It was only an overdose of the pills which Nic had got from the Tokyo hospital that allowed Richard six hours’ solid sleep. He took a handful while concluding a swift briefing with Captain Chang. And then another as he stood increasingly dopily through a couple of abortive attempts to contact Katapult, whose red dot seemed so tantalizingly close ahead of them. Then he went into his bunk at one a.m., lay down as though poleaxed and woke at seven the next morning.
He knew at once that something was not quite right. He eased himself on to the thrumming, choppily heaving deck and was shocked and relieved both at the same time to note that he had collapsed into bed without getting undressed. Even his shoes were still in place. But at least the fact that he was still dressed meant he could get on to the bridge more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. Pausing only to freshen up, check his reflection, brush his hair and rinse his mouth, he rushed up two decks. Rushed, he observed wryly, like a centenarian who has lost his Zimmer frame.
When he did make it up there, he found himself standing stiffly between the silent forms of Captain Chang and her first lieutenant, staring ahead over the garish brightness of the two submersibles on the foredeck. The morning had dawned overcast a couple of hours earlier, and the leaden colour of the sky was reflected by the surface of the ocean, in sharp contrast to the brightness of Neptune and Salacia.
As far as the eye could see, the legendary blue of the Pacific was hidden beneath a layer of plastic. The majority of the rubbish seemed to be clear bottles of every conceivable size from 330-millilitre water bottles through two-litre stalwarts the same size as Tanaka’s good ship Cheerio, to family-sized containers capable of holding a gallon or maybe two. There were personal items: trainers, flip-flops, footballs. Then there were the ubiquitous bags – from small ones that had once contained crisps or chips to big silver-throated multipacks. Shopping bags without number, from a worldwide range of stores and business outlets. There were black bags that had once held garbage – and some of them still appeared to do so. Green bags full of garden rubbish. And, floating in among the billions of bags, there were commercial containers. There were square ones – everything from Tupperware sandwich boxes to plastic dustbins – to massive water tanks such as could be found in any Western attic. There were barrel-shaped ones varying in size from fizzy drink cans to oil drums to the occasional hot water central heating cylinder.
And that was before he began to add in the kinds of flotsam that he was already familiar with from his adventures with the jellyfish. Floats and nets from day fishermen’s tackle to huge commercial trawler gear. Fish crates, life jackets, Day-Glo working jackets that looked at first glance like the torsos of corpses, thick red rubber gloves, yellow boots, tyres, ships’ fenders of every sort, size and shape. There were even full-sized containers like modest houses floating half submerged out there. And God alone knew what they contained.
Frowning with concern, Richard hobbled over to the starboard bridge wing and opened the bulkhead door that connected to the outside world. At once the bridge was filled with a strange, unearthly rumbling grating sound and a piercing, oily stench. ‘Where is Katapult?’ he croaked, concerned for Robin.
‘Dead ahead,’ answered Straightline. ‘We have had to cut speed but so has she. We’ll be up with her by midday.’
‘Which is when she will be at the bottle Cheerio’s location,’ added Captain Chang. ‘Though how Captain Mariner will find one bottle in the midst of this . . .’
Nic arrived on the bridge then. ‘What the . . .’ he said in disgust, looking out at the mess on the water.
‘What about the others?’ asked Richard, swinging the bridge door closed.
‘The same,’ said Straightline. ‘Mr Greenbaum’s daughter in Flint seems to be making steady headway towards us. The wind is a light northerly – they can both tack across it even though they are heading in opposite directions. The two vessels are in the teeth of a fierce competition now, but they don’t seem to be taking any risks from what I can judge of heading and speed from the locator beacons and the radar.’
‘Other than sailing through this crap in the first place,’ grated Nic. ‘Where’s Professor Tanaka?’
‘Here,’ Straightline gestured to the twin displays that showed the red dots familiar from the laptop screens, and Poseidon’s combat-standard radar display. ‘We will all get there to the same place at about the same time – the middle of nowhere – and the middle of whatever this excrescence is.’
‘That’s something I must remember to ask Professor Tanaka when I see him,’ said Richard thoughtfully.
Then Nic demanded suddenly, ‘Are we all right to be doing this? It looks pretty flaming dangerous out there.’
‘It is!’ snapped Chang. ‘Dangerous for us but also very dangerous for Katapult and Flint. Much more dangerous for them, in fact. If we cut and run to safer waters, then who will help them if anything goes wrong?’ She swung round and looked at her two employers with her fiercest frown. ‘And is that not what we are here for? To help them if anything goes wrong?’
Over a breakfast of cold noodles, congee warm rice porridge and crullers deep-fried doughsticks, Richard and Nic began to finalize their plans for the fast-approaching endgame as eight quiet chimes announced the start of the forenoon watch at eight a.m. ship’s time. As the bustle of the watch change went on all around them, they fell into an increasingly deep discussion. For they had a fine equation to balance: two yacht captains locked in the final stages of a race that neither was willing to lose – though neither of them knew the true worth of their prize. To make matters worse, communications with the vessels in question was intermittent. And, as wild card against them, Dagupan Maru was also closing on the bottle. Also being highly selective with regard to communications. And she was a container vessel more than capable of running them both down, smashing them to kindling and killing everyone aboard. ‘I wonder,’ mused Richard, mid-conversation, almost an hour later, ‘if Sittart could have had anything to do with the car that almost killed us?’
‘What put that in your head?’ asked Nic quietly.
‘I don’t know. But there’s something here. Something not quite right.’
Nic nodded, frowned and shrugged, used to Richard’s sudden flashes of insight. Feeling a little like Dr Watson sitting opposite Sherlock Holmes.
But after a moment’s silence, their discussion resumed. For they had to assume that someone aboard the sinister container ship – someone at the very least – knew very well what a colossal fortune the bottle might represent.
And then, like the extra odds always skewed in the house’s favour in Las Vegas casinos, there was the fact that Tanaka’s predictions turned out to be true beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The weather around the Pacific Rim had clearly speeded up the currents of the North Pacific Gyre so that there was in fact a small but expanding continent of floating garbage, a plastic Sargasso Sea, gathering here. A Sargasso that was not yet solid enough to present a hazard to shipping in terms of blocking progress or hard enough to make collision damage likely – unless someone was unlucky enough to run into one of the containers – but which was sure to be full of other, as yet uncalculated, dangers.
After breakfast, the two men returned to the bridge and stood side by side with the captain and her navigator for a while, as three quiet chimes Warned that it was nine thirty a.m. aboard Poseidon, only two-and-a-half hours from their projected rendezvous. The four of them stood watching as the vessel pushed its way with increasing caution through the slowly thickening trash. Richard’s unease continued to mount and he found himself limping out on to the outer bridge wing where he could come closer to the strange conditions they were sailing through, as though experiencing them with all five senses would also bring him closer to understanding the danger.
As Nic, less seawise than his battered friend, went below and started looking into business of his own, Richard leaned against the forward rail of the bridge wing, his whole aching body seeming to yearn forward as though some part of him could fly far ahead of Poseidon and come aboard Katapult to Robin. But it wasn’t long before his fatigue-enhanced fancifulness gave way to the need for urgent physical action and he hurried below again, as fast as his bruised and battered body would allow.
On A deck, he found Nic deep in conversation with Ironwrist Wan and Fatfist Wu, controllers of the submersibles on the foredeck. And it didn’t take long for the four of them to agree that action – any action – would be better than this relentless waiting, made infinitely worse by the amount of decisive energy that it had taken to get two of them here in the first place. And that decision seemed to lift a weight from each man’s shoulders. For, given where they were, there was only one course of action open to each of them.
But before either Richard or Nic could take anything like the action that they agreed, they were called back up on to the bridge by a peremptory summons broadcast by Captain Chang. ‘What is it?’ demanded Richard as he limped through from the lift abaft the bridge. Captain Chang did not answer. She simply gestured. And there, heaving over the port-quarter horizon was the massive bulk of Dagupan Maru, black against the wide grey sky.
Richard grabbed the binoculars from their holster on the console beneath the clearview and was limping out on to the port bridge wing even before Nic arrived on the bridge itself behind him. This was the first time he had seen the freighter with his own eyes. And her picture on the laptop files that Jim sent from London Centre – let alone the photo of her name on the drifter’s camera phone – came nowhere near to doing her justice.
Dagupan Maru was a bloody big brute of a vessel, he thought. Not quite the size of his three-hundred-metre, quarter-of-a-million-ton supertankers like Prometheus, but bigger than any other vessels in the Heritage Mariner fleet. She looked every one of her two hundred metres in length, each of her twenty-five metres beam. And her deadweight tonnage could even be more than Prometheus’s, let alone Poseidon’s. Her command bridge, six decks above her weather deck, watched the watery world ahead of her over the tops of four blunt cranes that seemed like roughly squared oak tree trunks, the arms of their gantries squared away fore and aft in a line above the centre of her deck. There was a forest of satellite, GPS and communications equipment on top of her bridge house which served to make her radio silence more sinister still. There was a tall mast at her forepeak, festooned with radar equipment. And, focusing in on the massive flare of her bow at the foot of this foremast – a broad bow which seemed to him to be little more than a brutal black wall smashing arrogantly through the relative scum of waste – he could all too easily see how its larger sister had ridden down an eight-man Transpac without noticing the impact. How it could equally easily grind down Katapult, or Flint – or both. She was certainly not bothering with Poseidon’s increasingly careful approach. She must be running at full speed, Richard calculated, relying on the huge ram of her bulbous bow to get her safely through the rubbish. But even taking Chang’s caution into account, Poseidon could outsail Dagupan Maru any day of the week.
‘Shit,’ came Nic’s voice at his shoulder. ‘So that’s her, is it? She’s sure an ugly-looking brute. Sparks is trying to contact her but she’s not answering.’
But no sooner had Nic said this than Sparks, the radio officer, was on the bridge wing beside them. ‘I have Katapult,’ he said. ‘Captain Mariner’s on.’
‘Richard,’ said Robin’s voice in the radio headphones an instant later. ‘Where are you?’
‘Only a couple of hours away, closing up behind you in Poseidon,’ he replied.
‘What? Why ever are you doing that?’ she demanded.
‘In case this garbage gets to be anything like as dangerous as it looks.’
‘You’re fussing over nothing! We’ve got this far without needing any help and we’ve no intention of starting to ask for any now. This is a race, not a regatta! We’re being careful. The radio’s been playing up and the sonar’s on the blink but the radar’s fine and we’re tracking the bottle and Flint clearly enough. We see Poseidon’s echo and identification numbers clearly enough, now you mention it, though I can’t get over the fact that you’re aboard her! And anyway, if anything goes wrong, there’s a bloody great freighter just pulling over the northern horizon. I haven’t managed to raise them yet but I’m sure they’d be happy to help.’
‘Well, my love, about that . . .’
Richard was in the middle of his explanation – though he hadn’t got to the bit about the lottery ticket yet – when the four bells gently announced that it was ten a.m. ship’s time midway through the forenoon watch, and the most unexpected thing happened. Suddenly Nic’s cell phone started ringing. He got it out, shaking his head with surprise. And froze.
‘Son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘It’s Liberty!’ Then suddenly he was locked in a conversation with his daughter that was in many respects the same as the one Richard was having with his wife.
Neither man had made any real progress with the fiercely competitive women, when their attention was called to the next stage in the chess game that seemed suddenly to be evolving with disturbing rapidity out across the dead sea ahead of them. For, no sooner had Dagupan Maru settled into their field of vision than a helicopter lifted off it, leaping up from behind the solid wall of the bridge house and skimming forward with disturbing speed.
Richard broke contact with Robin and crossed to the bridge wing once again, grabbing the binoculars as he went. Then he was out in the stinking morning with the glasses glued to his eyes, scanning the skies for a close-up of the machine. As soon as he focused on it, he started swearing under his breath, for before he could even register the make or model, he saw that it had been fitted with floats. ‘Nic,’ he called, without taking the glasses from his eyes, ‘get Ironwrist and Fatfist to fix floats to Poseidon’s chopper . . .’
‘Already done! That was one of the things we were discussing when you joined us on A deck. The pilot’s ready too. You want to go up and see what’s going on out there?’
‘Yes,’ Richard growled. ‘And soon. I hate being caught on the back foot . . .’
He turned and as he went back through the bridge, he asked, ‘Straightline, can you guide us to Tanaka’s bottle if we go up in the chopper?’
‘Yes, Captain. I can get you to the location, but from the look of things it would be too risky for you to land and pick it up.’
‘OK. We’ll see when we get there . . .’
Ten minutes later, Poseidon’s Changhe lifted off with floats attached in case a landing on the water was possible and both Richard and Nic aboard. Richard was happy to occupy the co-pilot’s seat and direct the pilot according to Straightline’s advice from Poseidon’s bridge.
As soon as Dagupan Maru’s chopper saw the Changhe, it speeded up and so both aircraft sped low across the littered water. Richard’s rotors nearly took the tip off Katapult’s mast as he raced due east and she tacked northward one, maybe two, tacks away from her goal. And for a moment, Richard thought he could hear Robin’s howl of protest at this underhanded cheating.
The two helicopters arrived at the same point at almost the same moment, saw the same thing and made the same decision – as though they had a choice. For both Chang and Straightline were correct. The sea beneath them was thick with thousands of plastic bottles. Only a very detailed search at sea level would show precisely which one was Tanaka’s Cheerio bottle. But such a search was forbidden to the helicopters by the heaving thickness of dangerous rubbish that the armada of bottles surrounded. There were more containers, clashing together like bergs on the restless Arctic Ocean. Oil drums half the size of tree trunks rolled restlessly in the choppy water. Swathes of commercial netting swirled, waiting to wrap themselves round the choppers’ floats and drag them down. There was no clear water here – none in fact closer than either Katapult which they had just overflown or Flint which they could see approaching on a southerly tack.
And yet neither chopper wanted to be the first to leave. They circled round the place, watching each other like duellists, as soon as they realized landing was out of the question. And Richard, the earphones clamped over his ears, looked straight into the cabin opposite and saw his opposite number quite clearly. And it took him a moment to register, with a frisson of icy shock, that the man in the Dagupan Maru’s helicopter was not wearing headphones like his own. That the black boxes on those distant ears were permanent fixtures.
That the unaccountably shocked and angry face opposite did not belong to Professor Reona Tanaka. It belonged to Professor Satang S. Sittart.