The Coffin Ship by Peter Tonkin Page A

here.” He pointed to the northernmost.
    He reached up and pressed the buttons on the Sat Nav. Figures clicked onto the LCD. “This thing says we’re here.” He pointed to the southernmost cross. He looked starboard suddenly. Richard swung round to follow his gaze. The unladen tanker had moved exactly abeam of them, three miles south.
    “If the Sat Nav is to be believed,” said John grimly, “we’ve just collided with her.” Then he caught his breath at the enormity of what he had just said—especially to Richard Mariner—and he stuck his pipe in his mouth at once to cover his confusion.
    Richard felt the flesh on his forearms quiver. He took a deep breath. “Keep checking our position against positions obtained from the islands using radar,” he ordered tightly. “And warn the others. I’ll send Sparks up to see what he can do with it.”
    On the face of it this worked well enough. Tsirtos, the radio officer—“Sparks”—spent the next couple of hours pulling the Sat Nav to pieces, checking, then reassembling it. He missed lunch. Without him, Slope was quieter.
    Lunch was all too short. Officers bustled through the meal and departed busily. Only Martyr showed any disposition to linger, and Richard got the impression the chief wanted to talk to him but didn’t know where to start.
    Richard sat, also silent, wondering how to help. But he had been away from the sea too long and had fallen out of the way of ruling a pride of officers.
    In the end, both men remained silent and rose when lunch was over with that unspoken conversation rankling between them and making matters worse.
    Richard went up to his office and began to make more lists and draw up the agenda for the first captain’s conference, which he wanted to hold in the morning.
    After an hour, Tsirtos came to report that the Sat Nav was fixed. Like Martyr, he gave the impression that he would have liked to have said more than he did say, and the captain began to get the mea sure of him, seeing beneath that curious Mediterranean mixture of shy immaturity and boyish bravado another, more calculating, man.
    Driven by abrupt restlessness, he rose and gazed along the deck. He had been aboard twenty-four hours now. The Gulf had used that time to get under his skin, inspite of all the tightly enclosed world of
Prometheus
could do to keep it at bay.
    There was an easy chair convenient to the window. He made himself sit down in it to watch the sea and think.
    At first, as he woke, he thought something incredibly horrible had happened. Every surface around him seemed to have been rinsed in blood.
    Prometheus
seemed to be sailing a sea of blood through a downpour of blood.
    That was what he saw before he understood what he was seeing.
    It was the Shamaal.
    The desert wind had crept up behind them, carrying sand like a plague of locusts deep within it. They were traveling at fifteen knots and the wind a little faster. The sand grains and the supertanker were all but still in relationship with each other. The tiny specks of red sandstone and crystal mica percolated through the air with the balletic grace of snowflakes. The sun, halfway to the horizon, looked like a huge blood orange.
    Abruptly, the deck beneath Mariner’s feet vibrated to a different beat. He glanced at his watch. 16.30.00. Ben Strong, on the bridge, had cut the speed.
    16.30.30. A knock at the door.
    “Come!”
    It was Slope, sent down to inform the captain of the new situation.
    “I’ll come up,” he decided, inevitably.
    Even from the bridge, it was difficult to see the forecastle head at the far end of the deck. The usually clear lines of the deck itself were already slightly out of focus, the geometric angles cloaked by curves of drifting sand.
    Ben was on watch as Richard entered, standing behind the helmsman’s left shoulder, glaring into the murk. John Higgins, although off duty only half an hour, hovered over the Collision Alarm Radar. As Richard crossed the threshold, he glanced