The Coffin Ship
Authors: Peter Tonkin
THE COFFIN
SHIP
PETER TONKIN
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
For Cham
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.
—First used 1833,
Oxford English Dictionary
A ship has happenings according to her weird. She shows perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they laid for her.
—H. M. Tomlinson,
“The Sea and the Jungle”
From side to side, the storm covered more than a thousand miles. A thousand miles of towering clouds reaching from wavetop to troposphere in unbroken columns of swirling air thirty thousand feet high; a thousand miles of banshee winds gusting to one hundred and fifty miles per hour, a thousand miles of waves whipped up house-high from abyssal trough to mountainous crest.
Down the center of
Prometheus
’s deck, among the pipes, fifteen feet in the unquiet air, three feet wide with railings four feet high, nine hundred feet long, there was a catwalk. There were eight steep steps up to it from the restless, foam-washed deck. Up these they went, Richard first and McTavish last, all hanging on to the railings for dear life. Although the wind had dropped, and the rain and clouds had gone for the time being, the sea was still running murderously high and the combination of movement and slipperiness was fatally dangerous to their weak legs and uncertain feet. Time and again one or another of them would go forward, back, to one side or the other with bone-shaking force. Elbows and knees had the flesh on them bashed away. Ribs were bruised, welted; cracked.
There was little conversation, however, until they reached the forecastle head. Then Richard said, “If they’re not here in twenty minutes or so, we’d better start back. If the storm closes down again and catches us out here in this condition, we’re dead.”
Nobody had the energy to point out that if they went back without securing the tugs’ lines before the storm hit
Prometheus
again, then everyone aboard was as good as dead anyway.…
HAPTER
O
NE
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.
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.