‘Can you make out her name?’ called Liberty, leaning forward against the wheel and straining her eyes at the ghostly vessel drifting a couple of miles ahead. It was just after dawn on the fourth day of fast sailing and the sun rising behind them had cast its first great beams ahead of them to reveal the outline of a ship. The vessel was surprisingly close and drifting closer still, pulled towards them by the current while they were being pushed down on it by the wind. It had approached so close without them suspecting its presence during the night because it was apparently running dark and silent. No lights. No radio. They saw it in the bright dawn just before it registered on their simple collision alarm radar.
‘Can you make out her name?’ Liberty called again.
‘Not completely. Looks like something Maru to me,’ called back Bella Chung-Wolf. ‘Her forepeak’s a mess covered in dirt and rust. There’s something else written there but I can’t make it out. We’d need to get way nearer, even with these.’ She waved the binoculars in the air to show what she meant. The steady wind whipped her long black hair forward and moulded the cotton shirt to her back. She had all the sure-footed athleticism of her mixed heritage, half Cantonese half Cheyenne, thought Liberty. But even so, as skipper, she should have insisted on life jackets if people were going running up and down the length of the steadily heeling deck. Even given the excitement of this unexpected encounter.
‘Still nothing on the radio?’ Liberty glanced down at Maya in the snug where Flint’s communications equipment sat stubbornly silent.
‘We can’t even call her up unless we have some idea of her name,’ Maya answered.
‘Maybe we could try something like, “Hey, ghost ship drifting three miles off my starboard bow, this is sailing vessel Flint; how’s things with you?”’ Emma Toda called from her place at Bella’s side on the bow. ‘Something like that?’ She and Bella giggled at the thought. Liberty thought better of asking Emma to explain a little more about the meaning of the universal Maru which seemed to be added to all Japanese registered vessels. But Emma was so proud of her Japanese background they would probably have had to endure a half-hour lecture before they were any the wiser.
‘What about the authorities?’ said Liberty, frowning. ‘We ought to report her and get on our way.’
‘Not a whisper,’ answered Maya. ‘We might as well be in deep space.’
‘And there’s no sign of life on deck?’ she called back up to Bella, who obligingly put the binoculars to her eyes again.
‘Nothing I can see. She looks like a ghost ship to me. A modern-day Marie Celeste.’
‘Well, if we can’t raise her and we can’t raise the authorities, we have two simple choices,’ said Emma, skipping back towards the cockpit, as sure-footed as Bella in spite of her square, muscular physique. ‘We stay clear, head on, and report her as a hazard to shipping to the first radio contact we raise. Get them to pass on a warning to the nearest coastguard. Or we go aboard.’
‘That’s what we ought to do,’ said the punctilious Maya. ‘There could be someone aboard in trouble. We ought to make sure, you know?’
Liberty knew very well what was going on here. After the horrors of their stormbound run south and their near-fatal encounter with the Disney cruise liner, there had followed four full days and nights of non-stop simple sailing. Coming up to one hundred hours with the wind on their shoulder, brisk, kindly and unvarying. The ocean like an aquamarine carpet undulating easily before them. A white wake spreading ever wider behind them. No other vessel heaving over the huge horizon. Not a bird, not a fish, nothing to disturb the easy passage, day after day. The closest they had been to human contact outside themselves and the very occasional burst of activity on the radio had been the high white lines of the contrails as planes passed hundreds of thousands of feet above. The girls were getting bored.
But Emma and Maya were right. In the absence of anyone else either nearby or within radio contact, then it was Flint’s duty to offer the apparently helpless vessel aid. And if they couldn’t raise anyone on her radio or communicate by any other signal then they would have to go aboard and take a look. Though what in heaven’s name they were going to do if they found a ship full of sick and dying sailors God alone knew. Hope and pray that something that size would have a more efficient communications system than Flint’s. And that Maya, the acting radio officer, could get it to work.
It was this thought which pushed Liberty to her final decision. The vessel drifting down on them looked to be about two hundred feet in length. Her tonnage was hard to judge because she was sitting low in the water, but Liberty would have been surprised if she was much less than two hundred tons deadweight. She was clearly a commercial vessel. Too small to be a freighter. More likely a fishing boat. But a substantial, ocean-going ship. Which might well be equipped with communications gear far more powerful than theirs, even though, by the look of things, it was probably not anything like as modern. But on the other hand, the name Maru meant that it was Japanese. And whatever else they did, the Japanese built some top-of-the-range communications kit.
Certainly, as Flint bore down on her, the difference between the hull below her central bridge house and the equipment perched above it was striking. The drifting ship had a long, low hull with a white band on her immediately below the scuppers, sitting brightly above black-painted sides that fell to a swollen, barnacle encrusted waterline. Or it should have been a white band beneath the scuppers. In fact it was tiger-striped with broad smears of red rust. Above the scuppers themselves, the deck rails seemed thin and ill-maintained, with sections designed to fold down almost to the waterline, pulled back and secured up in grilles like hockey nets.
From what Liberty could see, the green-painted non-slip of the deck was in little better shape than the pocked, blistered and rusting sides. And the deck furniture was, if anything, worse. But, under the relentless searchlight of the rising sun, the bridge house itself rose square and pristine above the rotting mess below. Two levels up, it stood almost glacially white, with wide windows facing forwards. And immediately behind it stood a communications mast that positively gleamed. A big white banner bearing an identity code in Western letters and numbers, aptly enough ending in thirteen; and above that the almost showroom-new radar, sonar, fish-finding and communications complex, its brand-new brilliance marred only by the filth of the lines and rigging all around it. And, now that she noticed it, the matching equipment which capped the stubby foremast looked in pretty good nick as well.
Behind the bridge and the communications mast, halfway to the poop, there was a rusted square gantry that seemed to mark the beginning of a work area even worse maintained than the foredeck. And on the square stern itself sat a tall crane no doubt used for controlling any nets that the ship might want to deploy. A battered Japanese fishing vessel almost certainly, concluded Liberty. With a promising-looking range of communications kit that nobody aboard was apparently willing or able to use.
The decision as to who was going to board her was easy to make, therefore. They needed someone who knew about Japanese stuff and someone who knew about radios. Emma and Maya. ‘OK,’ ordered Liberty brusquely. ‘Bella, come and take over the communications. Emma and Maya get ready to go aboard.’
There wasn’t a huge amount of preparation to be done. Emma and Maya dressed in their thickest cotton shirts, jeans and deck shoes. They shrugged on life jackets in case they fell into the water during transfer from one vessel to the other. They grabbed torches because there seemed to be no power aboard the ghost ship. They each took a two-way that would communicate with the radio Bella was in charge of, though Liberty was careful to order that they should stay together at all times. Beyond these simple things, there was nothing much else they could take at this stage. They had no guns – and Liberty would never have considered sending anyone aboard if she had the slightest notion that there might be violence. They had a carefully selected range of medical and emergency supplies aboard Flint but the boxes they were in were unwieldy and Liberty didn’t want to risk them unless there was clear and urgent need of them. So the simple, basic equipment they gathered together within the first few minutes looked as though it would be all they would take. But then, as Liberty steered Flint along her shadowy length on the ocean’s quicksilver surface towards her mounting shadow rising slowly up the sun-bright side of the ghost ship, Maya had another idea.
‘We should film this,’ she announced. ‘I can take the camera and video what we find. It would be great footage for our next news update.’
‘Good thinking,’ Liberty agreed at once. ‘And if you set the camera to transmit as well as record, then Bella and I can watch your progress on the laptop.’
Maya raced below and was back with the little camera in an instant, then she ran back to the bow and filmed the last few minutes of the approach while Bella tested the clarity of the picture she received on the laptop and Emma in turn tested the two-ways. The immediacy of that contact lifted a nagging weight of worry off Liberty’s shoulders at once. Because she could not get over the sneaking feeling that the vessel was somehow more dangerous than it looked.
However, the explorers had more to do than test their equipment, record their adventure and prepare to go aboard during the final moments of Flint’s approach. They had to get the sails down so that the yacht could at last come upright and lose the way she had acquired under the steady pressure of that unvarying easterly wind. Liberty was willing to use the motors during the final approach, but her yacht-handling proved more than equal to the task. Maya merely had to reach up as Flint eased under the anchor and past the ropes dangling from the rusty forepeak and grasp the midship rail just above her head, securing the bowline carefully as Flint at last came easily to a halt beside the well of the foredeck in front of the square, white bridge. Emma, in the meantime, lowered the foam-rubber fenders that would protect Flint’s pristine polystyrene sides from the rusty metal of the vessel they could now, from this close, identify as Un Maru.
Emma looked up at the name and glanced back towards Liberty with a smile. ‘Un,’ she called, straightening. ‘Her name is Un. It means Luck. Also it is the name of one of the temple dogs that guard the entrance to a Japanese Shinto shrine.’
‘Luck,’ called back Liberty. ‘But what kind of luck, Emma? Good or bad?
‘Well,’ called back Maya decisively, ‘let’s get aboard and see, shall we?’