“Sweet Jesus!” said somebody.
Mariner glared around the room, suddenly overcome with absolute fury. “Quite so!” he snapped. Even Ben Strong quailed before his gaze.
And Richard really began to remember what it was like to be the captain of a ship.
CHAPTER SIX
A short while later, Richard was standing on the bridge by the helmsman looking past his reflection and the twinkling lights on the console before him into the black velvet of a Gulf night. There was no moon. The dancing stars were like the huge, misshapen pearls they collected from the shallow seabeds here. He was thinking of a dawn five years ago. Of a beautiful, spoiled woman lying alone in her berth rigid with loathing for him. Making her plans for a messy, painful divorce; looking forward to hurting her husband and her father as much as she possibly could, out of pure childish spite.
She was in his thoughts almost constantly, this woman wasting the last seconds of her life on hatred.
Slope was behind him to his left, looking down into the green bowl of the Collision Alarm Radar. In those days the Gulf was too busy to let the Prometheus do everything for herself. There were always dhows up to no good, smuggling guns, pearls, slaves; small tankers and cargo ships; VLCCs; the odd ULCC, twice as big; SMBs; sandbars; rigs; tiny, uncharted islands; heaven knew what else. It was almost as bad as the Channel and no place to be sloppy or off guard. There were lookouts with night glasses on the bridge wings and in the forecastle head.
As first officer, Ben Strong was also acting medic. After they had cleared the mess in the Officers’ Lounge, Richard had sent the others to their cabins and closed the bar; detailed John Higgins to go through the rest of the videotapes, and ordered Ben to report to the bridge when he had seen to Tsirtos and Martyr.
Now he shook himself mentally and cleared his mind of its ghosts. He had more immediate problems. He started pacing the bridge, head forward, hands clasped behind his back, trying to focus clearly on the jumble of events at whose center he stood. It seemed obvious that the previous officers had, to put it mildly, been a strange lot. And they had met a pretty strange end. Martyr probably knew more than he was saying — but he was strange himself, and there was no guarantee he would confide anything more to his new captain — especially now — beyond what he had said, and the accounts that bore his decided signature in the logs and the Accident Report Book.
Why did he seem to regard the others, and Richard in particular, with such suspicion?
Why, if he held the dead crew in such contempt, had he been persuaded to join them?
Was there something going on, or was it just that sort of mild lunacy that sometimes breaks out at sea?
But they had only been at sea for six hours.
Ben and John came up together. “Did he, by God?” Ben was saying. “I’d like to see that.”
“Anytime you like, Ben. That and all the rest. But watch out for the chief.”
“All the rest, John?” snapped the captain as they came round the great bank of instruments standing like a low wall across two-thirds of the bridge. John nodded, his open countenance twisted with disgust. His gaze flickered across to the young third officer’s back, then up to the captain again.
“All right, Mr. Slope,” said Richard. “You can slip down to the Officers’ Pantry and make yourself a coffee. Take ten minutes.”
Slope hurried off, not too happy about missing the gossip.
Richard turned to Ben first and received a brief report on Tsirtos’s bruises and Martyr’s abrasions. Tsirtos had accepted aspirin. Martyr had not. As far as Ben could tell, they were none the worse for their experiences.
“I see,” said Richard, turning away. “John. What about the rest of that stuff?”
“It’s all the same. Most of it worse.” His voice was hoarse; emotion pulling his Manx accent into prominence. For once he was not chewing on a pipe; he looked pale, genuinely sickened.
“Oh, come on,” erupted Ben. “Blue movies on a supertanker — and all this fuss?”
John swung on him. “This isn’t just blue, for God’s sake. This stuff’s sick. Some of it looks like snuff.”
“Snuff?” asked Richard, startled into thinking of Regency gentlemen sniffing tobacco powder from silver boxes. “What’s that?”
“That’s where they actually kill people, right in front of the camera,” said Ben, soberly. “Jesus! That’s no joke. Are you sure?”
“How can I be? But that’s what it looked like to me.”
“Jesus. That’s horrific. Sorry.”
“I looked in the library too.” John held out a pile of books and magazines. One glance told Richard they were companion pieces to the videotapes.
Tankers’ libraries are usually stocked with old books brought aboard by previous crews. Prometheus had had three crews recently. A skeleton crew who had brought her out of mothballs in Valparaiso and sailed her to Lisbon for refitting. Another, who had brought her from Portugal to the Gulf. The only full crew she had had in recent years had died soon after coming aboard, leaving only Tsirtos and Martyr. And, judging from to night, neither of then had known what was in the library.
Wearily, Richard mentally filed away a few more questions to be asked in the morning.
Slope sidled back at that moment. “Okay, John,” said Richard. “That’s enough for to night. Destroy all that filth — I’d chuck it overboard in weighted sacks if I were you — and then turn in. It’s late and you have the next watch.” He automatically glanced at the two brass chronometers above the helm. One read 20.30, the other 23.30. GMT and Gulf Time respectively.
Richard had reached the end of his strength.
As he turned to go, however, Ben said, “Dick!” in an urgent undertone.
“Yes?” Richard turned back.
“I wasn’t going to bring this up, but that porn has put my teeth on edge.”
“What is it?”
Ben motioned Richard round to the chart table where he opened a deep drawer to its fullest extent. He lifted something out of the back and handed it over. It was a bottle of ouzo, half empty. “Makes you wonder; doesn’t it, Dick?”
It did indeed. All the way to the blessed oblivion of his bunk, Richard’s mind was filled with the nightmare vision of Prometheus under Levkas’s command sailing up the Channel on a black night with the off-watch officers below enraptured by the torture and murder of pretty young girls, and the on-watch officers getting blind drunk on ouzo.
He could hardly have been expected to know it, but his fears were almost identical to those of Captain Levkas. Except that Levkas had known Prometheus would never reach the Channel.
Richard sprang awake out of a deep, dreamless sleep. He was absolutely sure there was someone in his room. He groped for his bedside light, wondering in a panic about the rhythmic surge of sound. Nothing was where it should be.
This was not his bed!
Totally disoriented, he swung his feet to the floor. The vibration told him he was at sea, but that only confirmed his suspicion that this was part of a nightmare.
“Rowena?” He called his dead wife’s name as he always did in his nightmares and waited: sometimes she would answer; sometimes not. He took a hesitant step toward where the shadows were thickest, knowing that was where she would be. He took another. And barked his shins against a chair. The pain brought clarity.
He turned and reached for the light switch unerringly, knowing exactly where it was now that he knew where he was.
The cabin flooded with light. It was empty apart from himself, and yet the impression lingered that someone had been close at hand.