to sink.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was a hot night. There was no moon. A high overcast obscured most of the stars. Prometheus was just coming east of north. She was at 14 north and 18 east, less than two hundred miles off the coast of Senegal.
Some of the general restlessness might have been attributable to these facts. Even in the air-conditioned confines of the accommodation areas something of the night’s heat lingered. And these latitudes traditionally proved dangerous to ships. Even ships the size of Prometheus. For these were pirate waters. Not those sailed by Edward Teach or Henry Morgan, but waters where from time immemorial right up to the present day, it has been a flourishing village industry for men to crowd into the largest boats available and sail out on dark nights to surprise ships that pass too near.