The Leper Ship Read online

  The Leper Ship

  Peter Tonkin

  Copyright © Peter Tonkin 1992.

  The right of Peter Tonkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the UK by Headline Book Publishing PLC 1992.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

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  Extract from The Coffin Ship by Peter Tonkin

  LEPER SHIP: A ship forbidden to dock or unload in any port or haven because of the hazardous nature of its cargo. Recent coinage, World Press.

  All day I hear the noise of waters

  Making moan,

  Sad as the seabird is when going

  Forth alone.

  He hears the winds cry to the waters’

  Monotone.

  The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing

  Where I go.

  I hear the noise of many waters

  Far below.

  All day, all night I hear them flowing

  To and fro.

  James Joyce

  1

  The column of ancient Mercedes trucks thundered through the night south of Sidon like a division of Rommel’s Afrika Corps come north fifty years out of time. The lights of the lead truck struck into the dead blackness ahead, chopping from side to side beyond the rough roadway out over the desert with each twist of track, each lurch over rolling boulders. The headlights of the others behind struck out also, but they were increasingly ghostly, shrouded by thickening clouds of sand. So it was only Salah Malik by the right-hand window of the lead vehicle, Fatima beside him and the driver Ali ibn Sir who got a clear view of the figures lining the roadside.

  In flashes, like snapshots cut out of the moonless darkness, the figures remained in their minds, each more horrific than the last. Men, women and children standing silently, watching the transports lurch past.

  Silently.

  Such was the noise of engines, gears and tyres in the night that they could all have been howling and not one sound would have reached the ears of the three in the lead truck. Such were the terrible tricks played by the light and the shade that it was impossible to guess which mouths were crying out and which simply did not exist. Local villagers, in helpless, horrific lines, withered, twisted, maimed and mutilated.

  The mercilessly bright Bosch headlights glinted off blistered skin, open sores, red-pitted pocks. Puffed lips, slow black tongues. Hunched backs. Crooked legs. Stumped fingers adjusting keffiyehs and chadors beside white eyes too blind even to flinch in the sudden brightness; pulling tattered cotton cloth over the crusted craters of open nose-pits. Like lepers, but there was no leprosy here.

  In the broad cab of that lead truck, the animated conversation which had raged between the two men and the woman all the way in from the almost laden freighter Napoli’s anchorage at the coast had fallen silent, the nightmare atmosphere emanating from those terrible, mutilated watchers too horrible to allow even the bitterest recriminations to continue.

  Salah Malik looked out through the grit-grimed window beside him, forcing himself not to flinch away, feeling an urgent need to understand Ali ibn Sir’s murderous rage. A girl with no hands seemed to leap into the spotlight holding a rag-wrapped bundle against her scrawny chest with rounded stumps of stick-thin arms. The bundle twisted, revealing pink paddle limbs. It was a baby but it looked more like a turtle. It turned its huge head. And Salah realised it had no face. Blind eye-pits stood astride an amorphous bulge of flesh above a lipless gash too shapeless to be called a mouth. Only the ears, perfectly formed but unnaturally large showed which way the featureless ball of its head was facing.

  The Palestinian dragged his stricken gaze away from the silent horror just as the truck lurched round the final bend and descended screaming into the pit.

  It was wide and shallow, the size of a small open-cast diamond mine, spiral terraces winding down its side under the halogen floodlights, like an architectural excavation, here at the heart of the Holy Land. At the lip of the pit sat three heavy earth movers and the mechanical digger responsible for fashioning the pit after the carefully positioned explosive charges had torn it open. But at the bottom lay no biblical city, no pagan temple anathematised in the Book of Kings, no Sodom or Gomorrah. Instead, there lay destruction of a much more modern kind than anything that had overwhelmed the Cities of the Plain. There were stacks of steel drums, battered, sand-bound, each drum perhaps five feet high and the same round. There were cubes of concrete—recognisable as concrete only to the experienced eye—also covered with sand, each cube six foot by six foot by six. Bizarre figures clad in white protective suits moved among the cubes, manhandling them on to wooden pallets which men in motley uniform were stacking ready to load into the backs of the trucks.

  Salah’s gaze quickly took in the number of cubes and barrels waiting to be loaded on to the trucks. This should be the last trip the convoy would have to make. His long dark eyes narrowed and clouded as they rested on Ali: the local man, the unknown quantity in Salah’s calculations. Ali wrestled the big truck down to the collection area with fierce, ugly movements, as though the ancient vehicle bore some responsibility for all the horror surrounding them. Lying across his lap, secured round his lean torso by a loose shoulder strap, was an old but lovingly maintained Uzi. Salah knew the young man only slightly; well enough, however, to be certain that he could never take the weapon away from him. And yet disarming Ali ibn Sir and his men was the only way Salah could see of avoiding the threatened bloodshed. But, apart from Fatima, Salah was on his own here: the man from central office sent down to oversee the locals.

  When he had come south from Beirut to see the job completed, he had brought with him only the sketchiest knowledge of what was really going on, and no real conception of the full horror or its lethal impact. He tried to imagine how he would have reacted had that faceless baby been his own. And he knew there was very little chance of getting any of the Italians back to their ship alive. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so scared. No, that wasn’t right. The last time he had been this scared was all too vivid in his memory. It had been a scant three months ago, on the ancient oil platform called Fate at the mouth of the Gulf. But at least he had had Richard Mariner and the others at his shoulder then. He would have given almost anything to have had Richard Mariner with him now.

  As soon as the Mercedes ground to a halt he was out, striding towards the nearest Italians even before the first clouds of desert sand rolled forward into the stage-set lighting.

  ‘Is that the last?’ He spoke in English, both because the Italians understood it better than Arabic and because the local villagers did not understand it at all.

  ‘Yes.’ Cappaldi, the Roman company man, answered also in English, looking slightly surprised. He slid one finger round the collar of his silk Lauren shirt, betraying confusion more than nervousness. The two senior ship’s officers behind him looked up sharply, very much more sensitive to danger. Niccolo, Napoli’s first officer, moved forward so that Cappaldi and the other officer, the captain, were behind the solid barrel of his muscular body, as though he was squaring up for a fight.

  Salah hesitat
ed, calculating how much he could risk revealing to them, but suddenly Fatima was at his side, speaking rapidly.

  ‘When you have loaded the last of it, get your men together,’ she spat. ‘Do it quietly but do it fast. Salah and I will cover you as best we can. They mean to kill you if they get the chance and bury you here among this filth you have destroyed them with. It is in revenge for their children, and I, for one, don’t blame them.’

  The dapper Italian executive, the grey-haired captain and the solid first officer heard her out without moving a muscle, wisely masking their reactions from the busy eyes around them.

  Ali ibn Sir watched the small group from the driver’s seat of the Mercedes, stroking his Uzi unconsciously. He respected the reputation of Salah Malik, member of the Senior Executive of the PLO, and had been further impressed by the personal impact of the man, the sense of presence given by that core of absolute quiet which seemed to dwell at the heart of the tall, whipcord body. The light of intelligence and the fire of faith shone in those long dark eyes, tempered by occasional flashes of wry humour and a lively humanity unexpected in a man of Malik’s reputation. Legends clung about the man like a magic cloak in some child’s tale from The Thousand And One Nights. A man increasingly out of step, however they said. A man alone—except for the woman Fatima.

  He was still trying to fathom the woman and to calculate her relationship with this Palestinian statesman who had come from Beirut to help them. There were tales enough about her as well, and now that he had met her, they weren’t so difficult to believe. He was not sure that as a devout Muslim he could ever approve of her and the way she behaved but she, too, had begun to earn his hard-won respect. It was a pity, he thought.

  Caught between the foreigners and the locals, they were powerless to control events. No amount of political wisdom could stand against the rage of the villagers. The Palestinian and the woman were warning the Italians of the judgement about to be meted out to them. Now they, too, would have to die.

  For Ali ibn Sir, it had begun nearly a year ago. He had been born and raised here, but he was away in the north when the first rumours had started. Tales of strange sicknesses, tales of stricken children. The desert south of Sidon, they said, had become accursed.

  Ibn Sir was a practical, well-educated man, no mere superstitious desert farmer, though sprung from generations of desert farmers. He was a scholar, educated locally at first, and then going on, with an inevitability ensured by his fierce intelligence, to the university in Beirut. He was still there when civil war broke out and his real education had begun, and he had remained there, learning political science the hard way, until they called him home. He had returned, not just as a local boy made good but as a junior officer—for lack of a more precise title—in the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He did not believe in curses, but he came home when Ibrahim his brother called, to find out the truth for himself. Ibrahim was a small farmer with herds of goats and camels. Ali had nephews and nieces here. He had parents here, who had lived with Ibrahim since he had gone north and joined the PLO.

  He returned to find his family’s herd gone. No one had told him that the animals too were suffering, but it turned out that they had been affected first, and Ibrahim’s first of all, grazing out along the margin of the desert, furthest out of the village livestock. And his nephews, herdsmen to his brother’s stock, had been among the first to fall ill. His youngest niece, newly weaned, taking little more than goat’s milk, had been the first to die. He had left a contented family, prosperous, long-established and content. He returned to dull-eyed strangers, stricken by they knew not what, dying on their feet. Destroyed, apparently, by the land which had bred them for generations. ‘Take me to the desert,’ he had said. ‘Show me your grazing lands.’

  At first they had seemed to be the same grazing lands familiar to him from his childhood, with their hollows where enough moisture collected in the freezing nights to nurture thorn scrub and thin grass. But then the familiar terrain began to change.

  Trackways he had grown up with vanished into encroaching sand. The desert itself seemed to have altered its character, to have become more forbidding. Out in the dead zone ten miles south, he felt his hair stir with an overwhelming certainty that something was terribly wrong. So strong was the sensation that he almost forgot that he had long been educated out of superstition. He turned to his brother who was driving the jeep with slack hands, almost letting the battered old machine guide itself, as though it were one of his dead camels. ‘Ibrahim,’ he said quietly. ‘What has happened here? The desert has changed.’

  ‘They say it is the curse,’ Ibrahim told him wearily.

  ‘They are stupid and old-fashioned and we know better. What has happened to make you like this, Ibrahim?’

  ‘My children have started dying, Ali. Our parents have lost their hair and their teeth and their sight. My wife has a growth in her belly like a rock beneath her ribs. And I, I can no longer feel my fingers. It is as though the leprosy has returned.’

  They drove on in silence across the stricken landscape until suddenly Ali called, ‘Stop!’

  There in front of them, imperfectly concealed, revealed more by the shadows cast by the setting sun than anything actually remaining on the sand, was a roadway. A roadway here where no one had ever wanted to come. Where no roadway had ever existed. It led to the coast, to signs of a makeshift docking facility.

  Now, at the inland end of that road, nearly a year after he had found it, Ali sat cradling the Uzi he had been lucky enough to come across during his work, the whole sickening conspiracy lying open before him. It had been proved first by the scientists he had been able to call in; they had tested the soil and recorded levels of radio activity high above normal. It was proved next by the researchers who had combed land registries and company records until they had found two that matched, showing that the dead zone in his desert had been purchased by an Italian firm called Disposoco specialising in the disposal of toxic waste.

  Had the stricken farmers been standing alone, they would have been all but helpless. They would no doubt have died quietly, and the desert, with its reputation, would have hidden its secret well enough. But the farmers were not standing alone. With them stood the PLO. Confused and lost for an effective alternative, Ibrahim ibn Sir had turned to his brother Ali. And Ali had turned to his friends. A message went to Rome, to Disposoco’s board of directors: remove your waste from the desert or die. The message had been accompanied by a series of codes known only to the highest echelons of the terrorist organisation and the anti-terrorist police. The Italians were convinced; there had not even been the necessity of an example. Disposoco had sent Napoli with equipment and experts to blow open the desert dump and oversee the removal of the waste.

  The bulldozers needed to exhume the waste would be left behind, as would the trucks needed to transport it. The villagers would need the former to fill in the excavation, Disposoco said; the latter would simply be a gift, though this should not be interpreted as any kind of admission of liability on their part. They had sent Enrico Cappaldi to ensure that everything went to plan. The PLO had sent Salah Malik to ensure the same. It was almost a civilised arrangement, as though the wrong being put right were some slight financial oversight. As though the horrors by the wayside, twisted by the thoughtlessness of the waste disposal company, had no families, required no restitution.

  Did they believe that? Did they really expect that Ali and Ibrahim ibn Sir, last of their family now, and the rest of the villagers who had the strength to move and the burning will to fight would let this outrage go unavenged?

  2

  ‘When do you think they’ll attack?’ asked Fatima tensely.

  ‘If it was me, I’d wait until we get this stuff back to the ship.’ Salah’s eyes were everywhere. Both of them knew that his estimation was a faint hope. They would be killed here at the scene of the crime. And that meant whatever was planned would begin as soon as the last truck was loaded.

  ‘T
he only real chance I can see is to load the Italians into the trucks at the same time as the waste,’ said Salah. Put the last of them in among the last of it. Use it for protection. They’ll have to be careful, but it will protect them. Should protect them.’

  ‘Not the sort of protection I’d want, I must admit!’

  ‘It’s all they’ve got.’

  ‘Right. I’ll have a word with First Officer Niccolo. He seems to be the most reliable,’ decided Fatima. ‘Captain Fittipaldi is old and slowing down.’

  Salah watched the determined young woman walk off. From her demeanour it would be hard for even the most suspicious observer to guess her mission or its importance. She was truly extraordinary, the Palestinian thought. Born in Dhahran, raised in England, she was kidnapped back from a promising if fledgling journalistic career in London by a born-again Muslim father. She escaped, only to fall into the clutches of a half-sane terrorist with wild ambitions to capture the old oil platform called Fate, close the Gulf and hold the world to ransom. But she had come through it all to find a niche in the PLO as though specifically designed by Allah, blessings be upon Him, for the task. She had become his assistant—his right arm—with open generosity and absolute reliability, as though they had always been on the same side. As though they had always been friends and colleagues and he had never been forced to shoot her. He had shot her with a small-bore weapon high in the left side of her chest. She had been lucky to survive, but quick to heal. And swifter still to forgive, if not to forget.

  His thoughts turned again to Richard Mariner and all the people he had fought alongside to regain Fate, all the people he could do with right now. Then he shrugged and made his way over to Enrico Cappaldi.

  Disposoco’s representative was the most at risk, although he did not seem to realise it. Cappaldi had not impressed Salah at all. Fashioned to be a male model rather than a businessman, the effete, arrogant young Roman got under foot at every opportunity and had such a capacity for irritating those around him that Salah had wondered more than once whether he had been sent out here on purpose to be killed. It did not require too much imagination to conceive of a senior executive, husband or father only too willing to use this as a means to save his company, marriage or family.