Ghost Ship

FORTY-ONE

Seven thousand miles and six time zones from Korea, a small flotilla of ships was in the process of linking themselves together with heavy steel cables.

Over the course of a day, two oceangoing tugs had arrived from South Africa. The Drakensberg had reached the Condor and towed it to where the Waratah lay drifting in the current, while a second tug, known as the Sedgewick, had arrived six hours later and was preparing to run lines to the foliage-encrusted hulk of the old ship.

But before she could be put under tow, an inspection had to be made. At Paul’s direction, a salvage crew had gone aboard, splitting into three groups. The main contingent began clearing the accumulated growth and sediment from the ship’s hull, hoping to make her lighter in the water and less top-heavy. As they excavated up above, the Condor’s chief engineer went down into the lower recesses of the ship to check the integrity of the hull and internal bulkheads. As they worked on the inside, Duke and another diver were finishing up a survey of the hull’s exterior below the waterline.

The radio cackled at Paul’s side. “Paul, this is the chief.” Paul put the radio to his mouth. “What’s the word?” “The engineering spaces are pretty gunked up. At least two feet of sludge down here. And in some places several feet of water.”

That didn’t sound promising. “Can you find the leak?” “No leaks,” the chief reported happily. “It’s freshwater. Rainwater, if you want me to guess, must be leaking in somewhere. But if you ask me, the hull itself is sound.”“That’s good news,” Paul said. “What about corrosion?”

“I think we’re fine,” the chief said. “To be honest, the old gal is in great condition for a ship that’s passed the century mark.”

“Any idea why?” Paul asked. “She should have rusted to pieces years ago.”

“I think it’s the sediment,” the chief said. “It’s very dense, more like clay. It seals so tightly it blocks out most of the oxygen. Less oxygen means less rust, less rust means a strong hull.”

“Sounds good,” Paul said. He wondered how the exterior looked. “Duke, are you finished with your survey?”

Duke’s voice came back after a slight delay. “A f f i r m a t i v e,” he said.

“How’s she looking below the waterline?”

“The plating is in great shape,” Duke replied. “If the chief is right, then I’d guess the exterior was sealed up with mud almost from the moment she went aground.”

Paul was glad to hear that. “Good news all around.” “Okay if we head back to Condor for some lunch and dry clothes?” Duke had been in the water for three hours already. “You’ve earned it,” Paul said.

“Roger that. Duke out.”

Paul turned his attention back to the interior. “What do you think, Chief? Are we going to make it in?”

NUMA had plans to bring the Waratah into Durban two days hence. She wouldn’t make Cape Town — her official destination when she’d vanished — but if she reached Durban, it would be a triumphant homecoming.

“We have a good chance,” the chief replied. “The only real danger is that she was obviously sitting aground somewhere for a long time. A ship isn’t supposed to be out of the water and resting all its weight on the bottom like that. We can already see some deformity in the plating underneath.”“Is that going to be a problem?”

“I wouldn’t want to ride out a storm on her,” the chief said. “But if the weather stays nice, I think we’ll be okay.”

“Good work,” Paul said. “Check in with me when you get topside.”

“Wilco,” the chief said. “Going to recheck the stern and make sure we’re not taking on water through the propeller shaft tube.”

Paul clipped the radio back on his belt, grabbed a shovel, and joined the crew in clearing the deck.

Meanwhile, Gamay and Elena explored the interior of the ship, hoping to shed some light on the mystery. A dedicated search of the bridge, captain’s quarters, and other official spaces gave little away. The logbooks were gone, along with the vast majority of personal possessions.

“Let’s check the passenger cabins,” Gamay suggested.

Elena nodded and followed Gamay deeper into the ship. They descended the main stairway, encrusted with black mold and layers of gunk, arrived at the main passenger level and entered a hall as dark as any mine shaft. With only their flashlights for illumination, the two women moved slowly.

Down here, the musty odor was almost overpowering, as the floor, ceiling, and walls were covered in the same gunk as the stairwell. The sound of water dripping added to the cavelike atmosphere.

“Kind of creepy down here,” Elena said.

“On that we agree,” Gamay said.

From above they heard occasional clanging and the disembodied echo of the deck crew’s voices as they shouted to one another, but they were muted and distant like voices from the past.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Elena asked.

“No,” Gamay said. “And neither do you.”

Elena chuckled. “Well, if I did, this is where I’d expect to find one. All those people lost and never found. I’ve heard that angry spirits cling to the last place they were alive. Haunting it. Waiting for someone to find them and set them free.”

With Elena going on about ghosts, Gamay felt the prickle of goose bumps on her skin. “I’ll take a ghost over another crocodile any day,” she said.

It took a while but they’d soon checked through every one of the first-class cabins.

“Notice something?” Gamay asked.

“No clothing. No luggage,” Elena said.

“And no jewelry,” Gamay said. They’d been working on the theory that the ship ran aground somewhere and the passengers and crew died waiting for rescue. But the fact that they’d found only one of the ship’s lifeboats suggested something else.

“If they abandoned ship,” Gamay said, “they’d have had to leave their steamer trunks behind. But strands of pearls and diamond-studded bracelets are easier to carry.”

“I’d bring mine,” Elena agreed. “But why leave a ship that was obviously not sinking?”

“No idea,” Gamay admitted as they made their way back to the main stairwell.

“Should we go down one more level?” Elena asked.

Gamay nodded. “At the risk of sounding like my husband, let’s keep going until we get to the bottom of this.”

Down they went, checking the smaller cabins that lay on the next deck.

“Crew stations,” Elena noted, studying the cramped cabin arrangements.

“Or steerage,” Gamay said. “The Waratah was designed to carry a lot of immigrant passengers. Fortunately, she wasn’t loaded to the gills when she left Durban.”

They searched persistently. But beyond the everyday items from another century that would generate great historical interest, there was little to explain what might have happened.

That began to change when Gamay forced open the next door.

The space was larger but no less cramped. Gamay offered a guess, based on the look of the beds and storage cabinets. “Ship’s infirmary.”

She stepped into the compartment and went right. Elena fanned out to the left. They’d gone several paces when Elena let out a gasp.

Gamay spun around and found Elena aiming her light at a skull with desiccated skin stretched across it, a tangle of wispy gray hair on top and the bristles of what had once been a thick handlebar mustache on the upper lip. Another body rested beside it.

Gamay crouched beside them for a closer look. The man wore a uniform. “He’s a crewman,” she said. “Or at least he was.”

A small badge seemed to indicate he might have been a foreman in the engine room, perhaps in charge of keeping the boilers stoked. A hole in his shirt led to a hole in the torn and dried skin. Gamay began to get a sick feeling. The same feeling she’d had upon discovering the body on the Ethernet.

She checked the other body. It was shirtless and the skin was more decayed. She couldn’t tell what had happened to this man, but as she stepped away her foot hit a stainless steel tin resting beside him. Something clinked.

Gamay picked up the tin, pried off the top, and dumped the objects out onto the palm of her hand. The first was flattened and mushroomed out at one end. The second was in relatively good shape.

“Bullets,” Elena said.

Gamay nodded. “Taken from these men, I’d bet, either to try and save them or after they died.”

Without speaking another word, they finished their survey of the infirmary, discovering three additional bodies in the rear section, one of which was strapped to a bed. A clipboard with ancient yellowed paper still attached to it had fallen from the peg on the footboard. Gamay picked it up. She couldn’t make out anything on the top sheet. The second page was in better shape. And as the light hit the paper at just the right angle, one small notation became readable.

“ ‘Time of death,’ ” she said. The hour was obscured, but the date next to it was legible. “ ‘August 1, 1909.’”

The significance dawned on Elena quickly. “Five days after the Waratah went missing.”

Gamay nodded. They’d found their first real clue. “We need to go tell Paul.”

Paul was busy with the deck crew when Gamay and Elena came up to him.

“We’ve found something,” Gamay told him breathlessly.

Paul put his shovel aside as she began to explain, handing the mushroomed lead slugs to Paul as she finished.

“No passengers, no lifeboats, no logbooks,” Paul whispered, going over the facts, “but several crewmen dead in the sick bay and at least one recovering from bullet wounds several days after the ship vanished.”

“Could there have possibly been a mutiny?” Elena asked.

“This isn’t the HMS Bounty,” Gamay said. “It was a cruise ship. No one here had been press-ganged into work. The sailors were professionals. Working on her was a fairly coveted job.”

That left only one answer. “Then it had to be piracy,” Paul said.

“Which would explain a great deal,” Gamay replied, “including our present location.”

Paul nodded. They were over three hundred miles northeast of the Waratah’s last reported position. Given that the current in Mozambique Channel flowed north to south and then around the Cape, she couldn’t have drifted to their current location unless her resting place had been even farther up the coast, even farther from where she should have been.

“To be honest,” Paul said, “I’ve been thinking it might have been piracy for a while. I can’t come up with any other reason for her to wind up this far from where she should have been.”

Gamay nodded. “But if you were a pirate and you’d just taken a large ship for a prize, the first thing you’d do is sail it in the opposite direction, out of the shipping lanes, away from where anyone would look.”

“Explains why the search and rescue vessels from the Royal Navy and the Blue Anchor Line never found her either,” Paul said. “They were looking in the wrong place.”

Elena chimed in with a summation. “So a group of pirates board the ship, take control of her, and turn her north, knowing it will be days before a search even begins. By that time the culprits can be hundreds of miles from the danger zone.”

“Must have been easy to disappear back then,” Gamay noted. “Radios weren’t in use on ships yet. And the airplane had only been invented six years prior, which meant they were few and far between and of relatively short range. Certainly not suited for long missions out to sea looking for missing ships.”

“It was a different time,” Paul said, “even compared to ten years later.”

Paul found himself intrigued by the mystery, which seemed to grow deeper and more complex by the moment. “So where did she end up?” he wondered aloud.

“Considering the current in this section of the world, it could be anywhere from here to Somalia,” Elena said.

“That’s true,” Gamay said. “But I’ve come up with an idea how we might narrow it down. Strangely enough, it begins with taking a closer look at those spiders.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “You really are cured.”

“Only temporarily,” she said. “You still have to kill them for me at home.”

“I set them free out the back door,” Paul said.

Gamay shook her head. “Of course you do.”

“So what’s the plan?” he asked.

“Before we toss all the foliage, insects, and debris over the side, we should take samples of everything. The seeds, the bugs, the spiders. We should even have someone examine what’s left of our crocodilian friend before Elena turns him into a handbag.

“If we can determine what kind of plants and bugs we’re dealing with, we might be able to use that information to narrow down where the ship has been all these years.”

It sounded like a great idea to Paul. “You’re the expert and the gardener of the family,” he said.

“I’ll help,” Elena said. “Especially if it means I don’t have to go down below again.”

Paul laughed. “I’ll tell the crew to stop excavating until you two have collected your samples. I’m sure they’ll enjoy the break.”

Paul walked over to the deck crew and gave them the good news. He was getting ready to radio their findings to the Condor when the sound of a helicopter approaching became audible.

Paul looked west, expecting to see the Condor’s Jayhawk finally returning from Durban, but instead the sound came from the north, where two black dots were descending from a higher altitude and coming directly toward them. They were staggered, with the first one perhaps a mile in front of its partner.

Suspicious, Paul took out a pair of compact binoculars and focused on the nearest of the two craft. It was dark green in color, clearly military, and carrying ordnance in pods on either side.

Flashes caught Paul’s eye, like sunlight reflecting off the canopy, but it wasn’t the sun. Ribbons of water flew up on a track toward the bow of the ship. The heavy thunking sound of .50 caliber shells tearing through metal followed.

“Hit the deck,” Paul shouted, stepping away from the rail and diving behind the piles of dirt as if they were sandbags.

The other crewmen dove to the ground around him, and Paul caught sight of Gamay and Elena racing his way.

“What’s happening?” Gamay shouted.

The first helicopter thundered overhead, heading to the south and banking into a right-hand turn.

“Not sure,” Paul said. “But I’m beginning to think someone doesn’t like us very much.”

He looked up and trained the binoculars on the second helicopter, coming in low and slow. It was over a mile away and less than a hundred feet above the water when it released its payload.

Paul had been on heightened alert since the incidents during the dive on the Ethernet, but even he needed a moment to process what he was seeing. The payloads were long and thin. They hit the water with tiny splashes and then vanished, leaving only thin trails of bubbles stretching out behind them to mark their course. It was clear to see that they were tracking straight for the Waratah.

“Torpedoes,” he said.

“Torpedoes?” Gamay sounded as shocked as he was.

“Coming right at us,” he added and then turned to the crew. “Everyone off! Abandon ship!”