He hesitated an instant before turning. He had seen enough of death already, and had hoped to see no more. It was not fear; more a weariness. He was exhausted deep inside, as even the strongest will become after a while when tested near to destruction. As especially the strongest will become when they will not — cannot — share their burdens. But now he was here. He had no choice. He drew strength from that and turned.
Most of them were piled by the door, sitting or lying at ungainly angles; eyes and mouths wide, as though incredibly shocked at what had happened. A glance at them was enough to satisfy him that they were all beyond help. Another glance at Nicoli and his men clustered round their short ladder scant yards away. At Gallaher propped against the Fire Control Room, apparently peacefully asleep. Nine bodies. No captain.
Without further hesitation, he crossed to the Fire Control Room: his first priority still Levkas.
The captain was lying at the foot of the far wall, curled on his side, clutching an oxygen cylinder. The mask was loosely over his nose and mouth. Martyr crossed to his side at once, pushing the mask more firmly into place. He checked the cylinder pressure. It was empty. He replaced the whole thing. Only when the mask was firmly in place and pumping oxygen did he check for vital signs.
He could find none.
He straightened quickly, searching for the manual override to the firefighting equipment. It was on the wall nearby. He switched it off and the fans on. They would clear the inert gas in time, but in hours, not minutes. Only then would the atmosphere in here be safe. Only then could the bodies be moved. Until then, there was nothing to be done.
He looked down at the captain curled uselessly around the life-giving bottle like a dead child in the womb. He thought he might as well finish the job he had come down here to do. He took the hunched shoulders and tore them off the floor with a massive effort. He propped the inert body against the wall and stooped, letting it fall over his shoulder. Then he straightened, lifting the dangling feet into the air.
For some reason he glanced up as he passed through the Fire Control Room door, saw the blackened, shorted-out wires above the lintel, and began to understand.
He was breathing like a bellows when he reached the foot of the ladder up to the escape hatch. He glanced up at the distant hatchway and the one bright star that seemed to fill it. Should he go across and open the door? He could hammer on it to warn anyone who might be still outside. For all he knew the corridor was still full of the carbon dioxide that had leaked out before he had closed off the Pump Room. And, ultimately, that was the trouble. There were decks and working areas below this. The engineering decks — his own domain. The thought of filling them with deadly pockets of heavier-than-air inert gas was something he could not accept. He turned again and started to climb. With each rung, the captain’s inert body became heavier. With each added strain on his own body, Martyr’s consciousness closed down, keeping pain and fatigue at a necessary distance until he had completed his task.
How long it took him to complete the ninety-foot climb was something else he would never be sure of. He didn’t even notice when the ladder ended. He fell out of the open hatchway with his grim bundle onto the cool iron deck, to lie there like another dead man until Salah Malik, leader of the seamen, had the pair of them carried away.
But there was too much to do. He struggled back to wakefulness before they even reached the bridge, then stood watching as they lugged the captain’s body on into the brightness.
“Our first job is to contact the owner,” he said to Malik, who loomed competently at his side. “Then we’d better start clearing the Pump Room. I’ll write the Accident Report and make up the logs, since there doesn’t seem to have been a watch officer on the bridge for nearly two hours. Nor in the Engine Room since the lifeboat drill.
“I’ll have to guess what happened to Nicoli and his team, I guess. Any idea what they were doing down there with that ladder?”
Ghostly in the shadows, Malik’s shoulders shrugged.
“Well…Let’s get to it then. Two of your seamen gone I know. The rest just officers, I think. And Gallaher. Tsirtos in the Radio Room?”
“I suppose.”
He was. Sitting wide-eyed with shock, staring at the bright displays. “They’re all dead, aren’t they, Mr. Martyr? Everyone who went into the Pump Room,” he said as the chief put his head through the door. “Thank God you stopped me from following them! I walked round the ship after you closed the door. The stewards were all in their berths. The seamen are around somewhere. I’ve seen Malik. But the ship’s just empty. Corridors. Cabins. Everywhere. Empty. Like the Marie Celeste. Ghost ship…”
Martyr let him talk. There was time. Little enough, God knew, but time to let a shocked boy talk away his fear.
Gently he said, “Can you reach the owner?”
“Will we go down in history, like the Marie Celeste?”
“Maybe get a spot on the six o’clock news. Those reporters sure seem to love a good outbreak of death. Can you contact the owner?”
“And when I was wandering around the corridors, I could hear some kind of pipe playing. Ghostly. Like ghosts singing.”
Into the eerie silence, Martyr agreed, “Sure. One of the stewards plays a flute. His name’s Nihil. He’s the only one not from Hong Kong I think. It’s real pretty.”
“I never dreamed there would be anything like this, Chief. This is really my first berth. Nicoli got it for me. We’re from the same village. Were from the same village…”
“That’s tough. Can you get the owner for me now, Sparks?”
“What? Oh, certainly. He’s still at his hotel, I expect. The captain was just talking to him.”
“Well, get him!”
It took a few moments, during which Tsirtos calmed a little, soothing his way past an angry night porter, getting the phone rung in the owner’s suite in spite of the unusual hour.
As soon as the ringing tone filled the small room, Martyr said, “That’s enough for now. I’ll take it from here.” And he gently ushered Tsirtos out.
Just at the moment the door closed behind the departing radio officer, connection was made.
“Yeah?” snarled the owner.
“Demetrios? It’s Martyr. We got trouble.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Four thousand miles away, two hours later, Richard Mariner sprang awake in an icy sweat. He lay for a moment in the tangled wreck of his bed as the sound of metal grinding on metal died in his ears. He always heard the terrible sound of the impact, never the explosion. But then, the impact had, oddly, been the more terrifying of the two, and the explosion itself had seemed silent to him. The explosion that had destroyed his last command, his last crew. His wife. His life.
Mariner swung himself out of bed and strode through into the sitting room. Long windows facing the river made the place seem like a ship’s bridge and he stood where the helm would have been, looking over the Thames toward Nine Elms with the bright span of the Vauxhall Bridge on his left, unconsciously reliving those last terrible seconds on that other, real bridge.
He was tall, thin of waist and hip; but the breadth of shoulder and depth of chest gave him the appearance of rocklike solidity. The strength of his jaw might have suggested an equally resolute character to an old-fashioned expert in physiognomy, who might also have seen natural aristocracy in the aquiline jut of his nose, broken a little out of line now; and fastidiousness — perhaps tenderness — in the delicate line of his lips. In the half light, his face seemed almost blue: hair so black as to have a hint of it; square jaw, even when shaven, with a tint of it; and eyes like magnesium flares behind a pane of sapphire.